Fighter Pilot

by Christina Olds

  Two weeks later I was in Wiesbaden and poked my head into his office. He looked up from a mountain of papers and waved me in. I declined his offer of coffee and said, “Christ, Bob, I was on channel ten when Rome answered you. What a ration of crap that was! They sure didn’t answer MY call. Matter of fact, that’s the first time in two years I’ve ever heard them on the air.”

  “Yeah,” Bob growled, “all this time over here and I’ve never heard those bastards answer, not once, not ever. Jesus Christ, you’d think they’d get with the program. I’ve a good mind to write the sons a bitches up the next time they don’t respond. Hell, we’ve done nothing but cooperate all this time, helping set up this European air control system, and they’re out drinking vino or something.”

  He was getting pretty worked up and I wondered if my little joke hadn’t backfired a bit, so I asked in my best dialect, “Aira Forsa sevena eight, did-a you ever finda Civitavecchia?”

  Bob looked at me for a moment, then exploded. “Robin, you son of a bitch!”

  Bob Worley was a hell of a guy and a great friend, but he came to a sad end ten years later. He had made major general and was vice commander to General “Spike” Momyer at the 7th Air Force in Saigon. He was on a recce flight over some damned place in South Vietnam and took a golden BB. His F-4 caught fire, and instead of immediately punching out, he tried to get back to base. It didn’t work; it seldom does. The backseater ejected and survived, but they had used the wrong ejection sequence. A chase pilot flying formation on them watched Bob overcome by flames as the rear canopy departed. He had no chance to pull the ejection handle and went in with the bird.

  Life at Wheelus turned out to be wonderful in many ways. I finally convinced Ella to join me in the desert of North Africa by promising the rental of a big house on the outskirts of Tripoli. I also talked up the allure of the beach and great social high life. Much of it was British based, so it was quite civilized and just to her taste. We also had some really good long-standing friends stationed there with their children. My family arrived in late October and quickly settled in. The house was a walled villa, complete with gardens full of tropical flowers, date palms, the requisite flowering cacti, and a raised concrete pond with lilies and voracious catfish. Little Chris and Susie, ages four and three when they arrived, had the run of the garden and the compound, watched over closely by their nanny. We were attended by several Libyan houseboys, part of the staff inherited from the previous tenants.

  Ella was quite the picture out on the veranda in the evenings, dressed in white linen (including a white Hollywood-style turban) and large dark sunglasses. The incongruity of the scene never escaped me. I would leave the modern facilities at the base, the noise of jets, smell of jet fuel, sight of personnel in sweaty uniforms, and drive out the east gate through the dusty squalor of huts, garbage, cooking fires, herds of goats, groups of brown children running happily in rags accompanied by their squadrons of flies, and then turn through the high gates of our compound, immediately entering a clean, calm, green and white world. I would find my wife waiting regally for me with chilled crystal martini glasses ready on the veranda, Muhammad standing close by and holding a silver tray bearing a silver martini shaker. I admit, I enjoyed the juxtaposition of our little world to the other worlds outside.

  The better part of off-duty time was spent at the beach with our friends. We’d gather up the children, load the cars with scuba-diving equipment, blankets, umbrellas, picnic baskets, and ice chests, then head to the coast in a caravan to relax at our favorite spot. Arab children jumped on the running boards of the cars and reached through the windows to beg whenever we slowed down. The local men knew the routine and were always ready at the turnoff to push our cars down the long, sandy road to the beach, happy for their rewards of cigarettes and root beer. The wives would set up the blankets and umbrellas at the perfect spot to supervise the children playing in the shallow tide pools while we men outfitted ourselves in scuba gear to explore the coastline.

  These excursions into the Med weren’t just to look at fish. We quickly learned that a veritable treasure trove of artifacts from ancient ships sunk off the coast lay scattered on the sandy bottom. One day my friend Grumpy Steele and I found an old barnacle-encrusted cannon half buried in the sand. It was much too heavy to lift, so we pushed and dragged it along the bottom as far as we could toward the beach before abandoning the effort. Over the course of a few weekends, Grumpy and I moved that thing bit by bit until we got it all the way out of the water. It became the centerpiece of a great party under the beach umbrellas that day, but for the life of me, I can’t remember what became of it. No doubt it’s still somewhere in Tripoli, maybe in a museum but more likely in some sheikh’s courtyard.

