I filled in for navigators down with temporary illnesses, away on leave or on duty elsewhere. And I flew with several of those once-a-month visiting headquarters types from Hawaii or the Philippines, who managed to come to Vietnam around the end of every other month. They came to get a combat mission in before the current month was over, plus another at the first of the next month, to qualify for two months combat bonus pay. I flew with our own headquarters types who managed that in addition to their staff jobs.

Flying with all those different pilots was quite an education. Most were well-qualified, dedicated professionals, but not a few were either nuts or "hot dogs" with visions of glory. It was those latter types who worried me. Because there was sort of an unwritten rule that crews who came home with holes in their planes were eligible for Silver Star medals, some of those idiots "went cruising for silver stars" with total disregard for their safety, or mine.

It was just commons sense and good recce procedure, when going after especially dangerous targets, to get in and out quickly. Get the pictures and scurry away before the bad guys zeroed in on you with small arms or anti-aircraft fire. And never approach a target twice from the same direction. Keep 'em guessing and you might not get hit.

Yet more than one of those "hot dog" pilots insisted on making a second or even a third pass over the target. They thought we'd get better photo's of active gun emplacements or pinpoint on film where the fire was coming from. That was dumb, for we already got what we needed on the first pass. More pictures added nothing new for the photo interpreters who would examine the negatives and prints on the ground. No, what those pilots wanted was to get a hole in our airplane so they could qualify for that Silver Star.

And every once and a while I'd get to fly with a frustrated aerobatic nut, the guy who thought he should be a member of the Blue Angels or the Thunderbirds demonstration teams. One guy even tried to impress me by executing a split-S maneuver from just 20,000 feet. Now that's not difficult in something like a T-6 trainer or a Pitts Special aerobatic plane, but it's plain dumb in a heavy, fast-accelerating bird like an F-4. By the time we pulled out at the bottom we were nearly supersonic and just 1500 feet above the ground. RF-4C's were not designed for such nonsense.

One of the most interesting aerobatic maneuvers we did at low level over mountainous country. Consider that photo reconnaissance calls for pictures of reasonably constant scale, meaning that the camera should be about the same height above the ground throughout the photo run. So when it came to flying up a mountain slope and then zooming down the opposite side, it was difficult to keep a constant camera-to-ground distance. And, when you crested the mountain peak and pushed the stick forward, you quickly found yourself pulling negative G's and getting too high above the ground on the down side. By the time you got back to where you should be, you'd have several seconds (and miles) of improper scale photography. And you got a face full of dirt and dust from the negative G's which brought stuff up from the floor. The solution of some daring and creative pilots was to do a quick half-roll at the peak, pull back on the stick, to maintain positive G's, and then quickly do another half-roll, with more positive G's, upon reaching the desire photo altitude. That was wild, but it actually worked in reducing the amount of photo coverage off-scale.