In other words, the U.S. paid for the aircraft and the crew, and the military airlift people controlled the booking, but the same military people would not fill an empty seat with a military man from Thailand who had a few days off unless he was on official (“funded”) business. Seems sort of silly to hire a vehicle and run it at less than the maximum capacity. The crew couldn’t have cared less, but the rules were the rules. It was definitely half a war in many commonsense areas like this. The people in Thailand had none of the goodies such as Rest and Recreation—R and R, that is—so the combat crews who fought the air war over Hanoi were personae non grate with the Military Airlift Command people.
Local unit support fits into this picture and a great mass of people not assigned to the formal military airlift effort were involved in flying the original C-47 gooney bird or some more sophisticated model thereof. Each unit and headquarters had many runs that just had to be made, rather like running the family car to the drugstore, the post office, and so on. We needed them, and there were many highly dedicated people in this endeavor, but there were some there who never seemed to make the combat team and who adhered closely to the business-as-usual approach, no matter what the operation— and even they managed an air medal now and then. I don’t envy them and I think that support flying is not so pretty good. I wouldn’t change places for anything.
Next in this tour is the third air war, the easy route packages—the Thud driver’s definition of the southern parts of North Vietnam. North Vietnam was divided into six numbered areas, from 1 in the south to 6 in the north. This was a matter of administrative convenience, but the intensity of the defenses went up with the Route Package number. The easy southern Route Packages have cost many a man and many a machine, but although they could be most deceptive, those who fought their war there did not face the ever-present pressure for split-second timing, and the exposure rate allowed more ease of maneuver without the SAM and Mig threat. We used that area as check-out grounds for our new F-105 sports. A pilot needs a few rides to get in shape, just like an athlete, and this was the place for our warm-ups. You can get into real trouble on the simplest of combat missions (I guess even our B-52 crews faced some problems, like stepping on each other’s fingers reaching for the coffeepot and things like that). The BUPs have been this far north a few times, while the world stood still, the monkeys trembled and the toothpick manufacturers cursed their ill-chosen, old-fashioned production methods. (BUF stands for big ugly fellows in polite conversation, but is suitably amplified in true fighter conversation. This terminology irritated the big load drivers, and the Strategic Air Command general in charge of their operation issued an edict that the B-52 “Stratofortress” was not to be referred to as a BUF. His edict received amazingly little attention outside the strategic empire.) It is great sport to barb our fellow aviators on their operational areas, and there are many who would respond eagerly should the bell ring for something better, but face it we must, the toughest area for the BUF’s and for many fighters other than the F-105 was our training ground. It was where we went when operational conditions were unacceptable in the big league.
And the fourth air war was the big league. The true air war in the North. The desperate assault and parry over the frighteningly beautiful, green-carpeted mountains leading down into the flat delta of the Red River. The center of hell with Hanoi as its hub. The area that was defended with three times the force and vigor that protected Berlin during World War II. The home of the SAM and the Mig, the filthy orange-black barking 100-millimeter and 85-millimeter guns, the 57- and 37-millimeter gun batteries that spit like a snake and could rip you to shreds before you knew it, the staccato red-balled automatic weapons that stalked the straggler who strayed too low on pullout from a bomb run, and the backyard of the holders of rifles and pistols who lay on their backs and fired straight up at anyone foolish or unfortunate enough to stumble into view. This was the locale of Thud Ridge.
For those of us who fought there, geography was a basic fact of life. On the west, the Red River meanders out of the mountains and valleys that form the northern extremity of North Vietnam and the southern flank of Communist China. Nine-thousand-foot mountain peaks that are cut in places like the teeth of a giant saw lie to the southwest of the Red and separate it from its parallel traveling companion, the Black River. The stark peaks, deep river gorges and green unrelenting jungle were something to see from the air at 500 knots plus—that’s the only way. Our area of concern started along the Red River slightly north of a place we called the Brassiere, a well-defined pair of hooks in the river surrounding the viscous little town of Yen Bai. As a fighter pilot, you couldn’t work too far north of there without taking the chance of stepping on your necktie along the Chinese-border buffer zone, an unpardonable sin. I guess we are not giving away too much in operable infantry-type ground in our self-imposed buffer zone, a big fat 30-mile-wide strip of mountain territory that follows the Chinese border all the way across North Vietnam to the Gulf of Tonkin, but it does include many heavily traveled roads and rail lines stretching to the border of China and it provides a sizable hunk of free airspace for Mig sanctuary when things are not going the Migs’ way.
Yen Bai was one of the Thud drivers’ pet dislikes. It has the reputation of being Ho Chi Minh’s hometown and the way they shot from there you’d think it was manned by the Turkish brigade protecting Ataturk’s tomb. Maybe they had a statue of Ho down there—they sure seemed to be protecting something. I have been there many times and from the air it seemed that all you were battling was the guns. The rail line was dumpy and beaten up and the roads were dirt, as they are most everywhere in North Vietnam (don’t let those lines on the map representing roads fool you). Regardless of what they were protecting, Yen Bai was not the spot to wander over, or even near. If you came within a few miles, they would shoot and shoot hard, whether they had the slightest chance of hitting you or not. I swung about 3 miles north of there while inbound to a target one day and they opened up with everything they had despite the fact that we were far out of their range. The situation gave me the opportunity to study the ground defense pattern with relative impunity and I believe they were simply shooting straight up in the air. They unleashed volley after volley and the muzzle blasts of the big guns sparkled clearly from all sides of the town and from the center. The smaller-caliber guns spat from around every house in town and the place looked like a giant short circuit, yet all the bursts were directly over the top of Yen Bat and far from us. They were still shooting as they faded behind us and I often wondered how much of that jagged metal fell back on top of their heads. Maybe that was why they were always so mad up there—they shot straight up and clobbered themselves.
From Yen Bai the Red swings south and nuzzles up to the karst—a geologist’s word meaning sharp, rough hills—and breaks away to take the big dip past Phu Tho. Phu Tho was pretty much the start of the big circle that surrounded the hot area—the area that was always dangerous. You could fly near it one day and not see a puff while the next day the sky would blacken at your approach. You could never relax for an instant from there into Hanoi, and you always had to be prepared for drastic action. Continuing to the southeast, the Black swings up from Hao Binh, a dandy little center of activity for people and supplies located on busy Route 6; passes the airfield at Hao Lac; and then flows past the reservoir and joins the Red just before the series of curves, bends, and twists that identify Viet Tri from 20 miles out on a clear day. There were not too many clear days, but those river junctions were a welcome crutch in solving tough navigational problems. Once past Viet Tri the hot area spreads southward following the karst to about Nam Dinh and thence due east to the Gulf of Tonkin. You couldn’t be very comfortable along the coast up past Haiphong to the edge of the buffer zone around He Ba Mun, unless you could take solace in all the big, fat boats of many nations rolling contentedly as they awaited their turn to unload in the harbor. It was amazing how familiar some of those flags looked. That must have been a lucrative shipping business.