It is ultimately frustrating to have them turn you off completely whenever you achieve a setup that might give you a chance to clobber them. Even though we were not about to catch him, we stayed on his tail until we had gone far enough north to insure that all the strike flights had progressed through the area without having him turn on their tails, and then reversed and headed for the road leading from Hoa Binh back through the northwest hill country into China.
I knew this road quite well and had developed the ability to note changes in the overview almost instantly. There were several supply, barracks and transshipment clusters along the route that had been hit, to some degree, during the previous months. Intelligence summaries reported them as unservicea-” ble, but that was just not so. They were used to some extent, depending on the traffic flow down from China or up from Laos, and if you worked the area intently you could spot changes, despite the fact that developments were well hidden just as they were all over the rest of the country. I noted little change in the first few clusters but the third one was different. There were several new buildings and many of the older buildings had been repaired since my last tour of the development. There were several new dirt roads scratched through the complex and the entire operation smelled of activity. As I swung slightly to the north to double back and recheck, I called my element and told them to help me check the development thoroughly, and at the same time I spotted six big fat loaded trucks back at my eight o’clock position. I stroked the burner and called out the trucks as I wheeled hard left across the valley floor and pulled up for altitude to start a strafing pass on the trucks. The element wheeled with me and before I had a chance to initiate my strafing run, I spotted another half dozen trucks on a newly scratched crossroad leading to some of the supposedly abandoned buildings. I knew the element could handle the first batch of six we had spotted, and I called them to take care of them as I pulled around another 90 degrees to go after the second group of six. As I rounded the corner and dropped the nose, the red pipper of my cannon sight climbed lazily to the firing position I wanted, and the trucks looked like six hunched-up brown toads squatting in line. I steadied the pipper out for a second and squeezed the trigger.
The Vulcan cannon barked, and all hell broke loose. The entire valley floor lit up from both sides; I have never seen so much 37-millimeter fire in rny life. It came from everywhere. I was already on the run, so I held the trigger down and dispatched the line of trucks, but they zapped me while I was doing it. The white 37 puff balls were so thick it was like flying through a snowstorm and I couldn’t get away from them. They hit me hard in the vertical fin with a 90-degree deflection shot and I felt it. They had knocked a huge hole in the fin, taking all the electrical stability augmentation gear along with the surface metal and several supporting members, and the bird went ape. I was still heading down at almost 500 knots, and the loss of the electrical circuits threw her into a wild side-to-side oscillation that banged my head from one side of the canopy to the other. The puff balls still would not go away, and as I bounced harder and harder from side to side as the pendulum effect of the oscillations increased, I knew only one thing—that everything was white, except the green mountains approaching all too rapidly.
My basic problem at the moment was quite simple, but the solution was almost out of reach. The hard hit back in the rear end someplace had deprived me of the normal smooth control forces. Gone were the electrical pick-oils on the control pressures that usually translated themselves into a damping effect to insure smooth control movements and a resulting smooth flight path, and in their place I had a runaway control system that could only interpret and apply full rudder control deflections. The result was a full rudder deflection in one direction that would start the aircraft swinging sideways. As soon as the sick system sensed this swing, it immediately called for full opposite control response; the system was in effect tearing me and itself apart, as it fought to correct its own ever increasing and opposing gyrations.
The second phase of my problem was that I was physically unable to maintain a set position in the cockpit so that I might attempt some corrective action. The buffeting was not only hard on the head and shoulders, it also made it difficult to see properly, and the old headpiece can only take so much rapid swinging before those level bubbles get to be not so level. The G forces were high and getting higher with each exaggerated swing, which meant that my hands and arms were like swinging hunks of lead that I was trying to force to take switch actions within the cramped confines of the cockpit.
Next came the problem of the ground. It rose sharply in front of me into a mountain ridge, and as I had been hit when my nose was pointed down with the speed close to 500, I was still pointed down on a collision course with the base of the mountains. Unless I could stabilize the machine and get that nose up, I was probably going to become a part of the local real estate. The real hooker in the whole thing was that they still had me cornered from the ground. That stuff was detonating all around me like popcorn, and the speed I had plus the wild motions I was going through were the only things that were keeping me from taking more hits. I couldn’t afford another hit, and I couldn’t afford to pull back on the power or fling out the speed brakes. Either action might give me the change in profile I needed to get the beast back under control, but that would be of little value if I got blown up in the attempt.
I had been this wild control route before. I had an F-106 at 30,000 feet one day and, unknown to me, I had a dandy fire back in the weapons bay where a depot modification team had used a two-cent rivet rather than the ten-cent rivet they were supposed to use. When the fire got to the electrical control components, the stick locked full back and I went from flying at 30,000 feet to stalled out with the nose straight up at 40,000 feet before I knew what had happened, I fought that beauty for thirty minutes before I finally overpowered the controls and established a rudder exercise stall from 30,000 feet that allowed me to crash onto the runway at 250 knots.
That one had been different, in that I had lots of altitude and time to play with. Here, I was running out of both altitude and seconds, and I was getting shot at.
Ted had my element and when he saw the valley erupt in ground fire he immediately checked me on my strafing run and saw me disappear into the white cloud of flak after seeing my aircraft lurch as it took the hit in the tail. He knew I was in trouble, and he knew that the guns were on me and that he had to get them off me. It was no trick to establish the fact that those gunners were plentiful and accurate, but that did not even slow him down. He lit his burner and pulled himself and his wingman over the top and onto a strafing run from the other side of the valley. He knew that the only thing that would pull the gunners off me, now that they knew I was wounded, was a big dose of lead in the head, and that is what he gave them. He picked what looked like the center of the concentration and pulled the cannon trigger and drove right down to the tops of the gun barrels. When the center section of the guns faltered with the impact of his first rounds, he stirred his control stick around the cockpit and he kicked his rudders, and the nose of his aircraft responded by humping, bumping and swiveling in front of him. The stream of lead spitting from his Galling gun followed the nose of the machine and he sprayed arnmo all over the area. The impact of the lead and the sound of his Thud screeching across the gun pits had the desired effect, and while the central flak battery went out of business permanently, the rest of the gunners faltered in their concentration on me.