The Tip of the Spear
by CDR Jack Woodul, USNR(Ret), artwork by Carl Snow
by CDR Jack Woodul, USNR(Ret), artwork by Carl Snow
The red tiled roofs of the nest of buildings the spies called “a railroad complex” seemed to glow in the morning sun as they grew in Puresome’s gunsight. He had spotted the target from what seemed to be 400 miles away, and the skipper had detached him from the four plane “mini-Alfa strike” to deliver his Mk 82 Snakeye bombs as the rest of the flight positioned to follow with conventional high-angle bombing runs. Not a burst of flak or insane “doodle-doodle” warning of SAM guidance radar had sounded in his headset to mar the quiet beauty of the morning.
Since he had started his low-angle dive out of the sun from some 10,000 feet, Puresome was on the rails — airspeed absolutely nailed — on a predictable, peacetime CompEx bombing run as the target grew relentlessly under the yellow glow of his gunsight pipper.
Puresome knew he was a grape. He knew it was coming and readied himself. But it was always possible that the gomers had OD’d on rice wine the night before and were suffering from runaway chopsticks instead of stuffing ratshot into muskets and tracking him with all sorts of missiles and sparkling devices. He made small tracking corrections to keep his pipper exactly on his aiming point of the first building, his thumb on the bomb pickle on the stick.
The red golf balls started crossing in front of him and puffing around his A-4 at about 1,000 feet as other members of the flight started yelling “Flak! Flak!” and Puresome dodged about the multicolored little clouds that were suddenly filling the sky. Yaaaaa! Puresome’s scrotes shriveled and his heart filled his throat.
But the buildings were rushing up at him at 450 knots with the yellow notch of his pipper dead on his target, and when the needle on his radar altimeter went through the bug set at 300 feet, the headset tone and the light by the gunsight that were wired through it activated, and Puresome went Pickle! Pickle! Pickle! to release three Snakeyes. He then started jinking like a madman.
Buildings blew up behind him, and flak bursts and red golf balls chased the A-4 Skyhawk as Puresome wrestled it violently around the sky. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the storm spit him out into quiet sky. Zooming out of the weeds, Puresome started breathing again. Warily moving the airplane around while looking for the rest of the flight, he was amazed to find that other than being scared guano-less, there didn’t seem to be a ding on his A-4E. Puresome could only mark it up to the amazing agility of the Scooter being honked around by the gallons of adrenaline pumping through the veins of the Mad Jinker.
“Snake flight, Snake Two is four o’clock low.”
“Ah, rog, Two, tally-ho, coming around right.”
Puresome climbed and cut to the inside of the turn of the flight of three, happy to rejoin the security of the schwarm and have three other sets of eyeballs to help watch. He rendezvoused on the skipper’s wing as the formation spread out into a wide finger-four and turned Up North.
Hours before the attack on the rail hub, Puresome knew it was going to be an interesting day when the flight schedule came out. Puresome always hawked the schedule, hanging around late at night until Norman the Fink, the schedules officer, gave issue of a pile of reeking mimeograph copies of the next day’s flight schedule. It was then that Puresome could see if any good deals might be possible for a powerless, sniveling junior officer to get the jump on his pals. Sometimes, though, the advance knowledge just gave him that much longer to contract a raging case of the chickenshits.
Today’s flight schedule had Puresome flying the skipper’s wing in place of Brown Bars Candy-Andy or Weed instead of his usual section lead on a four-plane mini-Alfa strike followed by road recce. This meant there’d be things to shoot at without the gut-ache of an actual major Alfa strike where gomer got really pissed and usually overreacted.
What really interested him was the ordnance load of six 500-lb. bombs on a centerline rack, two four-shot Zuni rocket packs on the outboard stations and 20 mike-mike, which in the aggregate were enough goodies to terminate lots of gomer artifacts with extreme prejudice. Ho Chi Minh’s boys were not likely to leave much stuff hanging around in the open during daylight, but sharp-eyed attack pilots were ever hopeful of finding something worth shooting. And the 5-in. Zuni rocket with explosive heads on them were mighty weapons that went where they were pointed, not like the erratic 2.75 folding-fin rockets that often swooped around as they tried to nail the shooter.
