Operation Thunderhead (2 page)

Shouting, “You're dead! You're dead!” Dramesi ran from the camp. His head start was enough that the guard couldn't catch the escapee, no matter how much he ignored being dead.

The instructors poured from the camp to locate the escapee. Searching through the dark desert, the instructors could not find where Dramesi had run to, or where he might be hiding. The reason for this was simple enough to Dramesi: He wasn't where they were looking. When he ran from the camp and finally slipped into the darkness, Dramesi then turned about and went to the opposite side of the camp, skirting around the area in the darkness. As the instructors were searching for him, the escapee was on the far side of the camp watching everything that was going on.

A short time later, Dramesi decided to try for his free breakfast and turned himself in. It was daylight and there really wasn't anyplace else for him to go except deeper into the desert. It was a training program and not a real escape. Risking the very real possibility of becoming lost in the desert was not a very good option.

So Dramesi turned himself in and got his free breakfast. The instructors debriefed him immediately and that was when they told him that he shouldn't shoot anybody during an escape. As far as Dramesi was concerned, it was a good debriefing. And he didn't forget the lessons he learned during the exercise.

But the experience of what it would be like to be a POW wasn't over. He received his reward of a meal, then Dramesi was put right back in with the rest of the POWs. Only now, he was thrust into a little box for isolation and punishment. The box was around five feet long and maybe 1½ feet wide. It was anything but comfortable, and for anyone with a trace of claustrophobia, the box would bring it out for everyone to see.

The dirty rats, as Dramesi considered the instructors, slipped him into the box. They had said they would give him breakfast, which they did, and that was all. The exercise had not ended.

Dramesi escaped again.

Using his metal belt buckle, Dramesi attacked the area of the door at the end of the box. Instead of a lock, the instructors had wrapped a wire around some protrusions to secure the door. Pushing the door open as far as it would go, Dramesi was able to just reach the wire in the opening between the door and the frame of the box around it. With his belt buckle, Dramesi scraped at the wire, finally breaking it and releasing the door.

When the door was open, Dramesi slipped out of the box, paused, and rewired the end closed. Anyone looking in to the area would just see the same thing that had been there before: a long box with the door at one end wired shut. There was no way to tell the box was empty without either opening it or getting the “occupant” to say something.

The instructors didn't know that Dramesi had once again escaped. And he wasn't making the same mistake in turning himself in again. He went missing from the box all day long and into the next day, when the exercise was declared over. Then he once again turned himself in.

It seemed that John Dramesi was just going to be a troublemaker for anyone who took him prisoner.

After his tour with the 4th Infantry was completed, Dramesi once more returned to the air, again as the pilot of an F-105D. In August 1964, the first F-105 aircraft moved from Japan to Korat Air Base in Thailand. The planes were to have provided supporting cover for air rescue operations throughout Southeast Asia. Far more often, they were used as strike support for CIA operations in Laos.

By 1966, the U.S. government admitted that Thunderchief aircraft were operating out of Thailand. The number of planes had increased considerably and the Air Force was operating two tactical fighter wings out of two air bases in Thailand. Assigned to the tactical fighter wing operating out of Korat Air Base, John Dramesi piloted his craft on bombing operations deep into North Vietnam.

Flying into what had become one of the most heavily defended air spaces in the world, Dramesi would have to steer his craft into target zones known as Route Packages (RPs). The most defended of these packages was RP-6A, the zone in and around the North Vietnamese capital of Hanoi. Heading into Hanoi was called going “downtown,” in part from the lyrics of a popular song of the time. Everything that a pilot wouldn't want to meet was waiting in and around downtown in the form of SA-2 surface-to-air missiles supplied to the North Vietnamese by the Soviets; 100, 85, 57, 37, and 23mm antiaircraft cannons in mounts holding from one gun to four; and 14.5 and 12.7mm machine guns, also in single, double, and quadruple mounts. All of that artillery was reinforced by the population, most of whom had weapons they'd use to fire at aircraft. It is not known how many North Vietnamese MiGs may have been brought down by this incredible umbrella of steel and fire, but hundreds of American aircraft were taken out of the sky by it.

