My celebration of the aced formation checkride was short-lived. For the first time since we started, Steve Hart was having trouble. He just couldn't seem to hold the wing tip on the star. He began to sweat each ride, and we all helped and encouraged him as best we could, but his instructor would not recommend him for his checkride. Soon the 88 came, then the 99. Within weeks of graduationalmost a year since a glorious beginningSteve washed out. He said his goodbyes and was gone. It was as if our friend had crashed somewhere out there on the prairie. We mourned his departure as if he were dead. It wasn't fair, we lamented. Steve was a good flier. Maybe he wasn't cut out for formation flight, but he could have been a valuable asset to the Air Force as a bomber or transport pilot. It just wasn't fair.
Eventually the Air Force would wise up and discard the idea of training all pilots in a fighter preparation format. In 1993, UPI began to implement changes that divided students into fighter or transport tracks at the end of the T-37 phase. Those destined for fighter-type jobs would continue in the T-38, and those chosen for the "heavies" would continue their training in a transport-type trainer. But the change was twenty years too late for Steve.
In the last days the much-heralded assignment block arrived. The flight commander handed the list to me and asked me to write it on the training board. As I did so, my classmates stood behind me, examining each entry, murmuring and buzzing with excited speculation. Seven of the twenty-seven assignments were fighter jobs.
I had already picked mine out, an RF-4 to Shaw AFB, South Carolina. That was my dream assignmentto fly fast, low, and alone, with only a navigator for company, photographing hostile positions. The RF-4 was armed only with a camera. I wasn't keenly interested in dropping bombs. And I also reasoned that since the Alabama Air Guard flew RF-4s, I could build good credentials for an eventual job there. I listed the two single-seat fighters, the A-7 and F-106, as second and third, then the F-4s. The T-38 had made me completely forget about my original desire to fly the C-141.
The next day the picks were announced. The RF-4 had been taken by someone who ranked above me. I was going to Tucson to fly A-7s.
Willy got an F-4, Pete a C-130. But never again would I have such an enviable choice. It wasn't just a once-in-a-lifetime choice; it was a once-in-a-million-lives choice.
Eleanor took leave of her senses and consented to take up with an Air Force bum and follow him God knew where. We were married the day after graduation. But before we left for Arizona, I borrowed a hacksaw and sawed my new wings in two. I had a promise to keep.
While the year of UPT was one of the finest of my life, the one that followed ranked as one of the worst. The instructors in A-7 school were combat veterans, fresh from a war that frustrated them and thwarted their will to fight and win. They loathed a government that had mandated not just defeat but disaster. And as usual with military instructors, they did not relish coming home to teach.
It was not the happiest of environments in which to learn the fighter pilot's trade. At times I felt that the instructors were taking their frustrations out on me, and I suppose I invited such treatment. I wasn't tremendously interested in bombing and strafing, and I guess it showed.
A few weeks after we had settled in at Davis-Monthan, the phone rang; it was Willy calling from F-4 school up at Luke AFB in Phoenix. "Have you heard about Phil Molina?" he asked. I knew from his tone that Phil was dead. A member of our UPT class, Phil had gone home to fly C-130s in the Air Guard. He had been flying copilot when it happened. A blade from one of the early electric propellers had separated and sliced through the fuselage, cutting hydraulic lines and control cables. The craft had plummeted to the ground. Visions of Phil's grinning face immediately flashed across my memory. I wondered how many times I would have to endure this experience. But the worst was yet to come.
I made it through A-7 school and was assigned to the 358th Tactical Fighter Squadron, the Lobo Wolves, a proud unit with a great heritage of honor and courage. In the years that followed, I flew the A-7 across the southwestern deserts and the jungles of Thailand, bombing and strafing until I had had enough. I wasn't cut out to be a career fighter pilot. At my zenith I made the squadron Top Gun board one month, but finally I had to admit it. I had the right stuff, or else I wouldn't have been there. What I didn't have was the right heart. I put in my papers, and Ellie and I packed up and headed for a new life of which we knew little.
