These pods led to a whole new way of flying bombing attacks. Instead of flying in at low level, where a pilot would be vulnerable to AAA, he’d come in at 15,000 or 20,000 feet in what was called a pod formation. When the North Vietnamese tried to make out what their radars were picking up, all they could see was a blob—not an individual aircraft they could lock onto and attack. The Air Force liked this idea and implemented it. Before long, the pods began to have a good effect over the skies of Vietnam.

A second response, meanwhile, came from a small company in California, Applied Technology Incorporated. ATI suggested a radar signal receiver mounted on an aircraft that would allow the aircraft to locate SAM radars on the ground, then tell the pilot the radar’s status—searching for a target, locking onto a potential target, preparing to fire, or just having fired a missile at a target—and it could tell the pilot if he was the target.

The Air Force also liked this idea, and ATI produced prototype black boxes for testing. Then they found a few experienced fighter pilots from TAC, such as Gary Willard and Al Lamb, and bomber EWOs (electronic weapons officers—the people who operate the black boxes) from SAC, such as Jack Donovan. (Most bomber EWOs had never been near a fighter, but they were schooled both in the ways of SAMs and of the black boxes that helped bombers penetrate Russian SAM defenses.) These people flew the black boxes in two-seat F-100s at Eglin AFB, Florida, and proved that they could find radars whenever they were turned on, no matter how much they were camouflaged.

The next step came in 1966, when black box-equipped F-100s were deployed to Southeast Asia and sent into North Vietnam. Al Lamb and Jack Donovan, flying one of these F-100s, killed the first SA-2 site (with rockets and strafing; later Weasels used a mix of Shrike radar-homing missiles, 20mm cannon, cluster bombs, general-purpose bombs, and sometimes, high-velocity rockets). Unfortunately, the F-100s were slow and vulnerable when flying in the heavy defenses over North Vietnam and took too many losses. As a result, this initial cadre of Wild Weasels returned to Nellis, and ATI built even newer black boxes for F-105s, which greatly improved their radar detection system. Since F-105s had a crude heads-up display, ATI could install antennas on the nose of the aircraft, and a red dot was projected on the pilot’s gun sight that showed the location of the SAM radar on the ground. F-105s also carried more munitions, and they were faster and more survivable than the first F-100 Weasels.