Solo (12 page)

And my feet: One night, during snowfall, I put my wet boots too close to our campfire to dry out. The soles bubbled up, the boots shrank, and in order to get them on the next morning, I had to cut slits in them. They left blisters.

I headed for the officer’s club dining room. (Several days later I’d find out that I had lost twenty pounds during my six weeks.)

In the dining room, several of us were seated at a table. In front of me sat a crisp green salad—on a clean white tablecloth. I said to the others, “That’s a crisp green salad. It’s on a clean white tablecloth.”

I ordered a steak, but my stomach had shrunk so much I couldn’t finish it.

Buddy, from Alabama, was at my table. “Bet you can’t eat dessert,” he said.

“You’re right,” I said.

“Pussy.”

I ordered apple pie and ice cream and ate it all.

Next day, we were free to leave. Buddy and I started for Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona, in his car. We’d have our eight-week radar-training course there before moving on to our F-4 training at Homestead.

“One thing I’ll never do as long as I live is miss another meal,” I said as we drove south through Washington State.

“Me too. For sure.”

Down through Oregon and California we each ordered a steak or a hamburger at every meal. I ate apple pie and ice cream whenever it was on the menu.

But somehow we didn’t plan well. On the second or third day of our trip, crossing the Nevada desert, we realized that (1) it was lunchtime, and (2) we had only one thin dime between us. We bought a Hershey’s chocolate bar with almonds from a service station, split it, and ate it slowly and silently as we looked out across the desert.

A
FTER EIGHT WEEKS IN
T
UCSON
, I was shipped to Miami, where I bought a motorcycle and found an apartment with a new friend, another F-4 backseater, Nick Lawrence.

There were about forty of us in all in the new training class—twenty front-seaters and twenty backseaters, including two buddies from Laredo pilot training, Bill Steele and Jerry Daughtry. The front-seat trainees were old-timers from other aircraft or former F-4 backseaters. Those of us fresh out of pilot training were backseaters.

Either the front-seater (the “aircraft commander”) or the backseater (the “pilot”) did the flying with his own set of controls. The backseater, besides flying, operated the navigation equipment as well as the radar system that tracked enemy aircraft and mapped the ground.

At Homestead, first morning of training, we all met in a large classroom. I was introduced to Colonel John Poole, the front-seater I’d be training with after instructors
taught each of us the fundamentals of flying the F-4. He was new to the F-4 too. He’d been on nonflying status for three years, stationed at the Pentagon. He was a short, balding, feisty forty-eight-year-old, and from my perch at age twenty-four, he seemed ancient. I quickly learned, however, that Colonel Poole was an excellent pilot, just a bit rusty. He’d flown a P-38 (a hot fighter) in World War II. On a bombing pass, ground fire through the cockpit had taken off a piece of the throttle and part of his left index finger.

After we’d flown together a few times, Colonel Poole started calling me Killer. Nick and I invited him over to our apartment for dinner several times, and I remember a late afternoon walk with the old colonel. He talked to me about his marriage, about how he and his wife had changed over the years. I remember few specifics from the conversation, but I do remember that I felt from him a kind of fatherly friendship.

Together we students flew in flights of four with an instructor flying the front seat of the lead aircraft. We flew gunnery-range missions, dropping practice bombs (they are a little bigger than a shoe box and leave a smoke trace on impact), shooting practice rockets (they’re small and self-propelled and leave a smoke trace also) and the twenty-millimeter gun in the nose of the aircraft. It shot a hundred real bullets (no practice rounds) per
second,
and the noise it made, rather than rat-tat-tat, was like a deep-throated groan. A blast much longer than two seconds would melt the gun barrel (the kind of thing I relished telling my buddies back home).

Normally our missions lasted about an hour and a half and were flown in two-ship or four-ship formation. That time was extended if we carried an external centerline fuel tank beneath the belly of the aircraft. Some missions required staying in the air even longer, so we had to learn air-to-air refueling techniques. Both pilots were required to be proficient.

Air-to-air refueling occurs in the smooth air of high altitudes. A flight of four F-4s approaches a C-135 tanker and flies in formation several hundred yards out to the side and behind it. The fighters, one at a time, leave the F-4 formation and fly to a position just below and to the rear of the C-135 and remain in a kind of close-trail formation while being refueled.

I once filmed a refueling with my Super-8 camera. The camera pointed up and forward through the canopy (Colonel Poole was flying), and in my movie the underbelly of the C-135 fills the screen. And there’s the face of the boom operator looking through his little window. The boom (a long pole-hose) is being extended toward us. It reaches just above our heads, swaying slightly, aimed at the receptacle in the top of the aircraft, just behind my head. We sense it click into place after a moment and then sit there taking on fuel while flying in formation. We appear to be sitting still beneath the tanker, but in fact we and the tanker are flying at about three hundred knots. The constantly increasing weight of our aircraft, caused by the onloading of fuel, means tiny adjustments in trim and power setting are required for us to stay in position.

• • •

W
E ALSO FLEW MISSIONS
in which a pair of aircraft were matched against another pair in air-to-air combat. Two aircraft would take off and fly to a general area. The other two aircraft would take off, and at a certain time, with neither flight of two knowing exactly where the other was, the battle would begin—two against two. Each flight of two would try to find the other on radar, which could “see” up to fifty miles or so and could simulate kills with a pretend radar-guided missile inside about thirteen miles. The backseater’s job was to find the other aircraft on his radar screen, then “lock on” with a radar beam. (This is what we backseaters learned to do at Davis-Mon-than Air Force Base in Arizona after survival training.) The aircraft would then be positioned for the mock shooting of a radar missile and a kill, verified by a call of “Fox One” on the radio from the aircraft doing the simulated shooting. After that, when one flight saw the other, there’d be a dogfight in which each flight tried to simulate shooting down the other, first with heat-seeking missiles (for distances from three thousand to nine thousand feet) and then with the twenty-millimeter canon in the nose of the aircraft for shooting inside about one thousand feet.

