The Hot Pilots (29 page)

Oh yes
, Simon thought.
Steve was going to make an outstanding colonel, and eventually, God willing, a splendid general officer
…

He had already arranged for Steve to receive the troubleshooting assignment.

He had been aware that Steve was coming into his office at odd times to use his files. For that reason Simon had left the
memo prominently displayed in his in-box, going so far as to repeatedly move the memo to the top of the pile of the daily
incoming blizzard of paperwork. He’d waited patiently for Steve to see it, and then to make the appropriate telephone calls
to find out what the job entailed …

You can lead a horse to water
…

Simon knew that he’d almost given away his scheme to Steve when he’d let slip that bit about the assignment being temporary.
Steve had picked right up on that; Simon had been forced to scramble to get himself out of that hole. It was important that
Steve think this was all his own idea; that
he’d
convinced
Simon
, and not the other way around. Steve could never know that Simon had orchestrated all this—

The telephone rang, startling Simon. The call was from the Air Force Museum in Dayton. Simon had offered them his entire collection
of memorabilia. They wanted to know when to send a truck around …

He worked out a date with the museum representative and hung up, feeling sad as he looked around the office at his things.
It would be disquieting not to have these mementos of his career close at hand. It would make the momentous transition he
was about to experience irrefutably real.

Well, to hell with it—Only thing worse than a crotchety old fart was a sentimental, crotchety old fart
, he thought, disgusted. Goddamned junk would only gather dust at the ranch. Who was he going to show it to down there … ?

He cheered himself with another drink, and with thinking about how surprised Steve was going to be when he found out that
his new assignment called for him to receive a temporary, spot promotion to full colonel. This was necessary because a troubleshooter
by definition ruffled feathers; he
criticized
. If Steve went throwing his weight around those bases as a light colonel he wouldn’t need to worry about the North Vietnamese
on his six o’clock; his own fellow officers would wax him. The troubleshooter would have to outrank the lieutenant colonels
who commanded at the squadron level if they, and the pilots to whom he’d be delivering his pep talks, were to take him seriously.

You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink
—

Simon leaned back in his chair, feeling smug as a riverboat gambler holding a royal flush. Steve’s promotion to bird colonel
would be as temporary as his assignment, but maybe the opportunity to wear a full colonel’s eagles would bring Steve to his
senses. Simon was banking that once Steve had a taste of them, he’d want those eagles permanently. That meant war college,
and once Steve got past that hurtle, Simon was confident that there’d be a general officer’s stars in his future.

Major General Howard Simon was retiring, but he intended to leave two things in his stead: his aviation collection to the
Air Force Museum, and the man he’d chosen to be his protégé—Steven Gold—to the Air Force, itself.

Simon laughed out loud as he enjoyed his cigar. It was true that Steve was something of a hard case, but like he’d explained
to his protégé, the Air Force never backed off just because the job was tough …

Steven Gold arrived at Muang Chi Air Base at 2200 hours on a balmy, rain-swept, summer night. He’d been in Thailand for a
little over a month. This was the third stop on his troubleshooting tour.

The drone of the GAT cargo airplane’s turboprops was still in Steve’s head as he lugged his bags down the transport’s ramp.
He was exhausted, and tomorrow was a big day. In the morning he would give his pep talk, and in the afternoon he’d fly his
first mission here. A few days from now he’d move on to the next stop on his itinerary…

There was a fine mist falling as Steve turned up the collar of his trench coat, shouldered his bags, and began to cross the
rain-slickened concrete. He heard the roar of auto engines and a horn honking. He turned, shielding his tired eyes from the
glaring headlights as a pair of Jeeps came toward him. As the Jeeps pulled up, he saw three pilots in each. By the fog-shrouded
glare of overhead arc lamps Steve saw that the driver of the Jeep closest to him was a young black man, wearing pilot’s wings
and gold second lieutenant’s bars.

“Colonel Gold?” the driver asked, saluting.

Steve grinned. After all those years as a light colonel he still wasn’t used to the fact that he’d come up in the world. No
point in getting too used to being a full colonel, however. The promotion was as temporary as this tour of duty.

“What can I do for you?” Steve said.

