Solo (19 page)

Initiation into our squadron, the Twenty-third Tactical Air Support Squadron (TASS), called for us to chug a glass of green liquid called a hammer and then say why we were happy to be a Nail (our call sign. I was assigned Nail 38). The hammer was about six ounces of vodka with a touch of green food coloring.

Lots of laughing and cheering.

On that night, as the party began to wind down, someone suggested a game of blow hockey.

“Too late for that,” said a pilot. “I’m going to bed.”

There was some murmuring. Then a pilot named Scott said, “Okay, I’ll play. How about you, Edgerton? Game of blow hockey?”

“Sure.” This was not a time for backing down. (As I look back, I see there never was.)

A rectangular lunch tray with the rough markings of a
hockey field was placed on a small table and filled to the brim with water.

A short, stocky pilot said, “Okay, I’m the referee. Who else is playing?”

“I am,” said Scott. He pulled a chair up to his end of the tray. Someone put a chair down for me, and I sat.

“I got five dollars on Scott,” I heard.

“Ten on Edgerton.”

Money was changing hands. Someone patted me on the back. “Go get him, Edge.”

“Okay,” said the referee, standing between us. Then he chanted, “Positions, men. Chins on the table, hands behind your back. Blow the target into the opponent’s goal. Three out of five wins. No movement beyond the edge of the tray. On three. One, two,
three.
” He dropped a cork in the middle of the hockey field, and we began blowing the cork in opposite directions. Before I could get my bearings, the cork was in my goal. The referee picked it up. Cheering all around. “Positions, men. On three. One, two,
three.
” This time I managed to score a goal. More cheering, some booing.

The referee picked up the cork. “Positions, men.” Two more goals and I’d win. I had to get this one. “One, two”—as the referee brought his hand down to drop the cork, it continued downward, but toward me—“
three.
” My face and head were soaked in water. A great cheer erupted, and pilots began slapping me on the back and welcoming me into the fraternity of Nail FACs. Someone had earlier escorted Hoot and the other new recruits outside. We would get them one at a time over the next few
nights.

Laughing and cheering were not uncommon in the Nailhole, a building with one purpose: to provide relief from war. We spent a lot of time there, and if not there, then in the squadron building near the flight line, getting ready to fly, or in the officer’s club dining room or bar.

New pilots were assigned flying instructors. I was assigned Captain Don Charles. His job was to get me reacclimated to the OV-10 by flying aerobatics, instrument approaches, and simulated single-engine landings. I’d also fly after dark to “safe” areas in western Laos, where I’d practice dropping flares and shooting smoke rockets. The flares, after release, would be suspended from a slowly falling parachute and would show the ground beneath as if it were one very large, lit football field. Later missions would call for flying after dusk, or before dawn.

Then I had to fly several combat missions with Captain Charles before being turned loose on my own. I remember our first. We briefed for the flight and then caught a van from the squadron building over to headquarters. We were checked into that building by a guard, who read from the badges hanging around our necks. Inside, we found several other pilots in a small briefing room. I was surprised when a woman entered, Lieutenant Erickson—the intelligence officer. Before briefing us, she introduced a captain who gave the weather briefing. Low clouds were a problem that day. An ideal day for a FAC who wanted to fly was clear weather. If the ground was overcast below our minimum flying altitude, we didn’t fly. Broken clouds presented problems because they often drifted over a target
area.

Then Lieutenant Erickson used a pointer to indicate “safe areas,” areas suitable for bailout, on a large map of Laos. She also pointed out areas of heavy triple-A firings (antiaircraft artillery) on previous days. As FACs we’d need to pass this information along (in a short prestrike briefing) to the fighter-bombers we’d direct on air strikes.

And then she said, “There’s a large concentration of gomers [enemy troops] just to the south of Delta Three Three [a point on the map].” She would be briefing most days for months to come, and she used the word
gomers
as casually as she would the word
pencil.
We would use it too.

