by CDR Jack D. Woodul, USNR(Ret), artwork by Carl Snow
It all came to this: Dr. Strangelove goes Naval Aviation. Since Mr. Heineman had designed his Hot Rod to be a tiny attention-getting device for cheaply delivering implements of total destruction, and since the chaps at the A-4 RAG had gone to great lengths to instruct Puresome in many mystic nuclear rites of passage, it seemed fair enough that there be some proof of the pudding.
So here he was, girding himself for battle in flight gear of purest white — suit, torso harness, g-suit, gloves and a helmet with a magic golden visor. All this, together with a special clamshell device installed in his A-4E that restricted visibility out of the tiny cockpit, was to protect him from the heated fury of mushrooming fireballs.
The ship’s ordnance persons had withdrawn a real Mark-Umpty Doomsday Device from the bowels of the ship, removed the nasty core and delivered the shape to the squadron’s ordnance persons, who strapped the thing to the centerline station of his aircraft. The sweating pilot unfortunate enough to be loading officer monitored his team closely, praying that no lurch of the ship caused even a scratch on the weapon. Checklists were chanted as the wiring harnesses were connected. A gallery of concerned onlookers, which included the ship’s special-weapons types and the squadron’s maintenance and ordnance officers, awaited LT Puresome’s arrival.
Puresome was wise enough to know that this was serious stuff, even though he stood out some, waddling down the deck in his Sir Galahad outfit. He signed for the bomb, did a careful preflight and climbed up the ladder and shoe-horned himself down into the cockpit. The plane captain helped him strap in, whereupon Puresome built himself a nest, stuffing his nav bag into a corner and his low-level map behind the nav bag, before strapping his kneeboard on his left leg. When the plane captain disappeared down the boarding ladder, Puresome turned his attention to his prestart cockpit checks, with special attention to his ordnance switches.
With external electrical power connected to the aircraft, he went head-down in the cockpit as he followed an intricate checklist to verify the bomb was electrically happy. Fortunately, it glopted and gleeped in the approved manner. The watching gallery of heavies got down off their tiptoes and sighed in relief when he gave them a thumbs up. The ship had provided an “up” bomb, and the Snakes had provided the usual “up” Scooter, but no one was completely off the hook until Puresome had launched. It wasn’t completely over until Puresome completed his low-level journey to the target and the bomb made a conventional bang! when he dropped it for score at the Pinecastle target complex south of Cecil Field.
When Puresome thumped off the No. 1 catapult and rendezvoused with the chase plane driven by a CAG staff puke, he knew the rest of the mission to create a simulated mushroom cloud was in his white-gloved hands, and a cadence of drums marked his way to the coast-in point.
In those misty days of the Cold War when the rumblings in far off Veet Nam were, until lately, confined to “advisors” in T-28s and a few lucky WestPac boats responding to “incidents,” the nuclear delivery business was 60 percent of an attack pilot’s trade. While fighter-puke RAG students were learning how to shoot off their watches and get back to the ready room first, attack weenies were signing blood oaths and sent off to bomb school to learn occult mysteries.
Many low-level flights were part of their flight syllabus, and Puresome spent long hours in the planning room, his head whirling from the fumes of great pots of rubber cement used to patch together the sectional charts that covered the route to targets within striking distance from NAS Oceana. The courses had to be artfully drawn for each leg complete with headings, one-minute ticks marked for every five miles, elapsed time for each checkpoint and fuel remaining. Puresome had a pair of tiny dividers to mark off these tick marks, as well as the required nickel to mark the turn radius over a checkpoint to the next heading. Many charts gave their lives to the finished product, which had to be cut and glued together to make a strip that could be folded into something that could be held on top of the leg in the tiny space available in the Scooter cockpit. At five miles a minute and 200 feet above ground training altitude, the outside whipped by at a blur and there was not much time for fumbling. As a result, a poorly executed map was cause for looking bad. If a pilot returned from a low level with his chart in a wad, things probably had not gone tickedy-boo.
These flights evolved into longer missions that involved visual navigation at high altitude, descending to low level for routes to a target and climbing back to high altitude for the return to base. When Puresome learned to midair refuel from a teeny, tiny A-4 tanker, the missions became longer and more complex. New and larger-scale charts gave their lives and contributed to potential cockpit wadding.