  Those were happy days for my family. We were all as brown as berries. Chris and Susie learned to swim in the Med, and my marriage was thriving. Ella became pregnant again. The girls were still too young to attend the base school, but they went with other Wheelus children to a nursery school near the compound, where they sat on woven mats and piles of straw to learn the alphabet from an Arab teacher fluent in English. Those classes were also attended by local boys wandering in to learn some English and accompanied by their small herds of goats. This naturally translated into the girls begging for goats as pets, so one was added to the compound garden. Our dog and cat were not amused. Ella was not amused either when the goat took up residence in the kitchen. Chrissie came home from those classes speaking Arabic with the fluency of a five-year-old and became our translator with the house staff. After Tripoli, her memory of the language naturally faded, but far into their teen years Susie would often wake Chris up to stop her from babbling loudly in Arabic in her sleep.

  Both girls couldn’t understand why Ella wouldn’t open the compound gates and allow the little Arab children to come in and play. So one day, with Chris as the ringleader, they took matters into their own hands. Ella was pretty vocal about the precious value of the family silverware stored in the dining room chest, so the girls emptied it, dumping all of it out of a window over the street. They believed the Arab children could sell the silver and buy clean new clothes, which would qualify them to be invited by Ella into the compound to play. The happy result of this “grand theft” was the appearance at the front gate the next morning of the dignified elder tribesman bearing a large basket of silver. Every single piece was returned. The sad news is that Ella taught Chris and Susie the lesson of a lifetime by throwing all of their toys into the street and issuing orders for the Arab children to keep them.

  More unhappily, Ella was at full term with our third child when things went horribly wrong in her labor. The baby was stillborn. It was a boy. Once home from the hospital, and blaming me for forcing her to live in the wretched unsanitary and backward conditions of Libya, Ella retreated to her room for two weeks. I had tiny Robert Ernest Olds cremated, and a few days later I drove to the beach by myself, donned my scuba gear, swam far out from shore, dove down, and released the ashes of my son into the water of the Mediterranean.

  * * *

  Two months later, July ’58, I was reassigned to the Pentagon and was once again in the Air Defense Command, USAF HQ. This unwelcome bit of news prompted me to write several letters to an old West Point classmate of mine, Colonel Paul “Pat” Hurley, who was in the Colonel’s Assignment Branch deep in those very headquarters. I’d been doing my level best since 1951 to live down the stigma of any connection to the Air Defense Command, and there was no way in hell I was going to go quietly. I recognized intercepting nuclear bombers as a necessary evil but had no use for the basic concept of their defensive mission. In my opinion, there was only one thing that counted in air power and that was offense. Offense was delivered in only two ways, SAC and fighter-bomber wings scattered around the perimeter of the Soviet Union. My hard work of the past two years had helped build combat capability within the tactical forces of USAFE. When would HQ USAF realize that it would be at least ten years before we could rely on the effe
ctive performance of missiles in either defense or response? Until that time came, the tactical fighter troops would have to carry the burden of taking the war to an enemy. When a missile was ready to take over my job, I’d be ready to take up hog ranching. Fifteen years herding fighter pilots in the air force left me eminently qualified for that occupation.

  My pleas to avoid the Pentagon fell on sympathetic but deaf ears. All I could do was beg not to work in ADC, but my assignment as dep chief Air Defense Division, USAF HQ, was written in stone. If the air force was going to throw away pilots, drain away fighting capability, and relegate this fighter pilot to desk jockey status, then I would have to make the most of it. Shit, I felt like a Christian entering the Colosseum, not knowing whether I’d be burned at the stake, stoned by Romans, eaten by lions, or raped by ravenous Amazons. Abandoning hope upon entering seemed natural.

