Thud Ridge (11 page)

"OK, Magnum, Mig at three o'clock." As I watched, yet another unwanted visitor slid in on Magnum's right side. I decided the bombs had to go. We had already used so much fuel that we would have little time, if any, to look for a good target once we managed to haul our fannies out of there. We had covered a fair amount of sky at 600 knots and, lo and behold, there was a slight break in the clouds and, wonder of wonders, one of the forbidden sanctuaries sprawled beneath us. This one came off the protected Hst some time later, but I claim the first load of bombs into the middle of that baby doll.

"Kingpin, let's get rid of these bombs and go help them. Kingpins, bomb now."

You could almost feel the Thuds leap with joy as the cumbersome iron blivets left. We stroked the burners and waded into the tail cone of the leeches clinging to Magnum and the frame of reference changed. Now we were lighter and faster than we had been and we were closing from their six o'clock. It was probably none too soon, as you could hear the strain within Magnum flight.

"Where's he at, three—er—four—er—three, Magnum."

It's a tough way to make a living.

"Rog, one behind and another at three o'clock." But now we were closing from the rear and Geeno had his flight lined up on the heading he wanted back to the north.

"Hot Dog two, hit the burner."

"OK, Magnum, let's take it back out the Ridge." I hoped Geeno wouldn't get overconfident now, and I wanted him to know he was not home-free yet. "You still got 'em, Magnum." He saw that he still had them on him, and he knew his element could no longer hold their bombs.

"Clean 'em off. Clean 'em off. Heads up, Magnum." The bombs fell and we charged in from the rear, but not without duress.

"OK, we got flak from the Ridge, keep it moving, Kingpins." That was about all the Migs needed to convince them that their afternoon was ruined. They had bombs falling in their faces, they had a flight closing on their tail, and the crunchies from the ground were shooting at the entire gaggle, now knowing, and probably not caring, who was who. So the Migs disengaged. Just like that. They plugged in their burners, racked their sleek charges up on a wing, and were gone as rapidly as they had appeared.

"Cactus, Mig up ahead going left to right."

"Where's he at now?"

"Cactus lead, Cactus three can't get rid of the right tank." Beautiful system. I was sure Cactus was hoping that his Mig would keep going from left to right.

"OK, Kingpins, back to the left. Let's move up the Ridge."

I thought that perhaps the drama had ended for the day, but I was wrong. The strangest little drama that I have ever been exposed to occurred during the next few moments. I have gone back over it time after time. I have listened to the magnetic tape from the minature Japanese tape recorder so that I could reconstruct these wild minutes back on the ground. I don't know what happened to Don. I don't know what he did or why. All I can do is relate what I saw and heard and try to fit the pieces together from what I now in retrospect can remember of my somewhat nervous, horribly intelligent little doctor friend. My friend who should have been teaching young men in the classroom, but who instead felt that he should be herding a 49,000-pound monster around the skies of North Vietnam at 600 knots in this crummiest of all so-called wars.

When we figured that we had Geeno out of the bag, we headed back up the Ridge, planning to turn west at the north end and beat a track for the Red River and thence south to a tanker and home. Rod was still on my wing like glue and as we rolled clear of the flak from the Ridge, Don and Bing were on the right side and together, and everything should have been OK. We were still moving around; that flak from the Ridge could still reach us, and we all knew that there were plenty of Migs still capable of giving us trouble. I rolled about 20 degrees to the left and gained a few hundred feet, then dropped the nose and let it fall back to the right as I kicked in a little rudder to make the bird slide slightly sideways in an uncoordinated maneuver calculated to hamper the tracking activities of any gunners looking at me. Rod moved in the same general plane, but crossed his controls with a different degree of emphasis and timing so that while we moved together, we presented different, uncoordinated targets. If you fly smoothly or play the show formation game, you help the gunners solve their problem.

