Ed Haerter
LIVING ON BORROWED TIME: Near Fatal Encounter with “The Hunter,” Fate!
The first flight was uneventful, with quite a lot of tracer fire coming down from the hills during our deliveries but no hits on us. On the second scramble, ground fire intensified significantly.
I had just finished with my last strafe pass, and right after easing off the "Gs" from the pullout, and starting to climb, I felt a distinct thunk on the aircraft, and I told Mike that I'd been hit. The aircraft started to fly erratically, just kind of wallowing. Mike looked me over to see if he could see anything, but it was very dark, and all he had was a flashlight.
We got feet-wet and continued back to Phu Cat, after deciding that the problem was most probably just a loose sway brace on one of the fuel tanks. We discussed jettisoning them but decided against it because of our uncertainty. When we got back to Phu Cat, it was overcast and raining; so, we had to use GCA to land, something we didn't like to do because they'd put a couple of guys into the hills south of the base.
At about 9 AM, I was just finishing my second or third beer, when one of the maintenance officers came up to my hootch and told me that they wanted to see me on the flightline. I was still wearing my grubby flight suit, had a day's growth of beard, and was tired and not in a very good mood about being bothered.
When we got to the flight line, I was amazed to see a large number of people, including a bunch of colonels and one civilian, gathered around #972. The civilian was a North American tech rep who'd flown in from Saigon, and he was talking to the DCM. The DCM asked him if it would be possible to one-time-fly the aircraft to Taiwan for a new wing, and the tech rep told him, "Colonel, I wouldn't taxi that frigging thing to the end of the runway!"
One of the maintenance sergeants motioned to me to join him under the wing. He showed me where they'd pulled off a panel to expose the front spar. It was cracked all of the way through, and the remnants of a dud 23mm shell was laying next to the wing panel on the ground. At that point, the tech rep came over to me and asked if I was the pilot who had last flown the aircraft. When I said yes, he said, "Captain, you have to be the luckiest SOB I've ever seen. I just got done talking to our engineers at the factory, and none of them could understand why the wing had not broken off."
He asked me, "How far did you fly the aircraft after it was hit?" When I said a couple of hundred miles, he just laughed. It seems like all of the things that happened during and after the time I was hit had been in my favor. First, I wasn't pulling any "Gs." Second, we flew straight home with no hard control movements. Third, I hadn't jettisoned the tanks; and last of all, and probably most important, the weather prevented us from doing a 360 overhead landing pattern. The two “G” break would probably have pulled the wing off.
53 Years on Borrowed Time