Viper Pilot: A Memoir of Air Combat (3 page)

Another problem was being aware a SAM was tracking you. Threat reactions had always been done visually, but the loss of Fobair and Keirn changed all that. They’d never seen the missile coming and had no warning they were being targeted. Even if they’d spotted it, no one knew how to defeat such a missile and it was obvious that a more sophisticated solution was needed. This new equipment would have to be placed in an aircraft that could survive against a SAM and also employ weapons to kill the things. The Air Force’s answer was to retrofit the AN/APR-26 warning receiver onto a fighter.

But which fighter? You’d need a jet that was very fast and could maneuver well enough to give the pilot or aircrew a chance at survival. Bombers and reconnaissance aircraft could try to rely on jamming and countermeasures, but that wouldn’t cut it for a fighter working right on top of the threat. Especially a jet that was
trying
to get shot at so the SAM would give away its position.

Pressed for an answer, the Air Force chose the F-100F Super Sabre to accommodate the two-man crew of a pilot and Electronic Warfare Officer. Made by North American Aviation, the Super Sabre was about ten years old when Project Weasel was conceived. Originally a training aircraft, the Super Sabre was only equipped with two 20-mm cannons. In retrospect, it wasn’t an ideal choice, but Project Weasel was making a heroic effort to counter the growing losses in Vietnam, and time was short.

The last problem was, who to fly it? Fighter pilots, as anyone who has ever been involved with them can attest, are a breed apart. The uninitiated or envious often call them arrogant, but that’s not really
it
.
It
is an absolute belief in their own invincibility, aggressiveness, and skill. Without this mentality, no sane man would go near a supersonic coffin that flings pieces of high explosive at the ground and other jets.

Fighter pilots regard combat as a challenge, so Project Weasel got to choose from the top aviators already flying the F-100F—but the EWO was another matter. The Air Force had never put EWOs into fighters before, and initially turned to the B-52 bomber community for radar experts. Training started in October 1965, at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, barely three months following Ross Fobair’s shoot-down.

They were trained to fight the SA-2. Everything that was known or suspected was thrown at them, along with best guesses at defensive tactics. Practice missions were flown against simulated SAM sites, and, eventually, one of the EWOs understandably asked what the point of all this was.

They were told that they would lead the strike packages into North Vietnam and would hunt and kill the SAMs. A properly puzzled pilot then asked how
that
was to be done, given the equipment limitations, intelligence uncertainties, and the thickness of the jungle. How do you find a SAM site? There was really no other way to locate a SAM with absolute certainty except to allow the SAM to shoot at its target—then, as long as the Weasel survived, he’d know the location.
As long as the Weasel survived.

Right.

In the immortal words of EWO Captain Jack Donovan, “You want me to fly in the back of a tiny little jet with a crazy fighter pilot who thinks he’s invincible, home in on a SAM site in North Vietnam, and shoot it before it shoots me? You’ve gotta be shittin’ me!”

You’ve Gotta Be Shittin’ Me. YGBSM. It instantly and irrevocably defined the Wild Weasel mission. It remains so to this day.

In November 1965, the first five Wild Weasel Super Sabre jets arrived at Korat Air Base in Thailand to begin combat operations. Right from the beginning, the Weasels knew that the only way to deal with a SAM was to kill it. You could temporarily suppress a radar by lobbing anti-radiation missiles at it, but that wouldn’t solve the problem, and it would still be alive tomorrow. No, you had to kill it with bombs or cannons. So they teamed up with F-105Ds—a supersonic bomber known as the Thunderchief—and went to work.

Called Iron Hand missions, they would hunt the SAM by flying down into its engagement zone, or envelope. This made the Weasel an attractive target, and the SA-2 target acquisition radar would try to lock the Super Sabre. Once the radar was on air and trying to lock the Weasel, then it could be tracked in turn and located. You could locate it by radar homing or, if the SAM launched, you might see the smoke trail. Sabres and the Thunderchiefs would then bomb and strafe the site to finish it off.

