Dancing in the Moonlight (Doing the Mekong Mambo)

Flying a low-level attack mission at night is not a relaxing experience in any aircraft, but combat in the AP-2H brought new meaning to the old memories of rock and roll. To begin with, the 8 barrels of 40 mm. mounted in the bomb bay were synchronized, that is they all fired at the same time and at the same rate. When they got started they imparted a vertical rhythm to the entire airframe, somewhat like riding across a plowed field in a pickup truck..

It was not unusual for the tail gunner to engage ground targets off to one side of the aircraft with the dual 20 mm cannons. When the deflection angle was high the recoil would push the tail around quite a bit, and the rhythmic 3-second bursts would start a wagging motion.

For particularly juicy targets the bombardiers used to program a Mk-82 fragmentary bomb and a high-drag Mk-77 naplam to land in the same place about the same time. If all worked well, the napalm would just start to roll out when the frag came in and spread it like a starburst. The two bombs were always carried on opposite wings and came off about half a second apart producing a noticeable wing-wag in the middle of everything else. Throw in the flashes from the explosions behind and the tracers flying by up front and it made for quite an exciting ride. - Story submitted by Capt. Ron Whittiker.