The black takeoff was not too bad, and as we reached altitude, the first light of day was piercing the horizon. The refueling was another story. It was the worst I have ever been through. I had Ken leading my element on his ninety-eighth mission and he has described the refueling as his single most harrowing flying experience. We had huge thunderstorms on all of our refueling tracks and they started on the ground and went up above 35,000 feet, even in the early morning hours. There was simply no possible way to avoid them, and though I tried desperately to keep the heaving, bouncing mass of fighters and tankers under control, it got pretty well messed up from the start: All of the flight leaders managed to locate their tankers in the rain and clouds, which in itself was quite a feat. It gets real spooky probing through a thick cloud trying to locate another moving object, and neither the tankers nor the fighters are maneuverable enough in the refueling posture to salvage the situation if somebody goofs.
Normally you take on a load of fuel when you first go on the tanker and then top off for a full load just before you leave. In bad weather two hookups are plenty demanding, but this day I had to accomplish eight separate hookups before I managed to get all my charges squared away. I don’t care if I never have to do that again. The further north we went, the worse the bumps became. We had people falling off refueling booms and sinking into the murk, separated from their flights, and we had entire flights slung oflf their tankers. There was just no place to go where conditions would be any better and it looked for a while like I would not be able to hold my troops together safely, and that I might have to scrub the mission I wanted so badly to complete. We all had to stay on the same radio channel so we could try to keep track of each other, and since every pilot was having problems, the radio turned into a screaming mess. I was trying to fly instruments, navigate the force, keep track of my tanker, and mentally picture the other tankers and fighters while attempting to figure out how I was going to maintain control of this mess. I had vertigo so many times I lost track of the number, and I repeatedly had to revert to straight instruments to convince myself that I was or was not in some degree of upside-down condition. The tankers were trying to give us all the help they could, but they became confused, and their turns became spastic as they bumped out of unison with us and exceeded the capabilities of our birds heavy with bombs and fuel. The entire situation approached the impossible.
In desperation I told everybody to stay off the radio for a few minutes and suffer in silence, and I contacted the pilot and navigator of my tanker on the radio. I told them that we were just about to blow the entire strike, and on top of that we were liable to run a bunch of us together if we kept lurching about as we were. Since we were the top cell, I told them to keep track of the others on their radar and to start moving up and down, searching for a break between layers of clouds where we could get the force back together. The process of climbing, diving, bending and turning, while we continually cycled off the boom in order to have a. full load to be able to take advantage of a break should we find one, was most painful, but we finally stumbled into a clearing between layers that was less than 1,000 feet high and less than 2 miles in diameter. It wasn’t a good setup, but it was this or nothing. I told the tanker to wrap it up in whatever turn was necessary to stay in that hole, and while we stood on our ears to stay with him we topped off on fuel once again.
I had little idea of our specific position since I had been dragging around behind my tanker during his gyrations. I called the tanker navigator, who gave me a set of coordinates for our present position which I managed to set into my navigation gear; at least the machine would know where we were. I then told my tanker to get out of the hole and head south, and to call each succeeding tanker and steer him and his fighters into this little clear spot with instructions to drop his fighters as soon as he reached the spot. I wrestled with my maps and figured a new course from our new drop-off point to the target and orbited in the restricted clearing until I knew that all tankers and fighters were en route with safe separation between each cell. When the big blunt nose of the second tanker burst through the clouds into my circle, I announced my new course and time on target to all the flight leaders and dumped my nose back into the thunderstorms to let down enroute to the target. What a horrible exercise.
After a bit more bouncing around, we broke through on the other side of the wall of thunderstorms and the air was clear above a low undercast that obscured the ground. All calculations were in the blind now and all I could do was follow my navigation gear and hope that both it and my new computations were correct. After battering us around so badly, the weather finally gave us a break, and as the seconds ticked away and ran out, I was over the desired spot and there was a break in the clouds that centered right over the valley I was looking for. The target complex was in the center of the break that extended from the ridgeline on the north of the target for about two miles to the other ridgeline, on the south of the valley. It was open for a couple of miles to the east and west and we could work, and I could hear the flights behind me breaking out of the thunder-bumps and charging north.
Everything looked just as it had the day before and I knew the precise target that I wanted. My selection of the gun pits that had clobbered me the day before as my target was both personal and professional. I flew east past the road where I had strafed the trucks the day before and placed myself in clear view of the guns that had hit me. I wanted to be sure that the North Vietnamese had not moved them, and I wanted to lure as many gun crews up and on the guns as I could. The gunners responded well, and the valley lit up just as it had the day before, but this time I was ready for them. I made one of the best dive-bomb runs of my tour that day and as I pulled up and looked back over my shoulder, the guns were down, and things were blowing up throughout the gun pits on both sides of the road. I had^hit dead center and those guns never fired another round that day. The rest of my flight dropped on separate building clusters and each one of them was right on the money. Earl, my number two man, had the most spectacular drop; the complex he hit must have been loaded with ammunition, as it rocked with one secondary explosion after the other, spewing orange flame and dirty gray smoke skyward. It was still rattling ten minutes later.
I moved to the north of the target and cleared the second flight into the valley which was now well marked with fire, smoke and dust. I moved on an east-west axis that allowed me to observe the work of the succeeding flights as they methodically chewed up the building complexes. I also managed to spot a few new clusters that I had not seen the day before, and all indications were that our find was as good as or even better than we had figured. I swung back to the east from one of these new sightings just about the time my third flight followed my directions to perfection and left another cluster of buildings aflame. The fourth flight was a good minute out, and a small but well-constructed set of buildings followed a straight road now perpendicular to my wing. Why not? I rolled in and strafed the length of the complex with my flight and as we pulled off to the south, the fourth flight rolled in over the top of us and bombed to the north. As they pulled up they rolled into a wingover to the west and strafed what the intelligence people told us might be an early warning radar site in the hills on the northern edge of the valley. It was going like clockwork and I was elated.