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Solo




  Praise for Solo

  “[A] spare, heartfelt celebration of the flying life. . . . One of the great pleasures of this modest, winning memoir is [Edgerton’s] rediscovery of his youthful passion. In Annabelle, a funny-looking, high-nosed three-person plane, Mr. Edgerton finds true love the second time around. It’s a match made in sky-blue heaven, with just enough room, in the back seat, to accommodate a happy reader.”

  —The New York Times

  “A perfect read for anyone who wishes they could skip security and proceed right to the cockpit.”

  —MSNBC.com

  “Edgerton is either the best living novelist to fly planes or the best living pilot to write novels. . . . He casts his cockpit exploits—from flying combat missions over Laos during the Vietnam War to piloting a Piper Super Cruiser—in the same droll Southern prose that has garnered him a cult following—and gives readers an intensely rewarding aerial view of war, passion, and 400-mph adventure.”

  —Men’s Journal

  “[An] engaging memoir.”

  —Washington Post Book World

  “Anybody who has ever flown, or served in an air force, will find that Clyde Edgerton’s Solo brings back many memories, some of them pleasant, others terrifying. I found my years in the Royal Air Force coming back to me in one big gush, as exhilarating as one’s first ride in a military aircraft. If you like flying, you’ll love this book.”

  —Michael Korda, author of Charmed Lives and Man to Man

  “Give[s] you a whiff of the bedewed infield grass at dawn, and the sensation of what it feels like to take on and enjoy a thing totally alone, the way we hardly do anymore.”

  —The Raleigh News & Observer

  “I reveled in this true story of an Air Force pilot’s love affair with the skies. . . . With vivid recollections, Edgerton gives a candid account of his passion for flight, displaying his trademark humor.”

  —Southern Living

  “Even if you don’t give a hoot about airplanes, Edgerton’s graceful, witty writing is likely to seduce you.”

  —The Charlotte Observer

  “In this memoir, Edgerton hasn’t really traveled all that far from his roots as a writer of fiction. In it one will find that impeccable sense of timing and inflection that marks his dialogue and that subtle humor he often slides our way.”

  —The Durham (NC) Independent Weekly

  “Solo is a fantastic book—spellbinding, exciting, funny, informative, moving, and beautifully, beautifully, beautifully written. Count me among the blessed legions of Clyde Edgerton fans.”

  —Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried

  “Edgerton has written a most intriguing memoir of his love affair with flying and how he fulfilled it as a combat pilot in Vietnam. . . . Edgerton’s vivid but laconic style should captivate Vietnam and aviation mavens and general readers alike.”

  —Booklist

  “Clear and truthful, this is what it was like, bringing back all you did or wish you had.”

  —James Salter, author of Gods of Tin

  “Solo covers flying from Piper Cub to supersonic fighter and the Vietnam War. Pilots will feel a tug of pleasant nostalgia, and nonpilots will find it entertains while it teaches.”

  —Bob Buck, author of North Star over My Shoulder

  Solo

  Also by Clyde Edgerton

  Raney

  Walking Across Egypt

  The Floatplane Notebooks

  Killer Diller

  In Memory of Junior

  Redeye

  Where Trouble Sleeps

  Lunch at the Piccadilly

  CLYDE EDGERTON

  Solo

  My Adventures in the Air

  R

  A SHANNON RAVENEL BOOK

  Published by

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  Workman Publishing

  225 Varick Street

  New York, New York 10014

  © 2005 by Clyde Edgerton. All rights reserved.

  First paperback edition, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, November 2006.

  Originally published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill in 2005.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Published simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Allen & Son Limited.

  Illustrations by Laura Williams.

  Design by Anne Winslow.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Edgerton, Clyde, 1944–

  Solo : my adventures in the air / Clyde Edgerton.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-56512-426-4; ISBN-10: 1-56512-426-X (HC)

  1. Air pilots—United States—Biography. 2. Air pilots, Military—United States—Biography. 3. Vietnamese Conflict, 1961–1975—Aerial operations, American. 4. Novelists—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  TL540.E3734A3 2005

  629.13’092—dc22

  [B]

  2005041094

  ISBN-13: 978-1-56512-546-9; ISBN-10: 1-56512-546-0 (PB)

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  First Paperback Edition

  For Shannon Ravenel

  With thanks to the boys,

  Johnny Hobbs, Jim Butts, Hoot Gibson,

  John Barker, Jim Schellar, Dave Grant, Butch Henderson,

  Lynn Snow, Tom Wright, and Fox Batistini

  In memory of

  Bill Katri, Danny Thomas, Rick Meacham,

  Dick Olsen, and Terry Glavin

  And thanks to Louis Rubin; Liz Darhansoff;

  Tonita S. Branan; Margaret Bauer;

  Rachel Careau; P. M. and Hannah Jones; Tom Purcell;

  Sterling and Anita Hennis; my daughter, Catherine;

  and especially my wife, Kristina

  CONTENTS

  Author’s Note

  Introduction

  PART 1 (1948–66)

  GETTING THROUGH THE INITIAL SOLO

  Early Notions of Flying

  The Cherokee 140 and the Basics

  Lessons

  Cross-Country

  The New War in Asia

  PART 2 (1966–67)

  AIR FORCE PILOT TRAINING

  Laredo

  The T-41

  The T-37

  The Spin

  The T-38

  Fingertip Formation

  Wings

  PART 3 (1968–70)

  FLYING JET FIGHTERS

  Survival Training

  The F-4

  First Assignment: Japan and Korea

  Last Flights

  PART 4 (1970)

  PREPARING FOR COMBAT

  War Fever or Flying Fever?

