WAR STORIES

By Ed Rider

After graduating from flying school in 1960 at the top of my class, I could have had any fighter assignment I wanted. But I knew that the current fighter pilots were not getting more than 16-18 hours of flying time per month. So I elected to stay in the Training Command as an instructor. I flew every flight I could, volunteering for weekend flights, parts delivery flights, etc. Some months I logged 125 hours which included hundreds of landings and instrument approaches. After five years I had over 3300 hours, mostly of flights of 1:30 or less. I could do aerobatics under the hood and shoot instrument approaches on needle-ball-airspeed and whiskey compass. I won a  bet with my fellow instructors by finding my way back to the home field, making a penetration, approach to 200 foot minimums that could have resulted in a landing. All without benefit of any instruments except needle-ball-and airspeed. However I cheated. When I was a sergeant, I had gone through electronics school and knew all there was to know about the radios in the T-33. I knew that the ADF needle would only point at the station if there was AC power. I also knew that when the AC power was turned off, the direction finding loop would not move. When we were taxiing out on the flight for the bet, I was in the back seat with the hood down. But before the inverters were turned off, I checked out all the radios, as per the check list. The Outer Marker Locater was directly on the nose as we taxied toward the take off end of the runway. After the check, I told the front seat to turn off the inverters. He made the takeoff and, according to the rules of the game, flew to at least 100 NM from the field rolling and turning so that I would have no idea in which direction we were going. When he turned it over to me, I first recovered from the unusual attitude he had put me in and then started a slow one needle width turn to find the null. The idiot up front was not listening to the ADF and had no idea what I was doing. I found the null and then did a needle width timed turn for 90 degrees. I held the heading for 10 minutes after the null faded and did a needle width turn to the right. If the null appeared before I turned 90 degrees it was behind me. If it appeared after 90 degrees it was on my nose. Once I had it on my nose, I tracked in to the cone of silence and then did a timed turn to the penetration heading and started down. At the published altitude I turned toward the approach heading and as I rolled out I acquired the null and adjusted my track by steering toward track and then turning back to get the null. I crossed the OML at 800 feet and was over the over run at 200 feet and only about 50 feet from the centerline. Needless to say, I was charged with cheating, even though the front seater checked constantly to make sure the hood was securely sealed. I never did tell them how I did it and I am sure some of them are still talking about it.

I was really tired of Training Command after five years and tried to get an assignment to Vietnam. I finally did and was assigned to B-57s. It was a quirk of fate as when I was a sergeant I was in a B-57 squadron as an Airborne Electronics technician. The navigators in the squadron kept writing up the Shoran system and I could not duplicate the problem on the ground so I applied to be put on flying status so I could check the system in the air. One of the captains in the squadron was the test pilot and he would take me with him when he flew test hops. In the dual models, he let me do aerobatics from the back seat. He encouraged me to go to OCS and flight school, which I did. Years later, they were pulling pilots out from behind desks to fly in Vietnam, and he showed up and I was his instructor.

Anyway, I got a transition checkout with the Kansas Guard and was off to Clark. I was assigned to the 8th TacBombSq. When I got to Clark, they were at Danang and the 13th TacBombSq was at Clark. The two squadrons changed places every two months. They were supposed to check me out on the bomb range but they had just gotten back from Danang and were too busy catching up and having fun. After several days of me asking when I was going to get trained and being ignored, one Friday someone came through the squadron room saying "We need a volunteer to go fly courier in Saigon". People started disappearing magically. I was so bored I stood up and said "I'll go". They said "Who are you'. I explained and they said Oh, you can't go because you don't know what’s going on. About 15 minutes later I had orders and left the next day. I arrived in Saigon late in the day and went to the hotel they told me to and went to the desk and said I'm here with the B-57s and there is a room for me. The desk clerk said "No room" at least 25 times in reply to my questions. It was getting near curfew and there was no place to go so I went to the bar. I was drinking my third or fourth Bomi-bom and cursing the idiots who sent me here when the guy next to me said "What is bothering you?" I told him and he said “Hey, I'm with the B-57s and we have a cot for you in our room."

