by CDR Jack D. Woodul, USNR(Ret), artwork by Carl Snow
There was no horizon. Clouds were everywhere, and it was as dark as only it can be at sea. “Real good — perfect vertigo weather,” queased Puresome, whose A-4 Skyhawk was sitting on the No. 1 catapult of USS Independence (CVA-62) at the very inconvenient hour of 0315.
He had come to be there due to the whims of Norman the Fink, the squadron’s beloved schedules officer, and the ship had just taken over the midnight-to-noon schedule from Oriskany (CVA-34), the other boat on Yankee Station.
Since the Gomers had learned that it was not real smart to move during daylight, trucks, barges and riceball-laden bicycles streamed south down the various parts of the Ho Chi Minh Trail at night. While magic A-6s launched into the dark loaded with a plethora of bombs to drop on hard targets such as the legendary Thanh Hoa Bridge, Skyhawks went out armed only with parachute flares and bombs to light up and squash Uncle Ho’s creatures of the dark. The Tinker Toy A-4s were mostly dependent on the ironically named dead-reckoning navigation method of compass heading and stop watch.
Given the fact that North Vietnam had surface-to-air missile sites and lots of flak concentrations that it would be wise to bypass as well as some tall rocks that you could smack into, it was not nice that sometimes you couldn’t see a damned thing. Night road recce missions produced almost as much quease as getting back aboard the boat in the dark without a prang.
The Snake squadron’s spiffy new A-4Es had a couple of toys that helped some. A navigation computer, a divine clock of sorts that whirred and clicked, offered a needle that indicated the direction and a readout giving the distance to the target. But, being a divine clock, the yanking and banking of tactical aviation and smacking the deck during carrier landings assured that the thing was usually Tango Uniform. The Scooter also had a mapping radar that was good for finding things like continents and big iron boats.
The big advantage of the A-4E over earlier models was two more underwing weapons stations to carry enough external gas along with things that went boom. Most A-4E missions did not require airborne tanking, which could be tough in dark, bouncy weather.
Encapsulated in his tiny, red-lit cockpit, Puresome observed the catapult shooter’s lighted yellow wands appear in the gloom, one of which pointed at him while the other twirled above the dim figure’s head. Puresome ran his throttle forward and watched the engine instruments spool up to full power. He had already turned on his goose-necked flashlight he’d stuck in the front of his torso harness so it would shine on the instrument panel in case of electrical failure during the cat shot. He also had set his radar altimeter bug to alert him if he settled toward the water after launch.
“Last chance to chicken out!” Puresome thought as he checked his instruments. Unfortunately, everything was tickedy-boo, so he wiped out the cockpit with the control stick, braced his left hand against the throttle and flicked the switch to turn on his external lights as a nighttime salute to the catapult officer. With the Scooter trembling at full power against the holdback fitting, Puresome locked his head against the headrest, focused on the Abbajabba all-attitude indicator and put his right elbow against his belly with his hand open. Yellow wands twirled, pointed and swooped down to the deck. The catapult fired, forcing Puresome back in the seat and bringing the control stick back to his hand. He held it there as he was hurled into the black.
When his eyes cleared from the force of the shot, Puresome concentrated on the flight instruments, retracted his gear and climbed away from the water toward the lower troposphere as fast as the Scooter would take him. Puresome dutifully cleaned up his airplane as he climbed and pooted out to 10 miles before arcing over to the Tacan radial assigned to the Snakes for rendezvous and departure.
Fortunately, the rendezvous point was in the clear above the cloud deck, and once there Puresome started a lazy circle waiting for his wingman Pee-nut to join. It was then he started thinking about the night carrier landing that would soon come. The thought would never stray from the corner of his mind.
Puresome saw his wingie’s anti-collision light pop out of the clouds and called, “Ralph Two, Lead’s at your nine o’clock.”
Pee called “Tally!” and Puresome concentrated on keeping his altitude and angle of bank steady while glancing at the progress of Pee’s running rendezvous. As his wingman advanced up the line of bearing, Puresome could tell that Pee had it under control and probably wouldn’t smack him during the join-up. A night rendezvous in the dark in a heavily laden airplane could be hairy. After Pee slid under his starboard wing and took position, Puresome pushed up the power and the two aircraft headed toward Guntrain’s Tacan radial that would take them Up North.
