Dragon's Jaw Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2019 by Stephen P. Coonts and Barrett Tillman

  Cover design by Kerry Rubinstein.

  Cover image United States Air Force.

  Cover copyright © 2019 Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Excerpts from Rampant Raider by Stephen Gray used by permission of the United States Naval Institute.

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  Da Capo Press

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  First Edition: May 2019

  Published by Da Capo Press, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  Editorial production by Christine Marra, Marrathon Production Services.

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  Set in 12-point Dante

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018958070

  ISBN 978-0-306-90347-2 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-0-306-90346-5 (ebook)

  E3-20190329-JV-NF-ORI

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue: Full Throttle

  Map of Vietnam and Thanh Hoa Bridge

  1 “We Will Pay Any Price…”

  2 A Damned Tough Nut to Crack

  3 The First Hammer Blow

  4 “He Did Not Want Any More MiGs Shot Down”

  5 A Grim Business

  6 Enter the Navy

  7 “Unlimited Losses in Pursuit of Limited Goals”

  8 They Needed a Bigger Bang

  9 Paying the Price

  10 Fools, Drunks, and Lost Fighter Pilots

  11 Carolina Moon

  12 The Thanh Whore Bridge

  13 The Bridge Claims Another Victim

  14 “We Are Mired in a Stalemate”

  15 “Courage Is Fear That Has Said Its Prayers”

  16 Nixon and Kissinger

  17 “You Ain’t Hit the Target Yet”

  18 Back to North Vietnam

  19 Pounding the North

  20 “We Dropped the Bridge”

  21 The Violent Crescendo

  Discover More

  Photo

  Appendix

  Bibliography

  Contributors

  Notes

  Index

  TO ALL THOSE AMERICAN MILITARY AIRMEN, PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE, WHO HAVE BEEN OR WILL BE CALLED UPON TO FIGHT IN THE DEFENSE OF FREEDOM.

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  The United States should not, under any circumstances, get involved in land warfare in Southeast Asia.

  —GENERAL DAVID M. SHOUP USMC, COMMANDANT OF THE MARINE CORPS, AFTER A 1962 VISIT TO VIETNAM

  PROLOGUE

  FULL THROTTLE

  The telephone rang in the wee hours. It was the duty officer in the ready room.* Time to rise and shine for a predawn launch, still two hours away. D. D. Smith’s roommate merely grunted and turned over in his berth. As usual, Smith staggered off to the head, came back, donned his dirty flight suit—he could get another day out of it—and steel-toed boots, and retrieved his pistol and shoulder holster from the tiny safe in his desk. He closed the door to the safe and spun the combination.

  The ship was quiet—just the usual groans and creaks as she rode the back of the sea. Everyone who could grab some sack time was doing it; Smith was the only one in the passageways as he made his way to the wardroom, which was of course closed. But the stewards were cooking in the kitchen, and there was coffee—in the Navy there was always coffee. He grabbed a roll or two and coffee and headed for his squadron ready room.

  Smith’s wingman was there—unshaven, with tousled hair, sucking a cigarette and drinking coffee from the pot near the duty desk. The squadron Air Intelligence officer (AI) was chatting with the duty officer. In minutes both pilots were seated in the front row by the blackboard, learning about their mission.

  That’s the way it usually went. But one morning there was a new wrinkle.

  On the flight schedule their mission was armed recce—road reconnaissance: rocket and strafe anything moving on North Vietnam’s north-south main highway, Route One.

  The AI dropped the bomb. “A few hours ago during the night the Air Force hit the Thanh Hoa Bridge. They think they did some real damage and want the Navy to do some BDA [bomb damage assessment] at first light. You guys get the look.”

  “Why us?”

  “You’re the eyes of the fleet.”

  “How come the air farce doesn’t do their own BDA?”

  “As if I knew.”

  Smith, the flight lead, immediately foresaw serious problems with this assignment. Just amble over the Thanh Hoa Bridge? No jammers or flak suppressors? There were a hundred guns around that bridge that would shred the two A-4E Skyhawks if they got anywhere near the bridge!

  Well, they punched off the front end of the big gray boat in the predawn darkness, rendezvoused, and proceeded toward the beach. Smith had no plan on how this was going to go down. His mind was still fixated on a nice, peaceful road recce where they might shoot up a truck or maybe a road grader. His mind refused to think about getting anywhere near that bridge in their two little A-4Es. The Dragon’s Jaw Bridge at Thanh Hoa was the most heavily defended structure on the planet, surrounded by antiaircraft artillery (AAA) pieces manned by five battalions of gunners who got lots of practice. And above the envelope of the AAA were the SAMs—surface-to-air missiles.

  SAMs could be brutally effective and very lethal. The only way to avoid them was to maneuver, and that would bleed off energy and drive the target aircraft down into the flak envelope, where North Vietnamese gunners could pick them off. The old tactic of cruising into bad-guy country at sixteen to twenty thousand feet was history.