At the appointed time, the flight members had trooped up to Integrated Operational Intelligence Center, pushed the buzzer and satisfied the Duty Spook with the secret sign. He unlocked the door and they were admitted into James Bond territory. They were issued black-and-white photos of their target, a railroad junction just north of Thanh Hoa that at least had some large buildings that were supposed to warehouse rice balls and fortune cookies so important to the war effort.
Once the primary target was eliminated, the flight was to split up and recce parts of Route Pack IV, blowing up barges, cargo-carrying bicycles and any identifiable bad guys. The pilots marked the target on their charts and updated the red parts that would be nice to avoid, listened to the weather brief and soon left the world of magic for specifics back in Ready Room 4 Starboard.
The skipper briefed the flight, with special emphasis on the route and approach to the target. The main axis of attack was to be wagon-wheeled out of the sun so the little buggers on the ground couldn’t see well, and nobody would be coming down the same chute in their high-dive bomb attacks. The pilots figured mil settings for the gunsight and wind corrections and made notes on kneeboard cards. The skipper assigned the second section of Skip and Alfa their area to road-recce after the attack on the railroad complex. Everyone wrote launch and recovery data on their kneeboards as well as code words for MiG activity, the North SAR and entry corridors into Da Nang.
Puresome always figgered that plain English, shrieked over the radio, beat code words any day. In the heat of battle it would probably be all he could remember, anyway.
The duty officer passed out their aircraft assignments. Puresome then snuck out for a last, nervous pass at the head before struggling into his damp, fuming flight gear before flopping into a ready-room chair as he waited for the balloon to go up. He idly watched and mentally graded the videotaped landing passes of the aircraft from the previous recovery as they appeared in the cross hairs on the PLAT television screen.
Sitting there trussed up in his g-suit, torso harness and survival vest always reminded Puresome of sitting around in his football gear, waiting to go do or die for Winsocki High — the same nervous anticipation, the same locker room smell. The comparison was completely silly-assed in its triviality, given the competition and stakes in the current game.
The “pilots and aircrew, man your planes for the 0800 launch” that finally clunked across the yellow teleprompter screen at the front of the ready room came as a great relief. Puresome stuffed his head into his helmet, grabbed his nav bag and stormed up the escalator into the sun and wind of the flight deck. All the A-4s involved on the launch were staged on the port side of the flight deck, aft of the angle notch, and Puresome quickly found Sidewinder 411.
And a problem — instead of six slick Mk 82 500-lb. bombs on his centerline rack, there were six Snakeye retarded bombs. “Ay! Yi! Yi! Yi!” thought Puresome. “Not good for Up North!” So he waddled down two airplanes and found the skipper, who rolled his eyes at the news and nodded. Puresome figgered they would deal with it.
So the flight had launched, rendezvoused above the ship and headed up the Gulf of Tonkin, the combat-spread formation shining in the morning sun. Puresome had dug his blue plastic Air Force check list book out of his nav bag prior to launch and found the weapons delivery data for a 20-degree Snakeye dive. He then set up the mil lead on his gunsight and rotated the bug on his radar altimeter to the bomb-release altitude. He would be ready when the flight switched to tactical frequency and the skipper briefed the new plan of attack. Puresome kept his head moving, quickly scanning the sky from his left shoulder around through his right, through the skipper’s airplane and up to and behind the second section’s aircraft, which were about a mile abeam and 2,000 feet higher. Their six o’clock was clear of sharpshooting gomers, and Puresome knew that Skip and Alpha in the second section were clearing his tail. The skipper’s head was moving too, but his primary job was navigating.
As the blue water up ahead started to turn brown from the muddy discharge of the sluggish rivers that emptied into the gulf, the Skipper turned toward the beach, easing his nose down and picking up speed. Puresome took a last look at his map resting on his kneeboard before sticking it in the left corner of the cockpit. He turned his gunsight on bright, rotated his function select switch to “bombs” and toggled his centerline station selector switch to “on.” So he would not forget it, he turned his master armament switch “on” as well — the system was ready to drop bombs, and Puresome figgered he could keep his thumb off the bomb pickle rather than to forget to turn it on and get shot at for nothing. And look bad. The flight checked “feet dry” with Red Crown and switched to strike frequency as it whistled over the white breakers washing on a brown beach, headed inland.
