The Spad hugged the trees to the north, and I hugged them to the south and thirty seconds later all the nasty tracers and noise had gone away and he said, “There’s nobody there, no sense in losing any more birds. We better call it off. Sorry, old man—thanks for the cover.” I concurred, and that was the end of that.
It’s easy to say, why press? The target wasn’t worth it, but John had a job to do and he wanted to do it to perfection, and God knows he tried. He hung it out over the target for them to shoot at, and I know many who will tell you how bad that is, but I have a lot more experience and a lot more combat than John had, and I hung it out twice without even a gun to shoot, and what’s more, I dragged my wingman with me, and we both knew exactly what we were getting into. I guess that is what combat is made of.
The weather refused to change and my old buddy Ralph bit the dust on an easy one fighting the same old rotten visibility, but also fighting the aircraft. He was element lead on a point target on an early morning go, and when they got there, the haze was even covered up with a low cloud layer. There was no choice but to fall back to the planned alternate of road reconnaissance, so they split into elements and started to work. Ralph had been in my squadron for a long time when I had an F-106 outfit as a light colonel. He had flown F-102’s before that and was one of my best. He and I worked up a little acrobatic routine that I thought was quite good—but don’t tell anybody about that as it’s not authorized. I helped arrange an F-104 assignment for him when he left the squadron, and he performed with distinction in his new assignment until Southeast Asia called and he joined us.
Part way down the route of the road recce, Ralph called out a truck and wheeled to attack it from low level in the haze of early morning. He still had all the bombs on his aircraft, and he was low and slow, heavy and sluggish, but he had a target in sight and he was after it. I never did figure out if he was going to bomb it from a very low angle or strafe it with his bombs still on the aircraft. All I know is that neither approach is healthy in the machine he was in, and I know that the ground gunners had a more lucrative target in their sights than Ralph had in his. I wonder if for an instant he was flying a batwinged F-106 instead of a clipped-wing F-105. He was only about 3500 feet above the ground, and his speed was weir below 350 knots when he took a direct hit from the previously silent guns. They ripped his belly section out and started a fire that in turn caused other large pieces of structure to separate from the aircraft.
His flight leader called him three times to bail out but the canopy never separated from the aircraft, and there was no bailout observed. The bombs were still on the aircraft as it impacted the ground. Number four reported that the last thing Ralph said was “Oh, no.” I’m sure by then he knew what was happening. All for a lousy beat-up truck, but if you are going to take a bunch of guys and feed them gunpowder and raw meat while you tie one hand behind them, this is what you have to expect—losses. It just hurts worse to lose them on the easy ones.
11. Unhappy Hunting Grounds
Everyone who flies a combat tour in fighters finds a favorite area to work in. You find places you detest and have no desire to fly into, and you find other places where you feel more relaxed, more competent, more aggressive. The index is not necessarily the severity of the defenses, and in fact a flier’s favorite section may be very heavily defended. It is just a case of feeling that you can master all the challenges in one spot and adopting that section as your personal hunting grounds. When you make that identification, it is amazing how well you can manipulate both the schedule and the conduct of the mission to allow you to comb your hunting grounds regularly. I despised the northeast railroad. I didn’t like the long haul that we had to make to get there and I didn’t like the approaches to the targets, even though it was easy enough to get there and the landmarks made navigation no problem. While there were plenty of people shooting at you on the way in and the way out, the gunfire was not an overriding factor until you got to the target itself. The targets were blah targets, and they were all heavily defended. We smashed most of the worthwhile ones fairly early on, and after we had knocked out the better targets in other complexes to the west of the railroad and toward Hanoi, the North Vietnamese loaded the railroad with guns from these other areas and then moved them up and down the rail line as needed. Our plan of hitting the same places again and again helped them in their arrangement of guns, and there were not too many places where they couldn’t hammer you pretty hard from all sides. Nobody wants to bust his rear end, but I abhorred the thought of busting it for some crummy beat-up piece of railroad track or a couple of used railroad cars.
I didn’t like the egress route either, because once you got past the guns that chased you to the coast, you would have to look at all those ships lined up waiting to get into the port at Haiphong with, flapping in the North Vietnamese breeze, the flags of many nations we had knocked ourselves out to help. It was rough to watch some kid blow up in your face and moments later watch your supposed allies unloading more equipment to be transported to the gunners so they could work you over the next day, or down the trail, so as to clobber some poor grunt crawling around in the mud down South. I didn’t like the refueling on the way out because everyone was always hurting for fuel, and the rat race to find your tanker and hook up with him was always more confused out there. And I didn’t like the long haul home. As far as I am concerned, all single-engine fighters still have an automatic rough running engine once you pass the shoreline and look out at all that water.
My favorite bombing and hunting area started around Viet Tri and went straight south past Hoa Binh, then west along Route 6 up to Son La. I never went into the area that I didn’t find a good target for my bombs and I always managed to find excellent armed reconnaissance targets after I had dropped the bombs. When you pick a favorite area you get to know it quite well, and you know where to look for the elusive targets. It thus becomes easier to generate a good mission. I have found as many as fifty trucks in convoy in there; I have played games with the Migs in there; and I have hammered countless buildings and supply caches and a goodly portion of them have gone boom. This has not been completely one-sided, and I hasten to add that I have been hit three times while working that area and there have been several moments of doubt as to my chances of getting out.
It was a murky gray Sunday afternoon when SAM hit me just to the east of Hoa Binh. I am very pleased to be a member of that exclusive club of aviators who have been hit by a SAM and lived to tell about jt, and I have to admit that it is quite a sensation. I was leading both wings that afternoon and we were after a sprawling barracks area stretched out across the flatlands just east of the mountains. As usual, visibility was poor and we expected a cloud deck about 8,000 feet but we were unsure of the extent of cloud cover the deck would provide. If it was too extensive we would be out of business.