Over targets in South Vietnam where we didn't have to worry about AAA or missiles, we tended to fly at nice comfortable altitudes from 5000 to 10000 feet, depending on the focal length of the lens and what coverage we were supposed to get.
Over North Vietnam, we still might be fairly high, but as fast as we could go, but often we were down low, sometimes as low as 50 feet, but more often more like 200 to 500 feet. The ground goes by pretty fast as those altitudes, and a few degrees of pitch change can cause a big altitude change very rapidly when going fast.
The most challenging flying in some ways was what the squadron did every night right after dark and again right before dawn. We had to take an infrared map from the coast to the Laotian border, from 10 miles north of Da Nang to 5 miles south. It took three aircraft flying for over 2 hours each to cover it. We were supposed to get overlapping flight lines from 1000 feet above ground level, and the ground goes up and down a lot between the coast and the Laotian border.
So we would cross the coast using our radar in a mapping mode to get on our proper flight line, then switch to terrain following mode and fly up and down over the mountains in the dark to Laos while maintaining a true track of 270 degrees. At 1000 feet altitude, the infrared sensor covered a strip about one nautical mile wide. Lets say we started on line one. After we got to Laos, we would try to make a four mile turn and them come back out on line five by maintaining a true track over the ground of 090. (We had an inertial navigation system, so that gave us a readout of true track). When we got to the coast we would see how we actually did, then go back in line two, back out line six, etc.
It was a weird combination of demanding and boring. Nothing exciting was going on and no one was likely to shoot at us since we had our running lights off, but it took a lot of concentration to keep flying up and down over those mountains in the black. When you crossed a ridge, it gave you a big dive signal, and it was hard at first to go 30 degrees nose down and trust the radar to tell you when to start pulling the nose up.
If you are wondering why the hell we did that, the purpose was to pick up camp fires, truck exhausts, and other heat signatures. I'm surprised that we only lost one aircraft that flew into a mountain on that mission. I was glad that I had a lot of practice out here in the California desert flying at mountains in broad daylight and 70 miles of visibility, looking at the ridge and the radar and telling it to tell me to climb before I chickened out visually.
We had no armament. People make too big a deal of that through. You can't very well shoot at targets on the ground or at other aircraft while taking photos, so armament would have just been wasted.
Someone tell me when to quit with the sea stories. Once you give an old pilot an excuse to tell stories, someone has to shoot him to make him stop.
BTW, my son was a Marine F-18 pilot for 11 years and flew off the USS Eisenhower over Iraq and Bosnia. He has more up-to-date and better stories than I do.
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