| Story by Robin
Olds Brig Gen, USAF (Ret)Like a brooding hen, she squats half asleep over her clutch of eggs. Her tail feathers droop and her beak juts forward belligerently. Her back looks humped and her wing tips splay upward. Sitting there, she is not a thing of beauty. Far from it. But she is my F-4, and her nest is a steel revetment—her eggs 6, M-117, 750-pound bombs. This avian has fangs—very unbirdlike. They nestle under her belly and cling to her wings. She is ready to go, and so am I. She receives me and my  backseater, and we become a part of her as we attach ourselves
to her with straps and hoses and plugs and connectors. A surge of juice and a blast of
compressed air and she come alive. We are as one—tied together—the machine an
extension of the man—her hydraulics my muscles—her sensors my eyes—her
mighty engines my power.
She screams and complains as we move through shimmering heat waves
along an endless expanse of concrete. Final checks, then her nose pointed down nearly 2
miles of runway, and we are ready. Throttles forward, then outboard—THUMP,
THUMP—the afterburners kick in. Now my bird roars and accelerates rapidly toward her
release from mother earth, leaving a thunder behind that rattles windows and shakes the
insides of those who watch.
I look over at my wingmen as we climb effortlessly toward a
rendezvous with our tanker. All is well with them, and I marvel again at the
transformation of our ugly duckling into a thing of graceful beauty—yet she’s
businesslike and menacing, thrusting forward and upward with deadly purpose.
Refueling done, we drop off and lunge forward, gathering speed for this day’s task. We hurtle across the Black, then the Red Rivers, pushing our Phantoms to the limit of power without using afterburners, weaving and undulating so as not to present a steady target for the gunners below. Then a roil of dust down to our left, and the evil white speck of a surface-to-air missile rises to meet us. We wait and watch. That missile is steady on an intercept course, and we know we are the target. Then, on signal, we start down. |
The missile follows—and now HARD DOWN—stick full
forward—the negative G forces hanging us in our straps. The missile dives to follow,
and at a precise moment we PULL, PULL—as hard as we can—the positive Gs now
slamming us into our seats with crushing force. Our heavy bird with its load of bombs
responds with a prolonged shudder, and we are free for the moment, the missile passing
harmlessly below, unable to follow our maneuver. On
to the target—weaving, moving up and down, leaving the bursts of heavy flak off to
the side or down below. The F-4 is solid, responsive, heeding my every demand quickly and
smoothly. We reach the roll-in point and go inverted, pulling her nose down, centering the
target in the combining glass as we roll into our 70-degree |
dive
toward the release point. My Phantom plunges toward the earth through an almost solid wall
of bursting flak. Then "PICKLE!" And the bird leaps as her heavy load separates
and we pull with all our force around to our egress heading.