A kill with a heat-seeking missile was verified by the victor calling, “Fox Two.”

The most prized call (from our aircraft) during a dogfight was “Fox Three,” for this meant that in the rough-and-tumble of fighting in the air, you had gotten on the tail of the enemy aircraft and stayed close enough, and at the right angle, long enough to shoot him down with your guns. Many fights ended in a stalemate, with two aircraft flying across from each other in a very tight circle (called
a lufbery), slowly losing altitude. If one broke away, the other would be on his tail. At five thousand feet up we were required to break it off, and that last part of the battle would be declared a draw.

Prior to the air-to-air combat training, Colonel Poole and I were embarrassed when leading a flight home one night. From the backseat I was not paying as much attention to the details of our flight as I should have been. I trusted the colonel. But he led our flight of four F-4s into the VFR traffic pattern from the wrong direction. Had the flight continued, all aircraft would have landed into oncoming traffic. The consequences could have included a collision. This is why instructors went along on training missions. The instructor in one of the aircraft on this flight caught the mistake and ordered the flight of four to break up and reenter traffic, each aircraft on its own. It was terribly embarrassing—for anybody, but especially for this sassy colonel, who liked to ask hard questions during academic lectures. And for his backseater. “Killer,” indeed.

So, late in the program, when the time came for air-toair combat, we had something to prove. One flight stands out in memory, along with a handful of others, from my Air Force career: our last scheduled air-to-air combat mission in F-4 training.

We briefed. Four trainees would be in the front seats of the two flights of two. Three trainees and an instructor would be in the backseats.

By this time, Colonel Poole and I were working well together. During dogfights when our opponent was behind us and I could see him but the colonel couldn’t, I was able
to give a running commentary about exactly where the other guy was and what he was doing. And the colonel’s World War II air-to-air training was coming in handy.

I’d say, “He’s at five o’clock, low at five hundred yards, climbing, and gaining.”

The colonel then might crank in a six- or seven-g right turn.

“Now he’s at three.”

“I have him, I have him,” the colonel would say. “If I can . . . if I can just . . .”

“He’s overshooting! Reverse [abruptly change direction of turn]!”

“There—we’ve got him.” And we’d suddenly be on our opponent’s tail.

This last flight was a kind of world series. Bets were placed.

Three times we locked horns with another aircraft—close-in. Fox 3 battles were usually standoffs. Occasionally someone would win one. Rarely, two. Three times on this particular mission we scored a Fox 3.

“I can’t believe it,” I said.

“Well, I can. We showed ’em, Killer.”

The two flights of two were joining up to head home. The battles were over. Number two joined on lead. Number three joined on lead. We were number four. I was flying. As we moved in to join up, the colonel said, “I have the aircraft.” But rather than join up, he flew away from and out in front of the other three aircraft. Do you remember how after an aircraft won an air victory in those old air-battle war films, it celebrated with a “victory roll,”
a slow aileron roll? That’s what Colonel Poole did. We were showing off, celebrating, and we could almost feel the other pilots gritting their teeth.

After landing, a van, as usual, came around to pick up the pilots. Colonel Poole and I were walking back to the flight building. The other six pilots were in the van when it stopped for us. The colonel said to me as it pulled up and stopped, “Don’t get in.” He stuck his head in and said to the driver, “We’re walking in. We’re too good to ride with these goof-offs.”

There was no response. The van pulled away.

B
EFORE FINISHING AT
H
OMESTEAD
, we took a water-survival course, similar to our training at Fairchild AFB in Washington State but without the hardship. Water survival was great fun. We got to play in the water for six days. Hanging from lanyards, we rode long, slanted wires down into water to simulate hitting the water in a parachute. We were each dragged in a parachute harness behind a boat, simulating being dragged by wind across the water. While being dragged along, we had to learn to flip onto our backs, spread our legs to stay on our backs, and release the parachute harness. We each strapped into a cockpitlike device that was suddenly submerged in a swimming pool. We released ourselves from the harness, opened the canopy, and escaped.

We parasailed across Biscayne Bay behind a speedboat several hundred feet below. An instructor on the boat called, “Release!” through a megaphone.

I detached myself from the line that was pulling me,
and then as I floated down, hanging in the parasail parachute, I reached to the package on my butt and released a self-inflating raft and a survival kit. They dangled below me as I descended. I inflated the float devices under my arms—life preservers—and as I descended, the instructor called, “Turn left,” “Turn right,” and “Prepare to land.” I followed his instructions, turning left by pulling on the left riser and right by pulling on the right one. The parasail type of chute did not drop straight down but rather at a gliding angle, so I determined my direction of drift and turned myself in to the wind to minimize drift on impact.

I hit the water, then released the parachute from my harness and pulled it in. (Had the parachute landed on my head, I would have found any single cord embedded in the silk and followed it until it reached the border of the parachute so that I could peep out, gather up the chute, and store it.) I pulled the life raft to me, climbed in, pulled in my survival kit (attached to the life raft), opened it, and retrieved and put on my sun hat.

Also in the survival kit were packets of shark repellent—a black inky liquid. The rumor was that its purpose was to banish the pilot’s anxiety, but not sharks.