It turns out that the courier was a B-57 that took off in the middle of the night and delivered target photos to all the fighter bases in Thailand. A couple of nights later I went out to Saigon airport with one of the navigators who had flown these missions before. He had a 21A with the route information on it and filed an ICAO flight plan. I had never seen one. I signed for a knee high stack of top secret files and they were put in the tail end of the airplane. It was raining so hard I could only see about 50 yards. After I cranked up I asked the tower for taxi instructions and told him I had no idea where I was or how to get to the runway. He knew by my call sign I was the B-57 courier and GCAed me to the end of the runway and cleared me for a VFR flight. That flight was as far as I had ever seen from VFR. The first base I was to land at had no radar on duty at 2AM and the tower estimated the ceiling at 500 feet. I made a Tacan approach to 300 feet and didn’t even see a glow. I asked the tower to turn the runway lights to full bright and made another approach to 200 feet and saw a glow but not much. On the downwind I managed to trim up and study the letdown plate closely and see how far off the centerline the Tacan was. This time I was determined and put the tacan at my 2 o’clock at one mile and spotted the runway at less than 100 feet. I touched down a little long and discovered the runway was low in the middle and I was hydroplaning in 6-8 inches of water. I ruddered it up to one side and had it almost stopped when I went into the muddy over run. Afraid I would sink in, I added power to one engine and pivoted 180 degrees, blowing mud everywhere. I made it back to the runway and a group of people ran out and removed some files from the tail and gave me some well soaked receipts. I took off again in less than 100 yards visibility and proceeded to the next base, all VFR.

That was my introduction to flying in Vietnam. After landing at 4-5 fighter bases in Thailand, I crossed over to Danang and then on to Saigon, getting back there about 10 AM. After 5-6 flights like this, one day when I landed in Danang I was met by the commander of the 8TBS who informed me that since I belonged to him, I was getting off there. Another pilot took my place and I was finally with my squadron. The following day I was on the schedule to fly a mission up north to Pac One to attack a ferry crossing. That night I found the pilot who was to lead our eight ship formation and discretely informed him that I had never fired a gun or dropped a bomb, even in practice. After he got through laughing his ass off, he gave me a dash 34 and told me to go study the switches and knobs required to shoot the guns and drop the bombs and then come find him at the bar and he would explain a little of what I would be expected to do. Needless to say, I didn't get much sleep that night. I was number 4 in the second flight and we were going to split and attack the ferry crossing from north and south at the same time. I was in the north flight and by the time we got into position at about 10,000 the flak was reaching up for us. I had an experienced navigator and he talked me through the switches and opened the bomb bay for me. I was right behind #3 as he rolled in and slightly off to the side. We were carrying 8 1000 pounders each. We dove at about 45-50 degrees and my nav told me to pickle at about 6000.  By then I was flying through the black balloons and as I stated pulling I ran into a cloud of red hot beer cans and they were exploding all around me and I could feel the percussions with my feet on the rudder. I could imagine my rudder being shredded and pieces falling off my aircraft. I pulled way too many Gs but was too pumped up to black out. When I looked back at the target, 64 1000 pounders had obliterated both sides of the ferry landings.

That was my first combat mission. Luckily, he pilots in the squadron were the most experienced pilots in the B-57. Many had flown the airplane from the day it came from the factory. The 8th and 13th had been stationed in Japan for years and competed on the bomb range, often for money. Those guys were so good that there was no such thing as a correction after the first bomb. I learned this as I flew with them. A FAC would mark a target and lead would roll in and drop. Then the FAC would have to mark another target because that one was gone. Several times, my lead would drop all his bombs before I had a chance to embarrass myself. I have seen a guy drop a 1000 lb on a gun position and the bomb was a dud but landed in the gun pit. These were the guys who took me under their wing and taught me how to bomb and strafe. One guy who was my biggest help was a big man with a huge right bicep. I was on a mission with him and we were strafing after dropping all our bombs. He made the first strafe pass and I made the second. He made the third and fourth and I made the fifth. He made the sixth and seventh and I made the eighth. You get the picture. I was pulling as hard as I could pull and he was inside me on every pass. It took at least 70-80 pounds of pull to get 5 Gs. When he called last pass, I took a big cut off angle on him to make a quick join up, at least. I was huffing and puffing and had my nose out in front of him and was pulling hard. However, I had forgotten one thing: my aircraft had 8 fifties and the barrels were pretty hot. I should have retracted the breech so they could cool off. I didn't and when I was about 200 yards out several rounds cooked off and sent tracers just in front of his nose. When I pulled up on his wing, he was smoking a cigarette and said "Ed, are you pissed off at me?"

