The first thing I had to do was find a circuit breaker. A circuit breaker switch in a fighter is an obnoxious little piece of black plastic that looks something like the eraser and the top half inch of a lead pencil. Each breaker controls one of the many electrical systems or inputs that makes a complicated weapons system tick. There are so many of them that the least essential are not even in the cockpit but are in compartments throughout the aircraft, where the pilot has no control over them in flight. If one of the external breakers pops in flight you have lost that system for the duration. The designers took the zillion most important breakers and placed them in the cockpit, so the pilot could have the opportunity to check and reset some of the electrical systems when necessary. The problem is that there is not enough room for them and they are strung out in lines, globs and little bunches in all the remote corners of the pit that are unusable for other major components. Many of them are on the sides and behind the pilot, and a midget standing up in the seat and looking backward might be able to peer under and behind the seat and armrests and make out the minute lettering and number code that identifies one black pimple from another. When you are strapped in, especially with combat gear on, you can forget all that. Many of them you cannot see, and some of them you can hardly reach. You have to know where they are and, if you can reach them, operate them by feel. While Ted was getting the guns off my back, I was fighting the G forces and the oscillation as I forced my now heavy arm and left hand down and back along the left console panel behind my left hip in search of the stability augmentation switch. If I could find it and disengage it, I would cut out the entire control augmentation system, and while this would give me a spooky set of controls in all the aspects of pitch, roll and yaw, it should at least cut out the frantic and incorrect outputs that were wagging my tail with such alarming force.
I found what I thought was the right one and managed to hook a thumb and finger under its narrow top lip, and I got it out about the time Ted got the gunners’ heads down. The instant I got it out I leaned on the right rudder with my right foot, as that was the direction I thought I was swinging toward at that instant. My hope was to lock onto one direction of oscillation and break the swing from side to side, and it worked as the bird slid to the right in an uncoordinated but single direction skid. The instant I felt response I threw out the speed brakes to alter my trajectory, honked back on the throttle, horsed back on the stick, then immediately rammed the throttle full forward and lit the burner as I eased off on the right pedal. She was a long way from being a stable bird, but she responded, and the nose eased up as she waddled and bumped toward the sky above the treetops on the hills that were now under me,.and I cleared the mountaintops by less than I like to think about. She was wiggly, but she was flying, and Ted had made it back up from his valley floor excursion.
I had only one of my other flights still working in the area, my SAM chasers, only a few miles to the south and east of me, and they still had a full load of ordnance. I called them into the area. They had no trouble finding the spot and were on the scene by the time I got my now slow-turning beastie around the corner and headed to the west and south. They needed only a quick description of the target, and each one of them picked a separate cluster of buildings and let fly with bombs. The results were spectacular and they got four secondary explosions out of four, with one the telltale white of ammunition, and another the black thick smoke spiral of fuel.
That place was loaded. I had to hurry back to the base to report my find and figure out the best way of exploiting it.
Hurrying was not the answer for me for the following hour or so. My wingman had pulled up alongside of me to take a good look at the condition of my tail feathers, and he advised that the hole was huge and was in effect,a jagged cut directly through the vertical fin and out the other side. The forward edge of the fin was held on only by the angled leading edge of the fin itself, and wires and loose skin flapped in the hole where supporting members and their covering aluminum skin used to be. His advice was simple, “Slow down before you tear that damn fin off.” I would have gone no place but down if I had torn it off, so slow down I did. I would have liked to go home at a comfortable low altitude and a low speed, but we had been working well to the north for some time and I had to have a shot of fuel to make it back. That meant up to altitude for the tanker, and I was a bit concerned about how my charge would handle up there, but we struggled up to 27,000 feet for our tanker. She didn’t handle too well, but I figured she was good enough so that a cooperative tanker crew and a good boomer could handle rne. I explained my problem to the boomer on the radio, and as I sat behind him, looking like an unhappy worm suspended by a string tied around his middle, he took careful aim and stabbed me the first try. I scarfed up a full load of fuel, just to be sure I had enough in case of any problems in the landing phase, and limped homeward thinking again how lucky we were to have such a good bunch of tanker troops on our side.
The landing was uneventful. I just backed way off from the runway and came driving in on a flat approach using minimum control pressures. There were many “ohs” and “ahs” as I taxied in and parked my wounded bird, and we found on looking at her on the ground that I had taken several small hits along with the big one. Our information man wanted a picture of me standing there with my head through the hole for a news release, and the maintenance guy and the factory representative wanted one for their bosses, but I refused. I have never allowed a picture to be taken of me with any one of my shot-up aircraft. I have had several friends who have posed for some rather spectacular photos of that type, and an amazingly high proportion of them are very dead from subsequent battle damage. I confined my activities to telling my crew chief to go steal an aft section off some sick bird that was down for maintenance, slap it on our rear end and get the painter to change the numbers. Of the F-105’s flying today there are few that do not exist on parts from other F-105’s.
We debriefed very thoroughly to be sure that we had all seen the same things on the ground and then got the intelligence staff working on all the pictures and background information that they could dig up on the area. What their effort boiled down to was some third-rate pictures that were extremely old and the information that the area had been a live target some time ago but had been dropped from active to inactive because of damage reported in the past and lack of recently reported activity. We were obviously not up to speed on developments in that little valley and that made our find all the sweeter. It might have gone inactive for a while, but it was obvious from the trucks, guns, buildings and secondary explosions we had observed that morning that this was no longer the case. I got on the horn to the big headquarters, described my jind in the most glowing terms I could conjure up, and asked for permission to take an entire strike wing into the place the next day to see what I could do about cleaning all that equipment out while it was still sitting in one spot. Response was not immediate, but I eventually got the go-ahead and my wing was delegated to my own control for only the second time in the entire tour. The headquarters intelligence types went to work for us also but only managed to come up with a few more outdated photos of the general area. I put the planners in my operations section to work, checked their initial efforts and gave them the go sign, and went about some of my other duties while looking forward to the early morning mission the next day.