Once at altitude, Puresome turned on his radar and played with the antenna tilt and gain control, more for something to do than for sharpening the generalized picture of the contrast between the Gulf water and the land mass. His ECM gear sounded the occasional “Gawwwp!” in his headset as North Vietnamese long-range early warning radar swept by them.
Since he was carrying flares, he set up his armament switches to drop from an outer wing station first, knowing that he would rapidly have to locate his selector switches and find by feel the center one of five in order to drop bombs on anything he lit up. He turned on his gun sight next, watched the reticule light bloom brightly and turned it down until it was barely visible. Since he had already set the bomb delivery mil setting on deck, the weapons setup was complete except for turning on his master armament switch.
As the two Scooters passed abeam Vinh, the clouds thinned out and the Gomers dutifully shined searchlights in their general direction. Since he figgered he would be able to see the surf on the beach as he went feet dry, Puresome switched off his radar and turned his cockpit lights down to where they were barely visible. He stuck his aircraft’s nose down and turned toward Gomerland.
Though it was very dark, Puresome was real glad they were not in the clag. He remembered an earlier night mission on Skip’s wing when they discovered they were over Vinh about the time the clouds around them lit up in an impressive light show that had nothing to do with lightning. Besides, dodging Mr. SAM meant one had to see him, unless you absolutely trusted the new ALQ gear to goof him. But that was like trusting CATCC not to put your holding radial in a thunderstorm.
Puresome checked “Feet Dry” with the controlling Fudd before he and Pee switched to tactical. All their external lights were out except the top anti-collision light, and both had gone to air-to-air setting on their Tacans to give them an indication of their distance from one another. Hacking his stop clock as he crossed the beach, Puresome held a base heading to their first turn point. Pee moved out into a spread formation as the flight pushed its airspeed up. Both Puresome and Pee moved their airplanes around the sky, varying the heading and altitude in what they hoped was an unpredictable flight path. With Puresome navigating and looking, Pee concerned himself with keeping the lead aircraft in sight and watching for nasty light shows. So far, intermittent flashes in the darkness indicated only musket fire.
“Turn point Number One!” called Puresome as he rolled into a heading to parallel the coast, hacking his canopy stop clock as he did so.
“Two, rog!” answered Pee.
Puresome eased down toward the ground, carefully watching his barometric and radar altimeters as he looked for the hoped-for gleam of dimmed truck lights. However, Gomer was nowhere to be seen.
“Turning port to turn point Number Two — you got a tally, Pee?”
“Rog, still have you. Did you see that bunch of flares someone kicked out back there?”
“Negats,” responded Youthly.
The ECM gear had been relatively quiet with no buzzing Firecan radar sounds or blood-chilling “doodle-doodle” SAM launch warnings sounding in their headsets. As a SAM’s booster made lots of light during the first part of its launch and the fearsome telephone pole itself had a torch at its back end, any sudden light at night produced reflexive attention. Puresome had a Phantom pal who got too fast one night and tore off a flare that ignited, scaring the beejeezus out of him until he realized the light wasn’t doing any chasing.
Puresome again hacked his clock and called out, “Turn point, coming port.” He soon found a glint of water that looked like a major waterway. As he moved off a bit to see it better, dark shapes started to emerge … barges!
“Two from Lead, we’ve got barges in the canal below! I’m popping up port for a flare drop!”
“Two’s going high!”
Puresome pulled up to 4,000 feet, slowed to a grapelike 250 knots and pickled off three flares as he came over the canal. As the last one left the plane, he crammed on power and started climbing.
“Lead’s going for a port perch!” Youthly sang out.
Almost as soon as the first flare lit, snaking lines of red fireballs started upward from both sides of the canal into the dark. Pee, positioning himself to be at his bomb run roll-in point when the flares went off, called, “They’re shooting at us! I see the barges!”
“Roger! Drop three bombs and pull off starboard!
Puresome climbed and began cranking around to position himself to roll in on the barges. As he climbed, he reached down to his armament panel and turned off the station selector for the flares and felt his way to the third switch inboard to select the bombs on his centerline station. As he reached 9,000 feet, he checked his speed and set his throttle as he rolled over into what his hemorrhoids told him was about a 45-degree dive.
