Excerpt of The Plain of Jars by N. Lombardi Jr

PROLOGUE Laos 1969

“It takes twenty years or more of peace to make a man; it takes only twenty seconds of war to destroy him.”

Baudouin I, King of Belgium, Address to joint session of U.S. Congress, 12 May 1959

Nothing that extraordinary really. Those things were known to happen. After all, there was a war going on.

Nevertheless, when he heard that firsthand account of what it was like to get blown out of the sky, it managed to unsettle him. It must have been just two or three days after he had shifted over to Eighth Tactical. He had walked into the Rec Room, where a serious card game was supposedly going on, though all the players had already put their cards face down on the table, absorbed in the narration of a highly animated second lieutenant in a leather bomber jacket who was standing over them.

“With death staring you in the face, you’re suddenly stunned at your own mortality,” the pilot was saying, “like, for the first time, you really grasp that it could all end here and now. And everything that’s in your life, I mean everything, changes in a fucking flash of a moment…But the funny thing, and I know you’re gonna say I’m full of shit, was…well, I could feel it, feel it coming, even before I got into the cockpit…”

The story ran on, but he had forgotten the rest of the details the young officer had so vigorously depicted. In fact, First Lieutenant Andrew Kozeny had intended to forget the whole damn thing, deeming it best not to even consider the possibility, to give no thought at all to such a disagreeable scenario, as this was the best way to rid himself of doubt and fear, emotions that tended to get in the way of what a pilot had to do.

Wanting to forget is one thing, but actually forgetting is another, for the mission briefing at 0400, only a few weeks later, reminded him of that episode in the Rec Room, and did indeed present the prospect that something dicey might happen on the next scheduled sortie. To begin with, the reconnaissance photos were practically useless. It wasn’t merely the cloud cover that perpetually veiled the mountains of northern Laos, since that was something all the pilots had long been resigned to, but the images were made even more hopeless by a frantic blur, caused by the erratic maneuvering of the RF-101 Pathfinder that had taken the snaps, and which was desper- ately evading a hell of a lot of unexpected flak at the time. The recon mission had to be aborted, and the location of the anti-aircraft artillery couldn’t be adequately resolved solely from the recollec- tions of the pilot. Therefore, the only logical recourse they had to protect the bombers, as outlined by the flight commander, was to use bait to make the enemy show themselves. The F-105 Wild Weasel, the plane that Kozeny was assigned to fly, had electronic sensors to detect the radar that the AA guns used for tracking hostile aircraft, and thus it was the typical lure to expose the enemy’s defenses, although a heavily armed one: the bomb racks under the wings held twelve 750-lb. bombs, as well as a couple of 2.75-inch rockets, and two CBU-2A cluster bombs. Kozeny’s part of this mission, along with his Electronics Warfare Officer and three other F-105 crews, was to get the bearing and range of the enemy radar, and knock out the gun emplacements so that the next six flights of bombers could come in without risk.

This wasn’t the first time Kozeny had flown flak suppression in a Wild Weasel, although the missions he had flown over North Vietnam were tempered by better intelligence and more discernible targets; not such a blind run as this one. But that wasn’t the only thing stirring his doubt.

Actually, the thing that was gnawing inside him was a facet of the mission that had little to do with his own tactical responsibilities: the bombing targets, if there were really any to speak of, were poorly defined.

The exercise was part of ‘Operation Rain Dance‘ with the objective of retaking the Plain of Jars, this particular mission being a retaliatory strike near Ban Ban. The 7/13 Air Force at Udon was busier than hell, especially the Tactical Fighter Squadrons with over three hundred sorties a day. The Intelligence and Operations briefing had told of a general concentration of troops in the target area, and the bombers would be flying a free-strike zone, loosely guided by the Airborne Command and Control plane circling high above them at 35,000 feet. At other times, release would be at the discretion of each individual Weapons Officer. In plain and simple terms, the idea was to pulverize the area, so that the Special Guerilla Units of General Vang Pao could come in and clear it on the ground.

The only features that Kozeny could clearly make out on the recon photos were the huts of a couple of small villages, and a structure he guessed to be a makeshift temple. But he knew that even if nothing of worth was visible, the bombers had to drop their munitions somewhere, and it bothered him that there was no prede- termined fixed target for unused ordnance at the end of a sweep. There was no way that a plane would risk landing with armed weapons—they had to dump them. “What about civilians?” someone had asked. “No problem,” was the response, which could be interpreted to mean that they were the same as the enemy.

This aspect of the mission disturbed him, prodding him uncom- fortably with a reminder of the letter he had just received from Cynthia, a letter that couldn’t have come at a worse moment. Then again, if only he had never decided upon this second tour, maybe he wouldn’t have lost her.