  At least part of the family was happy with the news. Ella, of course, was ecstatic. Washington social circles would be her cup of tea. I didn’t have a clue how to break it to the dog or the cat, let alone the goat.

  15

  Pentagon to Shaw

  The family enjoyed the return from Naples to New York on the newly commissioned USS Independence. This mode of transport was normally only due general officers and their families, but, once again, Ella batted her movie star eyelashes at her connections and pulled some rank. I had to thank her for this one. We relaxed the whole way back, although it felt like I was leaving heel marks all across the Atlantic. Ella was the happiest I’d seen her in four years, and I had hopes this move back to civilization would smooth our troubles. Once disembarked in New York on September 1, she moved into an apartment at the Carlyle Hotel, put the girls into a nearby school, and set about selling her Manhattan flat. I reported to the Pentagon and started looking for a house in the D.C. area. Whether or not I wanted the ops job in the Air Defense Division was no longer important. I was determined to make the best of things and devote whatever skills I had to flying a desk.

  My first stop was to visit an old friend who had an office somewhere deep in the Pentagon subbasement. When I found his cubbyhole there was a small sign hanging out over the corridor: AFOOP/I. Jesus, only in this damned madhouse. It didn’t help my mood to recognize what the sign meant. The Installations (Bases) and Units Sections of the Directorate of Operations in the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff Operations, Headquarters, United States Air Force. It was to be my new home. It wasn’t a corner office with a Potomac view.

  Our job wasn’t really improving the war fighting of the USAF. We simply worked for a chief whose job it was to convince Congress that the air force needed money to operate. By law, the chief didn’t command anything; he donned his Joint Chiefs hat for occasional appearances. Sure, he put out policies and doctrines; controlled force structure; made overall operational, matériel, and personnel plans; had the last say on promotions in the colonel and general ranks; and had the respect of the major command warlords, but that last was more military courtesy than anything else. Command of the war fighting was done through the Joint Chiefs, not the service chief of staff. The air staff in the Pentagon wrangled over roles and missions, fought over dollars, and spent hundreds of thousands of man-hours responding to the bullshit coming off Capitol Hill, to say nothing of the doctrinal battles with the navy and army.

  Within a few weeks at the Pentagon I felt defiled, as though everything I had ever done, everything I had ever believed in and given my loyalty to from the time I was a small Air Corps brat at Langley, was suddenly of no consequence. I’d been bitching about getting stuck in the air defense business since 1950, and all my discomfort came to a clear, sharp focus with the new job. I’d never been able to make myself believe in the air defense mission, as much as I was involved for the preceding eight years. I began seriously questioning what was really going on rather than giving blind obedience to the system. My dad and his buddies after World War I had fought for air power against all odds, against infantry and artillery generals and battleship admirals. Despite Billy Mitchell’s court-martial, my father stuck by his beliefs. They believed in themselves and in the mission of air power. They weren’t afraid to speak their mind, and many of them put their careers on the line fighting for their convictions. It was in my genes. I could follow my upbringing or go along with the pack.

  At Landstuhl and Wheelus I’d had time to think. I began to realize that the infantry and artillery generals my dad had argued against still existed, but they had evolved into bomber generals, who had taken control of the USAF after World War II. The new bunch were just as arbitrary and thickheaded as the stuffy old bastards my dad had fought. I was damned if I was going to give in to their system even though my own beliefs were not yet clearly focused. I realized Wheelus had been a foundation for my thinking on tactical air training. I knew what needed to be done to build a fighting force, and I determined to be the missionary for those concepts. I had managed to get us out of an inadequate bombing range at Tarhuna and had moved the whole works to El Watia. I knew what it took to get into the desert and haggle with the local sheikhs to get their agreement to use thousands of acres to build a huge tactical target complex, with dummy airfields, convoys, bridges, supply dumps, and all the stuff fighter guys needed to see to get in some honest training under realistic conditions. I had been planning to have air opposition and dummy flak to liven things up, but when I went to USAFE for the money to do that, I was turned down. Washington had told USAFE that the air force didn’t need to spend much money on conventional training. The fighter role in Europe was nuclear strike and that was it. We would focus on what we had been doing and downplay the conventional tactical mission. I found another way.