  T-33 Air-to-Ground Gunnery

  The OV-10

  On to Southeast Asia

  PART 5 (1970–71)

  COMBAT

  Nakhon Phanom

  Instructing in War

  Another Letter Home

  Bangkok and Prairie Fire

  The Speaker on the Wall

  End of Tour

  PART 6 (1984–91)

  ANNABELLE

  The Purchase and Beyond

  The Floatplane Notebooks

  The Annabelle Notebooks

  Office to Remain Open

  PART 7 (2003–05)

  LOOKING BACK

  Hippie Dance

  Courage

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This book is not for flying instruction. Some details—drawn from memory—may be inaccurate. And exceptions surely dot the landscape of my generalities about flight and flying. Those seeking technical accuracy should read the appropriate flight manuals, and for those needing a detailed, enlightened book about how airplanes behave, I suggest the classic S
tick and Rudder: An Explanation of the Art of Flying by Wolfgang Langewiesche. Furthermore, the most consistently technical and “how-to” parts of this book are all together on pages 11–37 (“The Cherokee 140 and the Basics,” “Lessons,” and “Cross-Country”). So, if you’re not looking for nuts-and-bolts reading about flying, then you may want to skip those pages.

  Most conversations in this narrative have been re-created from memory. Though all the people are real, most names (and radio call signs) are made up. Some facts may have become slightly distorted by the fog of time.

  Many women pilots fly today, but none were present at flying events described in this book, and so none are included here. In any case, I respect women’s piloting abilities and significant contributions to aviation.

  Finally, thanks to Karl Polifka, Jack McMahon, Bruce Williams, and Lloyd Kaufman for pointing out technical errors in the hardback edition of this book.

  INTRODUCTION

  YOU STAND AT THE end of a long dining room table that is bare except for a single toothpick lying there in the middle, pointed toward you. The toothpick is a runway—from two thousand feet up. You are alone in a little airplane. You are sweating, just home from your first solo cross-country flight. And as for that toothpick: you must somehow get a big spoon (your airplane) to land on it and stay on it or you will die.

  I dreamed of coming home from a solo flight soon after I was old enough to look into the sky and see an airplane.

  Sometimes a dream’s realization falls short of the dream. Occasionally a dream and its realization match, and then we feel lucky.

  For me, flying airplanes has trumped any dream of it. I could never have dreamed the hypnotic beauty of a lake of clouds scooting just below the belly of my aircraft, of towering cumulus cloud formations to my left and right. And I have been blissfully alone while flying solo, tucked securely in my protective cockpit, far away up there in a tiny spot in the wide sky, finding a peace that, as the Bible says, passeth understanding.

  Aircraft engine and engine instruments have become, along with airframe and landing gear, an extension of my nervous system.

  Beneath the exhilaration lies the unforgiving, exact nature of the whole business of flying: a dependence on geometry, on the number of degrees in a turn, on an exact speed and angle as two aircraft join into formation, or on imagined lines drawn through the sky. This dependency calls for skill. Skill brings confidence and security.

  I’ve flown among billowing clouds, alone, in a supersonic jet, run the aircraft up against and through the edge of a cloud at four hundred miles an hour, turned the airplane on its back, cut the power, fallen upside down through vertical halls of air, and then snapped the aircraft upright and added power to climb again.

  My almost crazy love of flying led me through Air Force pilot training, to an assignment in Japan, and on to a year of combat missions in Southeast Asia.

  Eighteen years later I bought an old wood-framed, fabric-covered airplane. On summer mornings I’d look through the windshield, just ahead, at a dew-covered grass landing strip in the woods—rising to meet my landing gear. The exhilaration was back. I named my airplane Annabelle. The name sounded old-fashioned and romantic.

  The philosopher in me warns that the thrill of flying airplanes in war should not be separated from the destruction that warplanes and their pilots bring to other human beings. But the writer in me—and the pilot in me—had to try. And in the process, I’ve knocked around in my mind’s back rooms and closets, found old misgivings and worries about my relationship to my own combat flying, and pulled them out onto the porch.

