The next day, leading a flight, Ken was able to swing back over the area again. He repeated our previous pattern and bigger than hell the beeper came up on command. He called for voice contact expecting the same void that we had received two days before, but this time the beeper talked to him on the emergency channel. Only problem was that it was talking in an Oriental voice. It was not until then, on that Thursday afternoon, that the mission we had started on Sunday was finally all through.
10. The Easy Packs
When your daily job is to attack difficult targets in the Hanoi area, you sometimes take your alternate targets too lightly. Nobody can outguess the weather, especially in a place like North Vietnam where you may well get only a few really good days all year, so on each mission you have to plan to go any one of several ways. That’s the reason for all the complicated mission planning I mentioned earlier. When you bank on going for the big one and at the last minute find yourself diverted to one of the easy Packs down in the southern part of North Vietnam, the emotions are bound to be varied. (A Pack, remember, is short for what the Air Force calls a Route Package.) Some feel mostly frustration that the prime job will not be done that day. Some feel a degree of fatality: nothing to be done about it and some of these kids will live longer because of it. The ones I worried about were those who had never learned, or who had forgotten, the bitter lesson that anyplace where they may shoot at you can be a source of dire trouble. It is a great temptation to ignore some of the rules you live by in an intense area when you are called upon to work in one that is not as intense but nevertheless hostile. There is nothing sadder than to lose a Thud and a pilot on an easy target, but it can and does happen for several reasons.
If the weather is bad enough to cancel the primary target, it is likely to be less than rosy in the rest of the country—not always, but quite often. Two particular weather bugaboos over there are far worse than they are anyplace else in the world that I have flown, and I’ve flown most places. The first is the thunderstorms, or even bumpy cumulus clouds that are in effect very junior thunderstorms. The big ones go up like nothing you can imagine, and when a good-sized cloud system sets into an area, you can expect It to be there for days. The clouds run from right on the deck to well about 50,000 feet, and as they grow, they roam back and forth and bump into each other, causing more thunder-bumpers and confusion. There is no going under, over or around a big batch of them, and if they are stretched across your path, you most often just have to grit your teeth, hang on as best you can and press for the other side. Any thunderstorm is a -rough ride, but these are rougher. The monsters and the cumulus type are alike as far as visibility is concerned—unbelievably bad.
The second phenomenon that makes Asian skies uncomfortable is the continuing poor visibility. Upon the arrival of a major or fast-moving weather system, the visibility will clear and the weather will be beautiful. Flying over there on a day like that gives you a sense of luxury. All the rest of the time the visibility varies from poor to dreadful. I have done my share of flying in smog and city-polluted air as well as dust over the deserts and smoke over an area like Tokyo, but they do not hold a candle to the murk that hangs in the air from Hanoi to Bangkok. In most reduced visibility conditions you can see straight down or at least penetrate the restricted visibility on some axis. Not thai: stuff. It is like somebody painted your sunglasses white. I guess some of it comes from the fact that everyone from India to Tokyo seems to be burning something, and part of it comes again from the heavy, wet air, but regardless, it is plain awful as far as seeing where you are going when you are flying a fighter.
Another thing that costs us on the easy ones is the appearance of the countryside and the lack of a skyful of flak to meet you upon your arrival in the target complex. The easy Packs look like the other side of the moon in lots of spots. The North Vietnamese have little need to clean up or rebuild the many crossings, fords, bridges and the like that we have destroyed in the past, as it is much easier to build a new route or find a new crossing. The hulks of the old targets scar the countryside. Moreover, nobody moves when you are flying over the area and only when you surprise something like a stray convoy of vehicles or construction equipment do you get any sensation of actuality or life below you. The guns are there, nobody doubts that, but they are not there in the concentration that you find up North. Many of the guns are on the move, while others have specific facets of the constant southward flow of men and equipment to protect. When you come upon this scene with a small maneuverable unit like a flight of two or a flight of four and gaze on the silent bomb holes and the silent roads and villages, and when you are excused from the rattle and burst of the heavier guns of Hanoi, it is easy to make the big slip. It is easy to forget that they will shoot. They are smart in the easy Packs, and most of the time they will hold their fire until you stumble into a position where they have a good chance of zapping you on the first try.
Another reason for Thud losses in the easy areas goes back to the combination of man and machine tempered by experience. Lots of us have flown many of the machines of the recent past as well as the present, and we have flown them on a variety of missions. Each one is different and each handles differently as you force or coax it through its performance spectrum. Like boats and cars, each model has its strong and its weak points, so that each one is best suited to a particular kind of mission. I would argue violently with the thought that any single machine could be desig’ned and built to accomplish all missions satisfactorily.
You can fly them all through the same sky, but that is a great deal different from doing the best possible job on each mission. The basic differences in speed, altitude, maneuverability and weapons delivery just do not make it good sense to assume away the differences and try to build one vehicle for all tasks. Pilots have a tendency to wish all good things from air machines they have flown into the one they are presently flying, and this can mean trouble. Those who have horsed an F-102 around a corner like a midget racer on dirt don’t forget it, and someplace way back in the computer is the feeling that all century series fighters should turn like that. Those who have violently changed direction in the F-106 while still maintaining perfect control don’t forget that. Those who have strapped the neat little F-104 onto their backsides and experienced the sensation that “I can make this baby doll go anyplace, anytime” do not forget that. Yet, when any of us fly the Thud with its almost complete lack of these sporty characteristics, we love the way we can whistle along on the deck with the big, high-drag bomb, tank and missile load, as we race down the Ridge to Hanoi with little fear for the Mig. However, when we take this same Thud and try to play maximum performance close support over terrain that often rivals Denver for elevation and rarefied air, we sometimes forget that we have a skinny little wing originally designed for high-speed, straight-and-level, on-the-deck nuclear delivery. When we forget that we can’t turn like a deuce, honk like a six or skitter like a four, we ask for trouble and we most often find it.