Air Force Pararescue team members race to their HH-3 Jolly Green Giant, as Sgt. Charley Smith's crew did at their secret base in Laos on November 5, 1967, upon learning that Capt. Bill Sparks had bailed out of his F-105 75 miles north of Hanoi. (U.S. Air Force Photonational Archives)

After ignoring an abort order, Pararescue Jumper Charley Smith soon realized why it was issued – when MiG-17s attacked his helicopter.

The CIA man who ran Lima Site 36 in Laos was known simply as “The Customer,” and he commanded a base that didn’t officially exist. The north Laotian site, with its crude landing strip in close proximity to the North Vietnamese border, changed hands almost every year, and it perpetually smelled of death. When the brush around the base was burned to clear defensive fields of fire, unexploded ordnance routinely went off.

On the morning of November 5, 1967, the site was in Laotian army hands, and U.S. Air Force Pararescue Jumper Charley Smith, a tech sergeant at the time, landed on the small runway in one of two HH-3 Jolly Green Giant rescue helicopters from the 38th Aerospace Rescue and Recovery Squadron, based at Udorn, Thailand. American F-105s would be striking the MiG base at Phuc Yen north of Hanoi that afternoon, and if any went down, it would be Smith and his detachment who would cross into North Vietnam to rescue—or recover the pilots.

[For a slideshow of historic photos showing Air Force
Pararescue Jumpers in action, click here.]

Hundreds of miles away, at about 8 a.m. at the American airbase at Takhli, Thailand, Captain Bill Sparks of the 355th Tactical Fighter Wing, 357th Tactical Fighter Squadron, was “walking the walls” where extremely detailed and up-to-date maps and photographs of the Phuc Yen target area were posted. Sparks always paid very close attention to the target area and notations of where anti-aircraft positions were located. Of particular interest to him were surface-to-air missile (SAM) sites.

Sparks was on his second tour of duty and had recently come out of the Wild Weasels when his electronic warfare officer, Carlo Lombardo, was shipped to South Vietnam. Though he’d flown 63 strike missions in 1965, the November 5 mission was only his fifth on his second tour. That all added up to more than 1,800 hours’ flight time in an F-105 and 2,600 total hours in fighters.

That day, Sparks was slated to lead the fourth flight of four supersonic F-105D Thunderchiefs to bomb Phuc Yen’s hangars, roughly 75 miles northwest of Hanoi. Flying “tail-end Charlie” was the worst position, as all the enemy gunners would be ready. And Phuc Yen was no soft target, with literally thousands of 37mm, 57mm, 88mm and 120mm guns supported by about 15 SAM sites, two airfields and hundreds of thousands of people on the ground with rifles.

Strike Mission

When Sparks took off shortly after 12:30 p.m., he formed up with the rest of his group and joined the air tankers. A group of F-4s was flying MiG combat air patrol (MiGCAP) that day to protect the strike planes from enemy fighters, and four Wild Weasels were with the flight to locate SAM sites.

As the aircraft made their way toward the target, they regularly refueled from the air tankers that would accompany them to about 50 miles from the Laotian/North Vietnamese border and stay on-station during the strike. By the time the strike force left the tankers, each plane had refueled four times.

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