At MCAS Yuma, Puresome learned the joys of warm guns while strafing banners and that diving down and pounding the desert with Mk 76 practice bombs and 2.75-in. rockets was almost as jolly. But most of his time was spent in learning the fine art of lofting, tossing or sailing upright or inverted over a target in simulated nuclear delivery, all at 100 feet above the ground and at 500 knots. He did idiot loop, over-the-shoulder deliveries until his flight suits were sweat-soaked and crusty.
The final exam for all this preparation was a flight known as an “A-20-R” in the RAG industry. It was a high- to low-level visual navigation flight with inflight refueling that ended in an over-the-shoulder delivery of a 2,000-lb. blivot called a “shape” against a defenseless target at Stumpy Point, followed by a climb to altitude for the trip back to NAS Oceana. When it came his turn, Puresome knew he would be graded on his planning, navigation, time on target, and how close to the shack his bomb fell.
There were lots of opportunities to look bad. A pretty day and some luck enabled Puresome to validate the infinite-number-of-aviators theory that allowed a wonder-flight every now and then, and he found the target right on time. Jacking his speed up to 500 knots, he whistled down the run-in line until he was over the right part of the target. So far, so good.
He punched the bomb pickle and pulled into a four-g idiot loop, following the indications of the needles on his attitude indicator. When he was about vertical, the shape separated from the aircraft with a satisfying “thunk!” and sailed up to about 12,000 feet as Puresome continued through the top of the loop and rolled out at the speed of stink in the opposite direction, lest he get fried by the simulated fireball. Down came the bomb and impacted a part of the bull’s-eye that would have made any rat-eating Commie quiver. This made Puresome and his instructor very happy.
So it went in the Attack Business. Even on the way to That Crazy Asian War, Puresome spent hours planning two nuclear missions against targets that would be his babies while he was hosing Gomer, just in case the Armageddon balloon went up. Even though he would have rather been watching movies like the Phantom pukes, and he dreaded having to personally brief CAG on the details of his mission planning, it was still better than holding at BarCAP. While stooging around the Mediterranean, there were always an A-6 and two A-4 duty bombers sitting in a corner of the hangar bay, guarded by very serious Marines with no sense of humor and with orders to seriously shoot anybody that came too close without serious badges and passwords. Puresome made a point to remember this when he was duty bomber.
But on this day, with the peaceful green of Florida flashing under his Scooter, Puresome was busy looking out the windows for stuff that the map said should be appearing as he moved his thumb along the tick marks that correlated with the stopwatch on the canopy rail. He hacked his clock over checkpoints and made fine adjustments to the throttle to match the time over known landmarks.
Approaching Pinecastle Target, his map was annotated to “arm switches,” so he turned on his gunsight and set up all of his ordnance switches except the “Master Arm.” When he was cleared in hot to drop his ordnance, he turned on his Master Arm switch and nudged the throttle forward to accelerate to 500 knots. The run-in line appeared with its range to target markers, and Puresome concentrated on staying on it and being exactly 100 feet on his radar altimeter and exactly on airspeed as the little airplane bumped through thermals on its way toward the bull’s-eye.
When the orange “V” of the pipper touched the bull’s-eye, Puresome hit his pickle button and felt the thunk as the bomb fell away. The chase plane had moved away from him and watched as the bomb’s parachute deployed and retarded its fall onto the target as Puresome got the hell out. The explosive in the bomb went Kaboom! where it should have, and Puresome hoped he was moare than far enough away that the real thing wouldn’t have fried him too much. Though decaffeinated, the pudding had been proved, and the sigh of relief eventually traveled back through lots of gold braid and stars to Foggy Bottom offices.
It was serious stuff, and Puresome knew it. The Evil Empire was very real in those days, and it had scads of missiles and bombers and its own Doomsday Devices. Further, folks there were the bad guys who had said that they would bury us and liked to do stuff like putting missiles in Cuba and sponsoring nasty little wars in emerging countries. Who knew what they might dream up to do with their nuclear arsenal while they were swilling vodka back behind the Iron Curtain?
Puresome hoped like hell that he never had to fly one of those missions he spent so much time planning. Probably he would be turned into a crispy critter by the simultaneous fireballs delivered by unseen ICBMs, submarine missiles and bombs carried by his buddies and those delivered by the Air Force. He was firmly against megadeath and glowing in the dark.
But he knew that, if it came to it, he was the guy in the Sir Galahad suit.