“Royal—Tomahawk. We need a tanker. I’ve got two birds down to three thousand. We need one bad.”
“Nomad one—Carbine. Do you read?”
“Royal—Carbine. I’ve got enough for about one more turn around the target. Have you got anyone inbound to replace me?”
“I am holding Waco at a higher altitude in an orbit around you. It will be a few minutes before he gets there.” Obviously the control people were not covering their slots in depth, and this was all the harder to understand because they had everybody and his brother available, and yet they had already started diverting flights back to their home bases. They probably got the word from one of the many headquarters control battle staffs down the line and did not have the knowledge or the gumption to challenge the poor decision. As a result, we were in a deeper pickle than we had been all afternoon. The sun was diving for the horizon, the haze was increasing, and we were running short on cover aircraft. No excuse for it.
Carbine knew that he could do nothing about the big picture from his spot in the action and answered, “OK, and I never did get an acknowledgment from Nomad on emergency or any other channel.” The Bear came up on the hot mike to advise that he was picking up a hand beeper, as apparently either Leo or his Bear, knowing the other beeper was saturating the air, desperately turned on the beeper in their emergency radio in a vain attempt to attract the attention of the Spad flying back and forth over their heads.
The frontseat acknowledged with an “Ugh” and allowed that he had better call Nomad one more time.
“Nomad, did you understand that you are to clear the choppers in when you are ready? They are standing by.” Then in complete frustration over the imeptness of the would-be rescuers and his own inability to do anything about it, he added to his Bear, “Crap, I don’t even know where that son of a bitch went now.”
’’Royal—this is Tomahawk. Will we be able to go back in and find my guy who is down?”
Carbine had now depleted his fuel to the danger point as he waited for me and the rest of my Waco flight to drop down and relieve him. I came in as he went out, repeating the sad story I had already listened to on my radio, and as his Bear took one last glance at the panorama, he noted that smoke a bit to the north and remarked, “I don’t think that smoke is them.” If not, then whose was it?
As we changed the airborne guard, Leo came back at us from the ground. He made a relatively long transmission, but much of it was cut out by other transmissions and the beeper. He said something about the beeper, apparently assuring us again that it wasn’t his, then, “They’re coming up the hill after us—get me out of here! Get me out of here!” We listened in stunned silence and none of us bothered to tell him what we already knew and what he already knew. He came on one more time with a big loud garble, then, “THEM—get me out of here! GET ME OUT OF HERE!” We didn’t. Carbine’s Bear said, “’What did he say?” Carbine replied, “He said get me out of here.” As I took over the low cover again, I could not get the Spads to talk to me. I made one wide arc checking for them, then went directly over the spot where the crew had been. There was nothing. No noise, no smoke, no activity, no answer to my calls. I swung wide for another check and finally Nomad gave me a call. “Waco, I’ve checked the area and there is nothing up here. All I found was a stuck beeper and it is garbaging the air something awful. There’s Migs in the area and there’s nobody on the ground and I’m leaving the area.”
I don’t believe I even acknowledged his call, but I knew I was now helpless and as he left for the south, I made another pass over the spot, low and directly over the little knob with the U-shaped road bending around it. I went right down on the deck over the small house alongside the road, over the open rice paddies and skimmed the tops of the trees on the knob and lit my burner as a farewell salute to my buddies. He was right. There was nothing there now—nothing I could do anything about.
9. Till Thursday
That bleak Sunday was to drag on four more days. The light was fading and Leo and company were out of business, but I still had a bellyful of fuel and there was still work to be done. Reluctantly, I left the area and struck out for where I might be able to do some good for Tomahawk four. Joe—the nice young guy who had come to us as an administrative officer, even though he was a rated pilot. Joe—the shy young man who had accepted my personal mantle of authority and roared through our almost impossibly inferior safety program within the wing like a bulldozer cleaning out rat’s nests. He was not a Thud driver by trade, but he scrounged an hour here and an hour there until he could leap all the hurdles and qualify himself for combat. He had a hell of a time mastering the art of hanging behind a tanker and refueling in flight, but he did it. Joe—another one of my boys who had not managed to graduate from the toughest postgraduate school in the world, the school that demanded a hundred missions over the North in a Thud for a diploma. He was now simply Tomahawk four, down over the North.
Since our superiors had managed to control away almost all the fighters we had previously assembled, I figured I had better get with the program in a hurry. I split my flight into elements of two to search more effectively and headed for the coordinates that were supposed to represent the spot where Joe was down. I knew that, unless someone climbed out of the tanker and tied him up with a rope, Tomahawk would be back in with the one wingman he had left, and I hoped we could have something good for him to cover and perhaps we could still use the Spads and the choppers. As I entered the new area, I knew even more than before that time would be a big factor. It was a fantastic looking spot. The hills rolled up into small mountains and further south leaped into the sheer saw-toothed karst that dropped violently to the winding riverbed far below. The sawtooths were already shading the huge trees rolling from ridge to ridge underneath them, and my first thought was of two big hopes. I hoped he hadn’t landed on top of one of those sharp knobs and I hoped we had a good gutty chopper driver sitting in the wings. I hoped half right.
I swung my element a bit north of due west and started a gradual turn that would allow me to get a good look at the land below and would bring me out of the orbit about over the sharp peaks to the south. There were a few trails showing in the jungle carpet, and the ground appeared to roll gently toward the delta to the east. Meager terraces had been scratched out where the land was level enough to cultivate; there were a few groups of dwellings, but nothing big. I gave a little test on a couple of them but I could not see that anyone fired at me or seemed to care that I was there. There was a fire burning in the jungle a few miles away and if I was in the right spot, that would probably be some portion of the aircraft that had gone its own way either before or after Joe left it. The stuck beeper had faded to the lonely north and the air was still and intense as four Thuds worked against the clock, the jungle and the elements of the air war in the North. I did not have long to wait, and halfway through my first turn a new, strong and definite rescue beeper came up on the inside of my turn. I grabbed a quick directional steer on him and called my number two man who verified both the beeper and the steer. We wrapped those Thuds around to the left like we were driving midget racers, and although the force of the turn nearly knocked them out of the sky, we were able to roll straight and level before we got to the spot on the ground where the beacon was telling us our fourth downed comrade of the afternoon was waiting for us and for the help we could bring.