Authors: Jack Broughton
Tags: #Vietnam War, #Military History, #War, #Aviation
Thud Ridge (38 page)
The deputy commander for operations (DO for short) is the executive who produces the airborne combat effort. His empire centers around a building called a combat operations center where all combat communications are accepted and dispatched. This is where those concerned with the action can find, at any minute of the night or day, who is flying which aircraft, when they left, when they are scheduled to return, and what they are accomplishing while in the air. The fragmentary portion of the headquarters instructions pertaining to a particular wing's effort for the next day arrives in this section at least daily, and upon receipt of the frag, the next section of the DO's people go to work—those known as mission planners or frag breakers.
The frag breakers must decipher page after page of times, coordinates, and numerical target designators to translate the frag into an understandable schedule of activity for the wing. When they have reduced the data to a simple form showing how many people start engines at what time to get from here to there, they assign responsibilities to each of the three fighter squadrons to provide the assets to get the job done. Full preparation must be accomplished in triplicate to cover the primary target assigned, plus first and second alternate targets. The man leading the entire show for the next day, the mission commander, must dictate his attack guidelines for each of the targets. Pilots selected by the squadrons then make out the maps, flight lineup cards, and detailed navigation cards to be used by the pilots within the strike force, and they must depend upon yet another section within the DO's shop—the intelligence section.
As soon as the intelligence people are alerted to the next day's requirements, they scurry through huge files and produce the applicable maps and photos to be used by the aircrews. They collect any information available on past attacks on the target, and they attempt to predict the defenses that will be encountered. This prediction can never be exact as the enemy refuses to leave his mobile defenses in one place, and a gun battery that is active, or up, one day may not fire—or may not even be there—the next day. Their prognosis must cover likely sectors of automatic ground weapons fire, such as machine guns. It must present the best estimate of action by antiaircraft guns varying in caliber from 37 millimeter to 100 millimeter, some firing visually and some firing under radar control. They must attempt to pinpoint the mobile Russian-built surface-to-air missile sites—Sam to us—and they must bring us up-to-date on how many interceptor aircraft—Migs —we might look for.
Some of the DO's people, such as the weapons officer, specialize in the use and delivery of bombs, rockets, and gunfire. They can advise on the best angle of dive and the best airspeed for any particular divebomb run. Others are constantly evaluating the tactics of the attack to determine the best approach to maximum efficiency, while still others constantly evaluate the performance of the pilots and the manner in which the bombs go to Hanoi.
At least two hours before the first start-engine time, the mission commander gathers all of his charges together and conducts a very detailed briefing on each of the three probable missions. Somewhere in this time frame the decision will be made in Saigon as to which target we will attack (we say we are executed). The decision is flashed through the combat operations net to the mission commander, quite often too late to make for comfortable timing in the still necessary internal flight briefings, physical transit to the aircraft, and launch of the strike force. You can bet that if a subject addresses itself to the primary job of attacking the enemy, the wing weenies have worked it over long before our throttle jockey walks out to his Thud.
If we now have our driver matched with a machine, we need to talk about what we are going to do with him. He will normally be sent into action as one member of a flight of four aircraft. This flight will be sent against a target of its own, or will be part of a strike force or group of flights all tasked to strike the same target. Each flight of four will be given a phonetic designator to facilitate identification and radio conversation. If we assume a call sign of Wabash, the flight leader would be known as Wabash one or Wabash leader. Wabash two would fly on the leader's left wing, and together they would be the lead element of the flight. Wabash three is known as the element leader and is the second in command of the flight. He flies on the right side of the leader with Wabash four on his right wing.
We can utilize our combinations of men and machines in several ways. If we launch them to bomb a specific-building or piece of real estate, they are on a strike mission. If we launch them with instructions to look up and down a certain road or to roam a narrow geographical area and attack the best target observed by the flight leader, they are then on an armed reconnaissance, or armed recce. If their announced purpose is to participate in a rescue attempt, they are on Res-cap. Anytime you are monitoring someone or something below, you are Capping, or on Cap. If our aircraft are being used to help the ground forces achieve some specific objective, they are providing close support. This support can be directed by a forward air controller, or FAC, who flies a slower aircraft and drops marking devices on the target, or it may be directed by radio or visual signals from the ground. If we send fighters to protect other aircraft from attack by enemy aircraft, they are escorting. When the forces are available, escort by faster, more maneuverable aircraft is desirable for slower aircraft or aircraft involved in a mission that demands all of their attention or all of the capability available in their machine.
Our fighter-bomber pilot is concerned with putting the bombs and rockets that he carries onto the target. Just as he must have internal wing support to get into the air, he must have airborne support to achieve his goal. This support includes photographic and electronic reconnaissance aircraft whose mission differs from his own armed recce only in that their goal is to find, record, and identify, as opposed to destroy. It includes aerial refueling support from huge tankers whose only task is to pump fuel through a tube in their tail and into a receptacle in the nose of the fighter. Overloaded fighters use a great deal of fuel when they accomplish maximum performance maneuvers. They must depend on ground radar stations, manned by a group known as controllers, to steer them and the tankers to a common piece of sky where they can accomplish the mandatory fuel transfer.