Over time, several essential aspects of this process have not changed. First, the SAM has to stay “on air” long enough to track the target and be seen in turn. Second, the Weasel has to live long enough to find it and successfully attack. Lastly, you couldn’t miss when you attacked, or the SAM—and all the guns around it—would kill you.

Sounds simple enough, right?

Right.

Three days before Christmas, not quite five months since Ross Fobair’s death, Captains Al Lamb and Jack Donovan engaged and killed an SA-2 in North Vietnam. The Weasels had proven their worth and would remain in Vietnam for the duration of the war.

But the F-100F Super Sabres would not.

After nine confirmed SAM kills and a staggering 50 percent Weasel casualty rate, it became apparent that changes had to be made. As far as a new aircraft went, the choice was obvious. The F-105 Thunderchief—called the “Thud,” because of the noise it made while landing—had been involved with the Hunter Killer mission from the beginning, playing the role of the Killer. Why not modify the formidable single-seat fighter bomber into a two-seat variant and make it the new Weasel? Weasels could then do their own killing.

The Thud was definitely a man’s fighter jet, and it outperformed the Sabre in every respect. Much faster—twice the speed of sound at altitude—it was twenty feet longer and some 20,000 pounds heavier. Even so, the F-105 could travel twice as far into enemy territory as the F-100F. Most important, the Thud had five underwing hard points capable of a 6,000-pound weapons payload with a further 8,000 pounds of bombs carried internally. Lots of choices to make SAMs go away.

The U.S. Air Force had Republic Aviation modify the F-105F to incorporate the lessons learned from Southeast Asia. A tandem cockpit was added for the APR-25 RHAW receiver and the EWO. Radar altimeters, better ejection seats, armor plating, and an updated weapons delivery system were also included.

By June 1966, less than a year after Ross Fobair’s shoot-down, the Wild Weasel 3 Program was in combat in Southeast Asia. In all, eighty-six F-105Fs were modified as Weasels, evidence of the seriousness of the Air Force program. The next month, the earlier-generation F-100Fs flew their last combat missions; meanwhile, Operation Rolling Thunder successfully continued turning big trees into toothpicks, and the war dragged on.

It was Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s notion that slowly increasing the pressure on North Vietnam would make Ho Chi Minh realize the utter futility of opposing the world’s greatest military. The idea, dreamed up by the Beltway theorists who were somehow permitted to run the war, was called “graduated escalation.”

And it didn’t work.

A true politician, McNamara didn’t understand the application of military power, nor did he accurately assess his enemy. Rolling Thunder simply committed American forces in a piecemeal fashion, and gave the North Vietnamese time to repair damage, shift resources, and study our equipment and tactics. The amateurs in Washington never fully grasped that time was on Hanoi’s side. As the war moved farther north, the Johnson administration gave the enemy every opportunity to learn how to counter American airpower by improving Soviet SAMs.

Five of the first eleven F-105Fs were lost by the end of August 1966, and it was again evident that further improvements to the Weasel were necessary. So along came the F-105G. The G model was a true Weasel, designed and equipped for the sole purpose of hunting and killing SAMs. The APR-25/26 RHAW was replaced with the upgraded APR-35/37 series. Its increased fidelity and sensitivity would allow greater targeting accuracy and, hopefully, better survivability for the crew.

The G model also carried Westinghouse AN/ALQ-105 electronic jamming pods in a pair of blisters under the fuselage. This permitted a much more powerful countermeasure response and freed up two more underwing hard points for additional weapons. The more capable ALR-31 system necessitated a redesign of the wingtips to give the warning sensors greater coverage of the surrounding sky.

All of these improvements represented lessons learned the hard way and, in many cases, from lives lost. With the APR-35/37 passive detection system to find the SAM radars, the ALR-31 to warn of a missile launch, and the ALQ-105 jammer to confuse enemy radars, the F-105G was ready to fight.

And fight it did.

