by Terry James
Randolph Air Force Base was a gravy assignment. But, he thought, giving the engine another rev and pulling it back to idle, he would like to have one more go in combat. He would like to engage the Migs over Vietnam in an F-4 or F-105 just one more time. The Phantom and the Thunderchief were his birds of choice.
“Okay, young man. Let’s shut her down and start our weekend,” Morgan said, pulling both throttles fully back with his gloved left hand.
The engines whirred to a halt and the instructor pilot opened the map box to his right. He pulled from it the clear plastic covered loose leaf form for the airplane everyone called “Triple Nickel,” alluding to the last 3 numbers, 555, painted black on the bird’s bright white vertical stabilizer.
After removing the ejection seat safety pins from the map box and inserting them in the seat’s T handle, he documented the malfunction, which he viewed as an “EGT gauge problem, number two engine.”
When he had pulled the G-suit hose from its connector on his G-suit, he reached to the clasp at his waist to pop open his lap belt. He handed his helmet to the airman, exited the cockpit, and stepped onto the ladder the crew chief had hooked over the edge of the cockpit’s canopy rest.
Morgan explained the problem, as he saw it, handed the form to the crew chief, and then looked down at the yellow parking spot, where the nosewheel tire sat directly at its center.
“You got it dead on, Shelton,” the older man said clinically. “Guess you owe me a beer at the club tonight. Wasn’t that our bet?”
“I don’t think so, sir,” the lieutenant said in military tone.
“Oh? That’s how I remember it,” the ranking officer said, beginning to walk toward the awaiting dark blue Air Force van.
“No, sir. That’s not how I remember it,” the young pilot said watching Morgan wrestle with his parachute, trying to loosen it, then jump it higher on his aching back.
“Well, son. I got a silver leaf here that remembers better than you and your gold bar remember,” James Morgan said with an amused twinkle in his eye.
“Yes, sir,” the lieutenant replied, with a smile in his voice. He and the other pilots in training knew well this man’s good-natured, bantering ways. Although it was an unspoken rule that instructors and their students didn’t fraternize, Col. Morgan often bought rounds for all his young charges. He was their favorite instructor. He would, as he always did, pay off his bet when he lost the wager on whether he or a student stopped precisely on the rounded end of the yellow parking spot painted on the concrete. Rarely did he collect on a bet he won.
“I’ll be glad to get out of this G-suit,” the older pilot said once they sat down on the long board running the length of the big van’s interior.
They greeted the other two pilots when they entered the van a minute or so later.
“Looks like the boss will be on schedule,” Maj. Chuck Bender said, taking his seat beside his own second lieutenant student pilot.
“Looks like,” Morgan replied, as the van began its quarter-mile roll southward down the street in front of the flight shacks and hangars to the right.
They moved past Base Ops, and saw, as they headed toward their point of departure, the Air Force personnel rolling the big plush units and even bigger air conditioning units and auxiliary power units into place in preparation for the arrival of Air Force One.
Laura Morgan looked into the mirror above the upright piano while she dusted and polished the instrument’s mahogany surface. She guessed she didn’t look all that bad at 44; at least everyone told her she was pretty. After all, she did have a daughter who was almost 23.
The officers’ wives, usually not too kind to each other, nonetheless always had questions about how she stayed so slim and kept her skin so young looking. She mentally chastised herself for the momentary daydream. She found such self-centeredness repugnant, and, she thought to herself now, such indulgence was a sure sign one was getting old.
She moved to the stereo, and after rubbing its surfaces with her dust rag, she knelt to pull a record from its place. She selected her favorite Barbra Streisand album and started it playing before returning to the cleaning.
She glanced at the clock. 3:35. She mentally translated to Military Time, 15:35. James would be driving in before long. His day of training the “eaglets,” as he called them, was shortened today. The President was coming in for one of his once or sometimes twice-a-month visits to the LBJ ranch.
