December 18th, 1972. 35,000 ft over Hanoi. Captain Robert Certain is sitting in a compartment underneath the cockpit of a B-52G that the crews call the black hole. No windows, no sky, just the green glow of radar scopes, stale oxygen through his mask, and the vibration of eight engines humming through the floorboards into his spine.

 If the aircraft is hit, his ejection seat fires downward. He needs 1,000 ft beneath him or the chute won’t open. Before tonight’s briefing ended, planners told every crew in the room that 10% of them weren’t coming back. Then they said no search and rescue aircraft would be available. You go down over Hanoi.

 You’re on your own. Certain aircraft is charcoal 01. 60 seconds from bomb release over the Yenvi rail yards. Two SA2 missiles punch through the fuselage from behind. No warning on the threat receiver. No lock on tone. Every instrument dies at once. The co-pilot starts screaming. They’ve got the pilot. They’ve got the pilot.

The EWO’s voice. Is anybody alive? Is anybody alive? A certain person looks through a port hole and sees fire in the forward wheel. Well, he pulls the ejection handle and fires downward into the night over the most heavily defended city on Earth. His chute doesn’t open until 15,000 ft. 20,000 ft of freef fall in the dark.

 On the ground, a woman smashes a rock into his face. Militia with AK-47s keep the crowd from killing him. They strip his flight suit, boots, and socks, leave him in his underwear in December cold and march him to the Hanoi Hilton. The pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Donald Rissy, dead. The gunner, Master Sergeant Walt Ferguson, dead.

 the co-pilot, First Lieutenant Robert Thomas, dead. Thomas had a young son back home, a boy named Derek, who would never know what happened inside Charcoal 01, who would grow up shaped entirely by an absence. Night one. 10 more to go. The crews called the B-52 the buff. Big ugly fat fellow or something worse, depending on who was talking.

 A Cold War nuclear bomber shoved into a jungle war it was never built for. The men who flew it knew that. At 30,000 ft, a buff can’t be seen or heard from the ground. The bombs fall faster than sound travels downward. They detonate before the noise of the engines reaches the surface. West Morland confirmed it.

 The first indication the Vietkong had that the B-52s were there was when the jungle erupted around them. Truang New Tang, the Vietkong’s Minister of Justice, wrote about being underneath. The first few times I experienced a B-52 attack, it seemed as I strained to press myself into the bunker floor that I had been caught in the apocalypse.

The terror was complete. One lost control of bodily functions as the mind screamed incomprehensible orders to get out. He went back to where his camp had been. It was not just that things were destroyed in some awesome way. They had ceased to exist. You would come back to where your lean to and bunker had been, your home, and there would simply be nothing there.

Three buffs in formation saturated a box 1.2 mi long by 6/10 of a mile wide. A single big belly B-52D carried 108 bombs, 60,000 lb. One sordy equaled six World War II B7 loads. When captured, NVA soldiers were asked what they feared most. The answer never changed. B-52s first always between June 65 and August 73 buffs flew 126,615 sorties total American tonnage on Indochina 7.

66 million tons more than 3 12 times the second world war B-52s alone delivered an estimated 2.6 6 to 3 and 12 million tons, one aircraft type, two bases, more than the entire American effort against Germany and Japan combined. Robert McNamera broke at his farewell lunchon in February 68. An aid watched him reel off tonnage statistics.

 Then his voice cracked and tears came as he spoke of the futility, the crushing futility of the air war. The bombing continued for five more years. The men who dropped those bombs spent 12 to 14 hours inside a pressurized aluminum tube. Guam to target and back, refueling midair over the South China Sea. They chain smoked, ate cold sandwiches, wrote letters sitting on a flying fuel tank.

 One pilot said it had all the excitement of being a longhaul truck driver without being able to stop for coffee. One navigator flew 363 sorties across eight tours. Nobody on the ground ever saw his face. A Russian twler sat off Guam the entire war, watching every takeoff, giving the enemy up to 8 hours warning. Then in December 72, North Vietnamese negotiators walked out of the Paris peace talks.

 Nixon gave Hanoi 72 hours to return. They ignored him and everything changed. Nixon’s order maximum effort repeat maximum effort of B-52 strikes in the Hanoi/H high areas 729 buff sordies in 11 days 15,000 tons waiting for them SA2 missiles 35 ft long Mach 4 with warheads that killed anything within 300 yd North Vietnam fired 1,200 140 of them for three consecutive nights.

 SACE headquarters in Omaha ordered identical tactics. Same ingress, same altitude, same posttarget turn. That turn was the kill zone. Formation broke apart. ECM antennas swung away from threat radars and a 120 knot tailwind flipped into a headwind. Slow, visible, unjammed, hanging in the sky. Brigadier General Glenn Sullivan, the commander at Utapau.

The post-target turn was the murder point. Five of six shootowns on night three happened in that turn. Captain Strickland confronted the briefers. Who is planning such stupid tactics and why? SAC headquarters in Omaha. Common routes chosen for ease of planning. Strickland shot back. The enemy is using your plan for ease of tracking and shootown.

 Schneiderman called it so much like the British in the Revolutionary War. All lined up marching in straight rows that it was bizarre. Six buffs down on night three. 7% attrition. Men weren’t just dying because of missiles. They were dying because of planning decisions made at a desk in Nebraska. At Utapow, Pat Kuster ran the USO. If they had two wooden boards nailed over the door in an X, it meant that the crew had been shot down.

 No ceremony, just an empty room and airmen loading personal belongings into a trunk. After night three, tactics changed. B-52Gs pulled from Hanoi. Roots randomized. On December 26th, all 120 buffs hit targets within 15 minutes, not 4 hours. SAM sites became targets. 2/3 of the missile inventory was destroyed.

 Final night, zero losses. In the middle of that, 18-year-old Airman First Class Albert Moore was sitting in the tail of a B-52D called Diamond Liil. Christmas Eve 72. His combat report. I observed a target on my radar scope 8:00 low at 8 mi. When the target got to 2,000 yd, I notified the crew that I was firing. 800 rounds, three bursts.

 The MiG 21 exploded. Last confirmed kill by a bomber tail gunner in the history of air warfare. That record will stand forever. On the way home, I wasn’t sure whether I should be happy or sad. You know, there was a guy in that MIG. I’m sure he would have wanted to fly home, too. But it was a case of him or my crew. He was 18. Silver Star.

 He died in 2009 at 55. While those bombs fell, men locked in the Hanoi Hilton for years heard them through cell walls. At first, they thought it was thunder. Then they recognized the rhythm. Colonel John Flynn, the senior ranking prisoner, tapped a message down the line. Pack your bags. I don’t know when we’re going home, but we’re going home.

Robert Thomas was not among the 33 crew members who came home in March. His son Derek was nine. A mile from the railards, Comm Street was gone. Nuan Vancao came back to find nothing. People were crying and calling out for their loved ones in the dark. I lost my family that night. Chutihoa heard a voice trapped beneath a collapsed shelter.

please help me and could do nothing. Her husband’s body was found cut through by a fragment. 278 dead on one street. 91 women, 55 children, the PS celebrating and the children dying happened the same night. Same bombs dropped by crews who never saw either one. At Quesan, it worked. January through April 68, 6,000 Marines under Colonel Louns besieged by three NVA divisions, 40,000 troops digging toward the perimeter.

 West Morland named the air campaign Niagara. 60 buffs a day, bombing within a,000 m of friendly lines. Colonel Stevenson, who flew 27 Kesan missions. Those guys wanted us dropping as close as possible. And every time we went in and dropped, they said, “Closer.” Marines 1,000 m out felt the percussion waves in their chests, powerful enough to push a standing man backward.

 The ground shook in long progressive lines as thousand pounders walked across the hillsides. Afterward, the jungle was gone. just raw dirt cratered so deeply that from the air the hills looked like the surface of the moon. An NVA prisoner said 3/4 of his regiment was wiped out by a single raid at unlock 4 years later they ran a buff every 55 minutes for 30 hours 5,000 enemy dead but the buff couldn’t kill what it couldn’t find.

 Michael McCarthy flew 156 sorties across three tours. 21 consecutive nights in one stretch. May 70. Most went to the Hochi Min trail. 12 hours round trip. Refuel over the Philippines, turn west toward Laos, and fly over Black Jungle. No lights below, no roads visible, just a dark canopy for hundreds of miles. The radar navigator would call the countdown.

 The bombs would fall. The aircraft would shudder and go light as 30 tons dropped into nothing. And then there was only the drone of engines on the way home. McCarthy never saw what he hit. Couldn’t have. There was nothing to see. 3 million tons dropped on Laos across seven campaigns. The trail was never cut. The jungle grew back.

 The NVA kept walking south. The seventh Air Force commander eventually admitted what every pilot already knew. They were bombing forests. The trail was still there every morning. Still there when Saigon fell. The accords were signed on January 27th, 73. Negro Ponte, the American negotiator. We bombed them into accepting our concessions.

15 buffs didn’t come home. 1624 civilians were dead. Hanoi called it Jen Bianpu in the air. 76 B 52H’s still fly. Airframes from the early60s fitted with new engines expected to serve until the 2050s. 100 years for a machine that was built to end the world. Robert Certain survived the Hilton.

 released after 101 days, became an Episcopal priest, wrote a book about forgiveness. Robert Thomas’s son, Derek, played 11 seasons for the Kansas City Chiefs, nine Pro Bowls, Hall of Fame, died at 33. Every profile mentions the father he lost, the co-pilot of Charcoal01, killed on the first night of the Christmas bombings. A man remembered mostly as the reason his son played the way he did.

126,000 sorties, 7.66 million tons. Everyone released by men who never saw where they landed. In Hanoi’s Enoka village, the landing gear of a buff shot down on December 27th sits half submerged in Hu Tip Lake. The metal has rusted the color of dried blood. A tree has grown through the fuselage. The water is still.

 Children walk past it on their way to school. Nobody explains it to them. They already know what it is.