“Flamingo—” Was Flamingo still down on the deck dodging SAMs?
“Clean ’em up—” Who in hell clean what up?
“OK, you’re clear, Nick—” I wondered if Nick was in the same flight as Bass four.
I had turned Kingpin, and Geeno had turned Magnum so that I was now directly behind him. I could see the entire show as his wingman called, “OK, Magnum, we’ve got a Mig Twenty-one at five o’clock now.” The Mig slid back, out of Magnum’s field of view, and the wingman wrongly assumed that the Mig had faded off to the right as had the two that were on me.
“Roger, you’re clear—”
I couldn’t wait for him to finish, as the Mig had only momentarily moved back to the side. He must have been getting low on fuel and decided to give it one more college try and go home, or he moved back to change some switch setting, because he pulled directly astern of Magnum and sprinted to a perfect spot high and to the rear between Magnum lead and Magnum two. They couldn’t see him and he was in an ideal spot for a double kill.
“Negative, Magnum, negative. He’s still on you, Magnum—six o’clock. Six o’clock, Magnum, a little high. He’s sliding around on you.”
Magnum two slid to the side a bit and dipped his wing enough to catch the awesome sight of a Soviet interceptor boresighting himself and his leader for a heat-seeking missile launch. “OK, Magnum two’s bombs coming off now, watch it.”
“Flamingo’s got a SAM on the southeast edge of the Ridge.” Man, I was glad that good old Flamingo was soaking up all those SAMs.
While Magnum lead and two unloaded their bombs and pulled for their lives, one of my original pursuers got in on the act.
“OK, Magnum, Mig at three o’clock.” As I watched, yet another unwanted visitor slid in on Magnum’s right side. I decided the bombs had to go. We had already used so much fuel that we would have little time, if any, to look for a good target once we managed to haul our fannies out of there. We had covered a fair amount of sky at 600 knots and, lo and behold, there was a slight break in the clouds and, wonder of wonders, one of the forbidden sanctuaries sprawled beneath us. This one came off the protected Hst some time later, but I claim the first load of bombs into the middle of that baby doll.
“Kingpin, let’s get rid of these bombs and go help them. Kingpins, bomb now.”
You could almost feel the Thuds leap with joy as the cumbersome iron blivets left. We stroked the burners and waded into the tail cone of the leeches clinging to Magnum and the frame of reference changed. Now we were lighter and faster than we had been and we were closing from their six o’clock. It was probably none too soon, as you could hear the strain within Magnum flight.
“Where’s he at, three—er—four—er—three, Magnum.”
It’s a tough way to make a living.
“Rog, one behind and another at three o’clock.” But now we were closing from the rear and Geeno had his flight lined up on the heading he wanted back to the north.
“Hot Dog two, hit the burner.”
“OK, Magnum, let’s take it back out the Ridge.” I hoped Geeno wouldn’t get overconfident now, and I wanted him to know he was not home-free yet. “You still got ’em, Magnum.” He saw that he still had them on him, and he knew his element could no longer hold their bombs.
“Clean ’em off. Clean ’em off. Heads up, Magnum.” The bombs fell and we charged in from the rear, but not without duress.
“OK, we got flak from the Ridge, keep it moving, Kingpins.” That was about all the Migs needed to convince them that their afternoon was ruined. They had bombs falling in their faces, they had a flight closing on their tail, and the crunchies from the ground were shooting at the entire gaggle, now knowing, and probably not caring, who was who. So the Migs disengaged. Just like that. They plugged in their burners, racked their sleek charges up on a wing, and were gone as rapidly as they had appeared.
“Cactus, Mig up ahead going left to right.”
“Where’s he at now?”
“Cactus lead, Cactus three can’t get rid of the right tank.” Beautiful system. I was sure Cactus was hoping that his Mig would keep going from left to right.
“OK, Kingpins, back to the left. Let’s move up the Ridge.”
I thought that perhaps the drama had ended for the day, but I was wrong. The strangest little drama that I have ever been exposed to occurred during the next few moments. I have gone back over it time after time. I have listened to the magnetic tape from the minature Japanese tape recorder so that I could reconstruct these wild minutes back on the ground. I don’t know what happened to Don. I don’t know what he did or why. All I can do is relate what I saw and heard and try to fit the pieces together from what I now in retrospect can remember of my somewhat nervous, horribly intelligent little doctor friend. My friend who should have been teaching young men in the classroom, but who instead felt that he should be herding a 49,000-pound monster around the skies of North Vietnam at 600 knots in this crummiest of all so-called wars.
When we figured that we had Geeno out of the bag, we headed back up the Ridge, planning to turn west at the north end and beat a track for the Red River and thence south to a tanker and home. Rod was still on my wing like glue and as we rolled clear of the flak from the Ridge, Don and Bing were on the right side and together, and everything should have been OK. We were still moving around; that flak from the Ridge could still reach us, and we all knew that there were plenty of Migs still capable of giving us trouble. I rolled about 20 degrees to the left and gained a few hundred feet, then dropped the nose and let it fall back to the right as I kicked in a little rudder to make the bird slide slightly sideways in an uncoordinated maneuver calculated to hamper the tracking activities of any gunners looking at me. Rod moved in the same general plane, but crossed his controls with a different degree of emphasis and timing so that while we moved together, we presented different, uncoordinated targets. If you fly smoothly or play the show formation game, you help the gunners solve their problem.
As I came back to the approximate track I had left only seconds before, I automatically looked to the right to check the element, and I saw Don’s nose start gradually down while Bing held his wing spacing. As Don’s nose dropped, his speed increased and he pulled abreast and then slightly ahead of me. It was a strange move, and he made no radio transmission. (I did not realize it at the time, but replaying the tape later, I found that in all that melee of voices, Don had not spoken once since we had started down the Ridge. A good wingman or element lead doesn’t have to talk to get the job done, and it is ideal if he keeps quiet unless he has something important to pass to the other members of the flight, but there had been an, awful lot of calls made in the hassle and the odds were that some of them should have been Don’s calls.) Suddenly, the multiple ejector rack, better known as the MER, a big piece of metal to which the bombs are attached, left the belly of his aircraft smoothly and cleanly, indicating that he had jettisoned it from the cockpit. This was weird in that his bombs were already gone, and his tanks were gone, and while the MER is a slight additional drag factor, there are only a couple of reasons why you would drop it. The first would be a situation where the bombs were hung up and refused to release from the MER. If everything else fails, you can get rid of the load by pickling the MER and all, and the entire load of bombs plus the rack goes in one big, inaccurate blob. This was obviously not the reason for his action. The other reason for getting rid of the MER would be to insure that the aircraft was absolutely clean of all outside garbage in the event you wanted every bit of maximum speed you could get, and Don was a speed man. It wasn’t a logical move, as the speed difference is not that significant, and the MER’s were a critical supply item. (We were even bringing bombs back when they were hung up or we couldn’t get them where we wanted to put them, to say nothing of the racks. The official line that there was no bomb shortage forced us to use various subterfuges to keep visitors from finding out the truth. At the same time, some of our high-level commanders were in a race with the Navy to see which could record the most flying hours. The result of all this was that we were at one time sending kids out to attack a cement and steel bridge with nothing but 20-millimeter cannon, which is like trying to knock down the Golden Gate Bridge with a slingshot. Stupid missions like that cost us aircraft and people.)