Supersonic Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (32 page)

Momyer’s face darkened. “We’ve lost eleven airplanes and twenty-two people in the last three months, all but a few against junk targets, mostly trucks carrying rice. Now when you take command, you can restore discipline and improve morale if you can. I frankly don’t give a damn about that, what I want is results. I don’t want any more losses, and I want the targets taken out on the first mission, not after three or four.”

Tom did what any sane subordinate would do. He said, “Yes, sir,” saluted, and got the hell out of Momyer’s office. But ever since then his remarks had weighed on Tom. He was being handed a group of pilots whose training had been all wrong and who were not getting the right support in the field. All he had to do was reverse the process, see that they were trained, and instead of lobbing bombs on rice bags set about winning the war, the air war, anyway. Tom’s tour was for a year, but he was determined to shape the Sixth up in six months—and spend the next six months shooting down MiGs.

The C-130 touched down right on schedule at Ubon and was cleared to park directly in front of Base Operations, where a reception committee waiting, backed by a huge sign saying: “Welcome to the Cougars.” A group of grinning officers was standing in rank order to greet him, and behind them was a bevy of beautiful Thai girls, each one with garlands of flowers.

It put Tom off. There was a war going on and flowers from Thai girls were incongruous. But he was an old guy, from other wars; he knew these men would be looking at him with suspicion, wondering what an aging crock could contribute to them. He didn’t know himself.

The acting wing commander, Lieutenant Colonel Fred Calfey, was genuinely glad to see him. Calfey took him down the line, introducing him to people whose names he forget immediately, as he knew they would always be wearing name tags.

They knew from their own experience that Tom had had a long day, and Calfey took him to his quarters, a double-sized hooch fixed up with air-conditioning and a private bath.

“Will we see you at the club, tonight, Colonel? There’s a lot of people who want to meet you.”

“Sure, Fred, I’m going to have dinner, but then I’m going to cut out and come back here—I’ve got some paperwork today, and I want to get an early start tomorrow. I’d like to talk to everybody that’s not flying tomorrow at oh eight hundred.”

“Nobody’s flying tomorrow, Colonel. We knew you’d want to talk to us, so we asked to stand down for one day.”

Tom controlled his temper. Standing down for a goddamn briefing! No wonder Momyer was pissed off.

“That’s fine. See you later, then.”

As Calfey turned to go, Tom asked, “Is Captain Steve O’Malley still with the Sixth?”

“Sure is; he’s due back from his mission in about twenty minutes.”

“Well, when he’s debriefed, and if he feels up to it, would you ask him to drop by my quarters?”

“Sure thing, Colonel.”

O’MALLEY SHOWED UP an hour later, showered, shaved, and wearing a luxury, a clean flying suit.

“Steve, I’m going to count on you for some straight answers. General Momyer is dissatisfied with the results the Sixth has been getting. I understand from the grapevine that morale is bad. How does it look to you?”

O’Malley looked miserable. “I don’t want to be a fink, Colonel. This is a great group of people; they just haven’t had the leadership they need. Our last commander, Colonel Nealon, didn’t exactly lead from the front.”

“Come on; tell me what’s going on. You’re not a fink; I know you better than that. But I’m behind the eight ball here; the guys will be watching me to see what I do, and I don’t want to make the same mistakes.”

O’Malley unloaded. Nealon had flown only twenty-four missions in the previous year, and of these only two were “counters”—missions to North Vietnam.

“And we’ve got this stupid stuff that comes down from the White House—I mean it, not Washington, but from the White House itself. It comes through channels, of course, and that means it takes so long that the enemy knows about it before we do. They say General Momyer hates it, but has to salute and do what he’s told. And the top people, the President, I guess, and the Sec Def, McNamara, are fixated on statistics. They want everything quantified. So when we were short on munitions, we were launching four F-4s, each one carrying half a load, because it increased the sortie rate.”

As O’Malley went on, Tom got a clear picture of the problem. Good aircraft, great mechanics, good pilots, but poor morale because of the leadership and the stupid missions.

“You’ve been briefed, I know, on the rules of engagement—we cannot hit enemy airfields, flak, or SAM sites unless they are preparing to fire on us. Crazy!”

