Captain John E. Donovan, an electronic warfare officer, monitored the equipment in his F-100F Super Sabre fighter. It was December 22, 1965, and his plane was part of a strike mission searching out enemy antiaircraft sites. Two days earlier, a similar mission had gone badly, resulting in the loss of a plane and its crew. As the F-100F in which he was flying raced through the skies over North Vietnam, Donovan detected a signal from enemy radar known as a Fan Song. He notified the pilot, Captain Allen T. Lamb, who began maneuvering the plane to help locate the radar. Lamb took the plane down until the signal dis- appeared and then ascended until they picked it up again, using the mountains and valleys to help them avoid becoming a target themselves. The two men were flying over the southwestern section of the Red River Valley, which was situated northwest of Hanoi.
Streaking around a hill, Lamb took the F-100F up to 4,500 feet and began looking for the radar and its attendant SA-2 surface-to-air missiles (SAMs). He saw the SAM deployed in the middle of what looked like a village. He noted the tips of three missiles bristling out from beneath a thatched hut, which afforded the missile battery good camouflage. Wasting no time, Lamb radioed the accompanying F-105D Thunderchief fighter bombers to follow his lead. The F-100 swooped down on the enemy position and fired rockets to mark the target for the bombing runs. The F-105 strike succeeded in knocking out the battery. Debris from the destroyed SAM site flew 400 feet into the air amid a column of smoke.
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