Puresome was soaking wet when he joined the other A-4s off the target. The skipper passed him the lead and quickly looked him over for dents, dings and unwanted holes. Except for collateral damage to his skivvies and a large part of his heart still stuck in this throat, Puresome and Alpha Golf 411 were undamaged. The skipper gave him a thumbs up, and Puresome tapped his helmet and pointed to the skipper, passing the lead back.
Since they had been briefed to drop bombs singly rather than on “ripple” on the primary target so as to save ordnance for road recce, all the A-4s still had bombs left. But the hornet’s nest he had stirred up had caused some misses, and there weren’t nearly enough holes or dead buildings around to consider the job done.
“Snake flight from lead, we’re going to stay together and recce north for a while, then we’re going to come back and finish the primary target with our remaining bombs.”
“Holy mierda!” thought Puresome, knowing once again that it was filthy work that must be done.
“Two! Three! Four!” The two sections spread out and picked up speed, maneuvering out of phase with each other, roller coastering their altitude and constantly weaving, changing their heading, watching for targets on the ground, MiGs, missiles and flak.
But nothing like Uncle Ho’s personal commie-mobile appeared, and the skipper soon reversed course. Puresome sincerely hoped they had been gone long enough that things had settled down, and it was rat taco and rice time back at the railroad complex. Snake lead soon cobbed the power and the division started climbing and closing up for the approach to the target. Once again Puresome could see the red tiled roofs glowing at him from what seemed 400 miles away.
“Snake Two, you have the target?”
“Rog, Lead, Snake Two has the target.”
“Okay, you make your run headed south, and we’ll roll in west-to-east toward the water. Go ahead and detach.”
“Two, rog!” Puresome rolled slightly away from the formation and pointed the airplane at the target as the other three airplanes displaced to the west, maneuvering to set up an almost simultaneous attack.
Puresome checked his armament switches again, set his throttle to about 80 percent and would have burned joss sticks if he had time or really thought it would help. His dive angle looked good, and once again he slid down the rails from altitude. Puresome was safety-wired to the jink position and was sucked up as small as he could get, but not a puff-ball filled the air — he had time to absolutely wire his run and sweat big drops. Time seemed to stop, and when the red golf balls suddenly started floating in front and around him, the red tile roofs were filling his windscreen, lights and tones were going off and he was hitting the pickle button like a madman.
The ground and sky blurred as Puresome furiously maneuvered to avoid the flak and flying himself into the ground. Suddenly spit out of the maelstrom, he saw the skipper’s plane surrounded by flak bursts as it pulled off from his bomb run. The A-4 simultaneously seemed to blur and start dumping a huge amount of fuel from the right wing. Almost immediately, the drop-tanks, Zuni pods and bomb rack separated from the plane and tumbled crazily away.
“Snake lead’s hit!” came the call.
Puresome didn’t have time to celebrate his second miraculous survival, but put another thousand pounds of pressure on the throttle and zoomed toward the stricken Scooter that had emerged from the flak storm. Magically it was still flying as it climbed and headed for the healing waters of the Gulf of Tonkin, though it was streaming a cloud of fuel. Puresome made paranoid clearing turns in his climb and saw the other two A-4s climbing away from a cloud of flak bursts, dust, smoke and fire from what was left of the target.
“Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! Sidewinder 403 on Guard, 30 north of Thanh Hoa. I’m hit, losing fuel and headed for the water!” the skipper transmitted to the world, then switched back to tactical frequency.
“Snake lead, Two’s got you. I’m joining from two o’clock low!” Puresome stopped his head from swiveling long enough to glance at his kneeboard for the Tacan channel of Bonecrusher, one of the SAR ships that was stationed in the northern part of the Gulf, and dialed the number into the control panel by his right knee.
