World: That Others May Live

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U.S. fighter-bombers last week continued to hammer at Hanoi's roads, bridges and fuel depots. As in the week before, Hanoi responded with the most sophisticated weaponry in its defensive armory—and again found it useless. Twenty SAM ground-to-air missiles were fired. All missed. Supersonic MIG-21 fighters rose to tangle with U.S. Air Force F-4C Phantoms flying bomber escort north of Hanoi. North Viet Nam is thought to have only 15 of the advanced Russian jets, and the encounter cost them two of those, knocked down by the Phantoms' Sidewinder missiles—the second and third MIG-21 kills of the air war.

Ordinary antiaircraft fire proved something else again. So densely has Hanoi ringed likely targets that in the past month ground fire has claimed an average of one U.S. plane a day over North Viet Nam. Last week five U.S. planes were downed. One of them was an Air Force Phantom. Set afire by flak, the Phantom's two-man crew sent out a distress signal, then radioed that they were going to try to reach the Gulf of Tonkin.

Hostile Land & Unforgiving Sea. Pilot Jesse J. Anderson, 39, had been orbiting his HU-16 amphibious Albatross over the Gulf for nearly seven hours when he picked up the Phantom's cry for help. Gunning his motors, Anderson sped toward the crippled plane. Before he arrived, the crew bailed out: one pilot dropped into the waters of the Gulf barely half a mile from the North Viet Nam coast, the other a mile farther out. Both were soon under heavy shore fire from machine guns and mortars as they bobbed helplessly in the water. Six U.S. fighter planes zoomed in to blast the shore batteries while Anderson set his Albatross down in the rolling swells. While mortar shells fell within 30 yds. of the amphibian, first one pilot, then the other was pulled to safety. Within an hour after they had bailed out, both were safe at Danang Air Base.

Anderson and his Albatross are part of the 650 men and 45 planes and helicopters of the Third Aerospace Rescue and Recovery Group. Their primary mission: retrieving U.S. airmen shot down over the North. Their motto:

"That Others May Live." Commanded from Saigon's Tan Son Nhut airport, the Third's mercy craft are scattered at radio readiness from Danang to Thailand. Since they set up shop in Viet Nam at the end of 1964, they have rescued, from hostile land and unforgiving sea, 453 Americans—287 this year alone, 31 in the past month. Since the air war began, the Communists have downed 291 U.S. planes. Roughly 80% of the crews manage to eject and parachute away from their doomed aircraft; thanks to the Third, and the Navy's own rescue service, most are soon in U.S. hands. Of 325 who have gone down, 34 U.S. airmen are known to be prisoners in North Viet Nam.