Solo Read online

  Pretend you’re driving along on the interstate. You’re in the right lane, behind but overtaking a car in the left lane. When the right rear taillight of the other car is lined up with the rearview mirror on your door, you slow to exactly the other car’s speed. That car is now the leader and you are number two in a two-ship-formation flight. You must stay exactly that distance from the car—say, four feet out—and you must not move forward or backward; that is, your rearview mirror must stay on the taillight of the leader.

  Airborne, you must also maintain the same altitude (up and down) as your leader. As he slows, speeds up, turns, climbs, dives, even flies upside down, you must maintain this relative position. Exactly. There is no ground below to hold you in place.

  In a classic air-to-air duel—against another flight of four—the flight of four breaks up into two flights of two, and during the air duel each wingman moves out wide and behind his lead. The lead’s job is to attack and shoot down an opponent. The wingman’s job is to protect the lead, especially the area directly behind him—his “six o’-clock,” where he cannot see well. In some situations, if number two is attacked, the lead serves in the protector role.

  Number three and four might also work to protect one and two, and the four pilots could be talking to one another by radio if the situation demanded.

  Now put the fingers of your right hand together and look at the back of your hand. A four-ship can also fly like this. Your index-finger nail would still be number two.

  Let’s go with the left hand. (The airplane represented by your little-finger nail would not be quite that far back—if your little finger is as short as mine—but rather it would be the same distance behind number three as numbers two and three are behind lead.)

  One way of getting the flight together after takeoff is this: Lead takes off, slows down to a speed a bit slower than the normal climb-out speed, and turns into a shallow-banked right (or left) climbing turn. Number two takes off and cuts off lead, flying faster than lead on a course that will eventually intersect with lead (lead’s speed was decided before takeoff, and everybody knows what it is). Number two gradually flies, from the right and behind lead, into the fingertip position, reducing power as he joins up so that when he’s in position, he’s flying at the same speed as lead.

  As number two, I know that the join-up is going well if, as I approach the lead aircraft from far away, with the proper cutoff angle, the lead aircraft appears to stay at one position against my windshield. If he is slipping forward, I know that I will pass behind him, and if he is slipping backward, that I’ll pass in front of him.

  Properly done, joining on lead, as two, is extraordinarily beautiful and fun. There are no magic tricks for doing it right. It’s a matter of correctly judging closure rate, relative speed, and position.

  In the meantime, number three, having taken off after number two, also joins on lead (while keeping an eye on number two to avoid a collision). He flies just beneath both one and two and joins on lead’s left wing, across from number two, who has already joined on lead’s right wing. Throughout the join-up, the lead aircraft continues a shallow-banked turn—in our example, to the right. Shortly thereafter number four will join on number three’s left wing.

  A brilliant and amazing feat on the part of number three occurs when he—taking off after number two—joins on lead before number two gets there. This is done by playing angle, speed, and altitude just exactly right and cannot happen unless number two is lagging somehow—and number three is aggressive. (If you’re number two, it’s very embarrassing to have number three join on lead before you do.)

  A formation of two or four aircraft may also taxi out to the runway in single file and then taxi onto the runway and line up to take off all at the same time in fingertip formation. Head and hand signals—no radios—are often used in order to simulate combat conditions when enemy radio intercepts are possible. Everyone sits still, awaiting takeoff. The lead aircraft pilot, with a finger twirl, signals for engine run-up. All engines are run up to 100 percent for an engine check. Pilots are on the brakes, holding the aircraft still. Then two and three look at lead, and four looks at three. The lead looks around to verify that everyone is ready. He taps his helmet, leans his head back as if looking upward. Number three does the same while keeping an eye on the lead pilot. When lead drops his head, number three does the same, and simultaneously all pilots release brakes. The roll starts. Lead will use slightly less than full power so that the other aircraft will be able to maintain their proper positioning during the takeoff roll by jockeying their throttle settings. After liftoff, the lead pilot snaps his head back just before raising his landing gear, and three does the same, so that all can raise their gear together. The procedure is repeated for raising flaps. As they fly, the number two and three pilots watch the lead pilot, while number four watches number three.

  After everyone is airborne, the lead pilot navigates, makes necessary radio calls to ground control, and looks around and makes decisions as if the flight of four were only one airplane. And while the lead aircraft pilot is doing all the thinking, what are the other pilots doing? Working their asses off, staying in formation. Let’s say I’m number two. My eyes stay on the lead aircraft. I never let my eyes move away, even for a fraction of a second. Where am I looking? A star is painted on both sides of the fuselage (the main body) of the T-38. The star has a background of two stripes. The trailing edge of the T-38 wingtip has a red or green light on its tip (starboard green, port red). As number two (or three), flying beside and slightly behind and below number one, I will fly so that the wingtip light of number one appears to remain in the middle of the star on the side of his airplane. (Everybody except lead is doing the same thing.) When lead starts a left turn and his wing starts rising, my aircraft must rise so that the light stays in the star. An imaginary straight line runs from my eye, through the wingtip light, and to the middle of the star. This position will keep me neither too far forward nor too far back, neither too high nor too low. This fingertip formation enables us to fly through clouds while maintaining visual contact. Sometimes to see lead well in bad weather, I may have to “tuck it in” so that our wings overlap. In order to keep the proper distance away from his aircraft, I first learn the “right picture” of his exhaust ports—not too round, not too oval. Later I know by feel.

