Beyond Survival. Gerald Coffee

radar monitors a bigger and more defined blip on their scopes than necessary.

      By now Lion Eleven had slid smoothly out of his own radius of turn, hesitated briefly just off my port wing, and crossed under to my starboard side. There he took up a comfortable cruise position on the outside of the turn and slightly aft.

      As my compass pointer swung to a heading of two nine zero degrees, I eased my wings level. Lion Eleven matched me. Ahead, the tranquil coast stretched out on either side. At the Than Hoa River delta, the overall S-curve of the entire Vietnam coast ran close to true north and south. There, just a small course correction to my left and now at a slant range of about twenty-five miles lay our first reconnaissance target. I repositioned the folded map on my kneeboard to put west at the top, matching the scheme of the world ahead of me.

      I noted the flight line drawn on the other map clipped below this one. There had been no time to brief my escort pilot on the additional requirement. Mission security and radio discipline precluded informing him now. I knew he would wonder what the hell was going on when I deviated from our prebriefed flight plan, but he’d stick with me. That was his mission. I’d explain later over a cup of coffee in the Ready Room. Hell, I had thought magnanimously, I’ll buy him a drink at the Peninsula’s bar our first afternoon in Hong Kong.

      The mission went like clockwork. Since there had been hardly any cloud cover over the lower half of North Vietnam, I had bracketed the husky steel and concrete bridge the way I had taught so many others as a recce training instructor in Florida. The actual targets for the attack boys had been less distinct, but I had flown the line and was sure of the coverage from my panoramic horizon-to-horizon camera. Although I had seen no flak, I had jinked frequently during the entire time I was over land, changing directions slightly with high G-turns often enough to keep any gunners from tracking me. Then, heading back toward the coast, my F-4 Phantom fighter escort spewing black smoke as he tried to catch up, I felt it. WHUMP! Hit!

      It happened so fast—no flak or tracers, no warning! After the hit somewhere back in the aft part of the plane, I had felt a light vibration followed by the illumination of my master warning light. Uh-oh! Red hydraulic #1 light ON. Red hydraulic #2 light ON. Red hydraulic utility light ON. I pushed the throttles forward now to afterburner to get maximum speed toward the relative safety of the Gulf. Thu-thump. The burners lit off and, with a light fuel load remaining, the effect of their thrust was multiplied, pushing me back against the contour of my ejection seat as the Vigilante shot forward and slightly upward.

      “Hit! I think we just took a hit!” I knew damn well we’d taken a hit, but years of being Top Gun-cool had tempered the alarm in my voice. Bob had heard my radio transmission and would be giving me a heading back toward the ship. The vibration had become heavier and the control stick sluggish. Still accelerating, the plane suddenly rolled to the left. Control stick stiff—no effect. Jammed right rudder pedal. Left roll stopped but then immediate right roll. Left rudder—no effect.

      Instinctively I reached for the yellow T-handle protruding from the side panel of the console near my right knee. I yanked it out sharply and felt the clunk of the two-in-one emergency generator and hydraulic pump extending into the wind stream from the starboard side of the fuselage. The wind-driven turbine pump should have regained the hydraulic pressure to my essential flight controls. Still no effect. Whatever had hit us must have severed both flight-control hydraulic lines, spilling all the precious fluid. Even with the emergency pump extended, with no fluid, there was no pressure. Still rolling, I tried to muscle the control stick into effectiveness.

      Nothing! No control! Sky—land—sky—land—ocean. The nose had dropped now and we had picked up more speed. “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!” Rolling rapidly! Speed 680! Red lights flashing! No more sky ahead, only the shimmering blue gulf spinning in front like a propeller. Christ! “Eject, Bob! Eject! Eject! Eject!”

      I noticed that the water all around me was green now, bright chartreuse green. My dye-marker had come loose from its pocket on my torso harness. That should certainly make my position more visible from the air? The air! I scanned the ocean horizon to my right and there, as if materialized by my thought of rescue from the air, was an old UF Albatross sea-rescue plane. He was heading north just a couple of miles out to sea. Hey, fella, I know you must be looking for me! Here I am! Here I am!

      Instinctively, I pulled my day/night signal flare from its pocket. The ring on the “day” end of the flare had to be snapped down hard over the edge of the tubular flare itself. This would break the seal so the ring could be pulled smartly away, igniting the flare and causing thick, bright orange smoke to billow forth. It could be seen for miles. The lumbering Albatross, my rescuer, droned on.

      I struggled with the ring on the flare. I couldn’t hold onto the flare and also snap the ring down with only one hand. My right arm and hand just refused to participate. The seaplane continued northward, expanding the distance between us. Frantically, I tried to smack the ring of the flare against the hard surface of my helmet but just couldn’t get the right angle. “Turn around!” I shouted. “Over here!” He was barely a speck above the horizon now. With a final desperate bash against my helmet, the flare flipped from my hand, plopped into the water, and sank.

      The loss of the flare caught me off guard. I had ignited flares a dozen times in training exercises, and once for real after ejecting from a crippled jet on a training mission over southern Georgia. Yet, throw in one variable—my disabled arm—and it was a whole new ballgame. Fixing upon the spot in the sky where the Albatross had disappeared, I suppressed my rising panic. I inventoried my remaining options, touching the pocket of my torso harness where each flare was stowed. I had my signal mirror and my spring-activated pencil flare gun, either of which could be operated with one hand the instant I caught sight of the next rescue craft. Somehow, even in this confused state of mind, I immediately realized that just because my primary and most natural course of action had been thwarted, I had resisted the paralysis of anger or shock and moved on to other possibilities. This was a principle inculcated by training and one that would serve me well in the immediate future.

      The eerie stillness of both water and air enhanced the dreamlike aspects of my predicament. Indeed, as if echoing back out of some sheet-soaking nightmare came my urgent call—ordering yet also imploring: “Eject, Bob! Eject! Eject!”

      Had he made it out of our doomed Vigilante too? Had the interconnect system between my ejection seat and his worked? I visualized the initiation of my own ejection activating the process of each little cartridge firing properly in series sending hot gases through the winding, bending lines to ignite the next cartridge, and the next. One caused the entire seat to pre-position for ejection, another activated the complex arm and leg restraining system, another activated a larger charge that blew the heavy cockpit canopy open and away, and finally the cartridge that activated the biggy—the seat rocket itself—propelling seat and parachute and Bob up and out of the plane, all a split-second before the same ingenious sequence had propelled my own seat out. A similar pyromechanical system would then deploy the drogue chute, braking seat and man to a speed allowing safe opening of the main chute without shredding, then a charge to instantly inflate the rubber bladders in the seat back, thereby popping the airman out and away from the seat to avoid entanglement between seat and chute. Finally, a barometrically activated cartridge deploying the main chute drogue and then the main itself.

      All of this I reviewed in a few seconds almost as a backdrop for my immediate concern: Where was Bob?

      SPWAT-TING! Something smacked the water a few yards away. SPLOCK! Off to the seaward. SPLAT! SPLAT! ZINNNG! The rippled surface exploded in two tall geysers ahead of me, and zinging sounds trailed off to my right. Instinctively, I twisted myself to the left, toward the shore. The puffs of blue-gray smoke hovered in the still air above the approaching boat. Now more flashes and smoke off to the right: another boat. THWACK! THWAP! THWAP! The spray flew around me. TZNNNG! TZINNNG! More flashes from the left: still another boat. Bullets whined above my head and fell into the water all around me, some skipping off the surface and going farther out to sea. Four boats were coming toward me, all very low in the water, each with a crowd of semiuniformed gunners. My instant picture was of rag-tag khaki and greenish clothing, some steel helmets, some pith helmets with camouflage material; they were probably mostly militia.

      The