“What about the enemy? What are the North Vietnamese like?”

“Damn clever. They have little itty-bitty airplanes that maneuver like crazy. Even the old MiG-17 is still competitive in its own regime. The MiG-21 is a hell of an interceptor. And they have good tactics—they are not interested in dogfighting; they just want to make the bombers drop their bombs. So they lie low, come in with plenty of speed, pull up, fire a heat-seeking missile, and they are gone. Sometimes they’ll stay and mix it up, but not often.”

“Why do you think Momyer is so pissed about poor results? He must know the story here.”

“I don’t think so. He knows that the orders come through from the White House—they go through his command—but he discounts that, saying those orders are a small percentage of what we do. But he is hit by the ground commanders in South Vietnam who see their forces and the South Vietnamese forces getting chewed up by regular North Vietnamese troops as well as by the Vietcong. He wants the supply routes stopped.”

They talked some more and O’Malley left, obviously pleased at becoming a confidant of the new CO, a man he’d long admired. Tom sat back, disheartened. There was an obvious solution—you didn’t try to stop the flow of supplies by bombing men carrying bags of rice on their backs. You stopped it by bombing the source of the materials in Hanoi and Haiphong. But that was forbidden by the rules of engagement.

Just before he dropped off to sleep, it came to Tom. There was no way to influence what the President wanted; there wouldn’t be any bombing of Hanoi or Haiphong in this administration. But Tom could get results if he got the North Vietnamese to engage and he could shoot down enough MiGs. It wouldn’t take a lot—there were probably no more than sixty or seventy MiGs in their inventory. But if he could take out a sizable chunk of them, it would make Momyer happy, it would raise the morale of the Sixth TFW, and it just might make Tom an ace in three wars.

At eight o’clock the next morning, all the pilots and most of the staff officers in the wing were assembled in the only building big enough to accommodate them, the Officers Club. Tom called Calfey over and said, “Colonel, have the officers fall in outside the building in open ranks. You and I will inspect them.”

Calfey looked at him dumbfounded, almost asking if he was kidding, then realizing that would be a mistake. It took ten minutes, but the men were finally assembled, and Tom and Calfey trooped their ranks. As Tom expected, it was unsatisfactory. He was not a fanatic on spit and polish, but these uniforms, shoes, and shaves were unacceptable.

“Colonel Calfey, we’ll repeat this inspection at eleven o’clock. Tell the men to be in Class A uniforms, have their shoes shined, and their faces shaved.”

At eleven, Tom and Calfey repeated the performance. The sense of resentment was palpable, but the group was presentable.

Tom said to Calfey, “Now we’ll have our meeting.”

At eleven fifteen, Tom walked in at the back of the room, Calfey called the group to attention, and they sprang to their feet. Tom strode the length of the room to the podium. He stood there, seeming to gaze directly at every individual before saying, “At Ease.”

He spent a full moment gazing around the room, watching the increased annoyance, some faces coloring, others making whispered asides. Then he said, “Pretty chickenshit, eh? Fat-assed old colonel, a crock from World War II, comes rolling into Ubon, doesn’t know his dick from a doorknob, and gets everybody into a sweat on their first day off in weeks. ‘The poor old bastard probably hasn’t flown this year, and he’s going to be leading us. God have mercy.’”

Looking around, he asked, “Did that about sum it up? Well, you are right. I am a fat-assed old colonel, and I don’t know my dick from a doorknob, but I’m going to learn, and you are going to teach me. I’ll start flying tomorrow, number four in the last flight, and I’m going to have you teach me everything you know. I’ll move from position to position, from one day to the next, and in two weeks, I’ll know as much as you do, and from then on I’ll be leading the show, every show, and especially every show that goes north.”

There was a quiet murmur, incredulous but approving.

“Now we’re going to intensify our flying. We’ll fly all the missions they assign us, and we’ll fly an additional training mission every day. We’ll practice dive-bombing, air-to-air gunnery, and, most of all, how to avoid surface-to-air missiles. Don’t tell me we don’t have the airplanes to do this, or the fuel, or anything else. If we don’t have it, I’ll get it.”