“Skipper, Three and Four have you in sight, we’re at seven o’clock and closing. Your six is clear and we’ll be there in a minute.”
The UHF had exploded into a garble of transmissions on Guard, where the whole world was trying to answer the emergency call. As Puresome joined on skipper, he briefly saw welcome water slide under them as his Tacan locked on to Bonecrusher’s signal. There was only a little fuel misting out of a giant hole that a 57mm shell had made when it passed through the “canoe” that housed the starboard landing gear and, without exploding, peeled back the top of the wing.
“Skipper, we’re on the two-four-five radial, thirty-six miles from Bonecrusher.”
“Roger, Snakes, I’m down to about six hundred pounds and need a tanker bad. Let’s switch Button 10.”
The battered Skyhawk had lost all its wing fuel and was flying on what remained in the small fuselage tank. The cannon shell had also severed a line from the utility hydraulic system that controlled the operation of the landing gear and little things like wing flaps and speedbrakes, which along with a probably crippled right leg made returning to the ship a bad idea. The immediate problem was finding a tanker before flaming out from fuel exhaustion. Then it would be a long drive to Da Nang or finding a nice place to punch out over the water if things didn’t work out. But Ed Heinemann’s Hot Rod was still flying with open options when most other tactical aircraft would have already deposited their driver.
The four aircraft turned down the gulf toward help and away from Indian country. The three escorts flying shotgun still had their Zuni rocket packs and 20 mike-mike to discourage gomer fisher persons, just in case, and Bonecrusher had vectored the Air Force HU-16 ResCAP amphibian to poot along behind the flight. But the folks back at USS Independence (CVA-62) had managed to pair a couple of Black Ace Fox-4s with an A-3 Whale tanker, and they had made a perfect radar intercept on the flight of southbound Scooters. Right before the engine flamed out, the skipper plugged the basket and stayed there, happily sucking gas and, happier still, a little faster than it was leaking out.
All the flailing around had burned lots of A-4 fuel, and the skipper seemed to hold the tanker franchise at least to Da Nang. With the situation in hand, the Scooters passed shotgun duties to the Phantoms, who had bags of gas. The Snakes bid the skipper “rotsa ruck” and headed on back to the boat. After the previous fun and games, Puresome shucked his oxygen mask and directed the cold air from the air conditioning eyeball outlets at his face. He flew loose cruise formation on Skip, relaxing before he spooled up for flying close formation around the boat and making a bee’s-knees pass for the LSO.
Word came to the ready room that the skipper had made it to Da Nang. By the time Puresome had flown his afternoon hop, the ship’s C-1A COD had retrieved the CO from the clutches of the Blue Suiters and Jarboons, and he was in the ready room reading the message boards and acting like he had just walked in the park.
“Damn, Skipper! I’da thought that after all the trouble you went to, you’da spent the night drinking gin and sleeping in a tent!” Puresome grinned as he flopped his helmet and nav bag in a ready-room chair.
“Well, I might have, except I think I pissed off the grunts at the bar when I asked if I was going to get out before the next mortar attack!”
The skipper then told a gathering audience that he stayed plugged into the Whale until it dropped him off upwind of the duty runway at Da Nang where, since they were expecting problems with his landing gear, the runway had been foamed. But in another tribute to the Douglas Aircraft Company, when he had put his gear handle down, all three wheels had free-fallen to the down-and-locked position! So he had dropped his hook and set up his approach to snag the short-field arresting gear. All was going well when an Air Force RB-66 called on short-final, landing downwind with an emergency. Since that would put the two aircraft headed beak to beak, the tower asked him if he could go around.
“Skipper, I think I know who you pissed off, and you need to go to Sunday School more.”
“Well, I made a three-sixty and came around and caught a wire, and the only problem was when I slipped and fell on my butt from the goo on the runway when I got out of the plane.”
Much later, reflecting about the day over Scotch juice and cubes of ice, Puresome concluded that maybe the skipper had been going to Sunday School enough.
And, remembering the red tile roofs and red golf balls floating up in front of him, as he would for the rest of his life, it seemed like some of the skipper’s Mojo just may have rubbed off on him after all.