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Show America’s top air ace, Col. Robin Olds, relives his toughest ‘I Fought to Come @eeeaoaeveene0e2e2e2eeeen 480 knots and weaved through valleys and over hills. We were taking small-arms fire. Actually, they were shooting down at us from rocks and hills. Five miles from target, we were going through solid sheets of tracer, a sky full of black smudges. I took two hits in my right wing, and the fuel and smoke poured out. My wing man took « piece of flak through the canopy. But we combat. HE THAI NGUYENsteelmills lie north of Hanoi, a bustling industrial complex ringed by one of the most con- centrated antiaircraft gun emplacements in history. To hit the steel mills, American bomberpilots must fly through a wal! of exploding steel. For most of 1966 and early 1967, the generals at 7th Air Force headquarters in Saigon puzzled over this wall of steel. Then they decided to try an experiment. They named the experiment “Falstaff” and called in the hottest fighter pilot in Vietnam, Col. Robin Olds, commander of the Air Force’s best-known MIG killers, “The Wolfpack” (the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing). The plan, they explained to the Colonel, was simple. Since the flak was so bad around Thai Nguyen at standard attack altitude, why not send in one flight of fighter bombers in a sneak attack “on the deck”—at 20 to 50 feet. Colonel Olds’ gray-blue eyes opened wide. He quietly remarked that the terraia of North Vietnam was a bit mountainous. The generals quietly suggested that Olds, one of the founders of the first Air Force jet acrobatic team, was probably the best pilot in Vietnam for the job. There didn’t seem much else for Olds. to say after that. Several mornings later, he and two other pilots found themselves in mosquito-nosed F-4 Phantom jets, roaring off the runway of Ubon Royal Thai Air Base, where Olds and “The Wolfpack” were stationed, and heading North. This is how Colonel Olds described the mission in an exclusive interview with FAMILY WEEKLY. “The weather was lousy, plenty of clouds and rainstorms, and we were flying primarily on instruments. The North Vietnamese were busy. On our radarscopes, we could see they had spot- ted us and were sending up SAMs (surface-toair missiles). We just prayed the SAMs wouldn't lock onto us as we felt our way over the moun- tains and down. At 800 feet, we broke through the overcast. There was the Red River below us. “Now we dropped down to 50 feet doing about Family Weekly, February 25, 1968 pressed on. I was going to put our bombs on target—even if I had to take the flight right into the blast furnaces. “Locked on target, we made our run over the mills. Bombs off! We banked hardleft, glanced back at the swirling smoke and debris over the target, and then headed home weaving through that wall of flak. I was still losing fuel. When wefinally rendezvoused with the SAC fuel tanker and hooked up, I had one minute and 15 sec- onds of fuelleft.” Colonel!Olds tells the story of “Falstaff” dryly and with a certain bitterness. Like many Air Force officers, he believes that no one back home quite understands the air war over the North. eee ee eeeeeeee & 6 our, he himself has emerged as one of the bestknown heroes of the Vietnam war. Heis credited with shooting down four MIGs, which makes him the top air ace of the war. (Officially, a fighter pilot needs five “kills” to be designated “‘ace,” but Olds’ lifetime score also includes 24 planes destroyed during World War II, which makes him an ace in anybody's record hook.) Olds fought in Vietnam through most of 1967, flew 148 combat sorties, and then returned to the States to be Commandant of Cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo. The Colonel brings to his new job a kind of old-fashioned flamboyant bravado. A tall, handsome man with bull-like shoulders and thinning, grey hair, Olds, at 45, prides himself on being a hard-headed fighter pilot who speaks his mind even if it hurts his career. “You had to see him when he took over ‘The Wolfpack’ at Ubon,” one of his fellow officers recalls. “He made it instantly clear that they were ‘his gang.’ It’s a tough war over there. If you're a pilot, you climb into your jet, take off, fight, “This isn’t like Korea—dogfights with MIGs make it back if you can, eat, sleep, and then mixing it with Sabre jets,” says Olds. “There's no glamour. The nameof the game is bombing fight again. Robin Olds believes in this war, and he gave a lot of men out there a reason forfighting. He was always there in the middle of the flak with them, and they trusted him.” Olds always wanted to be a fighter pilot. His father was a career officer and pioneered in the development of the B-17s. Olds, who grew up at sorties, and the North Vietnamese pay us back brutally—800 planes down at last count. Last Easter Sunday when most good Americans were going to church, I was somewhere over the North with seven MIGs on mytail and a load of bombs that wouldn’t jettison. That day and every day Langley Field in Virginia, likes to tell people 1 fought just to come back alive.” Despite Colonel Olds’ disclaimers about glam- that his first memories “were the cough of old Liberty engines in the hangars nearby.” Olds leads his “Wolfpack” from a briefing. The toughest jobs over North Vietnam went to his gang. x |