The helicopter has assumed a place in the direct combat support of the attackers. These choppers can stand still over a downed pilot and hoist him to safety, if the chopper can locate him and if the chopper can survive the two-way trip and the pickup. To find a downed pilot and steer the chopper to his position we use old propeller aircraft which are less vulnerable to small-arms fire from the ground, yet faster than the chopper. They have the ability to stay airborne for long periods and the heavy load of bombs, rockets, and guns they can carry allows them to harass the enemy on the ground near the downed pilot and thus protect both the pilot and the chopper.
But our GI pilot worries little about all these other folks at the start of his tour as he is more concerned with perfecting his own techniques. He knows that North Vietnam is split into six segments called Route Packages, and he knows the defenses are lighter in the southernmost package—Route Pack 1—and get tougher as the numbers increase to Route Pack 6—the northernmost segment. Although he will fly his first ten missions in the easiest of the areas, the first one is still bound to be an exciting event. When he starts to taxi out for that first takeoff, the bombs and rockets on his aircraft are inert due to the safety clips inserted in the fuzes. When he gets to the arming area at the end of the runway and the arming crew pulls those red-flagged clips out of the system, those munitions are armed and ready to go. He is carrying live ordnance and he is off to combat.
His first few missions will be scheduled in good weather where he can see the ground and the other aircraft around him—Visual Flight Rules, or VFR. After he has had a chance to respond properly to the numerous changes in radio channels by following his leader's instructions to "go to button three"—a switch to channel three—without making the wrong move and losing contact with the rest of the flight, and after he has accepted fuel from the tanker in sequence with the rest of his flight—or cycled off the tanker—in the bright sunshine, he will no longer be scheduled selectively for good weather. He will get to perform under IFR, or Instrument Flight Rules, when the weather is bad and when he flies only by position on his leader if he is a wingman, or only by reference to his flight instruments if he is leading others.
On his first few missions he is almost sure to use more fuel than any of the other flight members. He knows that he must maintain flight integrity and that he must go where his leader goes. Except for a few seconds on the dive-bomb run itself, he must maintain tallyho, or visual contact with all his flight-mates. This is not always easy to do with a big bombload, and until he learns the tricks, he will make up time and space by lots of burner. The afterburner, which gives additional power but on the Thud engine consumes fuel as fast as you could pass it through the necks of six milk bottles at once, is activated by simply pushing the hand-held throttle sideways. The flight leader is responsible for steering properly, or maintaining the correct heading, and he is responsible for putting all of the flight in the right place at the proper airspeed. If the wingman fails to respond to his leader's actions properly, he can plug in, or stroke the burner, to cover up, but his fuel supply will tell the story. Each mission has an established minimum-fuel radio call to enable the leader to make fuel plans based on the man with the least fuel. It will be the new man who reaches this state first and calls bingo.
There is a good chance that during these early missions he will learn that what we call switch actions are not always as simple as they seem. There are nine separate switches that must be activated to insure that the bombs will leave the aircraft properly during the dive-bomb run, and the pilot sets them up when he crosses into enemy territory and the flight leader calls, "Clean 'em up, green "em up, and start your music." If he forgets one—and when things get rough this is possible—it may cost his life. He had better learn to jink properly during these missions. That is the art of weaving, bobbing, twisting, and turning to avoid enemy gunfire as you come off the dive-bomb run. They used to call me the Super linker, but I never got hit coming off a target.
As he approaches the end of the first ten missions he will find his flight leader priming him more and more on things like the performance envelope of the Mig. He will learn where the Mig is at its best and where it is weakest. He will find what his particular leader expects when he calls "break" and throws his flight into a hard turn or into violent evasive action to avoid being shot down by an enemy aircraft. There will be no doubt in his mind that he will jettison, or toggle, his bombload short of the target only as a last-ditch life-or-death alternative.
If a Mig or anything else makes him toggle short of his target, he has been defeated. Moreover, in this war that pits high-speed fighters against small, hard-to-see targets in the middle of politically sensitive areas, he doesn't want to give the enemy a chance to repeat his old song about bombing civilians. He must disregard the fact that "civilians" working in and around the big rail yards and those manning the supply dumps and the vehicle repair shops are the backbone of what he is fighting against. They don't wear uniforms—they just haul ammunition. The first time he goes to Viet Tri he will be shot at from the "hospital," but this is of no import. He must be accurate. Even if he gets in the life-or-death spot, the Thud driver will avoid the population. I cannot guarantee the precise detonation point of every bomb that has left every one of our aircraft over the North, but I can guarantee that I have never seen a Thud driver guilty of wanton bombing. We had several who should have toggled their loads but did not because the bombs would not have gone on their target. They got killed for their trouble.
By the time he -learns enough Thai to know that
nit noy
means "a little thing" and
C H I Dooey
means "sorry about that," he will be through the first ten and ready to go against the North. The first time he pulls into the arming area as a member of a big strike force and watches the modified two-place Thuds take off with their wild weasels intent on killing the Sams, who will be trying to kill him, his mouth will be unbelievably dry. Perhaps Sam will seek him out, or perhaps a Mig will put on a little air show for him and send a heat-seeking Atol missile his way. Perhaps a comrade will fall, and if the comrade is fortunate enough to get his parachute open, the automatically activated electronic emergency beeper will etch its screech on his memory forever. For sure the guns will fire on him, and for sure he will be impressed as he moves along Thud Ridge and uses North Vietnam's own terrain to mask or block the view of the radar operators on the other side.
He will feel like a big man when he gets back from that first one up North, and that he is.
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