But I was a regular visitor. I made it a point to fly in for a day or two at each of my squadrons' bases at least once every ten days. I'd spend the night, attend their briefings, and go out on a mission with them. That way I could accurately monitor their performance, notice any changes in their proficiency or morale from one visit to the next, and stay informed about what was happening. We were the lucky ones because we did most of our combat flying in the south. The outfits that were really catching hell were hitting up north in the teeth of the most intense ground fire in the history of warfare, dodging everything from rifles, machine guns, hundred-millimeter cannons, and SAM missiles, to MiG 21s.
The list of what they couldn't hit was three times longer than what they could, and it was damned frustrating not to be able to fire on shipping offloading arms and ammo in Haiphong harbor, or to nail SAM missile sites or MiG bases, power plants, and fuel tank farms. All were on the forbidden list. The rules of engagement even forbade attacking a MiG while it was taking off or landing.
Vietnam was the first modern air war. We used "smart bombs," guided by laser beams and sophisticated electronics, developed a new weapons system in a tactical fighter aircraft called Weasel because its job was to ferret out and destroy enemy radar and missile installations, and armed some aircraft with secret electronics that could jam and disrupt North Vietnamese radar and communications. Meanwhile, the Russian-supplied North Vietnamese were no slouches, either. Their surface-to-air missiles were murderous, and their radar was able to counter many of our sophisticated measures with countermeasures of their own.
But you could get hurt flying in the south, too, where ground fire was intense at times, especially around the Ho Chi Minh trail. So, we always took off on a mission knowing that it would be either kill or be killed-one of the two was certain to happen-the same as any other combat situation in war. And I quickly learned that the kids flying in my squadrons fought with the same intensity that Andy and I had fought in World War II. Despite the uproar about the war back home being reported in the Stars and Stripes, those guys flew balls-out to do their jobs. There was no holding back, even when all hell broke loose.
I flew a Martin B-57 Canberra, a twin-engine bomber. It was perfect for our work, mostly air to ground bombing and strafing. It carried eight 750pound bombs, had four twenty-millimeter guns for strafing, and a range of more than eight hundred miles. Although the airplane was vulnerable to ground fire, and you had to be adept at "jinking"-weaving and twisting to avoid gunfire on the deck-it was damned effective as a light bomber. I flew with a copilot, taking part in close air-support operations, mostly at night, firing flares and hitting troops and supplies coming down the Ho Chi Minh trail. We had specially equipped recon airplanes that carried infrared detectors that could locate heat sources beneath the thick jungle canopy, as well as image intensifiers- low-light television and radar-that picked up troops and vehicles moving on a moonless night. We also had special "people sniffers" that detected sweat or urine traces down below. When any of these detection devices made contact, we'd be called in and hammer them.
In the south, a typical operation was responding to a call from a forward air controller, operating either on the ground with our troops, or flying in a small single-engine prop airplane, to launch an air strike on a specific point where Vietcong or North Vietnamese troops were spotted. The target was indicated for us by white phosphorous rockets, and then we'd hit it with heavy bombs or do strafing work.
Strafing was always dangerous because it meant coming in on the deck and drawing ground fire, especially over villages occupied by the V.C. A rifle bullet in the right spot could bring down a jet, and although we accumulated plenty of bullet holes on these missions, fortunately, few were lethal. We hit only villages where the V.C. had moved in, slaughtered the local leaders, and taken over the rice fields. They were expanding their cadres, raising food for their forces, and when they saw us coming half of them ran and the other half opened fire. That's the way the war was fought over there: bombing, strafing; strafing, bombing.
A lot of our strikes were directed against the fourth tree from the right because most of the real estate in the south was thick rain forest and jungle. On one occasion, we were ordered into an air strike against a suspected V.C. ammo dump. Christ, there was nothing down there but a thick canopy of trees, so thick we could barely see the bomb blasts, until one of the guys laid in a five-hundred pounder and the whole damned jungle blew up. The same thing happened to me.
The V.C. did a lot of tunneling, setting up whole battalions underground in a series of intricate tunnel networks that ants might have envied. Our intelligence could never tell where they were. But in the summer ol 1967, a combat battalion of American troops was moving across a valley about 150 miles from Saigon, when they began drawing heavy mortar and rifle fire from a particular ridge. My B-57 squadron was called in. I led a flight of four, carrying eight low-drag, delayed-action, five-hundred-pound bombs.
The forward air controller pinpointed the ridge as the most probable location ol the hidden V.C. They figured it was just honeycombed with underground tunnels. We went in and dropped one bomb at a time. I had a wingman with me, rolled in, picked a point where the ridge seemed most likely to be hiding the V.C., and dropped my bomb. I pulled up, but failed to see an explosion. I thought it was a dud. Suddenly, I saw an eruption of red-brick dust and smoke from either side of the ridge. We later discovered that my delayed-action bomb had gone right down the main entrance of the V.C. tunnel, shored with red bricks. So we went to work on that ridge and about every other bomb would result in red dust blowing out the side. Two days later, we received a report from Army intelligence that we had killed a tremendous number of V.C. troops. As a wing commander, I was credited with killing fifty V.C. soldiers. And it was pure chance, like a blind man pitching a ringer in horseshoes.
For me, the craziest part of Vietnam was back at Clark. I was in charge of the pilots in my wing, most of whom were married and had their families living at Clark, so Glennis had the rotten job of consoling and helping new widows. We lost about one guy a week. I owned the pilots, but the 6200 Materiel Wing owned my maintenance and airplanes. Mine was not to reason why, and it was a screwed-up mess. A squadron under my command would be inspected five thousand miles away, and I would get a bad inspection report saying our bomb racks didn't work. Hell, nothing worked on our airplanes, including the nuclear weapons delivery system on our fighters in Taiwan. But as wing commander, I was responsible. And it did me no good to complain that I had no control over the maintenance because Gen. Jim Wilson, head of the Thirteenth Air Force at Clark, devised that system and insisted on sticking with it. He ran things his way.
Every Wednesday afternoon, he would come down to my wing, get behind my desk, and sit down. He operated on a card item system of control, and I would have as many as two hundred card items-meaning gigs-against my wing in a single week, which really wasn't so bad considering there were five thousand guys under my command. So, I had to flip through these cards with him: "Beer can on front lawn of barracks. Beer can removed." "Airman caught out of uniform. Airman reprimanded." On and on, through more important things like gigs against supply status and operational readiness. Each gig card had to have remedial action. It took me a couple of hours to go through these cards with the general. One of the combat support groups had sixteen hundred cards, and it actually took a day and a half to brief him. It was a helluva way to run an outfit, but General Wilson was effective; I'll admit that. Everyone, including yours truly, was scared to death of him.