As I came back to the approximate track I had left only seconds before, I automatically looked to the right to check the element, and I saw Don's nose start gradually down while Bing held his wing spacing. As Don's nose dropped, his speed increased and he pulled abreast and then slightly ahead of me. It was a strange move, and he made no radio transmission. (I did not realize it at the time, but replaying the tape later, I found that in all that melee of voices, Don had not spoken once since we had started down the Ridge. A good wingman or element lead doesn't have to talk to get the job done, and it is ideal if he keeps quiet unless he has something important to pass to the other members of the flight, but there had been an, awful lot of calls made in the hassle and the odds were that some of them should have been Don's calls.) Suddenly, the multiple ejector rack, better known as the MER, a big piece of metal to which the bombs are attached, left the belly of his aircraft smoothly and cleanly, indicating that he had jettisoned it from the cockpit. This was weird in that his bombs were already gone, and his tanks were gone, and while the MER is a slight additional drag factor, there are only a couple of reasons why you would drop it. The first would be a situation where the bombs were hung up and refused to release from the MER. If everything else fails, you can get rid of the load by pickling the MER and all, and the entire load of bombs plus the rack goes in one big, inaccurate blob. This was obviously not the reason for his action. The other reason for getting rid of the MER would be to insure that the aircraft was absolutely clean of all outside garbage in the event you wanted every bit of maximum speed you could get, and Don was a speed man. It wasn't a logical move, as the speed difference is not that significant, and the MER's were a critical supply item. (We were even bringing bombs back when they were hung up or we couldn't get them where we wanted to put them, to say nothing of the racks. The official line that there was no bomb shortage forced us to use various subterfuges to keep visitors from finding out the truth. At the same time, some of our high-level commanders were in a race with the Navy to see which could record the most flying hours. The result of all this was that we were at one time sending kids out to attack a cement and steel bridge with nothing but 20-millimeter cannon, which is like trying to knock down the Golden Gate Bridge with a slingshot. Stupid missions like that cost us aircraft and people.)

Even as I was trying to figure out what was going on with Don, I instinctively rechecked my left side. You learn early in this game that you can't afford to keep your head still in the cockpit and you can't depend on even the best wingman in the world to do all of your looking for you. Almost without brain command, the head moves constantly, the eyes searching. As mine swung left, I saw the prettiest aircraft I have ever seen, and I have never seen another one like it. It was a Mig-21 in about a 40-degree dive approaching me from above in my eight o'clock position. He looked like he had rolled over from far above me, perhaps 25,000 or 30,000 feet, and pointed his charge earthward in a graceful screaming dive, and he was really moving. He went by me so fast I could have imagined that my engine had quit and that it was time to eject. As he streaked past, just off m.y wing tip and in complete control of this beautiful piece of machinery, I saw the most unusual paint job I have ever seen. The craft was painted several shades of gray in a scalloped pattern with the peaks of the scallops pointing upward toward the top of the aircraft. The paint blended beautifully with the sky and clouds, and was one of the most effective camouflage jobs I have ever seen. I know of nobody who paints their machines like this, but it would be an excellent idea. This guy was different; he was no run-of-the-mill North Vietnamese trainee. I couldn't see his eyeballs, but I'm willing to bet that they were both round and blue. It was a bit reminiscent of Korea many years before when you could pick out the master attempting to herd his charges through their combat upgrading. When they failed to respond properly, you could almost hear him scream "Idiots!" and launch into a masterful pass of his own. I certainly hope that our management of statistics and stories does not delude us into believing that we have met and conquered the best of the world's airmen. It just is not so, and the 10 to 1 kill ratio racked up by the Mig-21's a bit later ought to make somebody do a bit of thinking. I am not talking about a bunch of clods in old beat-up Mig-17's and Mig-15's; I'm talking about good pilots in good machines. We have many very competent adversaries lying in the weeds, but that is another one of those unpleasant things that as an Air Force and as a Department of Defense we have cultivated a deaf ear for. We don't like to hear anything that does not please us.

He never batted an eye at me and I had already instinctively plugged in my burner and started a swing toward his tail as he passed rne. He was so far ahead, it was hopeless, but you try anyway. My head swung back to the right, and what I saw horrified me. In just the few seconds since I had last looked at him, Don had fired up his burner and accelerated to a position several thousand feet below and in front of me. Our mutual protection was gone, and what was worse, I could tell that he was' still accelerating and pulling further away. Bing was fighting madly to stay on his wing, but Don was pulling away from him. What was he thinking? He was heading for a break in the lower layer of the undercast, but it was only a small hole and there were only a few feet of clear sky between those clouds and the ground. Suddenly I knew what that pretty Mig was after. He had Don and Bing spotted and with his speed and maneuverability, he was gracefully floating into a position to blast them.