We flew reconnaissance that day, looking for trucks, but found none. Troops were rarely seen. They were protected by jungle foliage. We were scheduled to direct bombers to cut a road. Captain Charles pointed out landmarks and helped me find our target, and when the fighters arrived, he assisted me in directing them to cut the road. He made all radio calls, simplifying my job, and I did all the flying. Much of the time I was confused or lost, and I was continually trying to update my position by matching ground features to map features. Because of the interference of low clouds, the bombers had problems with accuracy. No bombs hit the road. I watched for ground fire, but I didn’t see any. I knew that the most common antiaircraft artillery was thirty-seven-millimeter guns. I’d been told that their tracers, coming every few rounds, looked like orange Coke bottles streaking up from the ground.

After the bombers left to return to their base in Vietnam
and we reported by radio to a command center that there was no damage to the road, I flew around looking for trucks and familiarizing myself with the general area below me. Any combat mission was flown in a numbered “sector” about a hundred miles square, and that particular area was the responsibility of a single FAC. We looked for trucks or any other signs of life in our sector, and we directed all air strikes. No other FAC would be flying in our area while we were there, nor would any U.S. military aircraft fly through a sector without our clearance.

We’d been told over and over that while flying above Laos we always had to “jink” to the left or right at different degrees of bank. This way, enemy gunners would have difficulty getting a “bead” on us. We knew to jink every second that we were flying over Laos.

At some point along toward the end of this, my first mission, I became engrossed with cockpit duties, including studying the maps in my lap, and I stopped jinking for several seconds. Suddenly I felt a jolt and heard a pop directly underneath the aircraft.

From the backseat: “Good God, man.
Jink.
They’re shooting at us.”

Fired at already! I pulled the aircraft into a left bank and then a quick right bank. Back to the left. I looked below but could see nothing except stretches of green jungle and long, steep, rocky east-west rises we called karst.

We flew home and landed. I had an idea what I’d be doing for the next year or so.

One day a few weeks after that first combat ride, Captain
Charles and I were having a drink at the Nailhole, and he said, “Do you remember that first flight, when we got fired at?”

“Yep.”

“That was me banging my feet on the floor in the backseat. But don’t spread the word. Surprise is the key. I got the shit scared out of me the same way.”

I finished my checkout and started flying solo combat missions. Typically a target would be a section of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the north-south, trans-Laos network of dirt roads through the jungle. We would direct fighter-bombers to bomb the trail, leaving a crater that couldn’t be crossed by a truck. Before takeoff we would be given “line numbers” for prearranged targets (used so that coordinates would not need to be read over the radio and possibly picked up by enemy monitors). Sometimes a target would be a suspected storage area or a river ford, and we would be given the time for rendezvous with the fighter-bombers.

We used an encoder/decoder “wheel” (it had fresh numbers every day) to encode numbers that needed to be recited over the airwaves. We always carried grease marker pens and used them to write radio frequencies, bomb-damage assessments, and so forth on our Plexiglas canopies in the lower left or right front corners. I got the hang of things quickly and started feeling at home in my job.

Occasionally we would see a parked truck or what might be a storage facility under the jungle canopy—a target that had not been scheduled for bombing. In that case we’d call Hillsborough, the airborne command center, and they would send fighter-bombers, if available, from a carrier
in the Gulf of Tonkin or from an air base in Vietnam or Thailand, or from another mission that had not required them to drop all their bombs.

During all my flying over Laos, I do not recall seeing one standing building or obviously inhabited area. The Ho Chi Minh Trail, where people had once lived, was deserted except for those bringing supplies from North Vietnam through Laos and into South Vietnam or providing shelter or operating the large antiaircraft guns hidden along the trail.

There were four “boxes” in southern Laos. These boxes, several miles square, where trails intersected or had once intersected, were targets when aircraft over Laos carried bombs but had nowhere to drop them. The boxes had been bombed until not one tree stood. They looked like the surface of the moon—nothing but sand and bomb craters. And on some mornings, through binoculars, I’d see truck tracks around craters and across a box.

B-52 bombers flew “arc light” missions. Suspected concentrations of enemy troops, trucks, or supplies would be bombed with a hundred or so five-hundred-pound bombs (from one B-52). When an arc light was scheduled for my sector, I stayed clear of the area and watched a B-52 fly over far above, leaving contrails, and then in the jungle far down below, an area about the size of a town would suddenly explode beneath the jungle canopy.

If we saw a convoy of trucks moving (I never saw trucks moving at any time other than dawn or dusk), we were to dive immediately and fire a rocket. When a smoke rocket exploded near a truck convoy, the truck drivers usually assumed
an air strike was coming and quickly parked and deserted their trucks, climbing into “spider holes” (small bunkers). Otherwise, when resting or stopping, they hid their trucks under thick jungle foliage.

E
ARLY IN MY TOUR
, I had the opportunity to visit a top secret facility on base. Inside, a map with electric lighting behind it covered an entire wall. The sergeant leading the tour explained that certain markings on the map indicated where U.S. Air Force jet fighters had dropped sensitive hearing devices along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The devices were located in small green plastic trees—at their base, where the trees planted themselves into the ground. The sounds of passing trucks on the trail could be heard in this room in Thailand. Specialists could hear voices, men around campfires occasionally, once arguing about Marlboro cigarettes. Most important, when trucks were heard moving along the trail (usually at night), jets could be summoned to drop bombs on the trail near the hearing devices.

The electronic wall confirmed our technical superiority over the enemy. And what an incredible technological advantage we had. We controlled the skies over Laos. We could bomb at will. How could they win?

A
FTER ABOUT SIX WEEKS
of flying solo combat missions, I became an instructor. I still flew solo missions, but I also instructed the new guys arriving from the States. And on every pilot’s first combat mission, as soon as he flew straight and level for a few seconds, I lifted my feet in the backseat and crashed them to the floor. “Whoa! Jink, man! They’re shooting at us!”

As new pilots arrived, old pilots left. At a going-away party in the Nailhole soon after I arrived, a departing pilot proposed a toast to the truck drivers on the trail, our enemy. I was surprised, but none of the old-timers seemed to be. There was a respect for the resilience of those forces on the ground in Laos. This toast, it turned out, was not uncommon.

After a month or so of combat flying over the trail, I’d still not seen any antiaircraft fire. But some was coming right up.

My first trainee was Harley Williams, a young pilot just
out of pilot training. Harley was relatively slow but so sincere and good humored you couldn’t help liking him.

We had the early flight—one that would put us over the Ho Chi Minh Trail at between 6:00 and 6:30 a.m. just as the night FAC would be departing our sector. We briefed at 3:30 a.m., carefully going over all aspects of the flight. I quizzed him on emergency procedures. The boldfaced items in emergency procedures from our checklist had to be memorized. The other items would be read aloud.

ENGINE FIRE DURING FLIGHT

1.
AFFECTED ENGINE CONDITION LEVER—FEATHER & FUEL SHUT-OFF.

2.
FIRE LIGHT—PULL.

3.
FIRE EXT—AGENT.

4. If still on fire
—
EJECT OR LAND IMMEDIATELY.

5. Failed engine
FUEL EMERG SHUTOFF—SHUT-OFF.

We caught a van and rode to headquarters for a preflight briefing (intelligence and weather) lasting from 4:20 to about 4:50. Then we rode a van to the flight line, found our airplane, and had about thirty minutes for a thorough preflight check. I hadn’t thought about giving Harley extra time.

At 5:15 a.m. we were in the aircraft ready to crank. After flying the OV-10 most days for six weeks, as Harley had been doing (pilots on their first flying assignments had an extended checkout period), a cockpit check (forty-one items) and engine start (about fifteen items) could normally be finished in less than five minutes. A pilot
reading checklist items aloud and performing tasks sounded like this: “Gust lock, removed. Thruster safety pin, removed. Survival kit, attached. Riser attach fittings, secured . . .”

But for Williams it was, “Gust lock, removed.” One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three, one thousand four. “Thruster safety pin, removed.” One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three, one thousand four, one thousand five, one thousand six. “Survival kit, attached.” One thousand one, one thousand two . . .