On April 6, during a strike at Vinh, in North Vietnam, two North Vietnamese MiG-17s had shot down two F-105s, numbers one and two in a flight of four.

The flight had been holding south of the target awaiting another flight to clear the area. As they waited, the flight leader let the formation get slow: The Thuds were loafing along at about 350 knots, and they were bomb-laden, and thus clumsy and vulnerable. To make matters worse, the two elements became separated by a couple of miles, though they were still in visual contact.

Dick Pearson, who had been number three in the flight, had looked up and watched in horror as the two MiGs slid in between the formations, and then each MiG blew an F-105 out of the air. He and his wingman immediately jettisoned their bombs and tanks and went after the MiGs, but they dove for the deck and escaped. Pearson and his wingman then returned to the scene of the shoot-down and started a RESCAP (Rescue CAP)—circling the area and looking for chutes or flares and listening for beepers.

What the commanders in Washington wanted to know was how a couple of ignorant Third World peasants flying two vintage MiGs could take out two supersonic, state-of-the-art American jets. The answer was no surprise to Horner, no more than to the two pilots who were about to get laid out on the carpet in Washington. However, it was not welcome information to the commanders in Washington: Fighter pilot training during previous years had concentrated on nuclear delivery, and now the pilots were fighting a conventional war. Such incidents were bound to happen.

The MiG story, of course, came as a shock to Horner, but then he simply passed the North Vietnamese success off to a flight leader mistake. In fact, he was right up to a point. The flight leader had let his formation get too slow; and he hadn’t made sure that everyone in the flight was alert to intruders. He had let himself fall into stateside gunnery range habits, where one tended to concentrate on spacing rather than combat alertness. On Horner’s first mission, he remembers that his own pull-off from the target was not all that aggressive. Aggression came fast, however, when he noticed the orange golf balls passing his canopy and all the black puffs with orange centers of smoke between him and the number one aircraft.