Operation Thunderhead Read Free

Hanoi, going downtown, cost the United States Air Force 124 F-105 Thuds during 1966. Nearly four hundred of the aircraft were lost during the air war over Vietnam, almost half of the F-105s ever made.
    On April 2, 1967, Captain John Dramesi, flying under the call sign “Lover Lead,” climbed into the cockpit of his F-105D for his fifty-ninth Thud mission over Vietnam. The target was a truck park near Package One, the area around Ba Don in the North Vietnamese province of Quang Binh. The bombing mission was to be conducted in two flights of four aircraft each and a single flight of two aircraft. Dramesi would be leading the single flight of two aircraft, with Ken Gurry as his wingman.
    The ordnance load for the attack would have ordinarily been a half-dozen M117 750-pound bombs carried on a single multiple ejector rack (MER) along the bottom of the fuselage. That bomb load added up to 2¼ tons of “smash.” That was enough ordnance to do considerable damage to a carpark or any jungle target, especially when multiplied by the ten aircraft making up the three flights.
    Locating the target area, Dramesi and his wingman turned in on their bomb run. The rest of the flights had made their attacks and the target area had been pretty well saturated. Pulling away from the area, Dramesi called for permission to conduct an attack on a secondary target.
    Each of the Thuds was armed with an M61 Vulcan cannon and more than 1,000 rounds of 20mm ammunition to feed it. The six rotating barrels of the cannon could put out that high-explosive ammunition at a rate of one hundred rounds per second. That load of ammunition and the M61 Vulcan cannon would be more than enough to conduct an armed reconnaissance of a road northwest of Dong Hoi. The location where the road ran was known to be a staging area for enemy strikes into the border area between North and South Vietnam.
    Having received permission for their secondary target, the two Thuds in the flight were heading up the valley where the road was located, moving at a speed of over 575 miles an hour. The speed wasn’t defense enough from the enemy in the jungle below.
    The North Vietnamese were quite adequately using what was available for air defense. It wasn’t sophisticated; it wasn’t high-tech. It was simple and brutal. Barrage fire from 37- and 57-millimeter cannons pumped as much high-explosive ammunition as they could into the air ahead of the moving jets. Often enough, the speeding aircraft simply passed through the rain of steel coming up at them.
    Dramesi heard two or three loud distinct booms, and suddenly his plane was shuddering as it tried to stay in the sky. Gurry’s words came in over Dramesi’s radio. “Lover Lead, your wing tanks are gone, and you have fire in your tail.”
    Dramesi’s F-105D had been hit by some of the dense cannon fire coming up from the jungle below. He was at 2,500 feet and moving fast as his canopy filled with smoke and the plane started coming apart. Grabbing at the handles that controlled his ejection seat, he pulled them up and squeezed the triggers. The canopy blew away from the plane as the ejection seat rocketed into the air, up and away from the stricken plane.

[CHAPTER 2]
    FEAR
    A soldier—anyone serving in the military—has a lot to fear from time to time. Just the nature of their jobs means that soldiers work with materials and objects intended to kill people and destroy things. In combat, a soldier has a fear of being killed or wounded. This is a normal, healthy thing; it is the fight-or-flight reaction built well within all of us, deep in the basic survival centers of our brains.
    In spite of that fear, members of the military have to train long and hard to be able to function in a combat situation. Soldiers have to be able to use their weapons, move, and communicate. Sailors have to operate machinery that makes their ships such great fighting machines. And pilots have to work in an