Within two years, after a couple of interim jobs and some graduate school, destiny led me to Jackson, Mississippi, for what appeared to be a long and thrilling career as a petroleum geologist. The hunt for oil had its own brand of excitement. And what's more, the Mississippi Air Guard had invited me to join them flying C-130s. Scott and Brad were born, and Ellie and I thought we had finally found our place in the sun.
On January 19, 1982, I sat down and opened the evening newspaper. I stared in horror and disbelief at the photographs of the four Thunderbird pilots who had crashed while performing a practice air show maneuver in the Nevada desert. The entire diamond formation had slammed into the ground, following the leader whose flight controls, it was later determined, had malfunctioned. The four dead included Captain Willy Mays, Thunderbird Two, from Ripley, Tennessee.
For days I was cast into that vaporous domain where cries of "why?" and "what if?" continually strafe and dive-bomb you. It's a feeling painfully familiar to fliers when they lose one of their own. I sat idly at my desk in the office, staring out the window, useless to anyone. And still it was not to be the last time I would have to deal with such a loss.
The time I spent flying C-130s was some of the best years of my flying career. I truly had the best of both worlds: an interesting, challenging, well-paying job and an open opportunity to fly almost whenever I wished. But in the mid-1980s the oil business fell on hard times, and I took on the title of consulting geologist, which was a smoke screen for unemployed geologist. I jumped from retainer to retainer, never having more than a year or two of security, and supplemented my income by flying heavily with the Guard.
I began to take all the training courses and extra duty the Guard and Air Force could offer. During one such period while I was TDY at Maxwell Air Force Base, Montgomery, Alabama, I suddenly confronted my past in an incredible encounter. I was walking down a sidewalk near the Air University when a sergeant saluted me and stopped.
"Wait," he said, closely examining my name tag. "Do you remember me, sir?" I didn't. He extended his hand. "I'm Mike Johnsonthe guy you sent half your wings to!"
I was awestruck. It had been years since I sawed the wings. I hadn't thought of him in a long time. We talked and caught up with one another's lives. It was a warm feelingalmost like a family reunion. This man had never been able even to approach the fulfillment of the wing, yet he had understood what it meant to me. He had received the half wings; they had been forwarded to him in Viet Nam. And to that day, they were proudly mounted in a display case in his den.
I'll never forget this man who had made such a profound difference in my life. I've saluted him many times with a snappy aileron roll, up high where almost no one notices.
We all loved the C-130 beyond comprehension. We flew the "Hercs" down low over the catfish and cotton farms, in formation. On Tuesday and Thursday evenings motorists on Interstate 20 would marvel at the sight of our three-ship formations crossing at what must have seemed treetop level, giving birth to billowing parachutes on Bull Run Drop Zone near Edwards. We practiced landings on short runways, and flew to places all over the countryand a few out of the countryin support of other active and reserve units. It was the ultimate flying club.
Then, in 1986, an old dream was suddenly resurrected. On a Saturday UTA, Colonel Bailey asked for a show of hands from all of us who wanted to switch to C-141s. Mine was one of the few that went up. But despite the lack of enthusiasm from the crews, the announcement was made public. Senator Stennis, seeking more jobs for his constituents, threw some heavy political weight around and made us give up our almost new C
-130s to become the first Air Guard unit to be equipped with the C-141B Starlifter. I had come full circle at last.
The '141 was a big four-engine jet transport with a worldwide strategic airlift mission. Suddenly there was no more low-level flying, no air drops, no formation flying, no short runways, and very few nice weekend cross-country trips. Bull Run DZ was shut down.
Although the jets were beautiful and sported a modern, streamlined appearance, they were oldolder than some of those who were flying them. They were maintenance headaches, and the transition to our new global mission was not easy for the crews. Suddenly it wasn't a very suitable part-time pursuit anymore. An operational trip to Europe and back took a minimum of four days. It was tough for most guys to get off from their jobs for that amount of time. Great changes began to develop among us. Those who couldn't do it dropped out. Those who took their place had jobs that were more flexible. Our ranks began to swell with airline pilots and self-employed people. Some didn't have jobsGuard bums, we called them. They volunteered for all the flying that the scheduler would give them and made a decent living at it.
