War For the Hell of It: A Fighter Pilot's View of Vietnam

by Ed Cobleigh

  Indeed, the Northrop Corporation converted the Talon to a real jet fighter, the F-5A "Tiger." The Tiger is even now being flown in combat by the South Vietnam Air Force, the VNAF. Never mind that pilots in the USAF say that VNAF stands for "Very Nice Air Force" due to the lack of aggressiveness exhibited by most of its pilots. The F-5/T-38 can be considered to be a fighter plane of sorts. In learning to fly the Talon, I shoved the fear of non-survival further down into that mental cache. The T-38 took me and my rapidly expanding ego quite literally into the stratosphere.

  The F-4 Phantom was a whole 'nother feast of mastery over fear. The ugly, dirt-brown F-4 is nothing if not a purebred fighter plane, a machine whose sole purpose in life, and death, is killing. It is the world's top-of-the-line fighter, the best jet flown by anyone, anywhere. By the time I became comfortable in the spacious cockpit of the F-4, I wasn't worried at all about dying, only about failing.

  The USAF pilot training process is designed not to eliminate fear entirely, but rather to replace one type of poisonous fear with the flavor of one more palatable. The substitute taste is the fear of failure, of not hacking the program, to be considered a wimp by one's peers. This is the fear that drove me on, that made me burn the midnight oil studying, focusing my senses onto the tasks and missions assigned. Fear of failure is a rancid, sour taste; the opposite complementary flavor is the taste of success, of doing well at a supremely difficult and exceedingly dangerous task. That job is flying fighters for the United States Air Force.

  Over the months and years, during training sortie after training sortie, the fear of non-survival was baked out of me. Or, at the very least, it is buried so deeply that it takes extraordinary danger to summon it up. Even the sick fear of failure is suppressed and latent. I believe now I can hack the fighter pilot program. Today my operative worry is a concern about not doing well, the fear of not excelling. If and when I do excel, the taste is very sweet indeed. After hundreds of combat missions, I have come to believe, I have to believe, that nothing the enemy can throw up in the air at me is going to cause me to fail, or die, assuming there is a difference between the two.

  No training program can replicate the fear cooked up by combat. In training, lots of things can go wrong. The weather can be stinko. You can fly too low and too fast or too high and too slow. The aircraft can malfunction, blow up, and burn out from under you. Your wingman can collide with you. If grossly mishandled, the F-4 can be an evil pig of an airplane, repaying ineptness with a spin, crash, and fireball. However, all these fearsome risks are known, quantified, and predictable. Being predictable, training risks can be calculated and then either be taken on or avoided.

  Combat flying forces you to operate on another level. In combat, dedicated, brave, and occasionally skilled people do their dead level best to kill you. The risks are unpredictable and hard to calculate. There are no rules in an aerial knife fight. Most times, the danger can't be avoided or ducked. You have to perform; no rain checks are allowed in this game.

  The unquantified, unpredictable risks generate fear of another, unknown, unfamiliar flavor. In combat, you can do your best and you still may not excel, or even survive. Sometimes, even the Bad Guys win.

  Some guys never really come to grips with the unique, intense fears of combat. The Major was one of them. He came to fly the F­4 Phantom from the USAF Air Defense Command, where he flew the F-102 Delta Dart. The Air Defense Command is charged with defending the airspace of the continental United States. The Major was stationed in southern California, with its relaxed attitude and usually good weather. His duty days were filled with hours on alert status, flying training sorties, and living the good life. His stateside flying was very predictable, with canned mission scenarios and compliant, pretend targets flying predictable flight paths. The risks were few and well known. The F­102 is a straight and level interceptor which uses its radar and long-range missiles to engage lumbering bomber-type targets. The risks and dangers of combat were miniscule; no airborne enemy has attacked the mainland United States since WII.

  That is if incendiary balloons launched from Japan constitute an attack. If the Japanese ever try that again, even an F-102 should be able to shoot down a converted weather balloon without much risk to the aircraft or its pilot. A greater risk to that pilot is the USAF bureaucracy.

