Hamfist Over the Trail (15 page)

I filled my water bottle from the sink and chugged it. Once I got hydrated, I started to feel a lot better. But I sure didn't feel well enough to fly my mission later that night.

I went by my Flight Commander's room and knocked on the door. Major Withers answered and invited me in.

“Sir, I'm really not feeling too well right now. Any chance I can trade flights with someone on a later mission?”

“I beat you to it, Hamfist. When I saw the condition you were in at the Club last night, I figured it was a sure bet you shouldn't be flying tonight. I have you assigned to man the duty desk starting at midnight.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Now that you're here, I want to talk to you about that letter you got.”

“Oh, you know about it?”

“I think everybody that was at the Club, and probably everybody at DaNang, knows about it. I'm sorry it happened to you, but I'm also glad it happened to you.”

“What do you mean, sir?”

“That gal, the one who wrote you the Dear John letter, probably did both of you a big favor.”

I'm sure I looked puzzled.

“Let me tell you about what it was like at Kadena a few years ago,” he continued. “flying F-105s. Kadena was a great base, in Okinawa, the poor man's Hawaii. Life was good. We had great flying, mostly weekends off, and all of us married guys had our families there, since it was an accompanied tour.”

“Sounds pretty nice.”

“It was. Then, one day, out of the blue, we had a no-notice squadron meeting, and we were told we would be leaving for Takhli Air Base, in Thailand, in 12 hours, for an indeterminate time period. Operation Rolling Thunder had just started, and we were going to be part of the initial effort to bomb North Vietnam into submission. I guess you know how that turned out.”

I nodded.

“I went from the squadron to my house on base to tell my wife I would be leaving for combat. I walked into our house and she was giving our daughter a bath. As soon as she saw me, standing there in my flight suit, she knew exactly what was happening. She scooped up my daughter from the bathtub, I think she was about three at the time, and said, 'Charlotte, Daddy has to go away for a little while. Give him a kiss goodbye.’ And then she helped me pack.”

“My wife is a real fighter pilot's wife,” he continued. “She was the squadron commander of our family the whole time I was away. Did everything. Even arranged to have the grass cut.”

“Not everybody's wife was like mine. Some of the wives couldn't handle the short-notice call to combat their husbands had received. There were about a dozen wives that had this sick contest, where they would go to the Kadena O'Club every night and see which one could pick up a transient pilot the quickest. They called it their fuck club. They couldn't handle being Air Force wives. Basically, I think they just had nervous breakdowns.”

I was starting to get his point. If I had married Emily, she would have been miserable, and that would have made me miserable. And, if we'd had kids, that would have been more lives ruined.

“Thank you, sir. You really helped me put it into perspective.”

“Glad I could help, Hamfist.”

As I was leaving, Major Withers had one last comment.

“Some of my squadron-mates from Kadena never made it back. They're still up there in North Vietnam, at the Hanoi Hilton.”

36

July 22, 1969

One afternoon, when I went to Ops, there was a note waiting for me.

It was from Don Springer, my classmate from pilot training. He'd received an assignment to NKP, in Thailand, and had ferried an OV-10 to DaNang for some maintenance work.

“Hi Ham,” the note read, “I'm at DaNang for a couple of days while I get an airplane fixed. I flew in from NKP this morning. If you want to get together, I'm at the VOQ at Gunfighter Village, room 314. Looking forward to seeing you and hearing some war stories!

Don Springer”

I really liked Don. We'd been in different cadet squadrons at the Academy, but we'd had several classes together and got to know each other pretty well.

I couldn't risk infecting him with the Hamfist curse. I crumpled the note and threw it in the trash.

I still had two weeks to go until my R&R, and I really needed it. I was dog-tired and totally burned out. There were days I just didn't give a shit if I got shot down or not. What the fuck, I thought; when your number's up, your number's up. I found myself taking risks I never would have considered six months earlier.

