Solo (14 page)

One apartment or another in the BOQ in Japan housed a big party several times a month. At the end of the officer’s club Go-Go Night on Saturday nights or Mexican Food Night in the dining room on Wednesday nights, you might hear over the intercom: “Party in room seven” (or one or fourteen).

An international hotel that housed flight attendants from major U.S. airlines during layovers was located five minutes from the base. The officer’s club was a convenient outing for them, and many ended up at our parties.

There was a large, empty grass lot just across from the BOQ. On weekends in spring and summer, in the late afternoon, we’d have coed touch-football games there that sometimes lasted until after dark. A blanket in the end zone nearest the BOQ held ice, drinks, and food, and long breaks
in the games for rest and refreshments weren’t unusual.

S
OMETIMES PILOTS WOULD
attempt “carrier landings” in the officer’s club. Several large tables would be cleaned off and placed end-to-end. Beer was poured on their surfaces to reduce friction. A pilot backed away from the table as far as possible—sometimes into an adjoining room—took a running start, and dove headfirst onto the tables, arms pinned to his side (this was mandatory) to see how far he could slide before coming to a stop. Injuries were not uncommon. Especially if you were going fast enough to continue off the far side of the carrier.

Normally our wing and squadron commanders overlooked the antics of younger pilots, especially those of us in BOQ 16. But on one occasion just after a new base commander had arrived, we threw an unusually active party during which our building was damaged. Seven or eight of us were ordered to headquarters for questioning. The commander, accompanied by a mystery guest, sat with us around a table in a lush meeting room.

“Who lives in room sixteen?” he asked.

We looked at one another. Butch Henderson and Lynn Snow were in Korea for their five-week tour.

“They’re in Korea,” someone said.

“Okay, here’s the deal,” said the commander. “This man sitting beside me is a military attorney. He handles my legal matters, and if this kind of destruction of property happens again, the ones responsible will be off this base like shit through a tin horn.”

We toned down. Interesting turn of phrase. I’d never
heard it before—and haven’t since.

A
N
A
IR
F
ORCE PILOT
automatically accrued the informal status of the aircraft he flew. While the status of any particular aircraft can be argued about endlessly, a general ranking went something like this: fighter pilots were at the top of the heap, along with pilots of the A-1E, an old single-engine tail dragger. The A-1E could sustain hits from ground fire, was slow enough to have a low-radius turn, and could make many gunnery passes in a short time, and it was thus used regularly in efforts to rescue downed pilots in Southeast Asia. The tier below fighter pilots included pilots of Gooney Birds—the old C-47s from World War II, a big tail dragger with twin engines (like the airplane you see at the end of
Casablanca
). One of the pilots in my Laredo pilot-training class who finished high enough to choose a fighter, chose a Gooney Bird instead. It was a sentimental favorite. There was buzz about a new airplane designed for the war in Vietnam, the OV-10. It was a small, powerful turboprop aircraft with a cockpit designed like a fighter jet’s. It was used for reconnaissance and directing air strikes, and in a pinch it could transport up to six soldiers in a cargo bay.

In the next echelon were big cargo planes, and at the top of that batch was the C-130, designed to make low passes over jungle strips and drop cargo from the rear of the fuselage.

At the bottom of all mental lists that I ever knew about was the B-52, mentioned earlier.

Beneath all pilots (in the eyes of the pilots) were navigators, regardless of the aircraft they navigated. Most pilots who washed out of pilot training went to navigator-training school, and there was no shortage of navigator jokes. Navigators, on the other hand, considered themselves the brains of any flying mission. They left the steering to the dummy called the pilot, and they had their jokes too.

Backseat F-4 pilots held a unique position. Most were lieutenants just out of pilot training who’d been promised a quick upgrade to the front seat. But about the time I came along, the promise of an upgrade to front seat after six months became a joke. In most cases it didn’t happen, and then by the time it did, an extra two-year commitment (beyond the basic five years) came with it.

Because backseaters often flew the aircraft (I flew most of the formation flying during my flights), we were afforded fighter-pilot status, but among F-4 front-seat pilots we were merely GIBs—the guy in back. The back-seater’s standing joke was, “Remember that GIB spelled backwards is BIG.”

