A Backseat View from the Phantom by Fleet S. Lentz Jr. Col USMCR (Ret)

Author:Fleet S. Lentz, Jr., Col USMCR (Ret)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Published: 2020-06-18T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 21

The ­Ten-Degree Run

February 1973

In February 1973, I logged 30.6 hours of flight time, 22.8 hours of that combat time, in 23 hops out of The Rose Garden spread over 23 days. Every RIO in ­VMFA-115 was flying his buns off. Seemed to me then and now, RIOs were in short supply. Other Silver Eagle RIOs had as much flight time that month, as many combat hops, as I did—or more. The operational tempo was high. Very. The Southeast Asia conflict we were in was still very much on.

***

One hop of that time stands out. My pilot was Beak. He was our aviation maintenance officer, a major, already a Heavy. Later he became a lieutenant general, ­three-star. Some pilots bore watching but according to the informal, ­back-channel RIOs Protective Association grapevine, Beak was good. He was one of those Heavies we instinctively respected. Respect and trust just went to men like him. And not because of the piece of shiny metal on their collars.

Though I was still a first lieutenant, I had already become a mission commander. I was salty enough to know that rank was not a ­deal-breaker in the plane, especially on a combat hop. Beak was simply my stick and I was his scope.

Flying with Beak, I wanted to bring my ­A-game. As we boarded the Phantom on a hot morning, I thought to myself, Lord, help me not to screw this one up. Beak and I reefed and zorched out of The Rose Garden as Section Lead. The heat made it harder to get airborne and we were doing whatever it took. Yanking and banking. ­Hard-core flying.

We aerial refueled per standard operating procedure. Beak was good on the tanker despite the fact that we had a full load of ordnance. We crossed the Mekong, then switched up to airborne ­command-and-control frequency, ­fire-checked chaff and flares, all without incident. We didn’t know exactly where we were headed other than to a route package of some number, one through six, which ACC told us and then handed us off to our FAC. When we checked in with the FAC, he would finally give us the mission, tell us what kind of target we would be taking on.

We were under the control of a Raven FAC on this hop. Based in Vientiane, Laos, the Ravens were, hands down, the best contingent of FACs we worked with. In their little ­propeller-driven airplanes, they were utterly fearless and deadly accurate. Their reputation was solid, ­theater-wide. They had suffered many lost planes and ­shot-down pilots. But they took the air war straight down on the enemy, regardless. Like them, we would get down low in the weeds to see, identify and destroy a target. Or at least try.

The FAC described our target as a possible ­track-mounted, ­heavy-caliber gun, ­85-millimeter, hidden in a karst or cliff face. The bad guys had covered the entrance to the cave and camouflaged the rails the gun rode on with brush. The FAC thought he knew where

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