  Suddenly the Major was folded, spindled, and mutilated by the USAF personnel system. He was given a minimum time checkout in the F-4 and soon found himself in Thailand fighting the Vietnam War. He did not adapt well. Instead of boring holes in the safe upper sky of California, he was dive bombing Laos, his windscreen filled with views of nothing but rapidly approaching dirt. People were trying very hard to kill him. The nights over Laos were inky black and deadly, not like the shining and friendly skies of Los Angeles County.

  We all could see the Major was overwhelmed by the danger of it all. Fear ate at him like a parasite in his brain. Instead of feeding off the fear, using it to spur himself on to cope, he let it consume him like malevolent tapeworm. He never learned the difference between the subtle taste of well-done fear and, the choking bile of panic.

  I once read a book by an airline pilot, Earnest K,. Gann, who categorized two types of fear. I don't know what reasons an airline pilot has to be fearful. Perhaps he worries that his aircraft's coffeepot will conk out or that the stewardesses will be fat and ugly. In any case, this airline guy nailed his analysis spot-on. He postulated a distinction between fear and panic. I have found these categories to be accurate.

  Fear sharpens your reflexes, focuses your attention on the essentials, and eliminates extraneous, time-wasting thoughts from your gray matter. Time slows down under the influence of a well-founded fear. Fear-driven, your brain calculates various courses of action at warp speed and selects the one most likely to lead to survival and/or triumph. Your hands move of their own accord on the controls, the aircraft melds itself into your reflexes which are operating in quick time. Your immediate cockpit environment fades away as you become one entity with the jet, a man/machine hybrid. I have returned from stressful missions with over six Gs on the recording G meter and I couldn't remember exactly when the extreme G loading occurred. You would think that instantly weighing 1100 pounds would stamp the event on your memory, but not when your memory banks are flooded with startled fear.

  Things are different in the air with fear absent and only lurking nearby. One minute you are flying, yet at the same time a portion of your thoughts is ruminating over what you intend to do once you land. Or more likely, whom you intend to do later tonight. A fighter pilot is a guy who, when he is flying, thinks about girls. When he is with girls, all he talks about is flying. However, it only takes a few rounds of antiaircraft fire over the top of your canopy to erase any thoughts of physical or social interaction with the opposite sex flooding your head with an intense desire for actions intended to allow you to live a few seconds longer.

  Panic, the other side of the fear omelet, short-circuits your brain's wiring. You do stupid, irrational things. You make critical, life-threatening mistakes. You focus on trivia, ignoring life or death matters. Under a panic attack, your body betrays you. Your breathing labors, your heart jumps out of your flight suit, your hands shake. Panic is an enemy that must be defeated, dealt with, before you can begin to cope with the real Bad Guys.

  The Major never panicked, or at least not for long and not so as anyone could tell. If he had, his backseat navigator would have had a quiet word with the Squadron Commander and the Major's flying career would have been terminated then and there. But, he never learned to deal with the fear of combat either. He never learned to forge his fear into a goad for higher performance. He was always flying his first ten missions, over and over again.

  The first ten combat missions are when fear tries to reign supreme. More guys are lost, shot down, or crash on their first ten missions than at any other time in their combat tour. The first ten flights are when fear tries to mutate into panic and before experience has had time
to jell into proper self-preservation instincts.

  After the first ten, you reach a fearsome crossroads in your mind. One fork often leads to chemical addiction as you become fonder and fonder of fear's highly addictive chemical by-product, adrenaline. You learn to relish fear, anticipating the shot of adrenaline that always follows. As time goes on, like all junkies, you have to have deeper and deeper doses of fear to get the adrenaline high you have learned to crave.

  The other fork, if taken, numbs your tolerance and reverses your craving for adrenaline. On this path, fear is a constant companion, one who must be defeated daily. The guys on this path are the real heroes. If you crave your daily danger high, fear is a friend; bravery is not required. Otherwise, if fear is always there for you, it takes daily bravery to function.

