When it came time to prepare the ER on Geeno’s boss, I decided it was time to have a bit of fun out of the grim business that took all of our conscious and many of our less than conscious moments. I sat down at the typewriter on a Sunday afternoon when I was not flying and dashed off the report that follows. I then went up to my trailer and called him on the phone saying I had something I wanted to discuss in private. He responded, and when he entered the trailer I managed to have the report on my desk, not quite concealed, where he was bound to see it. The curiosity factor was tremendous and he about flipped trying not to look at this all-powerful piece of paper that had his name and some wildly out-of-place markings on it. After a few minutes of idle chatter, I broke down and showed him the farce with a straight face. Concern changed to disbelief and then to laughter as he read through the paper. It went like this:
This Lieutenant Colonel is a most impressive officer with an intense interest in flying. Fly, fly, fly, that’s all the son of a bitch does. Every time you need him to get something done he’s airborne. Try and pin him down for a decision—“the Colonel is flying.” During this reporting period his squadron has set several records for combat flying time and for the biggest number of fighter combat sorties from a single squadron. Sure—what’s so tough about that? He’s got those poor pilots so scared of coming in second in anything that they pad more time than they fly. Who ever heard of a seven-hour mission to the bottom of route pack one? And those bandits in his maintenance section—those bastards would steal a rose off their grandmother’s grave. The rest of the poor slobs on the flight line work their tails off and his guys run around all night stealing parts and switching aft sections. He has welded his entire squadron into a tightly knit and cohesive unit. You bet your ass he has—they all lie and cover up for each other like a bunch of cell mates. Call him on the phone and what do the airmen say? “Sorry sir, he’s in an important conference and asked not to be disturbed.” He’s in the sack and they know it. His dynamic personality has made a lasting impression on the local nationals and brought about a new era in Thai-US relations. Who’ll ever forget the night the Thai commander had us over to his place? He even ran out of Thai whiskey—and that funny little dance he did in his bare feet between the broken bottles. He has been decorated, and decorated, and decorated. That’s all those poor Lieutenants and Sergeants do down there is make up decorations for him. They even tried to get him another Silver Star for making last week’s staff meeting on time—for once. I recommend that he be assigned at the highest possible staff level, preferably to the Pentagon, That place is so jumbled up and big, that with his ability to get lost in the shuffle it is hard to see how he can do any harm up there.
As we progressed through the lines, we decided the levity was too good to hold to ourselves so I called the other two squadron commanders over and we all had a big guffaw. One of the other squadron commanders was now Geeno. When we had lost Don, we wanted to replace him immediately with a strong commander from within our own resources. Geeno was the logical choice, and though he took Don’s job with the heavy heart that we all shared, he waded right into the problems he faced, and within a few days you would have thought that he had been a combat squadron commander for years. Unfortunately, we were not to have the benefit of Geeno’s tough but gentle personality for very long. He believed in his mission too much, and he immersed himself so far in the details of his charges that a few weeks later we lost him.
It was a Saturday morning and Geeno had drawn the early briefing and takeoff as the mission commander for both the Korat wing and ourselves against that lousy Thai Nguyen railroad yard, which served the steel mill (at that time we had not yet been turned loose on the mill itself). This was one of the many wild setups over there and the North Vietnamese naturally wanted to extract the maximum price for letting us clobber that complex. They had enough stuff in there to protect both the rail yards and the steel plant, but as they were always pretty sure of our restrictions and what we could and could not hit, they could quite well afford to orient all their guns toward the protection of the rail yards and trust to luck and intelligence for the protection of the steel plant. We made their tasks lots easier in many respects.
Their SAM and Mig defenses were not hampered by being divided between the two targets lying one on top of the other, and they had excellent area defense. They had positioned their SAMs in such a manner that they could cover our ingress to the target area of Thai Nguyen from any angle and protect both the yards and the mill. They had the benefit of lots of practice in tracking us as we came down Thud Ridge; and because they knew we would avoid both the Mig sanctuaries at Phuc Yen and Kep and the magic inner circles at Hanoi and Haiphong, they were able to look at us all the way in and have a fan- shot whenever the missile gear indicated conditions to be favorable.
The Migs were also in a favorable posture since they were based on-both sides of the Ridge—at Phuc Yen to the west and Kep to the east. I have often marveled at the Migs’ amazing lack of success. I know airplanes very well and my three years of leading the USAF demonstration team, The Thunderbirds, did nothing to dim my perception of relative maximum performance capability among different aircraft. I have fought with the Migs in two wars now—be they declared, recognized, popular or not—and I have yet to see any general indication that the Mig drivers we have faced thus far are using the maximum skill or technical capability available to them. I don’t think you will find a truly professional fighter pilot who would not sell his front seat in hell to be a Mig squadron commander in the face of an American fighter-bomber attack, should such a transformation be possible in our world of reality. Please remember I am only speaking professionally and am not expressing any desire to go the rice and fish route. I am simply saying that they could murder us if they did the job properly.
They don’t go first class and our guys are both good and dedicated. I guess that is the difference. I have had a batch of them on my tail when they have had a better aircraft that could go faster, turn better, and outaccelerate me. I have been on the low end of odds as high as 16 to 2—and that’s pretty lousy. (In this particular case of the poor odds, they hung me up for twenty-three minutes, an almost unheard-of time period for aerial combat even in the early Korea days when this occurred. They didn’t scratch me, only because their cannon couldn’t hit the round side of a broad.) I have had them come up from under my tail spewing red tracers that looked like a runaway Roman candle burst at the seams. Had those guns been properly harmonized, they would have nailed me without a doubt.
They have still not learned their lessons well and I suspect they do not do their homework properly. With the advantages they have going for them, I am sure glad that the majority of those we have tangled with to date are not as clever in this game as our guys are. Anyone who reads the air-to-air results and feels that American technology has scored another victory over the competition of the world is sadly misled. We have been able to take advantage of their mistakes and they have not seen, or have ignored, or have been inept enough not to take advantage of, our mistakes. I scream caution at the top of my lungs that we have not yet met the first team of Mig drivers but I have failed to observe a flow of listeners to my door. As a matter of fact, it becomes less popular and less rewarding each day to scream about basic convictions in the conduct of any struggle between men and machines. I feel very strongly that our inability to talk of practicality or to accept the word of those who physically do the job is hurting us all the way from the drawing board to the battlefield. Is our level of incompetence so high that the doer can never be heard? Is it inconceivable that a captain could know something from practical experience that a general doesn’t know? I often wonder if Hannibal had any elephant drivers who tried to get the big message to him at the base of the Alps, but were swallowed up in a system that wanted to hear only good about itself.