Again I went back on active duty, this time for six weeks to check out in the Starlifter. It was an opportune time, as I was again between retainers. The course was designed as a refresher for people who had previously been qualified in the Starlifter but who had been in a desk job or some other pursuit that had taken them out of the cockpit. The "short course" wasn't intended to check out pilots who had never flown the C-141there was a twelve-week course for that purposebut the Guard had persuaded the Air Force that we could hack it. After all, the C-130, to which we were so accustomed, was, like the C-141, a Lockheed product. There shouldn't be too much difference. But in fact there were tremendous differences, we would discover.
My stick partner and longtime friend Hugh Stevens was the argumentative sort. A computer programmer by trade, he always kept one eye scrutinizing detail, and when I displayed disrespect for certain minutiae, Hugh mounted an intensive campaign to educate me. It was not uncommon for Hugh to burst into my room, through the connecting kitchenette, armed with a "Dash-l," gleefully documenting some minute fact that had been in dispute and about which I had ceased to care. During the long debriefings after our simulator flights, Hugh invariably engaged the instructors in protracted discourses over some morsel of flying knowledge, while I sat back and yawned, fidgeted, and tried unsuccessfully to subvert the debates. For six weeks he dogged and niggled me unmercifully, but finally we graduated and happily returned to Jackson to become the pioneers of a new concept of strategic airlift in the militia. And as the oil business grew steadily worse, I found myself increasingly plying the world's skyscapes in the big jets to make ends meet.
In 1989, I gave up on the oil business and joined United Airlines, commuting to Chicago to fly Boeing 727s. My life was completely dominated by airplanes at that pointmaybe too many. I had to keep up with, and devote time to, three aircraft: the C-141, the 727, and my own Grumman AA-5.
By then I had spent fifteen years "flying the line" for Uncle Sam. Had I still been on active duty, maybe as much as half of that time would have been spent flying a desk. Young Air Force pilots often complained of the incessant pressure to "broaden" one's career. Most of them wanted nothing else but to fly, to be the best they possibly could, maybe to command a squadron and pass their knowledge on to the next generation. It seemed rational, but the Air Force continued to insist that all pilots become managers, bean counters, and upwardmoving professional administrators.
It has been changing more in favor of pilots recently, but I remember when a visiting general was speaking at Officer's Call at Altus Air Force Base while I was in C-141 school. He was asked why the Air Force couldn't establish a career track for those who wanted exclusively to fly for twenty years.
"Oh, but we have" was his response. "That career track you speak of is called the Air Force Reserve and Air National Guard."
I'm exceedingly glad that reserve component funding came from Capitol Hill and not from the Pentagon. Otherwise the militia would have been neglected stepchildren. As it was, pork barrel politics worked in our favor. The politicians whom we sent to Washington were big on the Guard. "Nothin's too good for my boys down thea. I want 'em to have the best tanks and arrowplanes money c'n buy." And for the most part, we got them. Life was good.
Our unit, in particular, had done well. We were the 172nd Military Airlift Group, Mississippi Air Guard" The Wings of the Deep South" we'd called ourselves. We had been the first militia unit back in the early 1980s to get brand new "H" model C-130s; the first such unit to respond to the Hurricane Hugo devastation; the first into earthquakeravaged Soviet Armenia; the first of any Guard or Reserve unit to plunge into Operation Just Causethe liberation of Panama; and the first unit in the entire history of American airpower to log twenty-five years of accident-free flying. Our unit drew its strength from a vast population of Mississippians to whom the slogan "Duty, Honor, Country" was much more than just poetic words uttered from the lips of a fading old soldier. Mississippians had never heard that "patriotism" was supposed to be an outdated and unfashionable thing. And it was no secret that the Mississippi Air Guard was a proud, shining star over a state that abounded in problems both real and imagined. Mississippians had invested their trust and pride in us, and we carried the banner of the Magnolia Militia the world over. Even foreign radar controllers recognized the call sign "Ruler." One thickly accented German controller had once asked me on a congested frequency, "Rula Eight Fife, are you from Mizzizzippi?"