The F-105D Thunderchief was the workhorse aircraft in bombing many of the targets in North Vietnam. Nicknamed “Thud” by many of the pilots and ground crew who flew and supported the F-105D, the planes did the dangerous missions in part because of the very fast flight the craft could do at low altitude. That also meant Thuds were exposed to the brunt of the antiaircraft fire available to the North Vietnamese.

At the peak of the air war over North Vietnam, the chances of a Thud pilot completing 100 missions was considered to be only about 75 percent. Loss of the craft was high; in part there were so many of them in the air at one time, that a hilly area in the approach pathway to the Hanoi target area was known as “Thud Ridge.” Attacking Hanoi, going downtown, cost the United States Air Force 124 F-105 Thuds during 1966. Nearly four hundred of the aircraft were lost during the air war over Vietnam, almost half of the F-105s ever made.

On April 2, 1967, Captain John Dramesi, flying under the call sign “Lover Lead,” climbed into the cockpit of his F-105D for his fifty-ninth Thud mission over Vietnam. The target was a truck park near Package One, the area around Ba Don in the North Vietnamese province of Quang Binh. The bombing mission was to be conducted in two flights of four aircraft each and a single flight of two aircraft. Dramesi would be leading the single flight of two aircraft, with Ken Gurry as his wingman.

The ordnance load for the attack would have ordinarily been a half-dozen M117 750-pound bombs carried on a single multiple ejector rack (MER) along the bottom of the fuselage. That bomb load added up to 2¼ tons of “smash.” That was enough ordnance to do considerable damage to a carpark or any jungle target, especially when multiplied by the ten aircraft making up the three flights.

Locating the target area, Dramesi and his wingman turned in on their bomb run. The rest of the flights had made their attacks and the target area had been pretty well saturated. Pulling away from the area, Dramesi called for permission to conduct an attack on a secondary target.

Each of the Thuds was armed with an M61 Vulcan cannon and more than 1,000 rounds of 20mm ammunition to feed it. The six rotating barrels of the cannon could put out that high-explosive ammunition at a rate of one hundred rounds per second. That load of ammunition and the M61 Vulcan cannon would be more than enough to conduct an armed reconnaissance of a road northwest of Dong Hoi. The location where the road ran was known to be a staging area for enemy strikes into the border area between North and South Vietnam.

Having received permission for their secondary target, the two Thuds in the flight were heading up the valley where the road was located, moving at a speed of over 575 miles an hour. The speed wasn't defense enough from the enemy in the jungle below.

The North Vietnamese were quite adequately using what was available for air defense. It wasn't sophisticated; it wasn't high-tech. It was simple and brutal. Barrage fire from 37- and 57-millimeter cannons pumped as much high-explosive ammunition as they could into the air ahead of the moving jets. Often enough, the speeding aircraft simply passed through the rain of steel coming up at them.

Dramesi heard two or three loud distinct booms, and suddenly his plane was shuddering as it tried to stay in the sky. Gurry's words came in over Dramesi's radio. “Lover Lead, your wing tanks are gone, and you have fire in your tail.”

Dramesi's F-105D had been hit by some of the dense cannon fire coming up from the jungle below. He was at 2,500 feet and moving fast as his canopy filled with smoke and the plane started coming apart. Grabbing at the handles that controlled his ejection seat, he pulled them up and squeezed the triggers. The canopy blew away from the plane as the ejection seat rocketed into the air, up and away from the stricken plane.

FEAR

A soldier—anyone serving in the military—has a lot to fear from time to time. Just the nature of their jobs means that soldiers work with materials and objects intended to kill people and destroy things. In combat, a soldier has a fear of being killed or wounded. This is a normal, healthy thing; it is the fight-or-flight reaction built well within all of us, deep in the basic survival centers of our brains.

