Here is a book segment and the accompanying song. Read it, then play the song and visualize. (Song: Riders on the Storm by the Doors.) Puts me right back there! Then the bomb run began in the early morning darkness over an Asian jungle. Our three-abreast, triangular-shaped formation banked steeply, ominously, onto the bomb run heading. The radar navigator, who would throw the switch to drop the bombs, informed the crew we were approaching the IP, or Initial Point, to begin the run. Just as we passed the IP, a male Asian voice began transmitting in Cambodian on our radios. He sounded as if he were babbling in an opium den, and his voice disturbed and frightened me. I feared he might be an apparition warning us off our task, a voice of doom giving a last opportunity to save ourselves, or a soon-to-be victim in the target zone making his last hopeless statement to his slayers. He continued talking, as if relating a story to a fellow opium smoker, while our formation approached the target. No matter what I did to my radio controls, I couldn’t make the voice stop. In the near distance 33,000 feet below us, the ground glowed red, eerily, from explosions from preceding bomber formations. A mist hung over the terrain that gave the area the look of a graveyard in a horror movie. The radar navigator began the countdown, “Ten... nine... eight,”—the apparitional voice continued his drunken soliloquy on the radio—“Three... two... one... bombs away!” The aircraft shuddered lightly as the bombs unhooked from the wings and dropped from the bomb bays of our three aircraft in a ten-second release sequence that would obliterate an area equal to three football fields and unleash a shock wave that would kill any unshielded creature within half a mile. North Vietnamese soldier and author Bao Ninh later wrote that the immediate aftermath of such a strike resulted in “a rain of arms and legs dropping before him on the grass.”(3) We waited as the radar navigator counted down to detonation, about fifty seconds for the bombs to fall 33,000 feet, “Three... two... one... impact!” The thin clouds around our aircraft reflected hundreds of small bursts of light from below. It was done. The radar navigator announced the closing of the bomb bay doors. We flew on in the darkness in silence as I pondered what we had done. I ponder it still. (Excerpt from memoir Flying the Line, an Air Force Pilots Journey.) Pictures: B-52 bombing formation, bomber at takeoff, radar navigator preparing to drop the bombs.
Posted on: Sat, 31 May 2014 15:57:54 +0000
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