"Citizen Airmen" the recruiting pitches called us. It meant that you held a regular job (maybe), or you were a student, using the Guard to work your way through college (a smart idea), or maybe your wife worked while you bummed it at the Guard Base. Whatever you did, at least once a week you had about an hour after work to make the transition from whatever job you normally toiled at, to the cockpit of a military jet. You had to give Uncle Sam twelve of your weekends and at least fifteen additional days each year. But to stay reasonably proficient in the jet, everyone put in three or four times as many days. You'd take a couple of days off from work, pair them with a weekend, and cross continents and oceans as routinely as your neighbor drove to his Warren County deer camp.
It was uncanny to me how people from such different backgrounds could join together for such a specialized and demanding taskand do it with relative harmony. The other pilot across the cockpit from you might be a stockbroker or lawyer. The flight engineers and loadmasters could be accountants, truck drivers, or students. But no matter what you did outside the gates, your heart was always sprouting wings, yearning for the smell of burnt JP-4 fuel (which you joked about) and the whine of the big turbines. Being a macho crewdog, you rarely spoke of yearnings of the heart. But they were there. Yes, it was a great jobsflying, getting paid for it, and serving your country.
By all accounts, I had enjoyed a flying career that spanned the spectrum of military aviation. I had known the thrill, the joy, and the excitement of the fighters. The heavies had matured me as a flier, had shown me the world, and had taught me the satisfaction of job accomplishment. Along the way, I found the kind of friendship and brotherhood that rarely existed in other enclaves of life. I had good reason to be content, to feel immensely blessed. Time and again, over the years I felt indebted to someone, or something.
And now, a wretched despot, empowered with the world's fourth largest army, had invaded our ally and threatened our vital interests. It didn't matter whether I was enthusiastic or not about rushing to Kuwait's aid. The account had come due. I had to settle it.
Three.
The TJ Blues
We have begun our letdown into Madrid. The flight across the Atlantic from Charleston has been typically long and abundantly dark, and we are feeling the first ripples of the soaking fatigue that will intensify and linger for months.
The Spanish controller orders us to a surprisingly low altitude across this vast city. I guess noise pollution
isn't a big concern here. Now I see why. Dawn is only a couple of hours away, yet the long strings of bright little pairs of eyes inching past yellow streetlights reveal a city alive. Madrid's not up early; it hasn't gone to bed yet.
We skim across the living plasma of light and humanity, marveling at the vitality of life below and its indifference to our ephemeral passage. After the hours of dark empty ocean, we become infused with it. The amber glow permeates our souls and preps us for the rejoin with society at the place called Torrejon, five minutes ahead.
We've all seen Torrejon before in less tumultuous times. We call it TJ, which is the identifier painted on the tails of its wing of F-16 fighters. We contact the tower and are cleared for a visual approach to runway two three. After landing we are instructed to turn off onto a connecting taxi way and wait.
The vast ramp is packed with airlifters. In the dawning light, we see the gargantuan beehive of activity that TJ has become. Enormous dark hulks are parked on almost every available space, their red and green wing tip lights piercing the darkness. Here and there the stomachs of the leviathans are exposed, their huge clamshell doors swung open, the interiors bathed in light. The hulks are being serviced by hosts of vehicles with sweeping headlights, scurrying about like frightened rodents. Towering tails move back and forth above the jumble like prowling sharks, gracefully swinging and turning as they maneuver. The magnitude of the spectacle is the first indication that we are caught up in something big beyond our wildest expectations.
After what seems a long wait, we are cleared to taxi to a parking space that has just been vacated. The engines spool down, and we download our burden of bags and equipment and wait for the promised crew bus. And wait. And wait. "The two biggest lies in the world," Walt mutters. "'Check's in the mail' and 'crew bus is on the way.'" A frustration that we will come to know and loathe begins to set in.
Tail of the Storm Page 4