If only…

If only he knew what would be happening on the ground in the little village that lay in the middle of the target area, just as the planes would be nearing their specified coordinates. Old Man Souvanna would be at the market shopping around for high quality areca nuts, spending endless amounts of time inspecting them before committing to purchase. Young Keo, with a bamboo switch in his hand, would be taking the buffaloes to pasture alongside his father. Boon-mee would be heading home after fetching water, the large earthen pot on her head threatening to topple her frail, diminutive body. And 19-year-old Jita would be skipping through the fields with thoughts of romance in her head, ecstatic over the hibiscus flower that her beau had just given her.

If only…

But it was too late—he was airborne, gazing at the gray, cloud- filled horizon ahead of him. He looked down below at a hazy patchwork of forested mountains and bare vertical cliffs that flaunted an unspoken menace. Kozeny then put his mind on the mission, alternately glancing out of the cockpit to key on his flight leader, ahead and to his left, and then at his Heads Up Display, the HUD, a hologram beamed into the air to his right reflecting his most salient meters and gauges. With this projected image, the pilot averted the need to look down at the actual dials— looking inside the cockpit could induce vertigo and cause a fatal collision.

Airspeed 650 knots, altitude 14,000 ft…looking out, sighting the leader, then glimpsing right at the HUD; leader, HUD, leader, HUD, all the while intuitively perceiving and adjusting the proper motions of his aircraft.

There was an orange haze, eerily beautiful, as the sun came up in a mist, shooting its rays to the heavens...

“Whoa! Oyster 2, got a beep!” called out his backseater, Lt. David Lewis, the Electronic Weapons Officer. “Triple A frequency, bearing zero-one-zero, range 7000!” His voice betrayed a buoyant excitement. Kozeny as well experienced a giddy rush of adrenaline, since the both of them had expected the typical North Vietnamese maneuver of turning on the artillery radar at the last minute, too late for the electronic countermeasures of the Weasels to be effective, and which would have left their asses wide open.

“Jamming pod formation,” cackled the radio. The leader of Oyster Flight was ordering them to switch on their jamming pods, and to fly abreast with a staggered separation, to confuse the enemy radar into reading one huge blip, rather than four individual targets. “Oyster-1, going in, engaging afterburners, on the nose twelve miles, fifteen high…maintain position on Oyster-1…”

Although the flight leader shoulders a greater responsibility, it was actually harder to fly wing because one had to maintain position. To Andrew, this part of flying summoned in him an indescribable sense of balance and timing, and the high-tech chore- ography that ensued gave him an unequalled thrill.

At supersonic speed with the afterburner thrust, the hillsides melted into a greenish blur. Kozeny released the radar chaff, strips of aluminum that fluttered to the ground, to further confound the enemy radar. He flipped on the switches arming his ordnance, and checked his angle-of- attack indicator. “Reversing right and level, ready to pickle…”

“HOLY F**K!” Dave screamed.

All around them, the colorful lines of tracer crisscrossed the sky, dotted by the puffs from exploding shells. The bursts of smoke were blue in color, telling them they were 57mm, and they were coming from somewhere other than their original target. The baiters had been baited, drawn in by one AA battery, while the other with its radar off silently waited for the kill.

“CHECK YOUR SIX! CHECK YOUR SIX!” Andrew yelled into the radio, alerting the others to watch their behind. He followed his lead down the chute, released the Shrike missile which would at least home in on the radar of the first AA unit, then banked left and pulled up, but not before his right wing was hit. “OYSTER 2 WE’RE HIT!”

Andrew rolled right now, banking and yawing, his pressurized suit nearly suffocating him as it inflated in response to the high-G maneuvers. If not for the suit, the acceleration would force blood out of his brain and into his extremities, causing him to black out….

He was losing altitude, getting too low. Then, machine guns, Kalashnikovs in automatic mode, unleashed a barrage of fire that penetrated the aircraft. Kozeny was scared, even more so when he realized that Dave’s body had just been riddled apart. Covered with spatters of blood and flesh from his ex-backseater, Andrew struggled to control the aircraft, the jet now screaming and whining as if in great pain, and violently hurtling itself at 1000 miles per hour, one and an half times the speed of sound, but despite all his efforts he could not bring her up. He dropped his entire payload to gain altitude but it was not enough to pull clear of the mountains ahead of him. His frantic hands manipulated the controls to ascend, while his mind raced through emergency procedures. The plane initially shot up into the sky, giving him some hope of regaining her, but then lurched and rocked, lost airspeed, and started to nose down.

For Lt. Andrew Kozeny, the journey leading to that flash of a moment was about to begin.