  The pilots who live with fear and who are afraid of. fear itself, to hijack FDR's nicely turned phrase, tend to outwardly manifest their inner emotional turmoil. Some develop facial tics, usually around the mouth, as if the taste of fear was related to that of jalapenos. Others lose weight with worry. Others get skinny by constantly shitting; not all diarrhea come from the local spicy Thai food. Self-medication with booze is always popular, as is whoring in the local town, usually done in some combination. There is a myriad of comely Thai girls readily available, who are only too willing to help you get out of your troubled mind for one hundred Baht. The one-hundred Baht bill is known, semi-affectionately, as a "love note." Love has less to do with it than fear and the tension it generates. Even commercially acquired sex is a great reliever of tension for some.

  The Major didn't drink that much and he was ever faithful to his wife back in the States. He didn't really enjoy drunken singing or poker games. For him, there was no easy outlet for the fear showing around his darting eyes and no release for the tension roiling in his gut. Thin when he reported to the squadron, he continually lost weight he couldn't afford to. Perhaps worst of all for him was the shunning. Guys who had outwardly seemed to have conquered their own fears but worried about re-infection, distanced themselves from him. The few who were still not immune to the fear virus shunned him as a carrier. The major was cut off from the emotional support and camaraderie that makes life in a fighter squadron so intense and makes combat more possible.

  A lesser man would have requested a transfer; others before him who couldn't defeat the fear demons have gone down that escape route. All it takes is a private meeting with the base chaplain. A few days later, a transfer to a staff job in Saigon duly turns up in the daily orders. A few more straightforward guys have dramatically tossed their insignia wings on the Commander's desk and ended their tour of duty safely running the Officers' Club, never to fly again.

  A unique privilege possessed by fighter pilots is the luxury of opting out of combat. We aren't like the poor grunts slogging through the sodden rice paddies of South Vietnam who can't call in sick or scared. Why can we quit when we feel like we must while others under equal pressure cannot? There are two answers to that troubling question.

  The first is practical. You cannot fly a fighter plane under the influence of the stomach-churning sickness of fear. Fear causes mistakes, errors of judgment, inept actions in the heat of combat. Fear causes important switches to be left inactivated, targets to be missed, and wingmen to be unsupported. Panic, the ultimate manifestation of fear causes a once steady hand on the control stick to snatch too many Gs on the aircraft, grabbing too much angle of attack. This ruptures the sensitive aerodynamic relationship between the curved wing and the encompassing airflow, snapping the jet over into a fatal spin. A fearful aviator is a danger first to himself and to his navigator, then to his wingmen. You can trudge through a rice paddy while scared witless dogging mines, snipers, and shit-covered punji sticks. You cannot successfully operate a supersonic jet with teeth clenched in fear.

  The second dispensation is ethical in nature. A fighter cockpit can be the loneliest battleground in the world. It holds one, sometimes two, souls. You climb into the cockpit alone, there is no one there to lean on, to provide moral support, to quiet your fear. A fighter pilot volunteers for personal, intimate combat every time he straps in. You step out alone onto the dusty main street of Dodge City at high noon with no posse, no deputy, no townspeople, only a sidekick in the rear cockpit. At least Gary Cooper had Grace Kelly to protect his six o'clock. In fighters, we fight alone and when we die, we die alone. It is too much to ask a man to fight by himself if he doesn't believe he can win and survive. That is why we have the ability to quit by various means.

  The Major availed himself of none of those remedies. He stubbornly, or bravely, stayed on the flying schedule. Too shaky in the air to be a Sewer Doer, the major flew daytime missions and brooded late at night.

  Often, as I made my way back to my quarters in the small hours just before dawn, I would see the Major sitting motionless on the porch of the BOQ, staring soundlessly out into the hot, humid night of Thailand. He would sit bolt upright in a folding metal chair, his back rigid, his hands on his knees. The Major was unable to sleep longer than an hour or two at a time. So, he sat there night after night, waiting without speaking. For what? For his tour to be over? For a nocturnal gift of something to defeat his fear? For someone to mercifully take him off the flying schedule? I suspected he was waiting for something, anything, to end his torment.

  ***

  Last night, my mission was a short, early one. I wrapped up the de­briefing just before midnight, wolfed down a plate of scrambled eggs and fried rice mixed with hot chili peppers. For dessert, I had a double shot of Tennessee whisky before hitting the sack. About 0300, I had to heed the call of nature, due no doubt to some weird gastric reaction between the Thai chilies and the sweet, brown whiskey. In the dark, I stumbled down the porch from my room toward the latrine at the center of the building.