“I’m Lieutenant Lincoln Ritchie, sir. We thought you might like to unwind after your flight. Maybe have a drink, talk about
a few things … ?”

Steve nodded, trying hard to forget how tired he was. What he really wanted to do was hit the sack, but he felt it was part
of his assignment to listen to pilots’ complaints, and a lot of guys were more comfortable talking off the record, as opposed
to the more formal exchanges that went on in the briefing room.

“Are the beers cold in your O club, Lieutenant Ritchie?” Steve asked.

“So cold they serve ‘em on a stick, sir.” Ritchie grinned.

What the hell
, Steve thought resignedly. These guys were going to have to be up just as early as he. If they felt what they had to get
off their chests was all that important, he’d hear them out.

“Tell you what, then, Lieutenant. Give me a lift over to Operations so that I can let them know I’m here, then let’s swing
by my trailer so I can drop off my bags. Then we’ll investigate this cold beer situation, firsthand …”

The Muang Chi officers’ club was dimly lit, just like every other O club Steve had been in during this stint. Come to think
of it, just like every club he’d been in, period.

He was sitting at a table with the six pilots who’d intercepted him. He was smoking a Pall Mall. A beer, a bowl of pretzels,
and a jar of Cheese Whiz—his dinner—was in front of him.

Behind Steve were a couple of guys sitting hunched over their drinks at the bar, but otherwise the club was empty. Because
the weather had been lousy all day there had been no missions flown out of Muang Chi. That explained the lack of pilots straddling
bar stools and hitting the sauce to come off their postflight, adrenaline highs.

It hadn’t taken long for the six pilots who’d shanghaied Steve to get to what was eating them: their profound dissatisfaction
with the tactical limits and support they’d been receiving from up the chain of command.

“The way I see it, things here are like what we experienced in Korea,” Steve said. “In those days, we were going up against
Stone Age logistical and communication systems with state-of-the-art airplanes and ordnance.”

“You’d think we’d be on top of the situation on account of that,” said one of the pilots, a lieutenant named Dave To-back.

“We figured it would all go our way in Korea, as well,” Steve replied. “But we were wrong, just like you guys. It was like
we were trying to take out a hornet’s nest with a tommy gun.”

“
Tommy gun
—?”

Whispered snickers from a couple of the pilots at the opposite end of the table:

“Who is this guy: Audie Murphy?”

“What war does he think he’s in—?”

Steve chose to ignore it.

“Sure you can blast open the nest,” he continued. “But you don’t kill many hornets doing it, and tomorrow that spit and paper
nest will be rebuilt, so what have you accomplished, besides blowing off a couple of clips of rounds?”

“And taken a hell of a lot of stings in return,” Lieutenant Ritchie added, nodding. “Okay, but maybe in Korea you guys didn’t
know any better,” he added. “But now we
do
know better, or at least we’re supposed to, but somebody forgot to tell the brass.”

“You tell ‘em, Linc—” one of the others declared.

“I hear you,” Steve sighed. “I know the Air Force seems to have a short memory. Every time we go into action we seem fated
to make the same mistakes, and then play catchup. It happened that way in World War Two, and in Korea. Now it’s happening
in Vietnam. I don’t know why that’s the case, but it is.” He shrugged philosophically. “You don’t like it and I don’t like
it, but this Air Force happens to be the only one we’ve got. You want to fly Uncle Sam’s jets, you have to take the lumps
with the sweet stuff.”

“We all know that, sir,” began one of the other pilots. “We’ve trained to be fighter jocks. We’ve walked the walk and talked
the talk, and now we consider ourselves the fortunate few who’ve been given the chance to put it to the test—”

“He’s right,” Dave Toback said. “We’re
happy
to be here, Colonel.”

“We just don’t understand what we’re supposed to be doing,” Lincoln Ritchie picked up. “From the start, we were ready to take
the fight into the enemy’s backyard, hitting him where it hurt—at the source of his supplies into the theater—but we weren’t
allowed.”

