Viper Pilot: A Memoir of Air Combat Read Online Free PDF Page A

and irrevocably defined the Wild Weasel mission. It remains so to this day.
    In November 1965, the first five Wild Weasel Super Sabre jets arrived at Korat Air Base in Thailand to begin combat operations. Right from the beginning, the Weasels knew that the only way to deal with a SAM was to kill it. You could temporarily suppress a radar by lobbing anti-radiation missiles at it, but that wouldn’t solve the problem, and it would still be alive tomorrow. No, you had to kill it with bombs or cannons. So they teamed up with F-105Ds—a supersonic bomber known as the Thunderchief—and went to work.
    Called Iron Hand missions, they would hunt the SAM by flying down into its engagement zone, or envelope. This made the Weasel an attractive target, and the SA-2 target acquisition radar would try to lock the Super Sabre. Once the radar was on air and trying to lock the Weasel, then it could be tracked in turn and located. You could locate it by radar homing or, if the SAM launched, you might see the smoke trail. Sabres and the Thunderchiefs would then bomb and strafe the site to finish it off.
    Over time, several essential aspects of this process have not changed. First, the SAM has to stay “on air” long enough to track the target and be seen in turn. Second, the Weasel has to live long enough to find it and successfully attack. Lastly, you couldn’t miss when you attacked, or the SAM—and all the guns around it—would kill you.
    Sounds simple enough, right?
    Right.
    Three days before Christmas, not quite five months since Ross Fobair’s death, Captains Al Lamb and Jack Donovan engaged and killed an SA-2 in North Vietnam. The Weasels had proven their worth and would remain in Vietnam for the duration of the war.
    But the F-100F Super Sabres would not.
    After nine confirmed SAM kills and a staggering 50 percent Weasel casualty rate, it became apparent that changes had to be made. As far as a new aircraft went, the choice was obvious. The F-105 Thunderchief—called the “Thud,” because of the noise it made while landing—had been involved with the Hunter Killer mission from the beginning, playing the role of the Killer. Why not modify the formidable single-seat fighter bomber into a two-seat variant and make it the new Weasel? Weasels could then do their own killing.
    The Thud was definitely a man’s fighter jet, and it outperformed the Sabre in every respect. Much faster—twice the speed of sound at altitude—it was twenty feet longer and some 20,000 pounds heavier. Even so, the F-105 could travel twice as far into enemy territory as the F-100F. Most important, the Thud had five underwing hard points capable of a 6,000-pound weapons payload with a further 8,000 pounds of bombs carried internally. Lots of choices to make SAMs go away.
    The U.S. Air Force had Republic Aviation modify the F-105F to incorporate the lessons learned from Southeast Asia. A tandem cockpit was added for the APR-25 RHAW receiver and the EWO. Radar altimeters, better ejection seats, armor plating, and an updated weapons delivery system were also included.
    By June 1966, less than a year after Ross Fobair’s shoot-down, the Wild Weasel 3 Program was in combat in Southeast Asia. In all, eighty-six F-105Fs were modified as Weasels, evidence of the seriousness of the Air Force program. The next month, the earlier-generation F-100Fs flew their last combat missions; meanwhile, Operation Rolling Thunder successfully continued turning big trees into toothpicks, and the war dragged on.
    It was Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s notion that slowly increasing the pressure on North Vietnam would make Ho Chi Minh realize the utter futility of opposing the world’s greatest military. The idea, dreamed up by the Beltway theorists who were somehow permitted to run the war, was called “graduated escalation.”
    And it didn’t work.
    A true politician, McNamara didn’t understand the application of military power, nor did he accurately assess his