Looking out of the dark into the swaying bright light of the flares, Puresome had enough time to see a line of barges by a small bridge as Pee’s bombs went off, straddling the bridge among the barges.
“Two’s off starboard!” Pee announced.
As red golf balls snaked around the sky, Puresome concentrated on putting his gun sight pipper on the barges short of the explosions. Thousand-mile-an-hour eyeballs checked the dive angle, airspeed and the unwinding altimeter as the pipper moved toward the first barge. Pickle! Pickle! Pickle! Puresome hit the bomb release button three times, stuck his head inside the cockpit and pulled up to 30 degrees nose high on the Abbajabba as he crammed on full power.
The airplane zoomed back up into the dark. When the nose was well and truly up, Puresome rolled over in a starboard turn and looked back to quickly spot his hits. Once before on a night mission, he had found himself very close to the ground and about to buy a rice paddy when he had not gotten his nose up far enough before banking to check out what he had blown up — he had resolved not to do that anymore.
Kaboom! His three bombs walked up the line of barges.
Puresome was up and away from the light show quickly. “Lead’s off, heading zero niner zero. You got me, Two?”
“Rog, tally,” Pee answered. “Coming back around port. I’m at your twelve o’clock, high, niner thousand.”
“Okay, I’ll keep my heading,” Puresome responded. “We’ll displace east, then come around and approach them from the north and drop the rest of our bombs. We’ve got time for another run. Fuel check?”
Puresome had been keeping track of the relentless clicking of the clock and the shrinking amount of kerosene in his tanks, since the recovery time back at the boat was a carved-in-stone requirement. The demon that lurked around the ship’s spudlocker often showed up on the darkest and claggiest nights, and tanker packages were known to not work. Because of that, it was prudent to show up with as much gas as possible in case some chaps were having themselves a bad night. Pee, like all wingpersons, had less gas than his leader.
“Two, I think we got most of the barges, so use the rest of your bombs to get the bridge. I’ll get what’s left. We’ll pull off starboard just to be different, then come on around and head for the beach. That a rog?”
“Two, rog,” came the answer.
Puresome found the canal and followed it toward the target. The flares had long since gone out, but there were small fires burning that helped him locate his flare drop. The Gomers started hosing the sky as soon as they heard the noise of the airplanes, and the slowly snaking red balls gained incredible speed as they came closer. Puresome thanked the Big Guy that there was not a Fire Can radar directing the shooters.
Just short of the bridge, Puresome pickled off his last three flares, crammed on the power and climbed. The flares illuminated a smoky, shadowy hell.
He was down into his dive when Pee’s five bombs disappeared the bridge, and Youthly adjusted the pipper to hit the remaining guts and feathers. Yeehaw! He pulled up and away and watched his bombs explode among the remaining rat-eaters. They could tell the air intelligence pukes they dropped on something more than “possible land” and, as Winny Churchill once said, there was little as exhilarating as being shot at without effect.
The section exited toward the gulf at high speed. When they went feet wet, Puresome checked in with the Fudd as the section climbed to a fuel-saving altitude for the trip back to marshal for the carrier-controlled approach to Guntrain.
The exhilaration had by now worn off and was replaced with the quease caused by the realization that the really hard part of the mission was coming up. Fortunately, the air wing was having a good night. No Phantom pukes, first down the chute, or the Blue Hawks who preceded the Snakes did much boltering. Both he and Pee got aboard acceptably on the first pass.
“I’m aboard, pull up the anchor!” Puresome hollered to himself as he scooted across the foul line into the loving care of the taxi director’s yellow wands.
So it went. On this particular night they had overcome the dread of the dark and had not flown into a mountain or the deck, or gotten hosed. They had found and biffed the Gomer. The tiny, confined space of the Scooter cockpit was a very private place where a case of the chickenstuffs had been kept solidly within its box. It was lovely that Puresome had been able to do so and come back to bug juice and sliders, and to draw a little black bomb on the bulkhead by his rack.
But Puresome was to never again enjoy fireworks displays, and it took a long time to quit flinching and remember to make a wish on friendly shooting stars.