This presentation of In Their Own Words is brought to you by the Honor Project and is dedicated to the brave men and women of the United States Armed Forces. The Wild Weasels were the Air Force's wildest pilots in Vietnam.

They flew fighter jets like the F-100, F-105, and F-4, deep into hostile airspace

to coax the enemy into opening fire with their surface-to-air missiles.

Once the weasels located the radar site, other fighter bombers were called in to kill it.

Paired with an electronic warfare officer, or EWO, the weasels constantly engaged in a deadly game of cat and mouse.

In 1966, Jerry Hobley, a 32-year-old Air Force pilot,

was one of the first men trained in the ways of the Wild Weasel.

Well, the aircraft versus the surface-air missile was a duel.

It was Dodge City at high noon. It was similar to other military duels, tank

versus tank, fighter aircraft versus fighter aircraft or even submarine versus submarine in some

respects, but in one very important respect, it was different. That is the adversarial systems

were operated in very different environments

and used very different technologies and weapons to deal with one another. Therefore, when

you're a fighter pilot engaging in another fighter pilot as a, for instance, you can project

from your system to his system and the differences usually small will dictate and control your tactics.

In the case of the surface-air missile versus the aircraft, they were very different.

So we had a very complex set of technologies interfacing with tactics that we had to deal with.

What was similar to the other duels, however, is that the final result was almost always fatal

to one of the two adversaries.

But Hublett's entree into the Wild Weasel program was not of his choice.

The story of how I got to be a weasel was I had been in Southeast Asia on two different

occasions and had been sent back the United States and was an instructor at Nellis, knew that

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