From the latter half of 1967, Weasels flew from their Royal Thai Air Force bases to hunt and kill the rapidly proliferating SAMs. All told, the F-105s flew more than 20,000 combat sorties. Over 300 Thuds were lost in the fighting, 126 in 1966 alone, though not all were Weasels. Of those, 103 were brought down by SAMs and Triple-A. It was an enormously dangerous and costly mission.

The enemy’s Tet Offensive of 1968 had shown that the North Vietnamese were in no way defeated and Robert McNamara’s amateurish meddling in tactics had failed completely. His Rolling Thunder plan had cost hundreds of aircraft and the loss of more than a thousand highly talented aviators. McNamara himself had resigned his position in late 1967 and fled to become president of the World Bank. He never lived down his culpability nor justified his God complex. Lyndon Johnson, also personally and politically finished, announced in March 1968 that he would not be seeking reelection. Johnson would die on his ranch in January 1973; McNamara lingered on until 2009. I like to imagine that the ghosts of the 58,178 Americans both men sent to early graves were waiting for them on the other side.

With LBJ and McNamara gone, the air war over North Vietnam slid to a halt. Rolling Thunder was officially and conveniently ended in November just prior to the 1968 presidential elections. By 1970, the F-105 was no longer in production and still-mounting combat losses necessitated a revised Wild Weasel.

Enter the F-4 Phantom II.

Made by McDonnell Douglas, the Phantom began its military career as a Navy fighter attack jet in 1961. In 1962, a USAF version, the F-4C, was approved and made its first flight in May 1963. It was stubbier and heavier than the Thud but carried an improved fire control system. F-4Ds and Es followed, each with improvements that increased weapon accuracy, maneuverability, and range. Thirty six F-4Cs were re-designated as EF-4Cs and called the Wild Weasel IV. But it was a Band-Aid solution to the worsening situation in Vietnam and a SAM threat that continued to evolve.

In early 1971, the Vietnam lull began to come apart. Air activity over the north increased, and a new enemy offensive kicked off in March 1972. Operation Linebacker was unleashed against Hanoi to drive the enemy back and to win the war. By the middle of April, almost everything in North Vietnam was fair game, and President Nixon, acting on his promise to end the war, turned loose the U.S. Air Force.

The Weasels were once again thrown into the fray, sometimes flying four sorties a day, as rail yards, airfields, and storage facilities were attacked. Infrastructure that had kept the enemy functioning for the past seven years was finally on the target list and being hit hard. The success of this campaign led to the Paris Peace Talks, and on October 23, 1972, air operations above the 20th Parallel were temporarily halted. Linebacker II, the final push, began on December 18, with the Weasels paving the way for massive B-52 strikes that finally brought Hanoi to its knees. But, in true American political fashion, whatever is paid for in blood is usually given away by Washington, and in early 1973, the U.S. began a massive pullout of forces. By January 1975, the North Vietnamese army captured Phuoc Long Province, only eighty miles from Saigon, and on April 30, the Republic of South Vietnam ceased to exist.

So the Weasels came home. Some of them, anyway. Twenty-six Phantoms had been lost and forty-two more officers killed, missing, or captured. Two Weasels, Leo Thorsness and Merlyn Dethlefsen, had been awarded the Medal of Honor.

The advancement of the surface-to-air missile had ushered in a new and revolutionary form of warfare. It would eventually grow and morph into the Integrated Air Defense System, the deadliest technology to ever threaten aircraft. Countertactics had progressed, in turn, from Weasel I through Weasel IV. These techniques would continue to evolve, sometimes forgetting the fundamentals learned in Vietnam and sometimes remembering. Equipment and weapons were proposed, improved, or discarded, but one thing, as we shall see, didn’t change. Never again would American airpower attack in force without the Wild Weasel.

2

Cold War and Hot Times

“I
F THE TREES ARE GETTING BIG, PULL BACK TILL YOU SEE BLUE
.”

Those were the immortal first bits of flying instruction I received from my dad. Followed shortly by “pull up now or we’re going to die.”