  The base civil engineer at Wheelus was a friend and turned his head when I raided his supply yards. We loaded stuff on trucks and headed 150 miles west to Sabrata, then south to El Watia. We laid out the dive, skip, and strafe targets, built the spotting towers, put up the radio masts, erected a cinder block mess hall and a crude barracks building, moved in power generators, and built a first-class range complex. With some reluctant volunteers to run the place, do the cooking, and score targets, we were in business. Bob Worley, in Wiesbaden, couldn’t approve what was happening in the Libyan Desert, but he didn’t object. In fact, Worley went to bat, telling quite a few of the USAFE staff to sit down and shut up. But the monkey was on my back. I had an ally fighting the system and I was getting the job done. I felt I knew what it would take.

  It was a blow to the plan when my assignment to the Pentagon came. I was yanked back into the air defense business, screwing with mountains of paperwork and knowing that less than 25 percent of anyone’s sweat and long hours amounted to one-half of bloody fuck-all for the guys in the field.

  There are ninety-two steps from the subbasement of the Pentagon up to the E Ring on the fourth floor. I know. I counted the damned things, routinely at five thirty or six o’clock on Friday afternoons, and countless more times during the normal working hours of the week.

  Fridays were special to normal people in one way and to many denizens of the Pentagon in quite another. Working America anticipated Friday as the best day of the week. TGIF! Time to enjoy a breather, time to spend with your kids, go to that dinner party, do some work in the garden, maybe even polish the car. But here in the damned Pentagon, Friday meant “What will the big man up in the E Ring have in store for us this weekend?” TGIF meant The General Is Fucking with us. It had become an irritating fact of life, an unpleasant certainty, to get that dreaded Friday call late in the day: “Come up. I’ve got something for you. Bring Al.” Sure, boss, right away, boss.

  One, two, three, four, five steps … there goes another weekend … twelve, thirteen, fourteen … always something generated by the rampant hysteria of Cold War in the late fifties … twenty-nine, thirty … hysteria fanned, of course, by that paragon of virtue, that holier-than-thou asshole, that scaremonger and hate spreader who must have been elected by an enclave of mass paranoia somewh
ere, a senator named McCarthy … fifty-six, fifty-seven, fifty-eight, hell, only thirty-four to go. Not only did McCarthy manage to provide the basis for the expenditure of untold billions for defense against the THREAT, the son of a bitch managed to dominate and ruin MY weekends. Of course, he wasn’t alone; he had a lot of expert help from the E Ring.… Seventy-three, seventy-four … and its vaunted inhabitants in a hallowed realm of windows and broad vistas, relatively fresh air, desks, chairs, and carpeting the size and thickness of which signified your relative importance in the heights of power. What combination of past egos had dictated that those physical things be considered the very manifestation of wisdom and position of rank and glory? Ninety, ninety-one, ninety-two. Open the door, three, four.

  We existed in that underground, windowless rabbit warren called the Directorate of Operations, United States Air Force. Hundreds of us worked in cubicles where the original designers of what was then the largest office complex in the world had intended files to be stored, prisoners to be interrogated, cars to be parked, supplies to be forgotten, janitors to make out, and mice and rats to multiply. It was a natural place to put the operational guys, the pilots who loved the wild blue yonder, whose souls swung and soared in the footless halls of air, who had flung their eager crafts up, up the delirious blue, chased the shouting winds along, and done a hundred things. We were the guys stuck in the basement without even a piece of sky to view. We occupied dank corridors and fetid cubicles, where even the air conditioners gave up. God knows the circulatory system installed in 1942 tried hard to keep the brass comfortable. Even that was marginal. So it’s not difficult to imagine how little fresh air reached the trolls in the subbasement. Of course, everyone smoked in those days. I won’t try to describe the stink that clung to the walls, reeked in corridors, and permeated our clothes. Most everyone had a raging headache by ten each morning.