★ Though not everyone bought the ECM concept, the ECM pods were also proving their worth. The people at Ta Khli Base, for example, were suspicious of them and were still flying low-level tactics, even after two years of deadly lessons to the contrary. (For a time, Ta Khli was bereft of Wild Weasels, all of them from that base having been shot down; the Weasels from Korat had to take over some of their work until more could be sent from the States.)

However, the wing commander at Korat, Brigadier General Bill Chairasell, decided that losses at low level were too high and ordered his pilots to try out the new pods and fly the required four-ship pod formation. Each aircraft had to fly so many feet from each other and so many feet above or below his leader, so the four ships filled a box of airspace about 4,000 feet across by 1,000 feet long and 1,500 feet deep. Though using the pods and flying in this formation left the North Vietnamese radar operators unable to discern individual aircraft on their radarscopes, and gave them insufficient accuracy in their systems to hit anything with the missiles they shot, that didn’t stop them from trying. They sent up their missiles into the blobs on their screens. They came close, but they didn’t hit. And this meant some jittery moments for the pilots up there, cruising along at 15,000 to 20,000 feet above the ground in their rigid formation, feeling naked to the SAMs, sweating it out if their pods would really work or not, only finding out when the missile would fly harmlessly by. Not only did flying the pod formation require extreme discipline, but flying it was a pure act of faith; yet it worked. Soon, because of Bill Chairasell’s leadership and the use of pod formation and the Weasels, losses at Korat took a nosedive, and “There ain’t no way” became “There is a way.”

Did all of this make a real difference? In some ways, yes. Flying became safer for U.S. pilots. They had better targets—steel mills, bridges in Hanoi, SAM storage areas, and other targets in Hanoi and Haiphong. Later they had a few precision, laser-guided bombs, which also helped. Later still, Richard Nixon’s Linebacker II campaign late in 1972 sent B-52s over Hanoi, and mined Haiphong Harbor. The B-52s put terror into the North Vietnamese as no previous U.S. effort had done, and gave notice to the Russians and Chinese that nothing in North Vietnam was immune to U.S. bombing.

But did any of this make a real difference? Obviously no.

LAST RITES

The war in Vietnam had many unexpected consequences, and many of them were surprisingly positive. Here, in his words, is how the war ended for Chuck Horner: