Vietnam II: A War Novel Episode 3 (V2) by C.R. Ryder Page A

think anyone was going to be flying on the fifteenth of January. 
    Not in that mess.
                 

Lieutenant Colonel Carol Madison
    Air Force Intelligence Officer
    Pacific Command Operations Center
     
    Operation Jungle Storm.
    I had seen worse names for operations.  At least this one made some sense at least in the foliage sense of the word.
    Everything came to a halt with the storm.  I looked at Typhoon Kim as God’s pause button.  The VCR was playing a movie.  Maybe it was a movie you didn’t want to watch.  So you hit the pause button and think about it for awhile.  Both sides could.  The PAV military commanders must have known how many men we had moved forward and how many planes we had ready.  The Vietnamese President must have known we weren’t bluffing.  Then our President and the Joint Chiefs had to think about what they wanted to do.
    Do you play the movie or stop it and watch something else?
    That was going to shake out in the next few days.  I couldn’t see us backing down at that point though.
    When we were planning this thing I was looking for anything I could find on the shelf.  What surprised me most was the fact that we had not kept a lot of notes on the first Vietnam War.  I would have thought that there would be so much data that we would be tripping over it.  Instead all I found was some open source stuff on where their air bases were.  With nowhere else to turn I looked to Jane’s Defense Journal.
    We were looking at everything from every angle.  The most disturbing idea was that they would take the POWs and use them as human shields on high value targets.  Knowing that we would not drop ordinance on our own people, especially the ones that we were trying to save, the Vietnamese would effectively shield their targets from bombs.  They were not known for following the Geneva Convention in the past.
    As the hostilities were about to begin this is what we had place for air operations:
     
    AOC ORDER OF BATTLE
    Personnel                                           105,100
    Fighter/Ftr-Bombers                             1,234
    Transports                                           260
    Helicopters (all types)               806
    Civil Aviation Transports               280
     
    This is what we had for the air war.  I only hoped it would be enough.
    Our estimates of the PAV Air Force put us with an abundant majority.  Since defending requires less personnel and equipment than attacking in reality we were only about even. 
    The Vietnamese Air Force looked something like this:
     
    FIGHTER                                          250
    SU-22 M-3/M-4/MR Fitter               40
    SU-17 Fitter                                          30
    SU-7B Fitter                                          30
    MiG-21/PF Fishbed                            150
     
    MARITIME PATROL              4
    Be-12 Mail                                          4
     
    SURVEY                                          2
    An-30 Clank                                          2
     
    TRANSPORT                                          82
    An-26 Curl                                          40
    An-24 Coke                                          9
    An-2 Colt                                          12
    Il-18 Coot                                          2
    Tu-134 Crusty