Bat lake view through the clouds. Monsoon season made for some boring
missions. Hillsborough wouldn't let you go home so you spent your time
looking for a hole in the under-cast in hopes you could drop and air strike on
some sort of target. One day after droning on and on, a hole opened up and
all sorts of targets were available. People on the roads, vehicles,
fortified structures, a gold mine of activity and movers. But before any
air could be requested the hole closed. I made a note to go back on a
better day and finish what I had wanted to start. But with solid clouds
there were no land marks and the TACAN and ADF stations weren't locking on.
I had to find out where this location was. Now a trick was to fly straight and
level, at a constant airspeed in a fixed direction with your clock running until
you saw something you recognized, then check a map and read backwards with the
time, distance, azimuth calculations. I was lucky I didn't announce my
good fortune at seeing so many targets right away. When I did the math it
seemed I had been scoping out targets around Bat lake, well inside North
Vietnam.