While Aman’s engines were still running, their jet blast complicated the task of maintaining contact with the tailhook.

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Aman yelled to Houghton, Bob, their nose keeps slipping off our tailhook!

Houghton yelled back, Right, and our engines are now flamed out!

With the lead plane’s engines off, however, the jet wash was significantly less and Pardo kept pushing the doomed plane. Both F-4s were now flying on only one pair of engines. Although they were still over enemy territory, the desperate maneuver had tripled Aman’s glide range and decreased his rate of descent to 1,000 feet per minute. As Pardo battled the forward plane’s slipstream, Aman and Houghton desperately fought to hold their aircraft steady and to maintain a heading southwest toward Laos.

Then Pardo and Wayne’s own F-4 began to show the effects of the hits it had taken. A fire warning light indicated an internal fire in the left engine. Its temperature had increased from the normal 600 degrees Celsius to 1,000 degrees. That meant that the flame holders or burner cans inside the engine had ruptured and there was an uncontrolled internal flame that might detonate the engine and quite possibly the entire aircraft. Pardo glanced around, saw the scary gauge reading and shut off the left engine.

By now the rate of descent was up to 2,000 feet per minute again. With only one live engine for both planes, there was no way they could possibly make it to safety. In desperation, Pardo turned on the left engine switch again. But in less than a minute, the engine warning light flashed again. Wayne told Pardo, Our left engine is on fire; we’ve got to shut it off and keep it off or risk a hell of an explosion!

Pardo shut down the engine again. Although they were now well out of range of enemy anti-aircraft guns, they were still in extreme danger from a MiG attack. Miraculously, both planes kept flying southwest. For another 10 minutes Pardo’s plane managed to fly and push Aman with only the one remaining engine. Wayne made a desperate radio call for a pair of aerial tankers, hoping that both F-4s could link up with them and be pulled to safety. He quickly realized, however, that there was no way the tankers would be able to reach them in time.

Pardo and Wayne’s aircraft had managed to push Aman and Houghton’s about 58 miles to the southwest, but now Pardo’s plane was also running out of fuel. The four American airmen knew they would have to bail out. Across the Black River, near the Laotian border, they radioed their position to the air search-and-rescue crews. As they started to lose altitude rapidly, Aman and Houghton ejected and landed on a flat, bushy area, with hills to the west.

Meanwhile, several A-1E Sandys and two HH-43 Jolly Green Giants had been scrambled from Thailand toward the area in Laos where the four crewmen were expected to hit the ground. Houghton suffered a painful compression fracture of a vertebra from the high-G ejection. As he was floating down in his parachute harness over a small village, he could see a band of armed men with dogs, running, shouting and shooting at him.

Landing in a small tree, Houghton lost no time in unbuckling his parachute harness, desperately trying to avoid his hunters. Despite his terrible back pain, his sense of self-preservation propelled his legs and feet as he ran, pistol in hand, through the elephant grass to a small stream. There, he began painfully scrambling upstream.

After 40 minutes, Houghton lay hidden and hurting in the brush near a hilltop with his radio in one hand and his .38-caliber revolver in the other, hoping that U.S. helicopters would find him before his pursuers did. As the dogs picked up his scent and the armed guerrillas closed in, Houghton, in excruciating pain, started running up the hill. He finally stopped in exhaustion and hid quietly in a thicket, pistol still in hand, waiting for a fight. He radioed to the rescue aircraft, reporting his and Aman’s location just west of the village and also the enemy situation.

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