A short time later I got my night check out, also in N. Vietnam. It really helped that I was very good at instruments and night dive bombing and strafing did not present any problem. We soon discovered that keeping track of the other airplanes made formation night attacks impractical so we were assigned an area and had it to ourselves. It was up to us to find our targets. I was assigned a good gung ho navigator and he carried an excellent pair of binoculars he got in Japan and we had pretty good luck finding trucks running with battle lights. We carried a fire bomb, the same LeMay used to burn down Tokyo, and it was great for trucks as most were loaded with things that burn and blow up. After a few two month tours I was quite proficient and my nav and I racked up lots of trucks. One method we used I never shared with the other pilots. In fact, a lot of the tactics I used I did not share. The pilots who replaced the old pros were not as good and I did not want to be responsible for getting some of them killed. Jim Coffey and I came up with a method to strafe trucks on the road if there was a half a moon or more. In the daytime I experimented to find out at what altitude and airspeed my guns would harmonize on one point. The guns were supposed to harmonize at 3200 feet. We found that 300 feet and 230 knots was the secret. A lot of the roads in Pac One near the coast were white sand. I would turn out all my cockpit lights and Jim would unplug all his except his altimeter. I would let down away from the roads and set my power for 230 kts and Jim would talk me down until I established myself at 300 feet. When I got comfortable there he would turn out his altimeter light. The idiot would unstrap and get out of his parachute and crawl up to get his head as close to mine as he could so he could see out the front windscreen. We would drive down the roads looking for dark places in the white sand roads. We often got shot at from the guns off to the side of the road but they were firing at sound and the engines were at such a low setting, they always fired above us. When I saw a dark spot, I waited until it was just short of where I knew my pipper would be and closed my eyes to avoid losing my night vision from the muzzle flash and fired a 3 second burst. Then I opened my eyes and made a hard break to the right because the guns would shoot at where they thought I would be. We sometimes shot at tree shadows but were very often rewarded by seeing a truck go up in flames and then get multiple explosions. The best one was a fuel tanker which lit up the whole country side.

One night we were assigned the area that included a major ferry crossing very near the coast. We went north at about FL30 and starting letting down as we neared the target. Jim got very excited because he could see a long line of trucks lined up on the road NW of the ferry. They all had their battle lights on and were visible even to me. We were over the coast and started spiraling down and planning how we would attack when very large explosions started going off around us. I jinked and changed altitude constantly and tried to get into position to roll in but they were really about to hammer us. I beat a hasty retreat and surveyed the situation from over the water about 10 miles away. We had both seen the guns firing from both the front end and rear end of the line of trucks. We figured they were radar controlled 85s mounted on tracks. I was not about to leave all those trucks undamaged and came up with a plan. We had 8 of the fire bombs and the fuses were set to go off at about 5000 feet. The clamshells opened and lots of small bomblets came out and spread and leaked fire as they fell. When the bomblets hit they spewed thermite and phosphorus in all directions. I got lined up with the line of trucks about 10 miles out and 15k feet and dived for the water and got up to max speed as close to the water as I dared. When I was 2-3 miles from the trucks I pulled up and started pickling at about 20 degrees and continued up to about 45, pulling sort of slow so the bombs would travel far. When all eight were gone at about 45 degrees, I pulled like hell and came over the top and dove back at the water. As we came over the top and looked back, we could see the line of explosions that had been trying to track us but we had been changing altitude and speed so fast they could not track us. In a 45 degree dive, I rolled upright and dove as close as I dared to the water. When we had plenty of separation we climbed to 20k or so and turned to look at the results. It looked like the biggest Fourth of July celebration you have ever seen. Hundreds of the little fire bomblets had left streams of fire falling from the sky and the bomblets hit among the 2-3 mile line of trucks and spewed fire like roman candles. We had lots of fuel and hung around to watch the show. As the show progressed, new points of fire began and soon the explosions began. It got better and better and I got on the channel for the C-130 that had control of the Pac One assignments and asked for a recce bird to get pictures. They said none was available and I requested they send one as soon as one was available. We descended over the fireworks looking for the radar controlled guns to fire on us. They never did. We counted 27 trucks burning and blowing up. Of course the Intel debriefers did not believe us and the pictures were never taken.