In spite of that fear, members of the military have to train long and hard to be able to function in a combat situation. Soldiers have to be able to use their weapons, move, and communicate. Sailors have to operate machinery that makes their ships such great fighting machines. And pilots have to work in an environment where technical actions have to take place smoothly and effectively, and decisions have to be made with split-second speed.

One fear that never goes away with training centers on the enemy and their actions. If a soldier is killed, then their concerns are pretty much over. If wounded, there will be a period, possibly a long one, of pain and suffering. There's the possibility of going home—perhaps not as physically whole as when the individual left for the service—but home is a reward of its own. But one thing will keep a military man from going home, wounded or dead: being taken prisoner, captured by the enemy. As a prisoner of war, a POW, no member of the military knows when he will ever see freedom again, or what treatment he will receive at the hands of an enemy who holds him helpless.

It is that feeling of utter helplessness, knowing that everything concerning your life, including life itself, is dependent on the whims of your captors, that brings on despair in the minds of men taken prisoner. History has shown that that the fear of being held prisoner can be well founded indeed.

Conflict, war in a simpler term, has been a part of mankind's past since before recorded history. For millennia, the idea of a prisoner of war did not exist. When an enemy was defeated, he was killed, wounded or not. Resources were too limited, food too hard to come by, for any of it to be wasted on a vanquished enemy. Usually his home was put to the fire; his village or town was sacked, with anything portable of value being taken; and any family, women, children, or elderly killed—though the women at least stood a chance of being taken as slaves.

It was into the time of recorded history that the idea of taking prisoners started to become more of a common thing, at least for larger, more organized nations. The defeated survivors surrendering on the battlefield were not simply taken prisoner; they were enslaved by the victor. When the defeated laid down their arms, they became chattel, property of the victors, to be used or disposed of at whim. They were even made the stuff of entertainment in some societies, paraded before a joyous populace celebrating the victory of their military, and the lessening of their chances of becoming slaves. In very limited numbers, some of those slaves could be made to fight for their lives, if not their freedom, in shows for the multitudes. Those captured in war were now property, part of the spoils taken by the victors.

Captured prisoners, enslaved or otherwise, had to be fed and cared for at least to a minimum extent. Warriors would be lost on both sides of an extended conflict. Valuable skills would be lost to each side as the men were taken and held by the opposition. And their care was a burden. Killing unarmed prisoners out of hand became less popular because the opposite side would consider that a reason to treat the prisoners they held in the same brutal fashion.

Prisoner exchange and the ransom of high-ranking nobility taken on the battlefield became more common as the millennia progressed, and the victors realized that such actions could work to their benefit if their turn came up in the prison pens. By the Middle Ages, the enslavement of captives happened less often, though the ransoming of ranking officers (knights) as well as nobility was fairly common throughout what was considered the “civilized” world. It was only in the religious wars such as the Crusades where the captured fighters of the opposing faith were still commonly put to death as unbelievers, heretics, or whatever label fit.

Eventually, the exchange of prisoners captured during war became the normal practice. The release of prisoners after a conflict was over wasn't officially recognized until the practice was finally put in print in the mid-1600s in the treaty that ended the Thirty Years War.

For hundreds of years, the threat of retaliation in kind kept most prisoners in some kind of security after their capture. But excesses still happened on a regular basis. During the American Civil War, the brutality of prisoner-of-war camps was well-known. Nearly a quarter-million prisoners were taken on both sides of the conflict. Thousands died from malnutrition, disease, and a form of organized neglect, particularly at some of the larger camps. At the hellhole known as Andersonville, Georgia, more than 10,000 prisoners died while incarcerated. The commander of that camp, Captain Henry Wirz, was later hanged after being tried and convicted on charges of murder and conspiracy. He was the only Confederate soldier convicted of war crimes after the Civil War.

While the Civil War was still raging in the United States, in Europe, representatives from twenty-six governments of the world gathered in Geneva, Switzerland, to try and limit some of the suffering of war. For the warrior, the conference resulted in a convention that at least respected the rights of wounded soldiers on both sides of a conflict.