About this time, Paul, my number two guy, on my west side and a little high, came into my field of view quite clearly. He really caught my attention, as the first time I saw him after we came up off the target there was a SAM bursting directly behind his tail pipe. Fortunately, it was fired at a right angle to him as he passed, a most difficult shot, or he never would have made it. The thing burst just perfectly on his tail pipe and covered about half of his aircraft with that horrible ugly orange ball, and to my surprise, he came flying out of the side of the orange ball. Some of his equipment was not working properly, and knowing that the SAMs had his range and elevation, he had no choice but to roll over and hit for the weeds. He had to get down behind the Ridge before they tapped him. This, of course, left me without a wingman, which is not the greatest feeling in the world. My element was coming up off the target and were to my east, but my left side was quite bare. Bending to the right, I noted that I was lined up to the west of the Ridge and pointed right at Phuc Yen; in fact, I was very nicely lined up with the hometown runways of these guys I was fighting with. The ground gunners were sure lighting up all around the airfield and I was able to do battle with them with my trusty Vulcan cannon. That’s not the kind of duel you engage in for any lengthy time period and live to talk about it, but it is satisfying to be able to at least give them a shot in their own backyard. It would be much better to knock their whole ball park out completely, but I guess that would keep them from shooting at us and that wouldn’t be fair—or something.
I spotted two Mig-17’s in a very sloppy echelon that put them almost one behind the other. They were under me in a lazy turn to the west and south away from Phuc Yen. I still had a bag of speed and I had my cannon and a heat-seeking Sidewinder missile, which requires multiple switch actions to set up—it’s not difficult, it’s just time-consuming and at the instant I did not have the time. The four separate switch actions that you have to take to go from the bombing mode to the missile mode did not lend themselves to this situation. With one more hand, I could have utilized the missile but I just could not fumble fast enough on this particular pass to get it set up. I closed on the two Migs like mad and they stayed in their gentle turn and did not appear to see me. I thought, I’ll go through my switching action and set up my missile—but if I do, I’ll have to wiggle around a bit and delay, and they may see me in the interim and initiate a break. If they do, I can’t touch them as they can turn so much tighter than I can. Or if I get the missile set up, the chances of it guiding are less than a hundred percent, and if it goes streaking across the sky, that will alert them and they will be off and running and I’ll never get a crack at both of them. I thought I might get one of them with that missile, but I was greedy, I wanted them both. So I jammed the throttle forward and got inside their turn and was closing beautifully. It was an ideal gunnery pass, just as pretty as it could be.
I started to fire as I pressed to within a thousand feet of the second Mig and I was doing pretty well on him and he started rolling over and to the right like a sick fish. I figured, OK, I’ve got this guy, now I’ll just keep pressing in and get the one up in front of him. About that time, the importance of the fact that I had no wingman to look around and protect me became painfully apparent. My element was now in pretty good position and John, my seeing-eye major flying number three, called me to break right immediately. It seems that another Mig had entered the scene from above and was moving into position above and inside of my turn and was about to have at me. I stayed as long as I figured I could, and then rolled down and under to the right and as I pulled through the maneuver, threw the third Mig off me and over the top of me.
While this was going on, all my other flights were active and Carl and Phil both managed to get a confirmed Mig out of their head-on hassles coming off target. My wingman pulled up off the deck after shaking his SAMs and got himself a probable to go with my probable. Things then turned into a three-ring aerial circus as the Phantoms, who were in the area with us, wanted into the act and had come down to our altitude. They had managed to get two Migs who had been on our tails on the way into the target and they wanted more. About this time I spotted another Mig spinning down to earth that one of our guys had hammered. Rob got one with a missile and it was a beautiful hit. The entire rear end of the Mig was burning, and you could see the skeleton of the aircraft as it burned and went straight line all the way across the valley in a descent, never wiggling, and hitting at the base of the Ridge. (I never have seen any chutes from any of the Migs we have hit.) Here we had Phantoms going round and round, Migs going round and round, and Thuds going round and round. Our total bag for the effort, which took only a few minutes, was six Migs destroyed and two Migs damaged and probably destroyed.
The Phantom troops got a little concerned when our guys started hosing off those Sidewinders because from some angles the Mig and the Phantom look quite similar, and in a fast-moving fray, it is easy to get a silhouette where they look very much alike. Once you fire that missile, it has no sense and just tries to do what it is supposed to do, look for a hot tail pipe. Once our Sidewinders started flailing through the air and Migs started falling out of the sky and guns rattled all over the area, one of the Phantom drivers said, “Hey Chief, they’re shooting Sidewinders. Let’s get the hell out of here,” whereupon they lit the burners and went back up to altitude and allowed us to finish up our work. We got a call from the Phantom wing boss that evening congratulating us on the fine work but protesting that Mig-killing was supposed to be their business.
After Rob got his Mig, he was quite low on fuel as he had been in burner for a long time. He was also right down among them at the edge of Phuc Yen, and had maneuvered to a spot behind us where he had managed to corner two Migs at his six o’clock position, a clever maneuver calculated to get you shot down. He called his plight and indicated that he was in trouble. I turned the force back toward him as he pushed his bird right down on the grass and got going as fast as he could. With the speed that the bird has at that altitude, he was able to shake his pursuers and we again turned the force out of the area. That was quite a wild melee and I think, perhaps more than any one day, taught those Mig drivers some respect for the combined forces that were lined up against them.
This was the environment that Crab flight, with Bob as Crab two, had to penetrate that day—all the way down to the bottom of the Ridge, bomb, turn, and- all the way back. As they turned the corner at the north end of the Ridge, their 650-gallon external tanks were dry and they elected to drop them, since by then the Mig opposition was obviously up and ready to tangle. They pickled the tanks, pushed the power up and started down the Ridge at about 580 knots. Knife flight was just ahead of Crab and was the first flight actually to get wrapped up with the Migs. When they called a flight of four at ten o’clock high, the Migs were pickling their tanks, which they also do to lighten their load prior to engaging, and Knife started a slow turn into them. Knife didn’t want to start a radical turn as that would take him away from his desired run-in and defeat the purpose of the mission itself. This was one of the Migs’ goals, and if they could draw us off course or get us wrapped up in something that would force us to drop our bombs, their mission had been accomplished. But Knife did start a gradual turn into the Migs to keep them in sight and also to keep them from getting into position on any of our flights prior to or during the bomb run itself. Crab lead spotted the Migs also, but seeing that Knife flight had them under surveillance, he announced to his flight that these particular Migs were not a threat to Crab flight.