The Spirit of Attack - by Bruce Gordon & Friends

About ten years ago I received a book in the mail.  It was unexpected because I hadn’t ordered any books from the usual suspects [Amazon, Barnes & Noble], and it arrived by post rather than by UPS or FedEx.  So I opened it and saw the title:  The Spirit of Attack – Flying Stories from Bruce Gordon & Friends.  Bruce Gordon is a retired US Air Force fighter pilot.  He is also the dad of my best friend from my childhood days in Fairborn, Brian Gordon.   When I had an Air Force career, I didn’t like fighter pilots.  They were just so much better than the rest of us who didn’t fly – just ask them how great they are and they will tell you.  Hell, they might even tell you without asking.  But I digress…  So having received an unsolicited book from a retired fighter jock gave me pause – should I toss it in the garbage, or should I read it?  Then I looked at the inside of the cover, and there reads a little blurb about this book being a limited edition, printed at home one at a time.  So I thought “ok, he went to the trouble to print one for me, and he is Brian’s dad, so I’ll read it.”

What is "the spirit of attack?”  The words “the spirit of attack” comes from Adolf Galland’s memoir The First and the Last.  He was a Luftwaffe ace during World War II who flew 750 combat missions and was credited with 104 air-to-air kills.  He later commanded all Luftwaffe fighters.  There is a quote from him that states “only the spirit of attack borne in a brave heart will bring success to any fighter aircraft no matter how highly developed the aircraft may be.”  To me that says aircraft limitations aren’t a barrier to those with the killer instinct.  I could be wrong since I’m not a flier.  Bruce Gordon’s squadron at Elmendorf AFB, Alaska had this quote on a sign above the entrance.

Why did he want to fly?  Everybody has their reasons for wanting to fly.  Adolf Galland’s interest in flying began when a group of air enthusiasts brought a glider club to the region where he lived.  Neil Armstrong’s desire to fly kindled when his father used to take him to the Cleveland Air Races.  Bruce Gordon’s reason:  he was interested in global airpower when he was in school.  He doesn’t say in as many words, but I’m guessing he thought the best way to study the applications of airpower was to join the best air force in the world and see for himself first-hand.

What did Bruce Gordon fly?  T-28, T-33, T-34, T-37 [the fearless Tweet], F-100, F-102, F-106.  He says he flew the O-1, the F-4, and even got some time in a B-25.  It would have been nice to read about his time in the B-25, but alas there was nothing to be found here.  The big takeaway I got from this was that he loved his F-106 for its high maneuverability.

Where did he fly?  Washington, Alaska [where he chased Russian Bears], Michigan, Korea, and Vietnam. With the exception of his combat tour in Vietnam, Bruce Gordon’s role was as an air-to-air interceptor.  He flew Close Air Support missions in Vietnam.  When his tip-of-the-spear flying days came to a close, he became an aircraft maintenance office at Wright Patterson AFB, OH.  It was there I met the Gordon family in 1973.

My favorite Bruce Gordon story – Of all the stories in the book [and there are a lot of them], my favorite Bruce story occurred in Korea.  He was part of a four-ship that was flying CAPs over the Sea of Japan [“East Sea” if you’re Korean].  They were flying top cover for an RC-121 ELINT collector [forerunner of the RC-135 Rivet Joint] flying in international waters.  He was in the middle of a six-month deployment to my old stomping grounds, Osan AB.  In the not-too-distant past prior to his deployment, the DANKs [“Dumb Ass North Koreans” if you’re wondering] captured the USS Pueblo.  Just before his deployment, the DANKs shot down an RC-121 in international waters, killing all aboard.  The only thing you need to know about recce birds, it’s that they are “alone, unarmed and unafraid” [or as we used to say in SAC “alone, unarmed and scared shitless”].  Soon after this incident the Air Force decided these unarmed recce birds needed some protection in this rough neighborhood.  One time while they were on

patrol, some 20 MiGs from Wonsan reacted to an RC-121 while he and his flight were tanking up.  Once they were refueled Bruce and Company returned to where they could protect the RC-121.  In the process, these four US fighters scared off 20 North Korean MiGs without firing a shot.  That’ll show the DANKs…

Combat – Bruce saw combat in Vietnam.  He flew 132 combat missions.  Did he get any air-to-air kills?  No, but air-to-air wasn’t his job.  He flew F-100s in an air-to-mud role – breaking things and killing people, the Air Force’s two core competencies.  He did this while the bad guys were shooting at him.  Oftentimes he would fly interdiction mission along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos and Cambodia.  Other times saw him supporting Troops in Contact, which he considered their most dangerous mission.  Here you are flying under the envelope of most SAMs [except perhaps MANPADs], but you are within range of small arms fire.  Killing bad guys is easy – killing them and NOT killing your own guys who are close by is a lot harder.  Close Air Support is a tough business.  They would carry Cluster Bomb Units [CBUs] and napalm, and once they dropped their ordnance they strafed the enemy with their 20mm cannons, all at about 50 feet off the deck.  When I was stationed in Cyprus, I often got to watch RAF Tornados practice their low-level passes at that height.  It’s closer to the ground than you would think.  For one engagement to support Troops in Contact, he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.  For the uninitiated, that’s a pretty big deal.

Are there any tidbits in the book that don’t involve personal “there I was” stories?  Yes, there are.  There are thumbnail sketches of a few basic air combat maneuvers.  They go by the names “high-speed yo-yo,” “low-speed yo-yo,” “scissors,” and the “barrel roll attack.”  While professing not to be a book about air tactics, these thumbnail sketches of some basic air tactics serve to illustrate that knowledge of how to use an aircraft’s energy can influence a successful outcome in air-to-air combat.  As a non-flier, I found this bit fascinating.  As he was writing this book he might have dumbed it down for readers like me, but one doesn’t get the impression.  I understood what he had to say without my intelligence being insulted.  

Eddie Rickenbacker - he met Eddie Rickenbacker!  How cool is that?  Eddie Rickenbacker a genuine hero [American World War I “ace of aces” (26 kills) and Congressional Medal of Honor recipient], but he is also world-renowned.  The two pilots have a shared heritage.  Both flew for the 94^th Fighter Squadron, the famed “Hat in the Ring” squadron.

There are quite a few “there I was” kind of non-combat related stories peppered throughout the book.  One story that sticks out is one when his aircraft lost power, and it illustrates how not to panic when all seems lost.  There were some stories that interested me personally.  One such story involves a picture of Bruce being carried away from his jet on the shoulders of his crew chiefs.  I had seen the picture a long time ago.  It was taken on the occasion of him shooting down a BOMARC surface-to-air missile over the Gulf of Mexico.  He had been the first pilot to do so.  There are other personal stories – some that I had heard before, others that I hadn’t.  Those that I hadn’t heard before helped me fill in some blanks in the Gordon family story.

To flesh out the rest of the book, there are stories from some of Bruce's fighter pilot comrades, many of which take place in Alaska.  One of his comrades has quite a few Korean War stories to tell, all of which are a good read.  The most interesting of all of these stories are at the back of the book.  Told from the point of view of both American and Romanian pilots, they tell of what happened over the skies of Ploesti, Romania in 1943.

Recommendation:  If I didn’t already own a copy, I would buy it.  I would do so not because his son is my best friend, but because I like the stories of those who have had enemies shoot at them and live to tell the tale.