Dad was a businessman and a highly skilled engineer by the time I came along. He’d designed cockpit instruments for NASA spacecraft and helped save the Alaska pipeline by redesigning their flow meters. But he was also a retired Marine fighter/attack pilot. Flying was something I’d always been around as part of a colorful family. Ours is a lineage that includes several generals, one of whom was a Confederate cavalry officer. I also had a great-grandfather who managed to charge up San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt, and another who shipped off to fight in France during World War I to escape a nagging wife.

Despite the family tree, Dad was never the Great Santini. He didn’t pressure me to join the military, and, in fact, I went to college to become an architect. No, flying was just something we did. It was fascinating to master a machine well enough to get it off the ground, yank and bank through aerobatics, then bring it back to safely land. Humans were never meant to fly, and most can’t learn, so I loved the special freedom of it—and still do. Fighter pilots usually are too busy to appreciate the miracle of flight, but it’s always there and I’ve been under its spell from the beginning.

Later I found it was a great way to entice young ladies into a date. Suppose you’re a girl and Bozo Number 1 asks you out to dinner and a movie. You’re tempted but along comes Bozo Number 2, who says, “Hey . . . how ’bout going flying with me before I take you to dinner?”

Yep. Guaranteed.

During my second year at college, something clicked inside, drawing me to become a professional pilot. I’d worked for architects the previous two summers, seen the business, and I enjoyed the creativity of designing structures. But I had a decision to make, because if I was going to seek an officer’s commission as a military aviator, it had to be started then, since the whole painful process took about eighteen months. So, it was wear a cloth tie and sit in an office for forty years—or cheat death and fly fast jets.

No contest, really.

B
Y THE SPRING OF 1986
, I’
D COMPLETED A FIVE-YEAR COLLEGE
degree in four years so I could be commissioned on time and keep my “slot” for Undergraduate Pilot Training (UPT). This is Air Force basic flight school and is only open to commissioned officers who’ve been physically and mentally screened to absurd levels. In the late eighties, there were five air bases devoted to washing out future pilots, and I’d been given a choice: to wait nine months and head off to beautiful, sunny Williams Air Force Base in Arizona or go in five months to Vance Air Force Base, Oklahoma. With the eagerness and ignorance of youth, I chose Vance. You know that “nowhere” place everyone is always in the middle of? That would be Enid, Oklahoma. A small town right out of the movie
Footloose
. No kidding. They legalized dancing there in 1987.

UPT was generally composed of guys like me: newly minted second lieutenants fresh from a university, the Air Force Academy, or Officer’s Candidate School. We’d been selected by several different boards, who minutely examined the sum total of our lives up to that point. That included background checks, grade-point averages, sports, letters of recommendation, extracurricular nonsense, and probably how we parted our hair. There were physicals, eye exams, psych evaluations, interviews, and a comprehensive qualifying exam. This was just to get commissioned as an officer. The vast majority of the seventy thousand Air Force officers stop right there and enter one of the mission-support fields, like personnel, maintenance, or supply. There are additional batteries of tests designed to trip up prospective pilots, make you feel stupid, and, yes, specifically test your aptitude to enter the flying world. Only about ten thousand of the seventy thousand officers eventually become pilots, and less than three thousand have what it takes to become active fighter pilots.

So, assuming you pass all that with high enough scores, you get past the gate and up to bat. For your efforts, you’re guaranteed nothing except a
shot
at the silver wings of an Air Force pilot. Everything that comes later is up to you. Contrary to popular belief, it doesn’t matter where you came from, who your daddy knows, or what university graduated you. Air Force pilot training is an equal-opportunity destroyer of hopes and dreams. I saw all types wash out. Academy guys, 4.0 GPA engineering types, and men who arrived with a thousand civilian flying hours who couldn’t fly formation or land a jet.

You’ve either got it or you don’t.

I
T WORKED LIKE THIS.