  Facing the problem, Smith decided to ingress at six to eight thousand feet, which allowed them to execute a quick dive for the deck in case of a missile launch. Yes, they were in range of flak guns at that altitude, but, hey, life’s a compromise.

  The aircraft had been retrofitted with missile-detection gear that sounded an alert when the plane was acquired by search radar, when the SAM-fire-control radar locked up an individual airplane, and when a missile was in the air being guided toward it. The sounds that came through the pilot’s earphones as each of these evolutions took place were unique—and they couldn’t have been worse if a Hollywood horror–film composer had arranged them.

  The beam of the sweeping search radar made a chirp each time it illuminated the plane, so these chirps were regular and a few seconds apart as the radar antennae made its circle on its mount. When the missile-fire-control radar locked on, the tone became loud and steady. As the pilot’s adrenaline level went into medical emergency overload, he waited… and waited… and then there it was: the tone began to cyc
le, a deedle or warble, indicating that the fire-control radar had been switched to a higher pulse repetition frequency (PRF) so as to locate you, the target, more precisely in three-dimensional space. Red lights, one on each side of the bombsight, illuminated on the glare shield above the instrument panel and said MISSILE, just in case the pilot was terminally stupid or humming an Elvis tune.

  The finale occurred when the missile had been in the air for six seconds and the first stage dropped away: the earphone tone went to a screaming warble as the detection gear picked up the actual guidance commands that the fire-control radar was sending to the missile. The red MISSILE lights on the glare shield began flashing: the SA-2 missile was supersonic now and on its way to kill you.

  That was a moment!

  To make matters worse, it was not unusual for the North Viets to launch multiple missiles or, if they wanted to kill you badly enough, multiple missiles from different launch sites, which meant the deadly things came from different directions. The defense against a missile, whether one or many, was to outmaneuver it, which cost the planes’ energy and soon had them headed for the dubious safety of Mother Earth waiting below.

  That miserable morning the two Skyhawks began their jinking routine as they approached the coast while listening to the chirp of the search radars. The dawn revealed the usual Vietnam soup-like haze: they couldn’t see crap in the early light. There was no way they could make out the details of the bridge from a reasonable distance, and overflying the bridge at three or four thousand feet would just get them killed.

  Smith could see only one option. He figured swooping out of the haze with the rising sun at his back in his corkscrewing little A-4 gave him his best chance. Maybe he could surprise the North Vietnamese gun crews while they ate their breakfast of rice balls and fish heads or whatever. This was probably not a very bright idea, as the bridge defenders were undoubtedly on alert, waiting for an American plane to come motoring by to assess the effect of last night’s strike. The Americans were as predictable as the tides—they always sent a plane or two after an attack to do damage assessment. The Viet gunners had only to wait until the sucker showed up.

  Yet that was the only idea Smith had. He gulped down a deep breath, detached his wingman, and told him to keep him in sight. He pitched off at about eight thousand feet and headed downhill at full throttle. About a mile or so short of the bridge he leveled at fifty feet above the Ma River while going about 650 miles per hour. So far, so good.

  Uh oh, some tracers. Holy Crap! Lots of tracers—and some geysers in the water ahead of him! He was jinking as best he could while flat on the deck, and the bridge was coming up fast.

  Smith pitched the nose up, rolled inverted, and flew over the bridge for a good look—leaning his head back and getting an unobstructed view of the bridge through the top of the canopy. The Dragon’s Jaw was still standing in all its majesty. He saw no damage at all.

  Jinking like a wild man, he flew his adrenalin-drenched, pounding heart out of there as the guns hammered. Muzzle flashes and tracers strobed the gray morning haze like hot embers ejected from hell. Only every sixth or seventh shell was a tracer, so there were six or seven times more explosive shells in the air than he saw. Any one of them could finish him, send him on to whatever was afterward. Then…

  Miraculously, he was out of it.

  Out over the ocean his wingman was waiting.

  Later, at the flight debrief back on the big gray boat, Smith asked him if he had had any trouble keeping lead in sight. “Oh,” he said, “I lost you right away in the haze, but I could tell exactly where you were by watching the tracers converge.”

  * Adapted from Above Average, an Autobiography, by Commander D. D. Smith, USN (Ret) 2012, unpublished, used by permission of the author.

  CHAPTER 1

  “WE WILL PAY ANY PRICE…”

  Bridges are the tangible products of the advance of a civilization that urges people to pool their resources and join together to construct a permanent way over a watercourse or chasm not only for their use but also the use of those who will come after them. When war comes, as it often does, bridges become the focal point of military strategy to exploit, defend, or destroy.

  Military history is full of bridges: Xerxes’ boat bridge across the Hellespont in 480 BC, Horatius at the Tiber bridge, Scottish hero William Wallace at Stirling in 1297, the Old North Bridge at Concord, Burnside’s Bridge at Antietam, “the bridge too far” across the lower Rhine at Arnhem, the Ludendorff Bridge across the Rhine at Remagen—to mention just a few. Battles for bridges have determined the outcomes of campaigns and the fate of empires.

