Always Look a Gift-Horse in the Mouth

submitted by: Alva Leon Matheson




I was getting well into my second month as a Pleiku Covey and I did not have much to show for my efforts so far.
As I flew out to our AO in Cambodia and Laos on a sortie that was supposed to end with my first mini-R&R to Ubon I received a call from the FAC that I was replacing. He had located a large transshipment point on the Tonle Kong River and the highway between Attopeu, Laos, and Stoeng Treng in Cambodia. The location was on a big bend in the river that points northwest toward Ubon. The road out of Attopeu comes very close to the river at the southeast end of the bend, where the enemy was offloading supplies from trucks onto boats to carry down the river. It was a great target, with supplies stacked at least two hundred meters along the riverbank and about 75 meters wide, all covered with green tarps. I asked him if he had air inbound, but he had not been able to get any yet. He wanted to hand the target off to me because he was out of station time. By then my fangs were getting long and I was drooling at the prospect of a great target. I was glad that he was being so generous. Little did I know how his “gift” would turn out.
Since I was still close to the border, I called Carbon Outlaw for air and got a flight of B-57s. I had never worked, or for that matter even seen, B-57s before so I looked forward to a new experience.
They were the last of the US Air Force B-57s operating in SEA. They were out of Ubon and were equipped with the first low-light TV weapon delivery system. The system was an early experiment in using low-light TV for weapon delivery. As I found out later, by talking to them at Ubon, the system worked great at night, but in 7th Air Force’s wisdom they were being sent out on daylight mission to “get more data” or something similar.
Though I had never worked them before, I immediately knew something was wrong when they checked in. After the briefing they said, “We’ll give it our best but it will be a cluster f***.” They described their target marking requirements, which didn’t please me, but for that much ordnance I’d try anything.
To bomb “effectively” in daylight the TV had to use the contrast between the green background and the WP smoke to identify the target. This meant they required two to three marks on each run, the first so the pilots could see the target, and the last so the TV could. The smaller the last smoke-plume the better their accuracy was likely to be.
They planned level bomb runs of about seven-ten miles. This meant, with their airspeed and my limited performance, that I was required to shoot, pull up and do a 180 degree turn, mark again, and usually do it a third time for the final release. This procedure proved to be the cause of my getting the first holes in a piece of Air Force property, namely my O-2.
The B-57s and I both arrived in the area about the same time. As soon as my OV-10 gift horse had shown me the target we were ready to go to work. He briefed me that there were some 12.7 mm machine gun pits around the area, but that they were unmanned. I took a quick look and agreed that I did not see any guns or people in the pits, but they were clearly not too far away. How quickly one forgets that the bad guys don’t normally shoot until they are sure that one knows they are there.
Lead was ready for his first run which was going to be from the southeast to the northwest, parallel to the river, I planned to work 90 degrees to his run in heading. I started my first mark from the northeast heading southwest, fired, and then pulled out on the other side of the river. As I completed my pullout, lead called that he was ready for the next smoke. I did the 180 and rolled in from the exact opposite direction. As I pulled out of that pass, right over the gun pits, the B-57 asked for a third mark. I made my second 180 at about zero airspeed and started down the chute for the third pass. At that point, all the empty gun pits got real busy – and I was their only target. I thought I felt something hit the aircraft but, having never been hit before and being so busy trying to do my job, I didn’t think much about it at that second. As it turned out, after that second turn I had collected the first set of holes in my aircraft. Then to make matters worse, I watched lead fly past the target. His bombs came off, flew over the river, and hit on the wrong bank. Getting smarter by the minute, I told two that he would have to do with one mark late in his run, and I would be in on a random heading. His bombs were better and started some fires and secondary explosions on the riverbank. By this time both of us had decided that multiple marks and level runs were not the way to insure that we would enjoy a night at the bar in Ubon. Lead said that they were going to change tactics but that, “It would be a chewing gum exercise.” I had no idea what he meant, but he must have been a former regular B-57 guy because on his next pass, he went back to dive bombing as did his wingman. They got good bombs.
I worked another set of air during that mission and headed to Ubon. There I found that the tail of my aircraft had little windows that had not been there before. I was sure glad that those 3-level gunners couldn’t figure the lead on my “speedy” aircraft. We, the Pleiku FACs, worked the area well into the next day before we were satisfied we had hit everything.
I soon put those oddball B-57s out of my mind. Little did I know I had not seen the last of them. When I finally went back to the big BX stateside, my assignment was to Forbes as the FTD commander. Lo and behold there were the B-57s that had got me shot at and hit for the first time. Now they would be my training nightmare. They were a one-of-a-kind aircraft with no spare parts, no tech data, and, in general, no Air Force support. Over time, the commander of the Kansas Air National Guard and I were to share several drinks at the bar as we tried in vain to develop a workable support plan for our problem children, the B-57Gs.