  In fingertip formation we communicated by hand signals, as mentioned, and also by a very slight wiggling or bouncing of lead’s aircraft. For example, if lead’s tail end suddenly fishtailed a little bit (accomplished with rudder pedals), we knew to move into “route” formation, that is, loose formation. At that time we could quickly look inside our own aircraft to check fuel remaining, engine temperature, and so forth, and then look back at lead (though number four always looks at number three, who relays messages from lead when necessary).

  When the pilot of the lead aircraft brought his thumb to his mouth in a drinking motion while the flight was in route formation, that meant “check your fuel.” We then each signaled with upheld fingers how many hundreds of pounds of fuel we had left. The flight lead planned maneuvers according to the least amount of fuel among us.

  When lead gently rocked his wings, we moved back into fingertip formation.

  The lead pilot had to be extraordinarily smooth with the stick and throttles. An erratic movement—especially up or down—could set off a chain reaction.

  If we were a two-ship formation—I was lead, and you were flying on my right wing—and I suddenly did a quick little dip of my left wing, that would be a signal for a “cross-under.” You’d pull off a bit of power, drop back, add power, cross under just behind my exhaust ports (on the very tail end of the aircraft), and then add power again as you pulled up into position on my left wing—where number three would fly in a four-ship formation. The idea is to cross under quickly.

  Another kind of formation—not fingertip—is called close trail. It can be flown in four-ship or two-ship formation. If I were your lead and I sud
denly did a little porpoise with my nose (moving it up and down), you would know to slip back behind me and fly with the nose of your aircraft just behind and below my exhaust ports, and you would stay there no matter what I did. For example, I, the lead, might fly a loop or a barrel roll and you’d stay right there. And that would be hard work—for you. If, as number two, three, or four in close-trail formation, I could not feel the jet exhaust of the aircraft ahead skimming the top of my vertical stabilizer—the highest point on my aircraft—then I was flying too low. While flying close trail, or fingertip for that matter, a pilot learns the skills and limits of a wingman or leader the way I imagine competitive rowers must learn the skills and limits of their teammates.

  Sometimes the formation missions were a bit scary. An instructor might have to take over an erratic aircraft. Someone might be closing too fast on a join-up and have to duck under the other aircraft at the last minute for a close miss.

  In those four-ship missions late in the program, there would be three of us solo and an instructor flying lead. When we landed, we’d talk about the flight. I would almost be in a state of disbelief: How is it possible that we just did something so amazing and are here now together, talking about it?

  Wings

  AT THE END OF PILOT TRAINING, our individual flying grades and academic grades were averaged and we were ranked. The class was given a block of different types of airplanes (the combination differed from class to class) and each of us ranked our choices, with the top pilot getting his first choice and the bottom pilot getting the last remaining airplane.

  I was nervous about my assignment—my flying grades were high, but my academic grades, only average. What if all the fighters were gone before my choice came up? What if our block of aircraft had no fighters? Sometimes that happened.

  Practically everybody wanted a fighter, and nobody wanted a bomber, especially the B-52. Flying the B-52, we were told, was boring—hours of doing nothing at a very high altitude out of range of surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) and then a few seconds of pressing a button to release bombs, then more hours of nothing.

  Bombers and cargo planes were flown with yokes instead of sticks, and with throttles on the right. A fighter had a stick up from the floor and throttles on the left—like the T-37 and the T-38. The presence of a stick and the placement of the throttles were associated with speed, agility, and adventure. Both the T-37 and the T-38, with a few modifications, had been made into fighters—the A-37 and the F-5.

  The Air Force philosophy in my day was to teach each of us to fly a fighter so that we could quickly adapt to any aircraft in the Air Force. The Navy split their pilots into fighter and cargo categories early in their pilot training, as the Air Force does now.

  A few of our student pilots—Dickson, Bynum, and Williams—wanted to fly a big cargo plane, a C-130 or a C-135. (F is for fighter, B for bomber, C for cargo, T for trainer, and OV for observation.)

  The F-104 I had seen on TV in “the film” when I was a boy was rarely assigned anymore. I wanted a single-seat fighter—an F-100, 101, 102, or 105—and if not one of those, then the relatively new, very hot, dual-seat F-4.

  But what about those average academic grades? I was not at the top of the class. Had I come this far to end up in a damn bomber or cargo plane—something that wouldn’t fly upside down and faster than the speed of sound?

  The list came down, and slots for my squadron included four F-105s, four F-100s, and, luckily, eleven F-4s. I got an F-4. Nineteen of us got fighters and twenty-three of us got a mix of nonfighter aircraft.