"OK, Kingpin three and four, you got one on your tail." I got no acknowledgment. The interval between them and the Mig shortened. "Keep going to the left, Kingpins." They were almost to the edge of the hole now, and he wouldn't talk and he wouldn't change course. "Kingpin three and four, go full burner, he's closing on your tail."

"Cactus three, break out and fall back there with Cactus four. He's got a tank hung and can't keep up."

Magnum had headed for the deck, but he was not yet free. "Back up, Magnum, we got Migs coming in again."

Probably the most confused man of all was Bing, and as they ducked under the cloud ledge, he knew things were very wrong. He was obliged to stay on his element leader's wing, and his job was to protect his boss, but his boss was taking him down into an almost certain trap, and his boss was eluding the protection Bing was offering. Bing had long since gone to full burner and had gone through the speed of sound in his chase. He was now at Mach 1.1 and still not closing when he thought that perhaps Don had lost the continuity of events and thought that he, Bing, was a Mig in pursuit.

"Kingpin three, this is four back here on your wing—"

"Magnum, a pair high at ten."

The thought flashed through my mind that perhaps Don had somehow become confused on his call sign, but that just doesn't happen very often. "OK, the pair of Thuds that just went under the clouds—Mig on your tail—get back up here." If the call sign had been a problem, there was no answer to prove it.

"Flamingo—Sam launch. Take it down two."

"Magnum two, light your burner. Light your burner."

"Kingpin lead—Chicago lead. Has the mission been aborted?"'

All I needed was some confused radio chatter. "Chicago, it's aborted." Our fancy Mig was still visible as he approached the cloud deck, and I was after him in hopes that he would maneuver enough to allow me to get on him before he got three and four. I rolled a little left and dropped my nose to let my beast pick up all the speed I could get. I was sure glad I didn't have to worry about Rod, he was right there. "OK, Kingpin two, there's our Mig right down there. Let's go twenty degrees to the left—he's right at the base of the clouds —full burner now."

"Kingpin—Chicago. Say again, has the mission been aborted?" What in hell was the matter with that clod?

"ABORT—ABORT—ABORT!" And shut up. "Roger, understand the mission is aborted?" Unbelievable. "That's affirmative."

Our Mig blended with the clouds like he was invisible and then he disappeared under them. I knew I couldn't catch him or get on him underneath that deck if I didn't have him when he dropped through that hole. I had to bet that he would not find it to his liking down there in the haze and among his own gunners and would pop right back up through the layer and allow me to tap him as he emerged.

"OK, Kingpin, out of burner. Let's stay on top and see if we can pick him up."

"Magnum, take it to the right. Go hard left, Magnum, hard left now. Magnum two, rock your wings." Magnum was slightly scrambled; little wonder.

"Flapper heading zero two zero. Sam at ten o'clock." "Cactus one, go left. Go left, burner now." I was glad to see that Cactus was still in good shape as I was concerned over the straggler with the hung tank. This was no place to be a loner, and with Don in some obvious trouble, we couldn't afford any further complications.

"Kingpin one, how about tapping burner? I'm a bit steep and slow." I was abusing my competent wingman and practically had him standing on his head. His only complaint was that he needed that after-burner power to stay there.

"Kingpin two, you got lead, OK?" I was sort of standing on my head also and wanted to be sure he was with me. "Roger." He was there. "OK, good boy."

We had picked up some altitude and then had let our birds fall off on a wing and drop back toward the clouds. This way we could keep our speed up and cover the entire area where I expected our Mig to pop back on top. "Let's go back up again, Kingpin. He's still down underneath it." "Say again?"

"He's right down here underneath us, but he won't come back up again." Then up he came, right where we wanted him. We had plenty of speed, and we had a couple of thousand feet altitude on him. It was only about a 20-degree turn for me, and I was on him and closing fast from his eight o'clock. He didn't see me at first and I don't know if his ground controllers gave him the word or if he saw me when he made a little 20-degree check turn to the left. Regardless, he was plenty smart and realized that a pair of Thuds hurtling down on him was less than desirable. It was time for him to disengage and get out of there, and he wrapped his little beauty into a vertical 180-degree turn to the left and was gone. Just like that. I couldn't come close to staying with him, and he was gone. It must be great to call the shots like that.