He stepped down from the podium, hesitated, then climbed back up on the little stage and said, “One more thing. We are going to shoot down one hell of a lot of MiGs in the process.”

Like a fast serve being returned, he heard from the back of the room: “What’s this we shit,
kemo sabe
?”

Tom stopped in his tracks.

“OK, who is the wise guy?”

A short, heavyset man sent his hand up in the air, his dark face flushed with embarrassment.

“What’s your name?”

“I’m Lieutenant Michael Pavone.”

“What’s your job, Lieutenant Pavone?”

“I’m a backseater for Captain Murray.”

“Not anymore. From now on you fly with me.”

It was as good a way to pick a crew member as any—at least he knew Pavone had guts. No brains, maybe, but guts.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

January 27, 1967

Palos Verdes, California

V
ance’s health had been up and down for the past few weeks and it was unusual for him to hold a meeting at night, but there was a pressing issue and it turned out that both Harry and Bob were available after nine o’clock. Vance hated to impose on them, but with Tom gone, there was more work than he could handle.

Vance knew that Harry and Bob recognized that he was gradually turning more and more control over to them. He did it reluctantly, not because he didn’t trust their judgment but because he hated the thought of not being on top of every detail. He’d spent a lifetime building up his firm, and now, when it was at its peak, with offices in three cities, he had to give up the reins.

He felt fortunate that he had Harry and Bob to take over. Tom’s return to the Air Force had disappointed him, as much as he understood it, and judging from Tom’s letters, he was doing well, shaping his unit up, and even scoring two kills. Imagine that, a forty-eight-year-old man in combat and shooting down airplanes. It was incredible, even if Tom was his son, his favorite son. Vance could admit it only to himself; he’d die before letting Harry even think that was the case. But Tom was so much like his mother, while Harry was just another Vance Shannon. All of Tom’s strengths and weaknesses were the very ones Vance had loved in Margaret, God rest her soul.

The only real problem was Tom’s antipathy toward Bob. Oddly enough, Vance knew Margaret would have felt the same way. It was something inherent, some sense of turf that they both had aplenty. Tom had made an attempt, not at reconciliation but at least cooperation, a few months ago with some very pertinent suggestions on simulators, based on his experience at Eglin. But since then, it was the same old story, a coldly formal friendship. Tom’s wife, Nancy, went out of her way to be nice to both Bob and Mae, but the lines of separation were there, hard and unmistakable and, now, getting more troublesome all the time. Vance knew that Tom was clearly in the wrong, that his views were counterproductive for the family and for the business. Vance also knew that there was nothing he could do or say to make a difference.

Things were not improved by the way business had boomed for the last six months, not always in the manner Vance liked to see. Last December, the German Luftwaffe grounded the Lockheed F-104G, after the sixty-fifth crash of the hot little fighter. The grounding was the result of a recommendation of a committee in which Harry and Bob had both participated. Naturally enough, the Germans were unwilling to admit that there was anything wrong with their training system and wanted to find an inherent flaw in the airplane. The truth was different. The attrition rate for F-104G was no worse than that of other high-performance fighters in other air forces around the world and, in fact, better than in some that also flew the Starfighter.

It was a crisis for the Luftwaffe, as it grudgingly accepted that it had not been as stringent as it might have been in either pilot selection or training. But as was so often the case when Rodriquez was on the job, there was a windfall for Aerospace Ventures. Well-known among the Luftwaffe leadership for his twelve victories in Korea and able to speak German well enough to sell, if not actually negotiate the contracts, the affable Rodriquez had walked away with an $80 million contract for simulators to improve instrument training. The contract had to be shared with half a dozen European countries, but it was a fantastic boost to the Aerospace Ventures bottom line.

Vance thought to himself how strange it was that Bob and Harry got along so well but that Tom couldn’t stand Bob. Yet Bob used Tom’s ideas for simulators in the proposal he had made to the Germans. All that remained was to build them—easier said than done. It was typical of Bob that he had insisted that one section of the contract specifically spell out that the basic idea for the 3-D simulators he was proposing was derived from Tom’s suggestion.