The first two weeks were spent doing everything but flying: registering with personnel, the flight surgeon, security police, etc. For brand-new lieutenants, this usually meant doing it two or three times to get it right. We also began academics immediately. The USAF is big on technical classroom instruction, and any formal training course, whether you want to become a parajumper or a pilot, has a syllabus. The Air Force requires the highest qualifying scores of the four main service branches just for enlistments, let alone for officers. Given the extreme complexity of modern jets, especially fighters, this is understandable. Since we were recent college graduates, the course load was familiar to us, and we were happy to finally be on the “flight line.”

On any USAF flying base, the flight line consists of the squadrons, maintenance facilities, and everything in between that makes an aircraft go up and down. Located immediately adjacent to the runways and taxiways, this usually remained a pilot’s home until he became a field-grade officer and had to pay homage to gods of paperwork on a staff somewhere. Of course, we weren’t pilots yet. We were “Studs”—short for STUDent pilotS. (Naturally, that was not the explanation we gave girls at the Officer’s Club.) Think of it as a kind of yearlong, performance-based purgatory between being nothing and
maybe
becoming what you dream.

Then came that first sweet moment when, alone in my BOQ (Bachelor Officer’s Quarters) room, I shrugged into the new, stiff flight suit. It even smelled sweet (that would be the NOMEX material), and with my patches and lieutenant’s bars, I was smokin’.

So I thought.

So did we all.

One problem with that: no wings. This painful fact was pointed out to us at least once per minute by the instructors and any girl who wandered into the O’Club. It was like wearing a nice custom suit with no shoes. Obvious, embarrassing, and the first in a long series of humbling sprays from the Reality Hose. So, like everyone who eventually graduated, I made up my mind to have those prized silver wings, no matter what.

The first half of UPT was conducted in little horrible T-37 jet trainers. It was loud, obnoxious, underpowered, and sat low enough to the ground for the crew chief to look
down
at the pilot. The Air Force has since switched to T-6 Texans, and they have to be an improvement over the “Tweet,” the T-37. Anyway, the initial phase of pilot training was called “Contact,” and it was the first real chance the instructors had to wash out students. Everything dealing with basic flying was covered here—ground operations, take-offs and landings, spins, aerobatics, and, as always, emergency procedures.

The instructors came from several sources. The best were those who’d had operational assignments and were back in the training command against their will. These were former TTB (tanker, transport, bomber) pilots and, thankfully, a few fighter pilots. Without exception, the fighter guys hated flying trainer aircraft. And why wouldn’t they? Flying in a front-line fighter squadron was as good as it gets in the Air Force, and now to come back to the shiny-boot, scarf-wearing world of the Training Command was a plunge into the abyss. Fortunately for these guys, they only had to do one three-year tour and then it was back to the real world. Thank God all the operational guys were there, though, to muzzle the Others.

The Others were First Assignment Instructor Pilots, shortened to FAIPs, and they were universally a pain in the ass. These were pilots who didn’t get assignments out of the Air Education and Training Command after they graduated from UPT, and they had to stay on as instructors. Sure, they had to go off to San Antonio, Texas, for a few months, where they supposedly learned how to teach students to fly, but the bottom line was this: the only military-aviation experience they had under their belt was UPT and the Texas course. So, you’ve got a guy with less than two years of flying training trying to teach and, most important, evaluate a student’s ability to be an Air Force pilot. In my opinion, some were actually quite good but most were bitter wannabes. This is precisely why the operational pilots were brought back—to keep their thumbs on the FAIPs and give a reality check to the program. Otherwise we’d have an Air Force of close-order drills, sock checks, and spell-checkers.

My primary instructor pilot was a gruff, irreverent former B-52 pilot with the unlikely call sign of “Daddy Rabbit.” There were six of us assigned to him, and we were lucky. Jets are like pets in that the people who fly in them, like pet owners, end up resembling them eventually. The B-52 was known as a Buff (Big Ugly Fat Fucker), and though Daddy Rabbit wasn’t fat, he was big and ugly—
and
a superb pilot. His gift was instilling the “Big Picture” in his students, i.e., teaching us to not get mired down in minutiae but be aware of all that was going on around us. DR was also calm, unlike FAIPs.