Like getting in a pissing contest with that 9-level at Delta 43. On this night's mission, we had located a truck park near Delta 43, and it was defended by that quad-23. I called Moonbeam and said I needed fighters, I didn't care what the ordnance load was. Mark 82s, CBUs, even nape, whatever they could send me. They sent me some Navy A-7s from the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk.

I was thrilled. A-7s have a great bombing system, and these navy jocks were among the best. They had the reputation for being able to drive nails with their bombs.

The call sign of this flight was Canyon Passage 21 and 22. They were loaded with Mark 82 slicks. I gave them a radial and distance from Channel 72 for the rendezvous that would put us just north of Delta 43, our target area. They gave me an ETA of 5 minutes, with 15 minutes of playtime.

It was a totally dark, clear night. When the fighters set up an orbit over the rendezvous point, I couldn't see them at all. They were at angels 20, and I was at 9,000 feel. I needed to make sure they could see me and the target area before I marked the target.

“I'm going christmas tree in five seconds,” I transmitted. I counted from one-potato to five-potato and turned on all my lights. Beacon, nav lights, landing light, the whole enchilada. I just wanted to get the fighter pilots' eyes in my direction, and then I was going to drop a ground marking flare.

Canyon Passage 21 transmitted, “We have you in sight... Holy shit, Covey, get your fucking lights off!”

The sky around me lit up like the fourth of July. The 9-level gunner had registered on me. Tracers bracketed the left and right side of my fuselage, and I didn't know whether to break right or left. I maneuvered a little, but basically kept flying straight ahead. What the fuck - it's a big sky!

I turned off my lights and confirmed that the fighters had the target area in sight. I gave them the target elevation and wind information.

I instructed the fighters, “Okay, guys, we need to go after the gun first, then we'll hit the truck park. If you still see the target, you're cleared in from north to south, with a right break.”

I set up a holding pattern east of the target, and shortly Canyon Passage 21 called, “Lead's in from the north”. As soon as he made his radio call, there was withering 23 mike mike fire in the direction of north, from the target.

“Break it off, lead,” I called, “we have a gomer tuned in.” It was obvious this guy was listening in on our strike frequency. “I want you to make your next pass from Seattle to Miami, with a break toward Mexico City, and when you call in I'll go christmas tree again.”

My FAN, Tightass Tilton, was really not too keen to do this. He was probably the only guy in the squadron whose name actually suited him. He was constantly uptight. Every time I flew with him, he would whine that he wanted to go higher, stay further away from the target, RTB sooner. He especially didn't want to go near Delta 43. He was a young guy, a bachelor like me, right out of Nav school. If he had been a married guy, with a family, I could have understood his reluctance to get in a good fight. As it was, I just considered him a pussy.

“Uh, Hamfist,” he protested, “I don't think that's a good idea.”

“It'll be fine,” I lied, “I'm just going to turn the lights on for a second, then I'll break hard out of the way.”

Tightass squirmed.

Lead called in from Seattle, and I turned on all the lights again. One potato, two potato, lights off, just as our friend the 9-level gunner opened up on us with all barrels. I broke hard to the left as tracers whizzed by the right side of the aircraft. One out of every four rounds was a tracer, and it looked like a solid line of light. Through the open right window we could hear the staccato clicking of the rounds as they went by, followed, a few seconds later, by the actual sound of the gun firing. The smell of cordite filled the cockpit.

The triple-A on the ground from the 9-level was in mid-fire when it was engulfed by the massive explosion of lead's bombs. Lead had chosen, wisely, to expend all of his ordnance on that one pass, while he had the gunner in his sights. For some reason, secondary explosions started cooking off about 20 meters away, to the south.

This was great. I had destroyed my nemesis, the Delta 43 gunner, and I didn't need to use ground marking flares to direct number two to the truck park. I simply referenced the two sets of explosions on the ground. “Number two, we have two sets of fires 20 meters apart, oriented north to south. I want you to put all your bombs 50 meters east of the northern fire. I want you to run in from Chicago to Denver and break to San Francisco. One pass, haul ass.”

