Day 4 Thru 17

In Country Training

Before you could go fly solo you need to be familiar with your area of operation and get checked out in battle... we called them "Fam Rides"... you got 7 fam rides and then a check ride on flight 8.

My first fam ride was with our Squadron Commander... I think.  Ground troops were requesting air support and we got a flight of 4 F-4's with bombs.  We marked the target and as we were pulling off the target I heard a great big boom and the whole world shook.  We had been hit.  Our Squadron Commander was a cool son of a gun... he didn't even blink.  He was looking back over his shoulder and I was looking there too when we got the next big boom.  I watched the explosion... the boom was from bombs hitting the ground and the very clear shock wave radiating out from the impact point is what shook the whole world. We hadn't been hit after all... I began laughing out loud... happy to be alive! My Squadron Commander must have thought I was crazy...

Somebody high up the chain of command made a bunch of friends for life when they changed our minimum operating altitude from 1500 feet above the ground to 9000 feet above the ground.  1500 feet keep us clear of rifle fire but not Triple A or missiles.  9000 feet would keep us clear of some Triple (AAA) A and some missiles.  The main threat for FAC'S were SA-7 and 4 barreled rapid fire machine guns called ZPU .  9000 feet would get us out of their envelope.  

What looks good on paper is sometimes hard to make happen.  A civilian Cessna Skymaster could easily get to 9000 feet but we were weighted down with electronics and had the added drag of 2 rocket pods and a boxy infra-red flare.  9000 feet above the sea was possible but 9000 feet above the mountains was not. Add to that all of the jinking around and erratic flying paired with a vertical dive to shoot your smoke rockets and you were somewhere between 5000 and 7000 feet.  The max range of the SA-7 shoulder launched heat seeking missile was reported to be 9000 feet.  

After my first fam ride we flew the higher altitudes and carried binoculars.  We all had to learn how to aim our smoke rockets from 9000 feet.  I began flying with different FAC'S.  The only one I remember by name was Fain... I think we called him Fearless Fain.  He was crazy.  He was full of good bar stories.

One of his stories was a flight with a Vietnamese Army spotter and they were adjusting Vietnamese Army artillery fire... telling the guys shooting the big guns if they were left or right of the target... etc.  They got shot up real bad and when it was clear they were going to crash he told the Vietnamese soldier to bail out... and the guy froze.  The only way out of an O-2A was to remove the door on the soldiers side of the airplane and with him frozen there was no way to get the door off.  It was impossible to get out the window on the pilots side of the aircraft... but Fearless Fain did.  His parachute opened just as he hit the trees and he was messed up a little but survived to fight another day.  The Vietnamese guy went down with the airplane.

In another adventure he was shooting a smoke rocket to mark a target and the rocket got stuck in his pod.  Eventually that rocket lit off the other 6 rockets and he became the first rocket powered Cessna in the world.  Unfortunately he was rocket powered only on one side and his airplane was sliding sideways.  He was pointed at the ground in attempt to mark the target and he was now rocket powered towards the ground.  He managed to pull out of the ensuing dive through the trees and made it back to base with tree parts stuck out of various parts of his airplane.

So Fearless Fain was my teacher that day.  It was pretty ordinary.  We did several airstrikes in support of the ground troops and 4 and a half hours later we were still at it.  We were supposed to be done at 4 and a half hours... not Fearless.  I began watching the gas gauges they were nearly empty and he kept flying.  Soon they said completely empty and we kept flying.  5 and a half hours after beginning our mission we started heading home, while discussing emergency landing sites all the way there.  I was sure I wasn't the crazy one here.

Soon I had my combat ready check ride and I was good to go.  Our Squadron Commander gave me my check ride and his one concern was that I had difficulty listening to all 4 radios at once.  I never got very good at that... everyone always seemed to want to talk at the same time. 

I was combat ready on July 11, 1972.  The first of my daily solo missions would begin on the morning of July 12th.