Backseat was a worthwhile position for a young fighter pilot. I navigated, controlled the radar, and was able to learn from the front-seater. Though I normally flew with the same front-seater, I occasionally flew with someone new, giving me the opportunity to observe a range of flying styles and talents.

At one time or another, most of us had occasion to take an F-4 up for a test flight. After repair service, an aircraft sometimes needed to be put through the motions, including
supersonic flight. On a normal flight with either an external centerline fuel tank or bombs and rockets hanging under the wings, supersonic flight was not permitted, but test flights were usually flown “clean.” On one test ride, my front-seater and I decided that after breaking the sound barrier (a requirement of that test flight), we’d see how fast we
could
go. A Machmeter indicates your speed in relation to the speed of sound. I was piloting. I climbed to about thirty thousand feet, lowered the nose, and moved the throttles into afterburner. We got our little bump as we went through Mach 1. We continued to accelerate until our speed was Mach 2.4, over sixteen hundred miles per hour.

“S
ITTING ALERT” IN
K
OREA
was not practice. It was the real thing. I look back on that time—my four-day slots every few weeks in Korea—with a kind of amazement. No one expected that we would really drop a nuclear bomb on Russia. On the other hand we were prepared to do just that—or thought we were. At any time while we were sleeping in the alert shack, or playing Ping-Pong or cards there, or making audiotapes from the large selection of LPs, the Klaxon could go off.

When the Klaxon sound came blaring through the bullhorns, we scrambled and then ran for the crew trucks waiting outside with keys in the ignition. Four pilots to a truck. There would be two trucks, eight pilots for four airplanes. This was during the cold war. We assumed each time was practice, but we could never be absolutely sure until we were in our cranked aircraft listening to coded instructions
on our radio. In our flight packets were maps with a Russian target clearly marked. Our helmets were fitted with gold-plated sun visors to protect our vision when our bomb detonated. I don’t remember the particular targets near the city I was always slated to bomb, Vladivostok. But our four aircraft were possibly on the way to kill thousands of innocent people. People who’d never lifted a finger to harm me—and never would.

And if nuclear war came, hundreds of other aircraft were about to take off—from both sides.

My antimilitary inclinations in the late 1960s, and those of many of my buddies, took a gentle form. In Japan my refrigerator in the BOQ was decorated with a large peace symbol. On my wall was a poster of Snoopy, from
Peanuts,
who danced in hippie attire above the quotation “Groovy.” Another poster had these words under a big flower: “War is not healthy for children and other living things.” We were split in our thinking: While some of us would never have considered leaving the Air Force or not going to war when called, we felt a hazy empathy with the antiwar movement back in the States. But our Air Force culture allowed no discussion of the topic. Clearly, others of us would be adamantly opposed to the antiwar movement.

The nearest I came to nonmacho personal statements at Yokota were found on my refrigerator—about thirty quotations written in red Magic Marker: “People is people, but a frog is a friend forever.” “Everything is mighty comfortable on a raft.” “Jesus was a nonconformist.”

A
S
FAR AS
I
KNOW
, I was the only English major in the group. In Korea I took an on-base English course on Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson. My dream, beyond my five years in the Air Force, was to return to North Carolina and teach high school English. None of my pilot buddies understood. And besides all that, I was a would-be poet. I was confident in my own abilities—and in those of a popular poet named Rod McKuen. To real poets, McKuen was the quintessential fake. But I didn’t know that then. I had bought and read McKuen’s book
Listen to the Warm.
It was a wildly popular best seller.

One night while on alert, several pilots sat quietly in the card room as I read a few of McKuen’s poems aloud. The pilots had been chosen carefully: my front-seater, Sean Tuddle, twenty-seven and already married three times; Fireball Kelly, who’d once escaped from an F-4 that was burning on the ground; and Cam Knight, the “bubble check” front-seater. As they sometimes say in graduate English classes, we “explicated.”

“I like that ‘hidden country of your smile,’” said Cam.

“Why?” said Fireball.

“I don’t know. I just do. Read that part again.”

I read it again.

“What the hell does that mean?” asked Fireball.

“It’s just a way of saying ‘mysterious smile’ without saying ‘mysterious smile,’” I said.

