Beyond Survival. Gerald Coffee

remember. It was all so fuzzy. Green, sloping hills met the water ahead of me and behind me at some distance. I seemed to be in a very calm bay. It was absolutely silent at first, but then I was aware of the low rumble of a jet aircraft rocketing across and away from me, somewhere far in the distance. High overhead a thin trail of white smoke curved from the direction of the hills and ended in a darker cloud, all drifting slowly, benignly, out to sea.

      No speedboat rides! No Fun-House clown or summer smells! Bea! Where had she gone? A tepid little breeze ruffled the water around me. Still; quiet.

      My mind felt numb. Then vague reminiscences of the Sunday comics passed through it: Dick Tracy or Lois Lane coming to after being knocked out by the bad guy. What happened? Where am I? My arm floated limply before me. My face and neck were stinging like mad. I squeezed my eyes shut, straining to remember. Here I was in the water, in my flight gear and helmet. That was my parachute drifting in the depths below me. The first few shards of recall stabbed painfully as I focused harder, desperately seeking comprehension of my plight. A reconnaissance mission planned and approved. It was coming back now . . . .

      Bob and I had manned our aircraft for the last launch of the day. We had found our way across the flight deck of the USS Kitty Hawk, stepping around tie-down chains and ducking under wings, jibing lightly about how much the other would spend on shopping in Hong Kong. The Hawk would be heading that way immediately after our 1600 recovery. Soon that same flight deck had been engulfed in an awesome symphony of sound and motion: an attack carrier’s launch and recovery cycle. The jet engines from four dozen fighter and attack planes—all closely bunched toward the stern—screamed discordantly, gulping in tons of humid air even in idle. The hot exhaust from their tail pipes shot out across the catwalks at deck’s edge. Their collective force alone could have powered the leviathan runway through the water at several knots. My own J-79 engines had checked out fine, their eagerness reflected in the quivering gauges before me. Pretaxi check had been complete, wings “spread and lock” to go. Bob readied the navigation and reconnaissance systems in his own cockpit aft of mine. This, too, had all been so familiar: countless evolutions from the carrier decks in the Atlantic and Pacific, Caribbean and Mediterranean; the same choreography— yellow-shirted plane directors; green—and red-shirted maintenance and ordnance personnel; sophisticated warbirds, wings still folded vertically to conserve deck space, lumbering close aboard into position behind the sturdy jet-blast deflectors aft of each catapult, then straddling the steaming cats themselves.

      Suddenly the goggled face of my plane captain had disappeared from the side of my cockpit and was replaced by that of my squadron mate, Lieutenant Bob Renner. I knew he had just landed two cycles ago and had been debriefing his film with the Air Intelligence guys from the attack squadrons. “Beef” (he was husky) put his face close to my left ear and shouted above the din, “Jerry, the A-6 guys need to do some target planning while we’re in port. They need coverage of these areas just northwest of Vinh City.” He had thrust a folded map in front of me, several areas squared off and bisected by a dog-leg flight line—all drawn hastily with a green marking pen. “Your flight is the last chance to get what they need. Can you do it?” My own mission was to get verticals and obliques of the seemingly indestructible Than Hoa Bridge, and more verticals of military and supply areas up the river to the west. Plenty of extra time and fuel.

      Instinctively I flashed him a “thumbs-up.” “No sweat, Beef. Tell ’em it’s as good as got!” As I clipped the map beneath my own on the kneeboard strapped to my right thigh, I recalled—just for an instant— the map of that same area northwest of Vinh that I’d seen down in the briefing room. It was peppered with little red and white pins, red designating confirmed triple-A (antiaircraft artillery) sites, white the sites where they were only suspected. Okay, Coffee, I said to myself. Fly higher, faster, and “jink”—a lot. Make it hard for ’em to track you with their guns.

      I had been looking forward to the flight in any case, but now, with this new challenge, my anticipation was heightened all the more. This would be only my second flight over North Vietnam. Having joined the squadron in early January, I had flown all of my previous missions over South Vietnam or Laos. President Johnson had extended the holiday cease-fire of late ’65 through January as a gesture of goodwill to entice the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table, a recurring tactic that through the next several years would prove to be self-defeating. But on the first of February, there having been no conciliatory response from the Communists, we started hammering parts of the North again.

      My missions over South Vietnam had been productive but uneventful. I had seen flak only twice but never felt threatened. At the prospect of actually meeting resistance on this mission, my adrenal glands were already pumping a little more than usual. I noted this while carefully taxiing the big sleek Vigilante onto the starboard bow catapult, making my last few checks, and saluting my readiness to the animated Catapult Officer on the deck below me. I thrilled again at the near instantaneous surge and sharp kick of the cat shot propelling my thirty tons of warplane to 170 miles per hour in less than three seconds. It was never “routine.”

      “We’re on our way, Robert,” I had said to Bob rather rhetorically. I eased the nose up into a gradually climbing turn as the early afternoon sun slowly swept its patchwork of shadow and light from one side of the cockpit to the other.

      “Roger, Boss! Take up heading three five zero. Our rendezvous with Lion Eleven is at three four zero degrees, twenty miles, angels eighteen.”

      God, it was a sparkler of a day. The deep shining blue of the Tonkin Gulf seemed to intensify the more ethereal blue of the Southeast Asian sky. At the western horizon, where the blues would otherwise have met, ran the variegated green and brown ribbon of the North Vietnam coast. With the exception of a few low puffy clouds far to the north near China, the sky was absolutely clear. It stretched on forever. Had the earth been flat, I mused, I could have seen beyond that seemingly benign coastline to Laos, Thailand, Burma, India, perhaps across the Middle Eastern countries to the Red Sea and the eastern Mediterranean, where I had flown three or four years before on similar crystalline days and conjectured on my ability to see the Tonkin Gulf to the east . . . if the earth were flat.

      I had established a left-turn, three-mile orbit at our rendezvous point. Scanning back over my shoulder toward the ship, I picked up our escort plane visually. The F-4 Phantom jet had been launched just after us and was now climbing toward the rendezvous point. All reconnaissance planes were escorted by an armed fighter in case it should be attacked from the air. (It was also operationally prudent to fly over enemy territory in flights of two or more so that one pilot could account for the fate of the other should trouble arise.)

      Since the Phantom’s wings were level, I knew the pilot was still heading for the prearranged electronic point in the sky.

      “Lion Eleven, Green River Two. We’re at your ten o’clock, slightly higher.”

      “Roger, Greenie Two . . . I’ve got you.”

      The instant the pilot of Lion Eleven made visual contact, he altered his course to turn inside my turn but adjusting his angle of bank to just a little less than my own standard thirty degrees of bank for rendezvous. This would make his turn radius slightly greater than mine, causing him to move closer and closer to me on the inside of the circle while adjusting his throttle in tiny increments to match his own airspeed to mine.

      “Okay, Bob, he’s as good as aboard. Let’s check in on Strike Freq.”

      “Rog!”

      The VHF radio clicked through several bands of static, a fraction of another airborne conversation, and then stabilized on the check-in report of a flight of A-6 Intruders from the Hawk’s all-weather attack squadron. When they were finished, Bob checked us in.

      “Master Strike, this is Green River Two with escort at rendezvous. Over!”

      “Roger, Green River Two. Contact! You’re cleared on course. Strangle!”

      “Roger. Out!”

      I noted on my instrument panel the termination of the tiny blinking red light denoting the pulse of our IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) radar beacon as Bob “strangled our parrot,” a code