  PART 1

  (1948—66)

  GETTING THROUGH THE

  INITIAL SOLO

  Early Notions of Flying

  ON SOME MONDAY AFTERNOONS in the late 1940s, I held a rough canvas clothespin bag for my mother as she gathered stiff, dry clothes from the clothesline. When an airplane flew over, she surely noticed my looking up. The biplanes were my favorites. They seemed to lazy along with a steady gentle-thunder sound through the blue sky. Perhaps she sensed that I longed to be up there; before I was five years old, she had taken me to the airport several times just to see the airplanes and had snapped my photo with airplanes in the background. One day years later, she drove me to the same airport to catch a plane that would take me away to Air Force pilot training and a war. She did not hesitate in granting me leave nor shed a tear that I know of.

  Even so, she was, early on, very protective of her asthmatic only child; she kept an eye on me and guided and disciplined me. Her shielding behavior may have influenced my moving away from her toward danger. But—and lucky for me—despite being protective, she pushed me out into the world, out into our backyard, for example, to fistfight a boy who’d just chased me home. She encouraged independence. And perhaps that also enabled my step into the sky.

  One day—I was in my forties and she in her eighties—we were talking at lunch. She sat across from me at her kitchen table, her hand resting around a glass of iced tea. She asked, “Do you remember me taking you to funerals when you were little?”

  “Sort of.”

  “People said you were too young, but I wanted you to experience everything. Do you remember me taking you up to see the electric chair?”

  “Oh, yes. That’s kind of hard to forget.”

  I was six years old at the time, but it turns out it wasn’t the electric chair. It was the chair sitting in the middle of the gas chamber at Central Prison in Raleigh, North Carolina. Not that I was making picky distinctions in those days. Maybe I should be thankful she didn’t take me to an execution, though given my early Bible training about crime and punishment, I might have enjoyed it.

  As a boy I soaked up the provincial, conservative culture shared by my teachers, parents, extended family, and church. I learned that there was a God, and that he loved America better than he did any other country, and that any country opposing America was evil—and so was everybody in that country. Nobody said those words, but the message was there.

  One of my uncles had lost his arm in World War I. I knew the following numerical facts as far back as I can remember: after being wounded in his arm and legs, he went twenty-four hours without medical attention, seventeen days without a change of clothing.

  Two uncles and several cousins served in World War II. A calling to war was high and honorable. The movie star Audie Murphy had been a war hero. So had Ted Williams; he’d been a pilot. The national media depicted pilots from all of America’s wars as the most flamboyant of our country’s heroes. To me as a boy, that portrayal was compelling.

  I toyed with the idea of becoming a fireman, then a doctor, but when I realized I could be a fighter pilot—a war hero flying airplanes—there was (it turns out) no stopping me, especially after I started seeing “the film.” It aired on a local TV station just before sign-off at midnight. An F-104 fighter jet (resembling a rocket with short, straight wings) flew through clouds, performing an aileron roll (a complete rollover from right side up, to upside down, to right side up again) and other maneuvers while the poem “High Flight” was read—all this just before the national anthem played in the background. The film centered all my aspirations and hopes about where I’d end up: in a jet fighter cockpit.

  My ticket, I discovered along the way, would be the four-year ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) program at the University of North Carolina. Cadets wore uniforms and marched in drills once a week, took classes in “military science,” attended a summer camp after junior year, and on graduation became Air Force officers, though not necessarily on track to be pilots.

  Soon after arriving on campus in the fall of 1962, I walked into the ROTC office. A cadet sat behind a desk.

  “If I sign up for the program, can I become a pilot?” I asked. (I’d yet to fly in an airplane.)

  “Sure. You’ll have to pass a few physicals and some academic tests. You got twenty-twenty vision?”

  “Yep.”

  We talked
for a few minutes. Then he asked, “Ever had asthma?”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s the first thing they ask you, and if you’ve ever had it, you’re gone. I’ve got bad eyesight. That’s what stopped me.”

  A week or so later, I was filling out ROTC forms for those wishing to fly:

  HAVE YOU EVER HAD ASTHMA? ___ YES ___ NO

  Well, yes, but . . . I checked no. I would lie to fly.

  I WAS NOT A HAPPY CADET. The whole business seemed “Boy Scoutie.” I earned demerits for not having my belt buckle lined up with my fly. I quickly got into the UNC ROTC marching band—playing trombone—where the military protocol was more friendly. In my senior year I’d be offered a chance to earn my private pilot’s license. If I didn’t like flying in a small propeller-driven aircraft, or if I was no good at it, the program would allow me to pick a nonaviation Air Force career—but I wanted no part of that.

  During my junior year I learned that a former girlfriend of mine, Ruby, was dating a guy who had a pilot’s license. I called her.

  “Ruby, would you do something for me?”

  “What?”

  “Tell your boyfriend I’m an old friend and ask him if he’d take me flying?”

  “‘Old friend’?”

  “Well, you know, whatever. Yes.”

  “Is that what you want me to do?”

  “Sure. I mean, you could go with us. Have you flown with him yet?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was it fun?”

  “Sure was.”

  “Will you ask him? I haven’t flown in an airplane yet and I need to find out if I like it or not . . . on account of this ROTC thing.”

  “Oh, all right.”

  I met them at Horace Williams Airport in Chapel Hill, and Ruby’s boyfriend took us up in a Cessna four-seater.