It didn’t work out that way. Two of my majors were accused of strafing a Russian ship near Haiphong as they fought for their lives. I fought for them with all my might and instead of my getting my second Air Force Cross all three of us received a general court-martial. That is quite a story in itself and one of these days I may tell that story too. I haven’t decided if I will call it “The Turkestan Incident” or “Hanoi and Back—Six Dollars a Round Trip.”
Appendix: A Bit About Words
Much of what I have written in this book is flavored by the exclusive world of the fighter pilot, a man who assumes that everyone understands what he is doing and how he talks. (I have heard it said that if you tied a fighter pilot’s hands behind his back, he could not talk coherently for more than sixty seconds.) So I have written this book in the language of the Thud drivers over Vietnam, and that language necessarily includes a good many words whose meaning you’re not likely to know unless you’ve been there. Rather than break up the narrative with repeated explanations or end the book with something in the nature of a glossary, I have chosen instead to give you here a capsule account of any government-issue throttle jockey’s Thud combat tour. In the course of this summary, you will, I hope, form a clear picture of how our various air combat units were put together and how we worked together in them. And ailong the way you should get a better idea of the meanings of some of those odd-sounding special words.
The GI pilot stumbles onto a new base overladen with suitcases filled with worthless things that he will not need during his tour, plus a few pounds of personnel and pay records that the administrative folks will lose or maim but always make fatter while he is fighting the war. He is first assigned to a fighter squadron which becomes his basic anchor. The squadron consists of about three hundred enlisted airmen and forty officers (about thirty-five fliers and five supporters) and is commanded by a lieutenant colonel. The commander must be concerned with all facets of his squadron but our new pilot focuses on the operations section, supremely ruled by the major or lieutenant colonel known as the operations officer. The buck pilot is then assigned to one of the four flights in the squadron which are ideally run by four hard-nosed majors, each with eight pilots and five or six aircraft under his thumb. The details of when he eats, sleeps, flies, draws charts and maps for his buddies, or acts as squadron duty officer are controlled at this level.
There are three fighter squadrons within the parent unit on a base, which is called a wing. The wing commander has a staff made up of the commanders of all the support units, such as the supply squadron, civil engineering squadron, and medical unit, in addition to the fighter squadrons. The wing commander’s prime assistants on this staff are the vice commander, the deputy for operations who oversees the operational employment of the three fighter squadrons; the deputy for materiel who oversees the maintenance squadrons and the materiel squadrons; and the .combat support commander who is the focal point for all the housekeeping units. Lumped together, these people become wing weenies to the fighter pilot, and when a full-time pilot shows talent indicating he can be plucked from the pure stick-and-rudder business of the squadron and assigned chores as a wing weenie, there is bound to be some degree of trauma. The term “weenie” appeared someplace way back when, but the first time I encountered it was in Korea when our commander, Gen. John Murphy, used to call us together at six o’clock every other Sunday evening. He would go through our boners of the past two weeks and regularly announce, “You are a bunch of dumb weenies.” The sessions were dubbed “Weenie Roasts.”
The deputy commander for operations (DO for short) is the executive who produces the airborne combat effort. His empire centers around a building called a combat operations center where all combat communications are accepted and dispatched. This is where those concerned with the action can find, at any minute of the night or day, who is flying which aircraft, when they left, when they are scheduled to return, and what they are accomplishing while in the air. The fragmentary portion of the headquarters instructions pertaining to a particular wing’s effort for the next day arrives in this section at least daily, and upon receipt of the frag, the next section of the DO’s people go to work—those known as mission planners or frag breakers.
The frag breakers must decipher page after page of times, coordinates, and numerical target designators to translate the frag into an understandable schedule of activity for the wing. When they have reduced the data to a simple form showing how many people start engines at what time to get from here to there, they assign responsibilities to each of the three fighter squadrons to provide the assets to get the job done. Full preparation must be accomplished in triplicate to cover the primary target assigned, plus first and second alternate targets. The man leading the entire show for the next day, the mission commander, must dictate his attack guidelines for each of the targets. Pilots selected by the squadrons then make out the maps, flight lineup cards, and detailed navigation cards to be used by the pilots within the strike force, and they must depend upon yet another section within the DO’s shop—the intelligence section.
As soon as the intelligence people are alerted to the next day’s requirements, they scurry through huge files and produce the applicable maps and photos to be used by the aircrews. They collect any information available on past attacks on the target, and they attempt to predict the defenses that will be encountered. This prediction can never be exact as the enemy refuses to leave his mobile defenses in one place, and a gun battery that is active, or up, one day may not fire—or may not even be there—the next day. Their prognosis must cover likely sectors of automatic ground weapons fire, such as machine guns. It must present the best estimate of action by antiaircraft guns varying in caliber from 37 millimeter to 100 millimeter, some firing visually and some firing under radar control. They must attempt to pinpoint the mobile Russian-built surface-to-air missile sites—SAM to us—and they must bring us up-to-date on how many interceptor aircraft—Migs—we might look for.
Some of the DO’s people, such as the weapons officer, specialize in the use and delivery of bombs, rockets, and gunfire. They can advise on the best angle of dive and the best airspeed for any particular divebomb run. Others are constantly evaluating the tactics of the attack to determine the best approach to maximum efficiency, while still others constantly evaluate the performance of the pilots and the manner in which the bombs go to Hanoi.