  THE F-4 WAS THE FASTEST and most powerful fighter in the world, and my six-month training course in how to fly it would be at Homestead Air Force Base, just south of Miami, Florida. We’d learn not only the specifics of flying the airplane, not greatly different from flying the T-38, but also its missions: air-to-air combat, air-to-ground, and nuclear. But first came a three-week survival training course at Fairchild Air Force Base in Washington State.

  I remember writing home, and saying aloud proudly to anyone interested—or not: “My assignment will be F-4 backseat to Miami.”

  On our last day in Laredo, family members came to the ceremony for the awarding of wings. My mother flew on her first commercial flight, as I had a year earlier—to Laredo. There she pinned my silver wings onto my dress blues during the graduation ceremony.

  “My, my,” she said. “That little trip to the airport all those years ago—leading up to this. My, my.”

  “This is just the beginning,” I said.

  We never spoke of war.

  PART 3

  (1968–70)

  FLYING JET FIGHTERS

  Survival Training

  WHAT DO YOU DO after bailing out of an aircraft behind enemy lines or over a wilderness area? I was sent to Fairchild Air Force Base in Washington State to find out. After Fairchild, I’d start my F-4 training at an eight-week radar-operation course at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona (the F-4 radar was operated from the rear seat, and all training at Davis-Monthan would be in a flight simulator), and then I’d be back to Florida for six months of flying the F-4.

  During our survival training, I and a new set of comrades—fighter-pilots-to-be as well as air crews of big airplanes—would take a week or so of academic classes and physical training in preparation for several days in the wild.

  Within a few days of arriving at Fairchild, I met Buddy Harmon, another F-4 backseater. Buddy, from Alabama, was short and round faced and spoke with a southern twang I’d heard little of—except from my own mouth—in the past year.

  During those first two weeks we learned, among other skills, how to get out of our parachute harnesses on the ground in high wind. We were taken in buses to a flat area where a very large wind fan stood ready and waiting. I hooked myself into a parachute harness and lay down on the ground; then the parachute was held up to catch the wind from the fan, the fan was turned on, and I fumbled with my harness releases as I was dragged along, learning how to release myself quickly so as not to be dragged by wind.

  We were fed cooked dog, horse, and snake, just to show us that it wasn’t so bad. We had lectures, demonstrations, and practice about how to, among other skills, choke someone with a belt or a short piano wire with handles and how to hold, aim, and fire the .38 pistol, a weapon we’d carry in our survival vests on combat missions. We took judo classes. My mind’s eye could dimly see an enemy soldier. I felt better knowing how to use these weapons, but I suspected that I’d never need them, and I think most of us felt that way.

  “Where in hell we gonna get a piano wire?” asked Buddy.

  I hadn’t thought about it. “From a piano?”

  And then, after a couple of weeks of running everywhere on base (we were not allowed to walk outdoors), we were taken on buses to a training camp in the Washington wilderness, where we were shown how to use our ponchos to build a camouflaged shelter beneath leaves and dirt, how to build a makeshift lean-to, how to trap animals, how to travel quietly and unseen.

  On the day before we’d be turned loose in pairs—out of base camp and into the wilderness with maps and compass and forty pounds of equipment each on our backs to be chased by “enemy” troops with dogs—the fourteen in my group were given a live rabbit. After being shown how to kill it, skin it, gut it, and cook it, we did all that. Then each of us ate about one-fourteenth of a tender, freshly grilled rabbit. That’s the last “real” food we’d have for several days. Packed into our backpacks for our three-day trek in the mountains were two cereal bars and two bars of something called pemmican, a kind of beef jerky.

  Sergeant Webber was my partner in the wilderness. He would eventually be a crew member on a cargo plane. Together, he and I were to navigate through the cold Washington wilderness for two days, sleeping under our two ponchos (snapped together into a small tent) and running from “Communist soldiers” manning dogs on leashes—out to get us. Our job was to stay ahead of them, navigating with our compasses and maps through
manned checkpoints in the woods to a final staging area. If we were caught and released, or if we were late to a checkpoint or missed one, a card we carried would be punched. Three punches and we’d have to repeat our last three days of the wilderness program. A few days before we arrived, a pilot, taken to the hospital because of exposure and exhaustion, had died from pneumonia.

  The Washington mountains in our area were not high; they were climbable, steep hills. We wore regular, government-issue combat boots. Had snow been forecast, we would have been issued snow boots—inflatable rubber boots, designed to keep our feet warm and dry.

  Unforecast snow fell our first night out, blanketing everything. We had many fallen logs to cross and we were carrying those forty-pound backpacks. I remember how difficult it was to stand after slipping to the ground, and near the end of our trek, when we’d take a break to rest, I could imagine curling up and going to sleep, or just lying still, not moving.

  On the first night, I left my wet gloves outside the tent flap. The next morning they were frozen.

  “Webber, have we got time to build a little fire and thaw these things out?”