  French colonial administrators in what was then French Indochina in the late nineteenth century were determined to build a rail network in Vietnam to tie the country together, and bridges were a key part of that plan. The Long Bien Bridge in Hanoi was named after the French colonial administrator Paul Doumer (Du-MAY), under whose administration the work was begun. It was completed in 1902, and for a time its mile-long cantilever design was the longest span in Asia.

  Eighty miles south of that the French built another bridge across the Ma River (Song Ma) that, from time immemorial, people and livestock had crossed in small boats, or sampans. French engineers decided that the best place to bridge the river was nine miles inland from the Tonkin Gulf, a site three miles northeast of the provincial capital of Thanh Hoa, where the river flowed between a jagged limestone ridge on its west side and a small hillock on the east. The river gorge was about fifty feet deep. The Vietnamese who lived nearby thought these geological features looked like bones on the sides of a dragon’s jaw, so that became the popular name for the location and where the French built their bridge. Completed in 1904, the Cau Ham Rong, or the Dragon’s Jaw Bridge, was a single span of 532 feet, a double-steel arch with vertical beams supporting the deck.

  After France surrendered to Germany in World War II, a pro-Axis Vichy French regime took over in Indochina, one that cooperated with the Japanese. Japanese troops occupied the country, which they probably would have done regardless of whether the French cooperated.

  In 1945 the Vietnamese resistance, the Viet Minh, looking for a way to interrupt Japanese-Vichy logistics, decided to destroy the bridge at Thanh Hoa. Popular legend has it that they hijacked two locomotives, loaded them with explosives, and set them racing to crash head-on in the center of the bridge. Whatever the truth may be, an explosion did indeed destroy the bridge.

  After World War II a new French government sent administrators and troops to reclaim their lost colony, only to run into a whirlwind of Vietnamese partisans. The war dragged on until 1954, when the French army was massively defeated at Dien Bien Phu. In 1954 a multination Geneva Convention divided Vietnam at the 17th parallel of latitude. President Diem refused to recognize the division, claiming that fair elections were impossible in the Communist north, a claim that was indubitably true. An estimated one million Vietnamese moved south of the 17th parallel, and Hanoi began supporting Communist guerillas in the south.

  The fact that the Vietnamese partisans in the north were avowed Communists, led by a longtime Communist named Ho Chi Minh and supported by the Communist governments of China and the Soviet Union, was political poison in the United States. Despite the fact that Vietnam, a tropical backwater of rice paddies and mosquitos with a subsistence economy, was literally on the other side of the world from the United States, the conventional wisdom in the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations was that its fate was tied to all of Indochina and, ultimately, Indonesia and Australia. At the height of the Cold War no administration, Democrat or Republican, could afford to be called “soft on Communism.” The Eisenhower and then Kennedy administrations gave money and military assistance to the South Vietnamese government after the Geneva agreements of 1954.

  In 1957, twelve years after World War II ended and three years after Vietnam’s partition into North and South, the Communist regime in Hanoi decided to rebuild the Thanh Hoa Bridge across the Ma River. The
decision to rebuild the rail and road network along the coast that linked the nation—north or north-and-south combined—together was absolutely inevitable. The new structure was built in precisely the same location, the Dragon’s Jaw, as the old bridge destroyed by the Viet Minh in 1945. It was largely designed by Nguyen Dinh Doan, a structural engineer.

  Some Westerners considered the bridge overengineered and overbuilt; certainly it was up to the task. Two steel truss spans met in the middle of the river on a massive, oval-shaped, reinforced concrete pier measuring sixteen feet across at the narrowest point. The cantilever spans from both banks were affixed to concrete abutments anchored against the bridge’s limestone ridge on the west and the hillock on the opposite bank, and the “free ends” met on the concrete pier. These free ends were moveable due to the stresses and natural flexing of the structure. Fifty-six feet wide, the bridge supported a narrow-gauge railway track with concrete roadways on either side. The bottom of the structure measured about fifty feet above the surface of the river at normal flow. The French design had been elegant; the Vietnamese was practical and designed to carry more traffic. Like the French bridge, the structure was oriented east and west, a location dictated by the natural channel of the river. The railroad approaches on both ends were about two miles in length.1

  The North Vietnamese worked on the bridge for seven years, finishing it in 1964. Although the first train had crossed on May 15, the bridge was dedicated on President Ho Chi Minh’s seventy-fourth birthday, May 19. The Dragon’s Jaw Bridge represented North Vietnam’s emerging status in the region and was a source of national pride above the 17th parallel. Although President Ho was not there, the Vietnamese politburo was well represented at the dedication ceremonies. The luminaries included Prime Minister Pham Van Dong, Deputy Prime Minister Le Thanh Nghi, and other Communist officials, including the ministers of transportation and heavy and light industry and the first secretary of the youth central committee. Communist propaganda organs pulled out all the stops: newspapers all over the North trumpeted the brilliant work of engineers, factory workers, laborers, and, above all, the superb leadership of the Communist Party in bringing this grand national achievement to fruition.