“Come on now,” Steve chided. “It’s gotten better … You guys have been socking it to the enemy’s POL facilities …”

Back in the spring the Joint Chiefs had lobbied Washington to allow the Air Force to bomb North Vietnam’s petroleum, oil,
and lubricant industrial facilities. Secretary of Defense McNamara and President Johnson had been hesitant to give the go-ahead
because most of the targeted POL sites were in the Hanoi and Haipong areas. The DOD and the White House were concerned that
the increased bombing might cause excessive civilian casualties, and might harden the enemy’s resolve. It was Johnson’s strategy
that the bombing be taken as a warning: a relatively mild slap that hinted of the knock-out punch being held in reserve. That
strategy would crumble if the escalated bombing effort prematurely caused the enemy to have nothing left to lose in his northern
home ground. Eventually, however, the bombing was approved. The first POL strikes had taken place at the end of June.

“We hear that Washington is claiming the POL campaign is a success.” One of the other pilots was scowling.

“You guys saying it isn’t?” Steve asked, looking around the table.

“It’s too little, too late, man—” Ritchie fervently began, and then paused, looking worried. “Sorry, no disrespect meant,
Colonel, sir.”

“Hold on, son,” Steve said. “I’m wearing these eagles because they buy me the right to stick my nose where I please, and say
what’s on my mind. I don’t want them to make you tongue-tied. We’re all on a first-name basis here. We’re all Thud drivers
trying to do the job we’ve been handed.”

“All right, then …” Ritchie nodded, smiling slightly. “Like I was saying the trouble with the POL campaign—and this is something
we all know, and LBJ is gonna find out—is that it’s too little, too late.”

“Wait a minute,” Steve interrupted, puzzled. “Intelligence is claiming that almost three quarters of the enemy’s facilities
have been destroyed, and project total destruction within a few weeks …”

“The Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA don’t understand the enemy any better than LBJ.”

“You saying that hitting those facilities hasn’t crippled the enemy?”

“It’s irritated him all right,” Ritchie said. “But no way has it crippled him. Oh, sure, maybe if we had hit those facilities
in the beginning we might be somewhere now,” he acknowledged. “But we didn’t, and in the interim we’ve given the enemy time
to decentralize his stores—”

Steve listened closely, aware from his exchanges with the brass in Saigon that this firsthand information hadn’t yet made
it up the chain of command.
Hadn’t made it
, he thought,
or had been stifled
…

“Now there’s buried POL stockpiles and little oil refineries all over the fucking country,” one of the other pilots said.
“They’ve stashed the stuff in towns and villages, where they know we can’t touch it, and so we’re reduced to hanging our asses
out over the combat zone. We throttle back, extend flaps, turn overselves into fucking targets for any rice farmer packing
a weapon more sophisticated than a bow and arrow, and all that’s just to drop ordnance on any oxcarts and bicycles loaded
with a couple of gallons of kerosene that we happen to spot.”

“Meanwhile, the enemy is still importing plenty of POL, thanks to the Russian and other supposedly ‘neutral’ tankers off-loading
in Haiphong Harbor,” Lieutenant Toback grumbled. “We can’t touch any of those tankers crowding the harbor, not even if they
shoot at us—which they do—unless they’re flying the North Vietnamese flag—”

“Which they don’t.” Another pilot scowled.

“There’s another aspect to all this,” Ritchie said. “The fact that we’re allowed to hit so few enemy targets means that gomer
can concentrate his defenses where he knows we’re going to be,” Ritchie said. “We’re taking state-of-the-art stuff: radar-directed
AAA, and SAMs …”

“I haven’t yet encountered a SAM,” Steve admitted, frowning, thinking that remote-controlled Surface-to-Air Missiles hadn’t
been around in Korea.

Knowing chuckles swept the table. “You’ll encounter them tomorrow, Colonel,” Toback said. “Route Pack Six is SAM country.”

Steve nodded. Back around the end of ‘65, North Vietnam had been divided into six areas called “route packages.” So far Steve
had flown missions over the relatively lightly defended Route Pack One: the area near the DMZ separating North and South Vietnam;
and Route Pack Five, which was well to the west of Hanoi. Tomorrow would be his first venture into the hottest route pack
of them all, number six.

“Tomorrow you’ll be striking at the heart of the beast, man.” Lincoln Ritchie winked. “Tomorrow we go downtown, to the Yen
Lam POL rail depot, in beautiful
Hannnnoi
”