He rolled his flaming Spad over onto her back and dove for the deck. His wingrnan got the natural impression that he had lost control of the machine and that resulted in a few more panic-stricken calls in the black unfriendly night. Down he went, pointed at the hills, the hills he could not see but those he knew were there. If he got the ancient warrior going fast enough he could blow the flame out. He could starve the fire, he could divert the airflow, and the fire would go out and he could limp home. And if not—why not try. He did, and it worked, and while it was working the remaining Tomahawks and Wacos and Nomad two marveled and wondered what the next step would be. The next step was a big batch of silence and lots of hard breathing. After what seemed like four hours and could not possibly have been more than a minute, the not-so-calm-but-ever-so-pleased voice of Mr. Nomad announced that the fire had gone out, that he was pulling the nose up, and that he had plenty of fuel to get back to his homedrome. The night was black, but not nearly as black as my thoughts. I wheeled once again, and more than seven hours after I left Takhli I touched down on that remote piece of concrete and unstrapped from the belts that bound me to the machine. I was beat but I was not through fighting.
You have no idea how tired you can get from a physical and mental ordeal such as that, but tired or not, you don’t quit. You couldn’t quit even if you wanted to, because you have to talk to people, you have to analyze, you have to debrief, you have to make the next plan, and you have to sign off on a bunch of administrative details to the families of four brave men and that hits you right in the gut.
I got on the hot line to the big bosses as soon as I got into the operations building and found them ready to talk. They were, of course, anxious to hear what had happened from my view, and I told them. I was anxious to know what had happened from the rescue guy’s point of view, but nobody was ever able to explain that to my satisfaction. My big points to them, as you can’t live in the past in this racket, were let’s get Joe out—we know he is there—and let’s go clean house on those lousy Migs. We had been forced to set ourselves up like a bunch of pigeons that afternoon, but I wanted to go back in style and clean their clocks while we got Joe out. The weather was rolling into that area and things did not look overly promising, but I did get a guarantee that the electronic types would keep a watch on the area all night and there would be visual and electronic help in the morning at first light. I got an acknowledgment of understanding of my request for a sweep against the Migs but that was all I got for the moment.
While I cleaned up the details and grabbed a bite to eat, we got the word “go” on rny proposal for a combination rescue effort and Mig sweep for the next morning. It was close to midnight already and morning meant something like 4 A.M. for this one, so the press was on again. All the aches and pains faded rapidly in the light of the new challenge and I set to work with my maps and my planners. We sectioned the area we wanted to cover where we thought we had the best chance of hammering the Migs and of protecting the primary searchers while we did a bit of searching on our own. We picked our flight lineups carefully, charted the routes and pinned down the timing. We decided to leave the bombs at home since we weren’t after ground targets on this one and we wanted to go clean. About 2 A.M. I started to get the wearies badly, so once I had the plan going the way I wanted, I turned it over to some of my troops who would not be flying in the morning and went to the trailer for a quick two-hour snooze.
Morning came quickly, but the challenge pushed aside the need for rest. The weather in the area where Joe had parked was as advertised—rotten. The clouds had stacked up against the hills and the electronic guys who had been watching the spot all night reported no signals, but cloud right down to the deck. There was little possibility of visual search that morning, but we could still run our part of the plan and perhaps wax some Migs and hope we would keep them away in case the rescue effort could get in gear with an unexpected weather break. It was an eager bunch that launched that morning—eager to look for some of our troops and eager to shake up the Migs. And shake them up we did. They expected to charge into a string of lumbering, bomb-laden Thuds and have their normal easy game of commit if it is favorable or run back to the home-free area if things don’t look too good. They waded in and were no little surprised. There were Mig fuel tanks jettisoned all over the area and once they discovered the name of the game, they were not at all eager to play, but they found it a bit difficult to turn loose of the first of us they engaged. I can recall the enthusiasm of one wingman in the middle of the fast,’swirling fray as the action went right down to the treetops and erupted in a blast of fire and dust when he hammered his Mig and drove him exploding into the hillside: “I got one I I got one!” His flight leader beat me to the mike button to say, “Shut up and go get another one.”
But when the first Mig flights discovered pur intent, the rest stayed on the ground. We made another swing over the entire area but they wanted nothing to do with us. Why should they come up and fight when they were safe in their havens to wait for another day? The weather stayed bad in the area where Joe was, and although we strained our ears and eyes, we added nothing to the rescue effort. It was a fun mission, though. When I landed, I had logged twelve hours of single-engine jet combat time in the past twenty clock hours. When you consider the incidentals that went with those flights, that leaves nothing but a few quick bites of food and those two hours of sack time I squeezed in. I wasn’t very sharp that afternoon, but none of us could relax because we could not forget the halfway job up north that needed to be completed. Despite the fact that Joe was in a rather lightly populated region, there are very few areas up there that don’t have enough people to give a downed airman a rough time. There was little doubt that they knew exactly where he was, and his chances of getting out were diminishing by the hour while the weather that hampered us made it that much easier for the bad guys.
When nothing good had been reported by Tuesday morning we realized that if we were to do any good on the now slim hope that Joe was still on the loose and still waiting for us, we were going to have to get the ball rolling ourselves. The afternoon mission seemed to provide a good vehicle and I loaded it with our best people again. It was an interesting one as it was headed for one of the better targets right in downtown Hanoi and although everyone knows that your chances of coming back from one of those are not the greatest, there were always people crawling over each other trying to get on them. That is something about a fighter pilot that is both unique and hard to describe. Tell him you are going to send him to hell, and that things will be rougher than he’s ever seen, and he will fight for the chance to go. He may be petrified half the time but he will die rather than admit it, and if he gets back, most of the time he will tell you that it might have been a bit rough but not so rough that he doesn’t want to go back and try to do it just a little bit better next time.