The normal tour of duty was 2 years with family accompanying but we were given extra credit for missions up North so most people left after about 18 months. I elected not to take credit for my missions north and at the end of two years I requested a one year extension. The Wing DCO had to approve it and he turned it down. I went to see him and he told me I had a reputation of being "Combat Happy". I asked him what that meant and he said I enjoyed it too much. I requested to see the Wing CO. That was Chuck Yeager. Chuck and I had flown together numerous times because the Air Force required Wing Commanders to fly with an IP if in a dual aircraft. Evidently no one in the Pentagon realized how superfluous an IP was flying with Chuck. At the time I was trying to extend, the T-33 section belonging to Base Flight was being transferred to the wing. I knew the T-33 IP and knew he was leaving in three days. Chuck was not a paperwork kind of guy and he had overlooked the fact that he was getting 8 T-33s with no IP and no one to supervise them. I informed him of this and said I would get checked out in the T-33 in one day as IP and FCF pilot and run the operation if he would approve my extension and let me go over and fly combat when I had the operation going and could find the time. As a result of my horse trading, I ran the T-33 as IP and was also IP in the B-57 checking out new guys on the range and still managed to spend about half my time in VN flying fun missions. Toward the end of my three years, the quality of the replacements went down as their rank went up. Most navigators in both squadrons had heard enough about my unorthodox tactics that they did not want to fly with me. I told them to compare the number of hits I had taken (0) with the number of hits the "Heroes" got. These were the people who managed to get back home with large portions of sheet metal missing. Many did not get back because they did stupid things.

When we moved from Danang to Phan Rang, we were supposed to be replaced as truck killers on the Ho Chi Mien trail by F-4s and we were to revert back to close ground support in the South. That didn't turn out so good because the F-4s sometimes hit the wrong country. Phan Rang had 4 F-100 squadrons so naturally we were multi-engine bomber pilots. The fraggers in Saigon knew nothing about our capabilities and the fragged loads were ridiculous. By this time I was the Weapons Officer and I went down to Saigon and got them straightened out. We could only carry three of the new Snake Eye 500# bombs in our bomb bay but could carry 9 of the old 500# GPs. We could carry 5 of the 250# snake eye but 21 of the old 250 frag bombs. I checked the depots all over the world and found lots of things we could use, like 5 inch HIVARs and seven pod 2.75 rockets. We had 4 hard points outboard of the bomb pylons on the wings that were seldom used and we could load them with these things. The first mission I flew down in the Delta I had a flight of 4. The FAC had never seen a B-57 and had no clue. I told him to erase a large place on his canopy. (The FAC copied the ordinance on his canopy with a grease pencil so he could keep track of what was left to expend.)
I told him I had 84 250# frag bombs, 16 750# napalm, 2400 rounds of 20MM and 5000 rounds of 50 Cal. and I could give him 2 hours on station. He just about jumped out of his skin. When he calmed down a little, he said there were not enough targets in his whole area for our load.

On another occasion shortly after our arrival at Phan Rang, I led a flight of 2 on a tree killing mission NW of Saigon. I had a new guy on my wing and someone had told me he was a pretty good stick. We still had our guns so I yelled for a FAC for a gun target as we headed home. I finally found one about 50 miles north of home. As I checked in with the FAC, a flight of 3 F-100s also checked in. I asked if they would let me go first as I was short on fuel. They had full wing tanks and were too heavy to strafe and said they would hold overhead at 4000 ft. I told them to make it a little higher and they said you are only going to strafe so why so high. I said watch out for us. The FAC marked and I was right behind his rocket. I thought I would test my new wingman and pulled off straight up.  At about 5000 I pulled down to inverted and held it until I had passed over the target. I looked out to the right and left for my wingman, figuring he would have pulled off right or left as in a normal pattern. I didn't see him and pulled down to split S for the next strafe pass. This time as I hung inverted, I looked in my rear view mirrors and there he was, inverted right behind me streaming fuel. When we had debriefed and made it to the bar, we were standing at the Multi Engine Bomber end of the bar when the three F-100 pilots came in. One of them said to the other 100 pilots at the bar "You wouldn't believe what I saw those MEB pilots doing. They were flying a rectangular gun pattern." Somebody said "They will get shot down." The first one said "No, you don't understand. It was a vertical rectangular pattern."

