There is no mistaking the sound and sensation of being hit. I have been tapped a total of eleven times in my 216 fighter combat missions, and the sensation does not become any less thrilling with repetition. The sound is not as loud as you might imagine, yet it is very precise and definite. I have searched for a good description and the best I can come up with is to take a quarter between your thumb and forefinger and hold it about four inches above a metal surface like a radiator, or even above a hardwood surface like a desk top. Now firmly, but not violently, rap the surface with the quarter. That’s the sound, and there is nothing quite like it.
I never worry too much about where on the aircraft I have taken the hit since I have been hit everyplace from the windscreen to the tailpipe, and the specific location is pretty academic. There are four big things you need to know in a hurry. You need to know if the controls are working, and you can check that by simply moving the stick and kicking the rudders to see if the bird reacts. You also have to take a quick look at those hydraulic pressure gauges and see if they are up and holding a steady pressure, because if they are on the way down, there is a good chance that you are also on the way down. Next, you want to know if the mill is still with you, and this you can check by glancing at the engine gauges on the front panel to see if they are in the green and by jazzing the throttle a few times to see if the power follows the throttle. Then you need to see if you are on fire. Theoretically, the two fire warning lights sitting right in front of you will illuminate to give you the word on fire, but I also look around as best I can; and when I have the chance, I take the mask off and sniff for the unmistakable odor of burning aircraft components. This entire check consumes only seconds.
I checked out OK, and John v/as still on niy wing, the target was in front of us, and the bad guys were shooting from the ground. I figured I had come all this way to do a job and that it wasn’t too healthy sitting up there wondering how hard I had been hit. I was a bit concerned about putting the extra strain of a high-speed dive-bomb run and pullout on my machine, since the strain might complicate any damage I had taken, but that’s the breaks. I had a job to do, and I got on with it and rolled into my run. Those two 3,000-pounders went as directed and we had dirt and buildings flying through the air to spotlight the target for the following flights. My bird recovered from the dive without incident and we charged out of the area and called the Avis wing to give them the go signal, plus a weather check on the target itself. The Avis troops did not fare too well. They had become tangled up with the weather and had been unable to maintain their formation; in fact some of their four-ship flights were split up. The Migs had also swung in behind them and as they milled about and tried to get organized, the Migs zipped through them and busted their entire effort wide open. Their leadman called their portion of the strike off, and as my machine was still doing OK, I took our flights over to their position and we managed to draw most of the Migs off them as they limped home licking their wounds. I limped back myself with my oil pressure still bouncing and my forward underside peppered by SAM fragments. The mill kept running until I got back to the base, but that was all she ran, and when I shut her down in the chocks she was all through. I got a new engine that night and had some sheet metal work done on my belly and we were ready to go again the next day.
Through the spring and early summer of 1967 there was little significant change in our attack pattern. We continued to work the full spectrum of allowable targets in the North and I managed to get into my favorite hunting grounds fairly often. The activity would vary in intensity from week to week, and the area would light up at one end while slowing down in another section, depending on the weather and the degree of traffic headed for the South, but you could always manage to stir something up if you could spend enough time in there. It was several weeks after my SAM encounter before they got to me again, and sure enough it was right back in my hunting grounds. They sneaked up on me this time and they didn’t miss doing me in by very much.
The job for the day was to hit both Viet Tri and Phu Tho, and to see how much damage we could do to the rail facilities and associated equipment between the two towns. They are right on the main rail line that comes from China down through the northwestern portion of North Vietnam, and both spots were quite active. We decided that we could get the best coverage by splitting the strike force into two sections of two 4-ship flights each and letting our SAM hunters take care of both attacks as they roamed the area. I put the second section on Phu Tho and I took the first section to Viet Tri.
There were both good and bad points about taking a strike to Viet Tri. It was not so great in that they had tough gun coverage on the entrance route and there were several SAM sites that had done well around there: they could look across the flat terrain at you all the way, including the actual dive-bomb run itself. They also had a pair of 85- and 100-millimeter batteries that were particularly mean. They were active every time I went up there and, as a rule, they were not afraid to shoot. They usually picked you up just before you rolled in on the rail yard, and they could raise enough fuss to goof up your run. I have personally been on several missions when we dumped many pounds on their heads, but they seemed to come bouncing back with a new crew by the next time we passed their way. I happened to have a good view of one of their rings of gun pits one day when my number three man put a load right in the middle of them. One minute you could see them firing, and the next minute the entire ring was immersed in a fireball of detonating explosives. There is no doubt that he got the gunners but he obviously didn’t kill the guns, so it was nothing but a messy clean-up job for them and they were ready to go again. You couldn’t ask for a better hit than my number three got but it didn’t really do the job. The answer is obviously better munitions. If you are going to expose your forces and battle the guns, you need a munition that will kill the guns as well as the gunners. You are not going to do it with 1930-style ladyfingers. A suitable weapon is well within the capacity of current technology, and as long as we continue to fight conventional wars we will need such a weapon. The ground guns are a most formidable threat to mission accomplishment, and unless we get off the dime and do something constructive to beat these gun systems, other than squashing them with falling fighter planes, we are going to be in bigger trouble if we take on bigger enemies. I am not the first to scream this fact, but like others ahead of me, I have seen little constructive effort in the antiflak area. In his history of the fall of Dien Bien Phu, Bernard Fall called attention to the extraordinary toll of French planes shot down by the Vietnamese gunners, repeating the success of the North Koreans against the Americans during the Korean War. Apparently our strategists have still not absorbed these lessons.
Viet Tri was not limited to a couple of large gun positions. Like so many other areas up there, the guns were spread all over the complex and they could move freely from day to day. Looking down on the town you could see sparklers from each dirt road intersection and from the backyard of every standing building. It is tough to knock out a threat like that unless you get permission to knock out the entire deserted town. They had one large complex of buildings just north of town that was billed as a hospital,- and was naturally off limits. If it was in fact a hospital, it must have been a hospital for sick flak gunners, because every time we looked at it from a run on the railhead, it was one mass of sputtering, flashing gun barrels. Like I said, there is no sporting blood up there.