“Punk,” he once said smoothly as I waffled through a spin recovery while Oklahoma filled the windscreen, “ya wanna try and do it right this time so we live to drink at the club tonight.” He also hated the training command and passionately loathed most FAIPs. So, Daddy Rabbit, if you’re reading this, thanks for everything.

Within a week, guys began washing out for air sickness, failure to master emergency procedures, or just a basic inability to think and fly at the same time. If a student busted a ride, he got a repeat, called an “X” ride. If he busted that, then he flew a “Double X” flight with a more experienced, non-FAIP, squadron officer. If he failed again, he went next to a Proficiency Check with a Flight Examiner, and if he didn’t pass it, then he was out. There were students who were fully enrolled and engaged on Monday and gone by Friday.

The Tweet phase progressed through formation flying and basic instrument procedures, and guys continued to drop like proverbial flies. As always, through all of this, there were endless academics. Aerodynamics, aircraft systems, weather, instrument flying procedures—anything that could affect you as a pilot. Emergency training was nonstop. More classroom instruction, simulator flights, and a little ritual each morning called “Stand Up.”

This occurred in the big flight-briefing room. Each instructor pilot had a table and usually four to five students (at the beginning). Every morning, before flying and academics, there was a Mass Brief. This covered weather, the schedule, and general announcements. One instructor would then give a thirty-second scenario involving a flight situation and turn it over to a random student. The Stud would then “Stand Up” and take over, in real time, whatever near-death situation had been presented. With an audience of instructor pilots and his peers, he’d have to take this to a logical conclusion and, hopefully, get the plane back on the ground. It was very effective in teaching a young pilot the basics of thinking on his feet and ignoring outside pressures during a crisis.

A
FTER SIX MONTHS AND TWO CHECK-RIDES, THOSE OF US WHO
were left got to move across the street to T-38s and the advanced flight phase of UPT. About 40 percent of the initial class was gone by this point, and those remaining were seasoned by now. Not cocky, certainly, because we still didn’t have wings and also had seen too many buddies wash out. But we’d recovered a bit of the misplaced confidence we’d all walked in with.

The attitude was different on the 38 side. Instructors still washed people out, but they figured we’d proven ourselves over the past six months by simply surviving to this phase. The Air Force also had a chunk of money invested in us by this point and would work a bit harder to keep a potential pilot around.

I loved it. Whereas piloting the Tweet had been brute-force mastery over ugly machine, the T-38 called for finesse. It flew like a fighter (at least a 1970s-vintage fighter); the Air Force had several fighting versions in the form of the AT-38 and the F-5 Tiger II. It sat high above the ground and had the tremendous virtue of tandem seating. This was much better than the Tweet, where the instructor was sitting right next to you.

Jet flying clicked for me during the next six months. I’d come out of Tweets in the middle of the pack, but my hands and brain caught up with each other with the T-38. It had an afterburner, and we now wore G-suits to counter the effects of gravity during maneuvering. Compared to high-performance fighters, the T-38 wasn’t a tough nut to crack. But as I saw my reflection in the glass doors, with my G-suit and helmet, I thought I was already there—a fighter pilot on his way to deal death. Maybe it helped. Maybe not. But I liked the look.

About eleven months into the program, all the instructors and commanders went into a huddle over a long weekend. They examined everything about us; each test score, simulator flight, and actual flight had been graded and scored. This mass of sleepless nights and sweaty palms was compiled into an objective score. If there was a tie, then subjective aspects were called into play: attitude, aggressiveness, appearance, “military deportment,” etc.

After the instructors emerged from their powwow, the class survivors were now rank-ordered; in my class, from Number One to Number Twenty-two. A line was then drawn at the 20 percent mark, and everyone above the line was Fighter, Attack, Reconnaissance (FAR) qualified, while those below were going to Tankers, Transports, or Bombers (TTB). In my class, there were five of us above the line—the Air Force rounded up or down, depending on their requirements.