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

and President Nixon, acting on his promise to end the war, turned loose the U.S. Air Force.
    The Weasels were once again thrown into the fray, sometimes flying four sorties a day, as rail yards, airfields, and storage facilities were attacked. Infrastructure that had kept the enemy functioning for the past seven years was finally on the target list and being hit hard. The success of this campaign led to the Paris Peace Talks, and on October 23, 1972, air operations above the 20th Parallel were temporarily halted. Linebacker II, the final push, began on December 18, with the Weasels paving the way for massive B-52 strikes that finally brought Hanoi to its knees. But, in true American political fashion, whatever is paid for in blood is usually given away by Washington, and in early 1973, the U.S. began a massive pullout of forces. By January 1975, the North Vietnamese army captured Phuoc Long Province, only eighty miles from Saigon, and on April 30, the Republic of South Vietnam ceased to exist.
    So the Weasels came home. Some of them, anyway. Twenty-six Phantoms had been lost and forty-two more officers killed, missing, or captured. Two Weasels, Leo Thorsness and Merlyn Dethlefsen, had been awarded the Medal of Honor.
    The advancement of the surface-to-air missile had ushered in a new and revolutionary form of warfare. It would eventually grow and morph into the Integrated Air Defense System, the deadliest technology to ever threaten aircraft. Countertactics had progressed, in turn, from Weasel I through Weasel IV. These techniques would continue to evolve, sometimes forgetting the fundamentals learned in Vietnam and sometimes remembering. Equipment and weapons were proposed, improved, or discarded, but one thing, as we shall see, didn’t change. Never again would American airpower attack in force without the Wild Weasel.

2
    Cold War and Hot Times
    “I F THE TREES ARE GETTING BIG, PULL BACK TILL YOU SEE BLUE .”
    Those were the immortal first bits of flying instruction I received from my dad. Followed shortly by “pull up now or we’re going to die.”
    Dad was a businessman and a highly skilled engineer by the time I came along. He’d designed cockpit instruments for NASA spacecraft and helped save the Alaska pipeline by redesigning their flow meters. But he was also a retired Marine fighter/attack pilot. Flying was something I’d always been around as part of a colorful family. Ours is a lineage that includes several generals, one of whom was a Confederate cavalry officer. I also had a great-grandfather who managed to charge up San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt, and another who shipped off to fight in France during World War I to escape a nagging wife.
    Despite the family tree, Dad was never the Great Santini. He didn’t pressure me to join the military, and, in fact, I went to college to become an architect. No, flying was just something we did. It was fascinating to master a machine well enough to get it off the ground, yank and bank through aerobatics, then bring it back to safely land. Humans were never meant to fly, and most can’t learn, so I loved the special freedom of it—and still do. Fighter pilots usually are too busy to appreciate the miracle of flight, but it’s always there and I’ve been under its spell from the beginning.
    Later I found it was a great way to entice young ladies into a date. Suppose you’re a girl and Bozo Number 1 asks you out to dinner and a movie. You’re tempted but along comes Bozo Number 2, who says, “Hey . . . how ’bout going flying with me before I take you to dinner?”
    Yep. Guaranteed.
    During my second year at college, something clicked inside, drawing me to become a professional pilot. I’d worked for architects the previous two summers, seen the business, and I enjoyed the creativity of designing structures. But I had a decision to make, because if I was going to seek an officer’s commission as a military aviator, it had to be started then, since the