Without freedom of movement, he was pretty desperately trapped. In this case, it didn’t make too much difference because Bob came on the radio and said, “Crab two is hit.” This, of course, alerted everybody to the fact that one of our guys was in bad trouble and there was an out-of-control aircraft traveling close to 600 knots in the immediate vicinity. A vital hit in a sensitive area of the Thud will very rapidly deplete the hydraulic systems that operate the flight control systems. The degree of depletion depends on the location and nature of the hit, but once that pressure is gone, the controls go with it and there is no way to control the aircraft even momentarily. This was the plight of Crab two; he was riding in a hurtling, out-of-control, heavyweight monster in the middle of a hostile environment determined to kill him if at all possible. Thus, only seconds after he had been hit, Bob apparently lost all control and knew that he was about to hit the ground. He evaluated his position in who knows how many microseconds, and had no choice but to take the high-speed ejection right in the middle of a hail of lead from all sides, rather than simply crash and be destroyed along with his dead aircraft. He called and said, “I’m bailing out,” and out he went, right into the inferno of Hanoi under attack. His aircraft hit the ground at a speed in excess of 500 knots.
The two-ship element, led by Crab three, had become understandably confused during the wild gyrations that had occurred and initially thought that Crab one had struck the ground out of his wild porpoise. In an area like that there is absolutely nothing you can do for a pilot who has jumped out, you can’t really even stop and look. If you observe the impact of the aircraft, it is strictly by chance. Anyone who stood still or retreated long enough to even try to find out what was going on would also be shot down. So that’s part of the code, the name of the game. Anyone who is hit and has to jump in that area does it strictly solo.
It took this particular flight a while to sort things out and get organized coming back out of the target area, and there is little doubt that this particular strike will go down in the annals as one of the wildest and toughest rides that any flight has ever had to go through. They did manage to get reorganized and return to base safely.
It was a real heartbreaker. Bob was such a nice guy, and in this business you naturally gravitate toward eager young people who seem to have all the spunk and drive and desire that you are looking for. Bob was one of those guys we all felt very strongly for, and his loss got to the squadron and the wing, but especially to the guys in his flight. Bob’s brother was over there at the same time and had been at our base visiting Bob shortly before this particular flight. He is also a fine young gentleman and is in the tanker business, refueling us as we go in and come out of the North. As soon as the flight got back on the ground and went through their formalities, they got in touch with Bob’s brother and he came right back to see what he could learn. Unfortunately, you have a tough time explaining these things in exact detail and it often takes an amazing amount of mental research to reconstruct things that happen so fast and so violently. However, when Bob’s brother came to the base we did everything we could to explain the situation and spell out our ideas of what had occurred.
I saw his brother that evening and that was a tough one. What do you tell a guy? You don’t want to discourage him completely because you don’t know what happened to the individual. You don’t want to pump him up too much because you know that the chances of survival from bailout at that speed are mighty slim. You know that the flak-filling air that he went down through during his short descent was extremely dangerous. You know that his chances of injury on landing were extremely high. But here’s a guy whose brother is at best missing, going back home to tell his brother’s wife—what? I don’t know. I appreciated his attitude and he was a wonderful man to talk to, but it was an awfully lousy conversation.
That same night, Hanoi Hanna came on the radio and announced that the same day an American aircraft had been shot down while raiding the Hanoi area. They have the usual line of chatter that all propaganda broadcasts use and a lot of it you can’t believe at all. But this particular night, Hanoi Hanna said that one of the American pilots, a fine, young healthy boy had been shot down and severely injured, and that despite the best efforts of the North Vietnamese doctors, had died in the hospital shortly afterward. You can’t always believe what they say and only time will tell if the announcement in itself was the truth, but I think it most interesting to note the terminology used in the broadcast. Most of the references to the Americans coming out of Radio Hanoi are highly uncomplimentary, and we are referred to as bandits, air pirates, Yankee dogs, rotten imperialists, and so on. Yet in this particular case, the individual is referred to as a fine, healthy, good-looking American boy. I wonder if this is an extremely clever bit of writing and narration designed to pluck at your heartstrings, or if perhaps young Bob impressed even the North Vietnamese as much as he impressed aU of us.
6. Behind the Flightline
Throughout my tour at Takhli, the basic rule held firm that it takes a lot of people to run a wing and to run a base. We had quite a community, and when I left, it was up to about five thousand men without a round-eyed white female in sight. The command section of a unit such as this is in many ways like the office of mayor in a small city. We had all the problems that you would expect in any municipality, and -these problems were compounded by the fact that it was a constant battle to scratch what you needed out of the jungle. Funding is controlled at higher command echelons and you seldom find those holding the purse strings sharing your operational enthusiasm for the things you feel you need. In short, making a first-class operation out of a bare strip in the jungle is plain hard work plus an awful lot of frustration.
The bases in Southeast Asia vary enormously from one to another, and some of them were pretty jumbled up and sorry. The differences were due in part to mission requirements, physical location or the varying degrees of higher command interest, but the big difference was the drive and the desire of the individuals running a particular unit. Southeast Asia is usually a one-year tour for those in command and staff positions, and there is always the temptation to let the tough things slide for the next replacement to worry about. This is especially true of the flying commanders, as things move very rapidly from the operational end and’there is a lot of ground to cover. Thus, you often do not get the opportunity to put the emphasis you want on the physical facilities.
The word jungle conveys different images to different people—quite naturally, because the jungle itself is so various. The image of vine-entangled trees, with Tarzan about to swing across the steaming pool of quicksand, seems quite apt in some corners of Asia. I took a small group out in the wilds north of Takhli in search of the engine from one of our Thuds that had crashed shortly after takeoff, and after three days out there I felt like the great white hunter when I returned. A couple of our pilots arranged a few days off duty and hooked up with a native Thai hunting party over toward the border of Burma, and their impressions were similar to mine, when they returned without a tiger. Other areas of the “jungle” are simply rolling green fields with trees that vary from sparse to nonexistent. I always enjoyed dropping down to a few hundred feet above the green carpet when it was practical to do so on the last hundred miles of the return leg of a combat mission. The color, the stillness and the variety are fascinating, and, to me, relaxing to view. It is not uncommon to see 200-foot-high trees with 75-foot trees nestled under them and still another 25-foot bramble of green undergrowth covering the jungle floor. Within a few hundred feet you may well see a native, who knows and cares little about your presence, scar farming a patch of burned-out open land that he will abandon when the urge to move on seizes him.