Her husband worried her lately. That is, worried her more than usual. Somehow, his physicals always turned out to be good reports. Col. James Morgan, according to the flight surgeons at Lackland’s Wilford Hall, was in great shape for a man approaching his 47th birthday.
But, they didn’t see him during those early morning hours. Times when she would look for him and find him standing on the balcony of their 10th floor apartment staring into the heavens. They didn’t see the shaking, almost convulsing, while his unblinking eyes gazed into the star-filled nights, his mouth sometimes muttering things she couldn’t understand.
“Guess I’m just sleepwalking,” he told her. “Nothing to worry about,” he assured, promising to mention the episodes to the flight surgeons.
They had told him at his most recent physical that everything looked perfect. “Some people just do unusual things in their sleep, like sleepwalk. Just be sure to lock your balcony doors so that you’ll have to be awake to open them. Wouldn’t want to have one of our best pilots thinking he can take off from up there without his T-38,” they had joked.
The Morgans had had a special, complicated locking system installed on the heavy-framed French doors. Maybe that would at least keep him off the balcony during his sleepwalks.
“Super L!”
Laura smiled, hearing her husband’s pet name for her. She remembered, with another smile, the night he gave it to her.
All he could talk about was the new fighter he was training to fly. She had told him, while they lay in bed that night in the early 1950s, that he loved the F-100 Super Saber so much that maybe he should go make love to it rather than to her. His response had been that the plane was only a Super Saber, but that she was “Super L.” The name had stuck, she remembered with fond reflection while she walked into their foyer.
They embraced when he had put the attaché case in the foyer closet and shut the door.
“How’d it go today, Smilin’ Jack?” Laura said, kissing him.
“Not bad, not bad,” James answered, and returned her kiss.
“Got a drink for a thirsty stranger, my dear?” he questioned in a seductive tone.
“Tea, Coke, or coffee?” Laura responded.
“How ‘bout bourbon and branch water, in honor of the commander-in-chief coming to town?”
His drinking had never been a point of contention between them. But lately he was heavier into the hard stuff than usual. She didn’t like him drinking at all. Never had. But, she thought, probably it bothered her more now because of her recent conversion to Christianity and her membership in the Presbyterian Church. She must remember to not preach to him.
He went to the little bar near the French doors leading to the balcony and started putting together his drink. He knew she wanted him to quit, and he planned to. Just not today.
“Speaking of strangers, Babe, someone called about 20 minutes ago. He said he’s the son of somebody you know. Didn’t give his name,” Laura said.
“Oh?”
“Said he’s TDY to Randolph for the weekend.”
“Did he say he would call back?”
“No, but I told him to call any time before seven this evening.”
“Well, he’ll catch up with me if he really wants to. Probably will hang out at the Officer’s Club some while he’s here. Somebody will point me out to him.”
Marine Capt. Mark Lansing watched the Boeing 727 touch down on the east runway, its tires sending blue-white puffs of smoke behind before settling for its rollout. It was the chartered plane that carried the press and went ever
ywhere the President went. Its arrival was a sure tip that Air Force One wasn’t too far behind.
The much smaller Lockheed Jet Star had already arrived and was parked not more than a hundred feet from where he stood gripping the chain-link fence, put there only a few hours before to keep the public from stepping onto the flight line when the President was at Randolph.
The Jet Star was a beauty, although a little on the pudgy side, he surmised, admiring it from behind his aviator sunglasses. It looked a bit stumpy, he knew, because it provided headroom other smaller jets didn’t. Even the six-foot three President could walk without having to lean forward in this aircraft.
It was painted and decorated in the blue, white and gleaming silver colors of the 707, the same one that had delivered President Kennedy to Dallas, then back to D.C. that fateful day four years earlier. The Jet Star was used to take the President to the landing strip at the LBJ ranch. It required fewer feet of runway.