As I mentioned before, the F-4s just were not cutting it as truck killers at night so they started sending us back up on the trail. It made it much more difficult because the distances were so much greater than from Danang. Sometimes we could not make it home and stopped at Nakon Phanom, Thailand or at a Navy base on the coast of SVN for fuel. We were doing the same mission as we did from Danang. But the Intel debriefers at Phan Rang had never heard such reports of trucks destroyed or of large caliber (37-57MM) and heavy ground fire. We found out that the F-100 wing commander had ordered his Intel to only report about 25% of the BDA we reported. When our squadron commander found out he raised hell. As a consequence, the wing CO went with me on a day mission and a night mission. On the day mission, we were going to support ground troops who reported 50 cal weapons shooting at them. At the briefing, the wing CO had his G suit and I pointed out that there was no place to plug it in the B-57. He said it had all his maps and stuff in it and he did not expect to need it in a bomber. We made 8 bomb passes and I pulled off with only 4-5 Gs. When we started to strafe, my wingman had a gun malfunction and his guns would not fire so I told him to hold overhead and look for ground fire while I strafed. When we got home and debriefed, I reported the bomb passes and said I had made 8 gun passes. The CO spoke up and said "You only made one gun pass." I said "Sir, since you couldn't plug in your G suit in a bomber, you slept through 7 gun passes." I had made sure that I never got below 5 Gs. I have had FACs time my gun patterns and the tight ones averaged about 18 seconds so there was 16 seconds between firings. When the old guys from Japan were still there, we determined that a three ship was the best for strafing. We could have guns on target about every 5 seconds. In a four ship we tended to get in each others way.

I became good friends with the weapons officer of the wing and we swapped rides. I would go in his back seat in a dual F-100 on in country day missions and he would go in the back seat with me on night missions up on the Trail. He saw first hand the clouds of red hot beer cans that came up after us and heard the popcorn popping. He also saw the results of our fire bombs lighting up a line of trucks. The most serious ground fire he had seen in SVN was maybe a single 50 cal. He finally convinced the wing CO to fly a night mission with me. At the briefing, I told him I would fly the mission as I would fly any other mission and that I might bend the rules sometimes. He did not bring his G suit this time. We took off about 2000 hrs. so he would not be out too late. The departure procedure called for a turn to the south after takeoff to the coast to clear the outgoing artillery and then follow the coast until passing 20K. This used about 4000# of fuel so I did not follow it. We were taking off east and as soon as I got my gear up I turned off my lights and made a right turn to the NW that would take me up across the west end of the runway heading NW up a valley toward Dalot. It took a while before I was high enough to clear the sides of the valley but I knew the heading was safe. We climbed to 35K and went way up into Laos. I checked in with a FAC and he had a line of trucks heading south. He had a starlight scope and could see them. Rather than drop flares, which would ruin his starlight scope vision, he dropped what are called log flares. These are long burning flares that ignite when they hit the ground and burn for a long time. He had dropped one on either side of the road and using the distance between the flares as a ruler, he directed me to where I should drop my bombs. I had 8 of the fire bombs (the FACs called them funny bombs and used their pattern as a measuring stick.) I spent about 30 minutes working with the FAC and dropped all my bombs. We hit several trucks, but as usual, it took a while before the explosions began. While I was making the bomb runs, the Col. became disoriented because he had no instruments in the rear seat and yelled "Jesus, they are shooting at us from the sky!" That is because I was inverted between passes. We had about 8 37MM guns shooting at us and 3-4 12.5 ZSU. None got close enough for us to hear the pops. After we were expended the FAC had an A-26 coming in to work with him and said he would forward our BDA later. I told him that I had my boss with me and wanted my BDA now so he said take two trucks destroyed and 10 secondary explosions. We still had lots of fuel so I orbited the target for about 20 minutes. Things started cooking off and soon we had 7 trucks burning and many, many explosions. When we went to debriefing I told the Intel guy we had two trucks destroyed and 10 secondary explosions and the ground fire was light and inaccurate. The Col. jumped up and demanded I change my report. I reminded him I could only report what the FAC gave me. He kept yelling about the heavy flak and the many trucks destroyed and the multiple explosions. After that, we were HIS B-57s and he bragged about us at briefings in Saigon.

This is getting a little long and so to make an end, I flew about 450 combat missions in the B-57 and enjoyed every minute. I did lose a lot of my friends, some from stupidity and some from bad luck. I think I was a very effective combat pilot and either because I was better than the gunners or very lucky; I never took a hit and killed more trucks and tanks than any other pilot during that war. Of course I am a fighter pilot so you can expect me to exaggerate.