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After detecting a radar aiming-signal pulsing from a Russian-installed surface-to-air rocket site 30 miles north of the city (one missile was believed fired but never visually spotted), four Thunderchiefs went after the nest, which was demolished by one of them. Whereupon four MIG-17s jumped the F-105s damaging two. Outmaneuvering one MIG, Major Fred L. Tracy, 38, of Goldsboro, N.C., got on his adversary's tail, opened up with 20-mm. cannon and was credited with a probable kill. The remaining MIGs fled.
"Speak Saroya." Darting in minutes later with only a camera to shoot, Major Hallet P. Marston, 37, of Miami, hit flak so dense that it twice kicked his RF-101 photo-jet into a 90° bank. A veteran of 101 Korean reconnaissance missions and 78 photo flights over North Viet Nam, Marston reported that he had "never run into more intense, aimed fire. When I varied, the fire varied." Nor did the flak let up until the attackers ducked behind a mountain ridge on the way home—after running a 60-mile flak alley leading away from the capital. Over Haiphong, shrugged Navy Commander Albert Schaufelberger, 39, a burly Detroiter who was the first pilot to release his bombs on target, defenders put up "moderate to heavy flak—you get subjective when you describe it."
The Air Force pilots over Hanoi drew small comfort from the stringent warning to avoid residential areas. Their orders specified that if any plane got shot down outside a city, a jet protective patrol would be put overhead and a helicopter brought in to rescue them within the hour. If, however, a pilot crashed his aircraft in an urban area, he was told that he could "speak saroya," Air Force jargon for goodbye. Going in on the fourth wave over Hanoi, the pilot of the downed F-105 Thunderchief did in fact speak saroya: hit by crippling fire, he bailed out. Later, he was identified by Hanoi as Captain Murphy Neal Jones, 28, from Louisiana, and described as wounded in the hand and face. By way of celebrating his survival, his captors paraded Jones at night in a truck through the streets of Hanoi, under the glare of spotlights and the threats of fist-shaking mobs.
"Cloud Nine." The more than 100 airmen who got home were rhapsodic over their success in hitting targets that they have long ached to obliterate. When the nuclear-powered Enterprise finished an eight-month spell on Yankee Station off North Viet Nam in June, a squadron commander noted that the ship had launched more strike missions than any other carrier in a comparable period. Yet, he added ruefully, "we just haven't done the job we could have." Said a diplomat in Saigon: "How would you feel if you" were a pilot in the best air force in the world and had to write home to your wife and tell her that you got two trucks last week?" The frustration ended with the Hanoi-Haiphong strikes. General Meyers said that his men "were on Cloud Nine." Pointed out one Air Force commander: "You don't have to worry about trucks if you get the POL."