  It was raining, a tepid drizzle of water from a damp night sky too hot and too humid to retain any more moisture. Across the dark courtyard, through the misting rain, I dimly perceived the Major sitting on the opposite porch in his usual spot. As always, he was staring with fear-pinched eyes at the night. I thought nothing of it, I had seen him there too many times before. The dripping rain and the late hour stifled any thoughts I might have had of a greeting or conversation; I really never knew what to say to him anyway. Nothing I could say would have exorcised his fearsome demons.

  I relieved myself and quietly made my way back to my bunk. The Major was still there sitting and staring.

  ***

  This morning, as I walked to the squadron, I remembered seeing the Major in his usual place last night. The vivid mental image made my stomach do a quick barrel roll, as the Major has been dead for over two months. His Phantom took a direct hit by ground fire over Laos. The jet trailed red fire and left a black smoke trail as it tumbled end over end into the jungle below. His wingman saw no parachutes.

  One of John Wayne's movie characters once said, "Bravery is not the absence of fear. It's being scared to death and saddling up anyway."

  The Major was the bravest man I ever met.

  Firecans and Spectres

  I'm back in the sewer once again and I have a raging lunatic in the rear cockpit of my jet. My navigator, who goes by the call sign of "Crazy Jack" is absolutely wacko. In his more lucid moments, he improves to the status of a mere homicidal psychopath. However, his bloodlust doesn't hamper his navigation and weapons systems skills. As a GIB, or Guy In Back, Jack is a piece of work.

  'We are just crossing the Mekong, flying alone into Laos at 23,000 feet and 400 knots, about 450 miles per hour, Tonight Satan Flight consists of just one lonely F-4; that would be us. It is eleven o'clock and the night is pitch dark, with the moon not yet risen. The Southeast Asia skies are hazy tonight, with thin clouds far above us and a broken layer of wispy clouds below. Only the brightest stars are visible through the icy stratospheric haze on top. The ragged cloud deck below is barely discernible against the dark black Laotian terrain. A full moon will be up shortly
to illuminate the scene with its stark blue light, but until moonrise, we will have to cope with the inky blackness masked by torn clouds.

  Knowing Jack's unstable mental state, I had fun winding him up earlier as we walked to our waiting Phantom. I hummed, then sang, the current hit by Credence Clearwater Revival as we carried our flight gear down the flight line, the vast concrete lake still hot from the day's heat:

  Don't go out tonight,

  Well it's bound to take your life,

  There's a bad moon on the rise,

  Hope you've got your things together,

  Hope you're quite prepared to die,

  Looks like we're in for nasty weather,

  One eye is taken for an eye,

  There's a bad moon on the rise.

  Predictably this got Jack's brain juices flowing and he is wired for action. For Jack, action is the elixir of life. After USAF navigator's school and the award of his navigator's wings, Jack's first assignment was to the Strategic Air Command as an Electronic Warfare Officer, or EWO, due in part to his civilian technical education in electronics. For four long years, he rode around in the back of B-52 bombers, bored out of his mind. This painful history explains his current precarious psychological condition.

  An EWO's job is to listen to the electronic signals emitted by an enemy's radar and then to identify the signals and thus the radar. In response, he turns on corresponding electronic countermeasures such as radar jammers, or releases radar-masking bundles of shredded aluminum foil, called "chaff." However, peacetime B-52 training sorties rarely encounter enemy radars. There are no such radars within hearing distance over the continental United States, and when Jack was on overseas flights, the Russians were reluctant to reveal the locations and characteristics of their radars by illuminating an offshore B-52. EWOs can't actually practice deploying their countermeasures in peacetime as jammers and chaff work equally well on civilian radars, such as those operated by the Federal Aviation Authority, or FAA, air traffic control system. Shutting down the FAA's ability to track civil airliners is strongly discouraged by the USAF. Thus, during his numerous long training flights, Jack had absolutely nothing to do. This was very upsetting to a man of Jack's natural energy and aggressiveness, to the point of unhinging his military mind.