He wondered what kind of feel it had when the pilot controls called upon it to perform. What kind of acceleration it produced when pushed to full throttle, when the four engines, two on either side of the fuselage just below the vertical stabilizer, roared to full power. Like all passenger jets, it had no afterburners. After the F-4s ABs, nothing would feel like much of a kick, he mused.
The chartered 727, a bright orange and multi-color schemed Braniff airliner, began its roll northward toward where he stood. He thought it would be a bore to fly such a plane for a living.
His choice was the F-4C. It was a fighter-bomber without peer. Maybe a few could go faster by a few knots, but none with the devastating combination of thrust, speed, firepower and ordnance capability existed. That, figuring in its athletic maneuverability and tank-like strength, made the F-4C Phantom the most awesome plane to command on the planet.
He felt sorry for the 727’s pilot and crew, shuffling the herd of, for the most part, anti-military, anti-war Washington press corps around. He even felt for the colonel who flew LBJ’s big, beautiful bird. The plane that was now at full flaps, nose slightly up, its white and chrome-like belly shimmering in the afternoon Texas sunlight.
Air Force One glided almost noiselessly above Universal City, its silver-edged wings seeming not to vary a single degree up or down. Momentarily the back most of its many tires sat softly on the runway. Unlike with the press plane, there were no puffs of smoke.
The engines roared mightily when the thrust-reversers began to slow the aircraft.
Lansing’s own hulking aircraft sat drooping in its green, brown, and tan camouflage just a hundred feet or so north of where the press plane finally came to a stop. The ramps of stairs were rolled to the doors, both front and back, and men and women spilled from the Braniff, watched carefully by Air Police from the hangar roofs, and by uniformed and plain-clothed Air Police on the tarmac.
The reporters and overflow White House personnel made straight for Base Ops, the cream colored, red-roofed building of several stories across the street directly behind him. They conversed, laughed, and made shuffling, rustling crowd noises like everyone else, he thought, wondering how they could at the same time seem so ordinary, and spew such anti-American garbage with their typewriters, cameras, and microphones.
It was good that Lt. Col. James Morgan was here, not on TDY, leave, or something other. Mark Lansing’s thoughts turned to the reason he requested temporary duty at Randolph Air Force Base. He needed the cross-country hours and on-going flight education, of course, but the real assignment was personal. He had to talk to Morgan. His sanity might well be at stake, depending upon the results of their meeting.
The Presidential 707 came to stop 200 feet in the distance. The crews hurried to make all the necessary attachments involving the air-conditioning units and the auxiliary power before the engines were shut down.
A huge, dark blue Air Force tractor-trailer rig moved between Air Force One and Mark, around whom people started to gather.
“I wonder if he’ll shake hands today?” a young mother holding a toddler said, shading her eyes with her other hand to watch for activity around the van and the big plane. Mark started to answer, but saw her question was to a woman standing on her right.
People had spread along the long security fence, and now were piling up several rows deep. He knew when he saw several dark-suited men with walkie-talkies scanning the crowd and moving to strategic positions on the other side of the fence that President Lyndon B. Johnson and entourage would soon be moving and smiling among the people.
19:10 MST
“Excuse me, ma’am, are you Col. Morgan’s wife?”
Laura looked from her companion at the table into the intense, blue eyes of the young man in civilian clothes.
“Yes, I’m Laura Morgan.”
“I’m sorry to interrupt, ma’am,” Mark Lansing said, leaning slightly forward to be heard above the noises of conversation and waiters serving Randolph Officer’s Club patrons. “Ma’am.” He nodded his unspoken apology in the direction of the woman sitting directly across from Laura.
The woman stood, smiling, and said, “That’s quite alright. I have to meet my husband.” With that, she left.
“Yes?” Laura asked.
“I called your home for Col. Morgan earlier today,” Lansing said, pausing to collect his thoughts.
“Yes,” Laura smiled, reaching her right hand to take his. “I remember that call.”