Number two dutifully came in from the northeast and pulled off to the right. There was no anti-aircraft fire at all. We were rewarded with huge secondary explosions, right on the truck park! The fires were so bright they blanked out the starlight scope. With the naked eye I could see at least fifteen trucks burning. Now
that
is what I called BDA!

Canyon Passage 21 flight was winchester, and we were bingo, so it was time to RTB. Tightass didn't say a word the entire flight back. I figured he was as pumped as I was.

After landing, Tightass headed straight to the Ops Officer's office and slammed the door. I went to the Intel room and gave a thorough debriefing. Just as I was finishing, Major Walters came in. “Hamfist, can I see you for a minute?” I joined him in his office and closed the door.

“Lieutenant Tilton said he doesn't want to fly with you anymore,” he commented, “He said you act like you have a death wish.”

“No, sir,” I bristled, “actually I have a desire to do my job. And tonight, I'd say I really did it.” I found myself raising my voice, “I destroyed the most deadly triple-A piece in all of Steel Tiger, and I think I got the best BDA this squadron's seen in months.”

“Lieutenant,” he came back – I knew I was probably in trouble when he didn't call me Hamfist – “that's commendable, but there isn't a target in all of Steel Tiger that's worth your life or another one of my airplanes. You weren't on a SAR, you didn't have TIC, it was just a goddam truck park. You probably wiped out a dozen gomers. And that quad-23. Good for you. Tomorrow Uncle Ho will send down a dozen more, along with a new gunner. You're taking stupid risks, and I won't have it. Pack your bags, Lieutenant. You're out of here!”

I was shocked. “What!” I yelled, “Sir! You're kicking me out of the squadron?”

“No such luck, Hamfist,” he answered, “you're leaving for R&R tomorrow.”

37

July 23, 1969

The Ops Officer, Major Walters, had made a wise decision to send me on R&R immediately. If I had been allowed to continue flying combat for another two weeks until my scheduled departure, there was no telling if I ever would have lasted.

I had gotten what the fighter jocks called “target fixation”, where they would be on a bombing run and trying so hard to meet their parameters for a good delivery, they would lose awareness of their altitude and end up auguring in.

I had seen that first-hand a few weeks earlier, and the horrific sight will forever burned into my memory. I was controlling a flight of two F-4s from DaNang, Gunfighter 55 and 56, on a truck park one night. It was a low-threat area, and I wasn't all that concerned about enemy reaction. I had gone christmas tree for an extended period of time, and hardly even drew any small arms fire. This was going to be easy.

Gunfighter 55 put his bombs right on target, and we got a few small secondaries. Then Gunfighter 56 rolled in. Shortly after he called rolling in, there was a terrific fireball, right on the target. I figured his bombs must have hit something really lucrative, to get that big a secondary.

“That's beautiful,” I transmitted.

Lead came back, “Negative, Covey. That was my wingman.”

The guy had flown right into the ground. We stuck around the area for over an hour, to see if maybe he had punched out and would come up on the radio. No such luck.

I did a lot of soul-searching, to see if there was anything I could have done to have prevented the tragedy. No, I gave a good target briefing, I provided the correct target elevation, I gave a good mark and a good run-in line. The guy had probably simply gotten target fixation. It can happen to the best of pilots.

The last thing I did before I got on the “freedom bird” to Tokyo was change my MPC into U.S. Dollars. We weren't allowed to have U.S. Currency in Vietnam because, they said, it could lead to black marketeering. So all U.S. Forces were paid in Military Payment Certificates. Basically monopoly money.

Periodically, everyone would have to turn in their MPC to exchange it for new, different, MPC. This supposedly kept MPC out of the hands of the locals, since they never knew when the money would be changed. To be honest, I never really totally understood the whole MPC thing. But finally I was getting my hands on good old greenbacks.