Jacksel Broughton - Thud Ridge

But the old pro was not done for yet. He lit the burner and—clouds, SAMs and Migs be damned—scratched for every ounce of altitude and speed he could get. Now the coast was only 30 miles away—the coast with the possibility of water bailout, Navy rescue craft and another chance. He got to 18,000 feet and 600 knots, and he could glide from there. He must have thought, If only the engine can outlast the fire for another minute—if only the last hydraulic system can scavenge enough fluid to let me steer for two minutes—if only. But the systems wouldn’t hold. Violently she rolled to inverted position and the nose snapped through toward the hills far below. The safety of the water moved from under the nose and in front to under the belly and to the rear. She was all done.

I had not been in position at Takhli too long when Art got a chance to come down on temporary duty from my old fighter wing in Japan and finish up his one hundred missions. We were desperately short on flight leaders and the personnel pipeline just couldn’t hack the course. He had previously flown with the same squadron I was assigned to, and I managed to engineer the assignments so that he rejoined the same unit. It took him no time whatsoever to get back in the swing of things and he and I flew together often—in fact, we got my first Distinguished Flying Cross of this war together. (Don’t ever let anybody tell you that you get those things by ^yourself in this facet of the air-war business.) He was most precise in all that he did, and I liked to fly with him because we would alternate the lead position from day to day and he would always be the best critic in the business.

There is always room to improve combat techniques and when you stop trying to learn ways to do it better, you are asking for trouble. What a shame that this spirit seems all too often to be throttled beyond the individual operating tactical unit. If only we could keep something of this fresh desire for better ways alive, if only we could accept the fact that the doers have both sense and ideas, and if only we could keep the military channels to the top open and active—how much better we could be. How often has a brilliant thought or concept been ruthlessly destroyed by the convenient retort that the swine in the field do not have all the facts and do not understand the big picture. We find it difficult to accept the fact that we, in the officer corps of today, are not dealing with kids in the street. We are dealing with sharp, progressive young men who are voluntarily putting their lives on the line for what they believe to be right. The odds are great against those who would push, those inclined to stand behind firm if unpopular thoughts, those unafraid to accept responsibility and make a decision. But if a young, eager thinker and doer is smart, he needs only a few severe lumps on the head to reconsider his approach. Accusations of constipation of the brain and diarrhea of the mouth sting deeply when vindictively delivered, and the stifling of progress by our own hand can be a simple and rapid process.

Art and I nit-picked each other until we were two of the best in the business. We generally did it over an exhausted cold beer in the sweaty squadron lounge. Sometimes we could not wait for that and I can clearly recall Art’s rebuke on the radio one day as we moved and sought targets at 600 knots; “Get your butt back up—you’re five hundred feet low.” He was a perfectionist, and a good one.

As he headed into the stretch for the magic one hundred missions that would send him back to the States, Art took a five-day R and R and caught a ride back to Japan to spend a few days with the family. It seemed most appropriate, especially since a typhoon had ripped the roof off his house while Pat and the children huddled in the corner. Nobody was hurt and repair and replacement were not too difficult, but I am sure the entire thing was scary for a gal in a strange land with her guy in an even stranger one.

When I was up there in gayer times my fetish for parsley was usually good for a giggle at squadron and wing parties. I just like the stuff, and I have ever since we used to get beef blood and parsley soup on the training table during football season. It became apparent that I was one of the few who gobbled up the parsley from the shrimp cocktail or the steak and soon I was receiving donations at each dinner. It became a monster, and there have been times when I had more parsley ceremoniously passed to me than I had steak. I tried to keep up the front for a while but finally had to admit that there was more parsley served in the officers’ club than I could possibly eat. Art came back from that R and R all full of pep and ready for the stretch dash. The rest had been good for him, but the big stimulus was the fact that he had received the assignment he had requested and was going to Nel-lis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, Nevada, to work for an old friend, John Black. He was overjoyed, and as each mission ticked off he would rerun the plans—when he would finish, when he would pick up the family, how long it would take to clear the quarters in Japan.

Pat had sent me a present—a carefully wrapped tin container with some number one cookies and, for her old parsley-eatin’ buddy, fresh parsley sealed against the trip in waterproof bags. I don’t think I have ever been more touched by a present, whatever its magnitude. But the timing was wrong, the elements were too strong, the flower had wilted, the parsley was rotten, and everything turned sour.

Off came the canopy and he got out with a good chute and a good beeper, the screeching electronic emergency signal that is activated when the chute opens. The guys followed him down and stayed as long as they could without losing another one to fuel starvation or enemy fire, and the Navy rescue guys gave it their usual superior college try, but we couldn’t get him.

This was the curse of the Thud. She would go like a dingbat on the deck and she would haul a huge load, but she was prone to loss of control when the hydraulic system took even the smallest of hits. There is just no way to steer her once the fluid goes out, and I can tell you from bitter experience that you can lose two of the three hydraulic systems that run all of your flight controls by the time you realize you have been hit. Once they have a vent they are gone. We had been agitating like mad for a simple backup control, just something that would lock the controls in some intermediate area and give you a chance to keep her in the air by changing engine power. We didn’t care about precision flying at this stage of an emergency, we just wanted something that would sustain flight to a safer bailout area. We finally got just such a system but too late in the game. If we had had such a modification at the start of this war we would most probably have at least one hundred fine pilots still with us who are now statistics. The modification came through too late for Art, and for want of a few thousand dollars worth of gear and some combat engineering and planning forethought, another prince was lost.

All the notification details are cumbersome and irritating at best. They are sheer torture when you truly know who you are advising and who you are advising about, but they have to be done. I even managed to badger a phone call through the multimillion-dollar communications confusion we own to talk to Pat. When we got to the other end of the 3,000-mile line, the last phone drop did us in and we couldn’t hear each other. We relayed our sentiments through an airman on the switchboard who could hear both ends, and she was beautiful as always. Many letters have passed since, but one stands out. She wrote the squadron to tell them how proud Aft was to have served with them, that he would serve again, and that she wanted to know what she could do for them when she got back to the States. I found out later that the big boss in Japan had not even«bothered to call her on the telephone, much less go by and say hello. They didn’t get along socially and besides, it was some sort of big holiday.