“Do you know if the colonel might talk with me for a minute or two? It’s about my father. Your husband and my dad were in the Army Air Corps together.”
“Why, I think so,” Laura said brightly. “I don’t think you gave me your name on the phone.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, ma’am. I’m Mark Lansing. Capt. Mark Lansing.”
He could see the woman’s expression change to the search mode, trying to remember. Her eyes widened, and her mouth opened in a smile when she recognized the name.
“You’re Clark and Jennifer’s son?” She asked the question with excitement, while she pushed her chair back and stood.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Laura embraced him, and he grinned, returning her hug.
“We haven’t seen you since…it must have been 1950!” She again tried to remember. “Yes! It was 1950. You were, let me see, you were 10 years old!”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, his voice dropping in volume, embarrassed from the fuss.
“Sit down here, Mark,” Laura said, seating herself and patting the table in front of the chair, which he moved to take his seat.
“Jenny--” Laura’s tone became soft. “How’s your mother, Mark?”
“She’s married. Met a guy in ‘57. He’s a few years older than Mom. He’s a retired brigadier…Army.”
“And, is she happy?” Laura asked the question softly, genuinely. She remembered the years after Jenny lost her husband, while memory of the tragedy reframed the circumstances of that distant past.
Jennifer had nearly gone insane. As had her own husband, James.
Clark Lansing had disappeared, and there was never an explanation. Jenny was told only that Clark never showed up that day for the flight in the Piper. The two men were going to look at some land the military wanted to purchase. Neither of them was any longer in the Army Air Corps, which, by July of 1947, had become the United States Air Force. But, officer friends hired them as consultants. They were to recommend whether to buy the land once they had looked it over.
James had told the story to the marshal and the military authorities. He told them Clark had in fact shown up that morning. That they had flown toward the prospective piece of land. Told them the disks had appeared, flew around and over them, then disappeared. When he looked to the passenger seat, Clark was gone, his safety harness still locked in place.
James had fought to preserve his own sanity, as well as that of Jennifer Lansing. He did everything he could to comfort her and her seven-year-old son.
He begged them to let him tell Jenny the story the way it rea
lly happened. Threatened to tell it all, just the way it had unfolded. The frightening time flooded Laura’s mind in a flash of vivid remembrance. If James ever told that Clark Lansing disappeared, with flying saucers involved--an Air Force colonel had told both of them--James Morgan would go to prison for murder. He could make the choice. Go to prison for murder or rejoin the Air Force at a rank one step higher than when he left, with his promise that he would never again talk about what happened during the same time that the infamous UFO incident occurred near Roswell.
His “military imprisonment,” as James called it, guaranteed he wouldn’t talk, being subject to orders and to consequences of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The colonel had said in a grim voice, “You will be safe and protected from prying ears and eyes with us.”
Laura didn’t like what it did to her husband, but there were no alternatives to the government’s way of dealing with James’ inadvertent role in the strange phenomenon. They promised him a safe, enviable assignment and combat if he wanted it when opportunity presented itself.
They had gone along with the lie. They had no choice. But the lie had taken its toll. The sleepwalking and the drinking were getting worse.
“Mom seems to be doing well,” Mark said. “I don’t get to see her enough these days.”
“And, you’re a captain in the Air Force now,” Laura said patting his hand.
“No, ma’am. The Marine Corps.”
“Well, we’ll try not to hold that against you, Capt. Lansing,” Laura teased, seeing a handsome man of over six feet tall with thick, blonde hair, and shoulders like a fullback, but remembering the 10-year-old she saw last in 1950.
“What do you do?”
“Fly F-4Cs,” he answered, glancing upward at the waiter. “I’ll just have some club soda, please.”
“F-4s! The colonel will be very envious of you. He wants more than anything to go over there and fly F-4s again,” Laura said.
“I understand he’s training guys. There’s nothing more important than that right now,” Mark said.