“Why can’t he say ‘mysterious smile’?”

“Well, he can. It’s just that he doesn’t want to use a cliché. He wants to make it new and different.”

“Cliché. Ha-ha.”

“‘Hidden country of your smile’ is a hell of a lot better,” said Sean. “Use your imagination, Fireball.”

“I just don’t know what’s wrong with ‘mysterious smile.’ ‘Hidden country’ could be anything. Hell, it might even be ‘hidden country.’ Cliché, my ass.”

And it went on like this for a while. But just that once. Explicating poetry didn’t catch on.

I tried to learn poker, a popular pastime while we were sitting alert, but I was slow and untrained, and these guys played hardball. After saying “Clover leaves or shovels?” instead of “Clubs or spades?” I was escorted from the room by glares. But I did get a few of us noncardlayers onto the game Botticelli. You guess the identity of a famous person with the only initial clue being the last letter of his or her last name. We played for hours at a time while sitting alert, waiting to carry out our part of Armageddon.

I
N KOREA WE SOMETIMES
flew over the ocean just out from a popular beach and, fuel permitting, performed aerobatics at a safe distance from the beachgoers, hoping they were enjoying the show.

My favorite maneuver was a four-point aileron roll. Flying straight ahead, I pulled the nose up about ten degrees and slammed the stick to the right (or the left) and then quickly back to center so that the aircraft paused with the wings perpendicular to the ground; then another slam and pause, leaving me inverted, with wings parallel to the ground; then another slam and pause, with wings again perpendicular to the ground; and then another, bringing me back where I’d started, flying straight and level. If it
came out about right, I’d do another roll, perhaps an eight-point roll, all the while imagining what it looked like from the ground, certain that the beachgoers appreciated the performance. It never occurred to me to think otherwise.

Other than participating in unauthorized dogfights, we normally stayed within all flying guidelines. Safety issues were hammered in through lectures and notices that followed all accidents and incidents (little accidents) Air Force–wide.

Occasionally one of our flying infractions occurred in front of the wrong person. My good friends Johnny Hobbs, a front-seater, and Bob Padget (“Poo”), his backseater, were preflighting their F-4 after refueling at Kunsan Air Base in Korea when an F-102 performed an afterburner climb-out on takeoff.

The ground crewman asked Johnny, “Will your airplane do that?”

Johnny, not knowing that an Air Force general was watching takeoffs, said something like, “Oh, I think it might.”

On takeoff, Johnny and Poo not only did a burner climb (permissible), but at a few thousand feet up, still in afterburner, they performed a slow 360-degree roll (not permissible). The general saw this, went inside, and got on the phone, and when Johnny and Poo landed at Osan they were told to report to our commander, Colonel Bennington.

With a general looking over his shoulder, Colonel Bennington was in something of a tight spot. He took Johnny and Poo off flight status and sent them home to Japan to await a reprimand or a court-martial or something—
something bad.

Grounded at Yokota, Johnny and Poo partied. And partied, and partied. They’d been there for about a week when a North Korean aircraft shot down an American military aircraft (in April 1969) off the coast of South Korea, near the border with North Korea.

All of us flying F-4s at Osan were issued North Korean target maps. We held combat briefings. Armament would be conventional, not nuclear. I remember that my front-seater, Sean Tuddle, and I were scheduled to be number four in a flight of four in a large contingent of aircraft. This was not good. We would be the last of the four aircraft to drop bombs on the same target, and by the time number four came in, the guns below would be blazing and would likely be more accurate than when number one rolled in.

Besides being ready to fly combat missions from Osan, members of our squadron were now flying two aircraft in shifts in a large racetrack pattern off the northern coast of South Korea—twenty-four hours a day. These new missions were boring, though tense. Our radar was constantly scanning the coastline, ready and waiting for an attack from North Korean fighter aircraft. Sitting there, armed, we were in effect daring the North Koreans to attack us. Finally, after years of training, I was close to combat. We’d fly the racetrack for about two hours until we were low on fuel, and then we’d refuel from a C-135 tanker and fly another two hours before being relieved by two fresh aircraft. I remember looking down at the ocean far below, wondering what it would be like if we were attacked.
And since they had just shot down one of our planes, why wouldn’t they try it again?