My mother tells me that when I was a little kid I used to say, “Sunday is the best day,” but in our wing we hated Sundays. It was one of those stupid superstitions, like accidents coming in threes, Friday the thirteenth, and all that. We didn’t really believe it and consciously we ignored it, but when we really got clobbered, it always seemed to be on Sunday. One particular Sunday must certainly have been the longest day in the world for Leo and all the rest of us. It was so long, it finally ran into Thursday.
- Leo was our lead weasel and his business was clobbering SAM sites. We put these specialists in converted two-seat Thuds that we robbed from the training program back in the States. They flew as a two-man team, and we tried to keep the same two together all the time, because their job of monitoring, finding, and attacking the sites was a tightly knit two-man effort of interpretation and flying. Leo was good, and he was the boss man of all the rest of our weasels. I used him extensively as my liaison with this specialized bunch of experts and what Leo said, they did. We had them scattered throughout the squadrons, which I always thought was a mistake. I wanted to put them all in one squadron like they did in the Avis wing, but I never could sell my point. I considered their job different enough to group them together under one boss and let them fly all the weasel missions from one squadron. This would provide the advantage of always having a flight of four all playing the same game—as opposed to the arrangement we used, where you would have a flight made up of part weasels and part pickup team from the particular squadron providing the weasel coverage for the day. If I had been able to sell my point, I feel that Leo, Harry, Bob and Joe would all be with us today, or at least we would not have lost them all on the same Sunday.
Perhaps Leo’s best single mission was when he took on most of North Vietnam all by himself. He spotted a SAM site and knocked it out in a hurry, moved to the next site down the pike and dumped that one also, and the route of the strike force was well defined with SAMs and their supporting components exploding on the ground. The plaintive wail of a pair of beepers told him that his Wingman had been hit and that two weasels were in their chutes. He spotted a Mig intent on shooting the helpless pilots hanging in their chutes—they play dirty up there—closed to almost collision range and blew the vulture out of the sky. With the Mig’s wingman on his tail, Leo, desperate for fuel, outraced his pursuer as he streaked southward for an aerial refueling. As darkness approached he returned, alone, found a flight of four Migs over the downed crew, flew directly into the middle of them and scattered them, shooting down yet another Mig. When the rescue proved hopeless he found there were no airborne tankers to refuel him and only through his own skill was he able to limp through the black night, penetrate the thunderstorms and land at an emergency base with little other than fumes in his fuel tanks. Leo was no stranger to stress, but a Sunday was to do him in.
As boss weasel, Leo scheduled the other weasels and when he was short of crews (but we don’t talk about shortage of crews, do we?) he would take the double load himself. He took the early morning run to Hanoi for his ninety-sixth trip and turned himself around for his ninety-seventh and last trip that Sunday afternoon. Did he goof by scheduling himself twice? I suppose he did, but somebody had to go twice and Leo was the boss, so he went.
I was leading the force that day and the mission was rotten from the start. The weather was OK and the briefing and preparations went OK, but we were in trouble from the time we started to taxi to the runway for takeoff. As we rolled down the taxi strip to the arming area, the gruesome sound of a beeper split the air. Somebody’s beeper was stuck in the on position and it saturated the radio. The control tower picked it up right away and tried to get a steer on the offending airman but could not pinpoint it. Everything was laid on, tankers, support aircraft and the like, and you simply can’t stop and start all over. We had to try everything we could to locate that beeper and get the guy with it to abort the mission and fill his spot with a spare aircraft. We started taking steers on each other as soon as we got airborne and managed to pin it down to Leo’s flight but we couldn’t tell which aircraft the beeper was coming from. Once you get strapped-into that monster with all that gear on, there is no way you can check your own beeper. You can’t move anything but your hands and feet and there is no way to reach behind you and examine the contents of your chute. We split Leo’s flight into elements and moved individual flight members fore and aft of the tankers as we headed north and we got the tankers to try and spot the beeper with their direction-finding gear but we couldn’t get a valid steer. The continuous transmission was strong enough to clutter the air but not strong enough to give a good steer at that altitude. The silly little things will transmit for a couple of days on a good battery, so there was little hope that it would go off by itself and we were in for a noisy afternoon. Just how noisy we did not know.
Another thing that we did not know—and it was coincidence rather than plan—was that three of us within the strike force were carrying miniature Japanese tape recorders. We flew so many divergent paths that afternoon, and the noise and confusion level was so high, that ordinarily it would have been close to impossible to reconstruct the activity. With a good deal of homework we were able to recreate all the sounds of that Sunday, as there was at least one recorder in the midst of the action at all times, and we had an added benefit of one recorder in the two-place lead weasel aircraft to give us some additional insight into that two-man crew. These tapes usually helped us to study and learn, but that Sunday they combined to weave a complicated tale.
I was Waco lead and my weasels were Carbine flight. I had Oakland, Tomahawk and Neptune flights as the other bombers and Dallas and Chicago were flights of Phantoms assigned as my Mig cover, though, as it turned out, those two flights might better have stayed home that day. As we dropped off the tanker and headed for the river, Carbine switched his flight over to prestrike radio frequency and swung away to the north to troll for the Saim sites we knew would be active. Ben and Norm were in the number one Carbine aircraft and even before we had switched radio frequencies in the rest of the force, Norm had already alerted Harry, his number two, Leo in his number three machine and Bob in number four that one of his indicators was sputtering like a rattlesnake with an ugly prelaunch warning. “Four miles to go now, strong signal. OK, SAM’s up and he’s off to our right. He’s at one o’clock, stronger signal, now he’s fading. No threat—and here’s another one. He’s at twelve. One at twelve, one at one.”
About that time, as Waco lead, I called all the strike flights over to the prestrike channel and we checked in on the radio. It is a reassuring sound to me as the flight lead barks his call sign and the flight members crisply respond with their number in the flight.
“Waco.”
“Two.”
“Three.”
“Four.”
“Oakland.”
“Two.”
“Three.”
“Four.”
“Tomahawk.”
“Two.”
“Three.”
“Four.”
“Neptune.”
“Two.”
“Three.”
“Four.”
Everybody was there and ready to go to work. You get so you can recognize most of the voices, and as they check in you can almost see and feel those strong alert men straining against their shoulder straps and sitting tall in their cockpits.