My electronics guys must have taken gas on Saturday night, because the birds were not in great electrical shape and there was a shortage of spare aircraft. I was not too happy with my personal machine but I had to take it with some of the gear not operating. There was no choice as there was nothing else available, and while I admit to toying with the idea of shafting one of the lieutenants or captains with my halfway machine and taking his, I couldn’t quite see that. I figured I was better able to get the job done with less than the optimum available to me than was one of my wingmen, and I pressed on with my own machine. By the time I got hooked up on the tanker I found that the tank hanging crew must have taken some of that same gas, as the huge 650-gallon center-line fuel tank I was carrying under the belly to match the bombload was not functioning properly. This piece of equipment was another one of our frequent offenders and we never managed to get them to work as they should. My malfunction of the day was a bit different than usual as I could get all the fuel from the tank to the engine without any problem, but something in the plumbing was goofed up and would not allow me to accept a full load of fuel from the tanker, either in the belly tank or in the main system. I bounced on and off the refueling boom a dozen times and I pulled circuit breakers and worked switches for all I was worth, but to no avail. I had my number three man back off and pull out all the emergency instructions and read them to me to see if I had missed anything, but I had not. I wanted a full load of fuel. We did not have too much to play with under ideal conditions, and if we got wrapped up with Migs or anything else unusual, things might get tight. While I crammed as much fuel into her as she would take, I had number three back out again and get out his hand navigation computer and figure out how I would make out on fuel if I left the tanker with a partial load, used the fuel in the belly tank first, and then jettisoned the tank to reduce the overall drag on the aircraft: I did not want to abort the mission. Nobody wants to abort, but when you are leading, it is sheer torture to turn your force over to someone else. Number three came back with the answer that I could just make it—probably.
As we dropped off the tankers and headed out across the hills, I was paying particular attention to my fuel consumption and waiting for that tank to go dry so I could dump it. About halfway in, I got the empty light and punched her off. Those monsters stand up on end in the airstream and just barely clear the aircraft, most of the time, and I was relieved to be rid of it, and relieved to have transferred the partial load of fuel into my main tanks where I knew I could use it. I wasn’t relieved for long as the dizzy oil pressure gauge started to weave back and forth in my face. With the engine we had in that bird, a fluctuating oil pressure indication was a real red flag and was the typical first signal for a series of rapid reactions that left you minus engine. We were only a few minutes out from the target now and I wanted desperately to continue. The weather was now definitely marginal and I wanted to make the go or no-go decision. I didn’t want to turn loose of my two-wing force, but the needle refused to stop its methodical up and down, up and down. I am constantly amazed at the wide range of thoughts that whistle through your head while you are flying combat. I wanted to convince myself that the fluctuation was not going to stop me and that the engine was not about to come unglued, and I managed to do it. I remembered one of my old midget-racing friends who had worked like a dog to get his machine in shape for one of the big races up in the northwest. His efforts paid off, and his driver pushed the car out in front and was holding a comfortable lead with three-quarters of the race completed when he suddenly pulled into the pits. Pogo, the driver, started to climb out, explaining that his oil pressure was fluctuating and he was afraid he would damage the engine. Ralph, the owner, wanted that race in the worst way and he practically gave Pogo a compression fracture as he stuffed him back into the seat and back onto the track. He had lost too much ground and they lost the race. There was nothing wrong with the engine, and the first thing Ralph did was cover the oil pressure gauge with tape. To my knowledge, he has never had a pressure gauge visible in any of his cars since. The microsecond it took me to recall that story whizzed past and I continued on to the target.
The mountains rise to about 5,000 feet in that section of the North until you have passed Hoa Binh, and then they drop rapidly to the flat sea-level floor of the delta. While we were not too far above the crests of the hills as we thundered off the last ridge, we still had to push the noses down a bit to get the approach altitude I wanted, and we had a real head of steam as we broke out over the flatland. The visibility was good enough to work, and although I found out to my surprise that the cloud deck at 8,000 feet was a solid overcast, I blasted out the code word for go and the strike was on. I knew that because of the ceiling the guys would have to alter their preplanned dive-bomb passes, but I also knew that these pros were good at that and that there would be no turning back in this wing today.
The target was harder to pick up than I had anticipated. The target photos that we had to work from were pretty sad and often outdated, and the first time you went on a new target that photo was usually the only clue you had on the details of what you were looking for. The countryside up there changes a great deal with the seasons, and rivers, streams and reservoirs can look completely different depending on the amount of rain that has fallen. This one had changed, and bore little resemblance to the target photo I had studied, and I had to turn almost 90 degrees further toward the north than I had intended. My number four man was actually the first one to get his bubble leveled and spot the target and as he called it out, I pulled hard to the left to line up for the attack. As I tugged at my 49,000-pound monster and prodded it around the corner, I was straining my head to look to the left and line up on the target. I tugged a little too hard along the up-and-down axis, and the tremendous bag of speed that I was carrying threw number two and myself up as well as around to the left. Since I was concentrating back over my left: shoulder I could not see that I was approaching an underhanging bank of clouds to my right front. I dragged number two and myself up into the murk in a hard left wingover at 600 knots and found myself with a few problems that required rapid, solution. I had to convert from visual flight to instrument flight and depend on my instruments to help me control the aircraft. In that I was really ricocheting along and was in a most unusual flight attitude this was not the easiest of transitions, but I managed to accomplish it. I needed to get back under that oloud deck so I could bomb and get out of there, and every second I stayed up in the murk took me further past my target, but I had to stay up there for a few seconds to give three and four a chance to gain a little displacement. They had been able to avoid the cloud and I didn’t want to run into them as I came spitting back out the bottom. This is where the failure of my electronics guys to get my bird in shape almost did me in and I must have made a pretty picture on SAM’s radarscope as I pushed over and got two and myself back out under the clouds. The SAM controllers knew the height of the ceiling, and as we emerged at the bottom, three SAMs were upon us. We never saw them coming and I can only guess at their site of origin. One of them must have been set for detonation at the base of the clouds and the other two were using their normal fuzing and as the preset fuze detonated a bit short of the base of the clouds and directly under the belly of my aircraft, the other two shrieked between John, my number two man, and myself. With their tails now pointed toward us, they sped on in perfect formation at an amazing pace with the round incandescent eyes of flame on their tail ends winking at us. I thought I was dead.