“Where did you work?”
“I, ah, came up to the Ridge. Couldn’t get across the Ridge. It’s mostly enshrouded so I came south to Phu Tho and Viet Tri and it’s still solid all the way.” The entire series of transmissions had been clear and without interruption, and we were now satisfied that the first inbound flight knew the score, freeing us to move to another channel once we passed the word to the commander of the second part of the strike force who was still on the way in behind us. A small task— but then the radio exploded again.
“Rolleyes, go manual. Rolleyes, go manual.”
“Relieves three—”
“One o’clock low—”
“Muskrat, flight manual—”
”—I’ll be turning to zero two.”
“Pintail three, can you contact the other force?”
“Pintail, why don’t you try and get contact through Royal?”
“Say again.”
Don had finally had all the noise he could use. “Pintail three, go to channel seven and see if you can pass the word to somebody. I’m going to manual frequency.”
I was most happy to accept this little chore and came back with “OK, will do, I’ll go to seven. Meet you on manual.” The channel changer clicked through its paces and the silence was golden. Now if I could only get Lincoln to talk to me, “Lincoln—Pintail. Hello, Lincoln—this is Pintail.”
“Pintail—Lincoln. Go ahead.”
“Roger, Lincoln—Pintail. It’s negative, negative, negative. No dice. We’re on the way out.” He rogered and we went home. It had been a crummy day and a crummy mission, and I had a headache when I crawled out of that beauty that evening.-
We sure telegraphed our punches. There were not all that many targets in that area, and it did not take too many smarts to figure out about where the force was headed, especially when we headed them there day after day, made them fly up to the target before making the go or no-go decision oh weather we knew was not acceptable, turned over the target and then came back the next day to try again. The pressure was on to get this complex, and when we got into that configuration, it was amazing how the simple basic portents of warfare slipped by the boards to be replaced by determination to accomplish what we had been directed to accomplish.
In the situation over there, the bosses were fighting several problems. The first has been discussed around many a table and is simply the target restriction problem. There are places that, in my opinion, should have been hit long ago. Some were more sensitive than others, but the hard-core targets were like little prizes dangled on a string in our face. When one of the fringe targets would be released, the eagerness to get to it immediately approached a panic. Unless the commanders could control the universe and set the elements aside in order to destroy a specified rotten plum, they seemed to feel that it was a personal insult and that the operators in the field were purposefully failing to cooperate. While it might have been an insult at some level of the maze, it was not so intended on the part of the operators. I know I never felt that my boss in sunny Honolulu showed any degree of incompetence by his demonstrated inability to translate the sunny skies of Lahina to the gruesome plains of the Red River delta, but the press became something almost personal and there I do argue with the directions we received.
Common sense and in fact military sense, often fell by the wayside, and the fact that Hanoi was not going to move during the next few days seemed lost to decision-making view as did the fact that we had waited a long time for these targets and could afford to wait a few more minutes to do the job right. Those doing the job felt that it would have paid better dividends to mix up the signals a bit and that if we had 1 feint and battle impossible weather parameters, it would at least have been wise to mix up the feints. We were all making a dry run if it looked like we had a chance, but i faced with the same weather odds the next day, we wanted t feint irt a different direction or go someplace else completely and come back a day or two later. In our restricted and over-supervised environment, the pressure would not allow that approach to the problem.
Additional pressure was generated by the fact that were different services and different command elements participating in a limited geographical area and competing for a limited number of worthwhile targets. There is bound to be a degree of competition under these circumstances, and I believe this competition is both healthy and productive as long as common sense prevails. There was plenty of action for everyone who could fly an airplane up there, and there were more than enough defenses to go around. I have never reached the level of command in this business to gain the unhealthy degree of competitiveness that generates bitterness and drives out good sense. Such attitudes do exist and they are most harmful, but fortunately, they are above the operating level, and most Navy and Air Force crew members of my ilk benefit from the exchange of tactical knowledge and doctrine that goes on at the aircraft operating level. It seems that the poor attitudes are directly proportional to the distance from the cockpit control stick, multiplied by the number of years, if ever, since the individual has been shot at in real anger.
We had a good program going wherein we would run monthly exchange visits with our Navy buddies. They would gather a group of four or five aviators in positions like group or squadron commander and pile them into their Cod, a small transport aircraft, and launch from the ship to recover at one of our fighter bases. We would then spend a number of days or hours yakking about what we were doing and how we were doing it and the exchange would be both enjoyable and refreshing. A couple of weeks later, a group of our people would visit the ship and have a similar interchange of ideas, and we were able to keep going both ways a constant flow of operator talk that helped all of us. One of my favorite Navy fliers, Dutch, was so enthusiastic when he visited us that he was reluctant to leave at the appointed time. He was torn between more discussion and the once-in-six-months opportunity to take a day off and enjoy a much needed rest in Bangkok. We agreed fhat you can only push yourself so hard before you become less than productive, and that a day’s air-conditioned sleep in a posh Bangkok hotel could be followed by a continuation of our discussion on the ship on the next trip. His exec brought the Cod back on the next cycle, and I met him when he landed. “Dutch got bagged,” he announced with deflating certainty. “He was leading the outfit, and they fired two SAMs at them as they approached the beach. He took them down and told the guys to watch out, there would probably be more on the way. There were, and the next one was a direct hit on Dutch.” That hurt as badly as if it had been one of my own squadron or fight mates. He and I both admitted freely that there was no corner on ideas and that neither one of us had all the answers. There is no friction at the operating level.
The day after that particular dry run to Hanoi, I noticed that Don was getting nervous; we all were. There are many things that eat at you when you sit on a series of hot ones as long as we had been on this package. But by nature, Don was jumpy at times and he was jumpy as we were directed to the primary target again. I can still recall his statement as we entered the small squadron briefing room for our flight huddle after the big wing briefing: “Anyone who is not completely terrified doesn’t understand the problem.” We called our signals in the normal tense atmosphere, and you could feel the spiders twitch, you could see them twitching on the other guys, and so many things became unimportant.
Everybody knew the flight briefing by heart, and you talked about things you would rather forget. Like, “If one of us gets shot down, the other guy in the element try and cover him as well as you can and see if you can spot the chute impact. The other element go high and start screaming for the Rescap people. High element conserve fuel and we will cycle off the tankers as necessary. Let’s not leave singles Capping alone in rough country. That’s the plan for the way in and the way out. If one of us gets knocked down in the Hanoi area— forget it. We all agree there is nothing we can do for each other then, and there is no sense losing more machines and people. Agree? OK, see you in the personal equipment room in ten minutes.”