Stranger to the Ground

“Simulated napalm and guns. First pass will be the napalm.”

“Hurry up, will you? The tanks are pouring on the coal; must have seen you.”

“Roj.”

I melt into stick and throttle, my airplane leaps ahead and hurls itself in a sweeping burst of speed at the road. There are the tanks, feathers of dust and grass spraying long behind their tracks. But it is as if they were caught in cooling wax, I move fifteen times faster than they. Take it down to the deck, attacking from behind the tank. In its wax, it begins to turn, grass spewing from beneath its right track. I bank my wings, ever so slightly, and feel confident, omnipotent, as an eagle plunging from height to mouse. Men are riding on the tank, clutching handholds. They do not hear me, but they see me, looking back over their camouflaged shoulders. And I see them. What a way to make a living, clinging with all your strength to the back of a 50-ton block of steel hurtling across a meadow. In the time it takes me to count three, the tank, frozen in its turn, frames itself for a moment in my windscreen, and the lowest diamond of my gunsight flicks through it and my thumb has released tanks of jellied gasoline from beneath the wings. Wouldn’t be a tank driver in wartime for all the money in the world. Pull up. Hard turn right. Look back. The tank is rolling to a stop, obedient to the rules of our game. Two is snapping his black swept shadow over the hatch of the second tank. Tanks make such easy targets. I guess they just hope that they won’t get caught in an air strike. “Nice job, Checkmate. Work over the troops, will you?” A friendly request, from a man who is seeing from the ground the sight that so often has been caught in his forward windscreen. In the war we would worry now about small-arms fire and shoulder-mounted antiaircraft missiles, but we would already have decided that when our time comes, it will come, and the worry would be a transient one. Down on the troops. Most unwarlike troops, these. Knowing the game, and not often having the chance for their own private and special airshow, they stand and watch us come in. One raises his arms in a defiant V. I bank again, very slightly, to hurtle directly toward him. He and I have a little personal clash of wills. Low. I climb up the slope of the long meadow toward my antagonist. If there are telephone wires across the meadow, I will have plenty of clearance going beneath them. In war, my antagonist would be caught in the hail of Armor Piercing Incendiary from six Browning 50-caliber machine guns. But though this is not real war, it is a real challenge he throws to me. I dare you to make me duck. We are all such little boys at heart. I make one last tiny adjustment so that my drop tanks will pass on either side of his outflung hands if he does not duck. I see the arms begin to falter as he flicks from sight beneath the nose. If he hasn’t ducked, he is due for a flattening burst of jetblast. But he does have determination, this man. Usually we scatter the troops like flocks of chicks around the hilltops. I turn on another pass from another direction, looking, from sudden height of my pullup, for my friend. One dot looks like another.

Another pass, carried perhaps a little too low, for my friend dives for the ground even before I pass over him. That is really very profound. One dot looks like another. You can’t tell good from evil when you move 500 feet per second above the grass. You can only tell that the dots are men.

On one FAC mission near the hem of the iron curtain we were asked to fly east for two minutes in order to find our Controller. Two minutes east would have put us over the border and into Soviet airspace. Enemy airspace. The Controller had meant to say “west.” The hills did not look any different on the Other Side. As we circled and turned west I had looked across into the forbidden land. I saw no fences, no iron curtains, no strange coloring of the earth. Only the green rolling of the constant hills, a scattering of little grey villages. Without my compass and map, with the East-West border heavily penciled in red, I would have thought that the villages of men that I saw in the east were just as the villages of the west. Fortunately, I had the map.

“How about a high-speed run for the troops, Checkmate?”

“Sure thing,” I say, smiling. For the troops. If I were a fighter pilot marooned on the ground with the olive-drab Army, nothing would ease my solitude quite so much as the 500-knot rapport with my friends and their airplanes. So, a pass for the troops. “Open her up, Checkmate.” And throttle full open, engine drinking fuel at 7,000 pounds per hour. Across the meadow, faster than an arrow from a hundred-pound bow, heading this time for the cluster of dots by the radio-jeep of the FAC. 510 knots and I am joy. They love my airplane. See her beauty. See her speed. And I, too, love my airplane. A whiplash and the FAC and his jeep are gone. Pull up, far up, nose high in the milkblue sky. And we roll. Earth and sky joyously twined in a blur of dwindling emerald and turquoise. Stop the roll swiftly, upside down, bring the nose again through the horizon, roll back to straight and level. The sky is a place for living and for whistling and

for singing and for dying. It is a place that is built to give people a place from which to look down on all the others. It is always fresh and awake and clear and cold, for when the cloud covers the sky or fills the place where the sky should be, the sky is gone. The sky is a place where the air is ice and you breathe it and you live it and you wish that you could float and dream and race and play all the days of your life. The sky is there for everyone, yet only a few seek it out. It is all color, all heat and cold, all oxygen and forest leaves and sweet air and salt air and fresh crystal air that has never been breathed before. The sky whirs around you, keening and hissing over your head and face and it gets in your eyes and numbs your ears in a coldness that is bright and sharp. You can drink it and chew it and swallow it. You can rip your fingers through the rush of sky and the hard wind. It is your very life inside you and over your head and beneath your feet. You shout a song and the sky sweeps it away, twisting it and tumbling it through the hard liquid air. You can climb to the top of it, fall with it twisting and rushing around you, leap clear, arms wide, catching the air with your teeth. It holds the stars at night as strongly as it holds the brazen sun in the day. You shout a laugh of joy, and the rush of wind is there to carry the laugh a thousand miles.

In my climbing roll away from the FAC, I love everyone. Which, however, will not prevent me from killing them. If that day comes.

“Very nice show, Checkmate.”

“Why, feel free to call on us at any time, Bravo.” So this is joy. Joy fills the whole body, doesn’t it? Even my toes are joyful. For this the Air Force finds it necessary to pay me. No. They do not pay me for the hours that I fly. They pay me for the hours that I do not fly; those hours chained to the ground are the ones in which pilots earn their pay.

I and the few thousand other single-engine pilots live in a system that has been called a close fraternity. I have heard more than once the phrase “arrogant fighter pilots.” Oddly enough as generalizations go, they are both well chosen phrases.

A multiengine bomber pilot or a transport pilot or a navigator or a nonflying Air Force officer is still, basically, a human being. But it is a realization that I must strive to achieve, and in practice, unless it is necessary, I do not talk to them. There have been a few multiengine pilots stationed at bases where I have been in the past. They are happy to fly big lumbering airplanes and live in a world of low altitudes and long flights and coffee and sandwiches on the flight deck. It is just this contentment with the droning adventureless existence that sets them apart from single-engine pilots.

I belong to a group of men who fly alone. There is only one seat in the cockpit of a fighter airplane; there is no space allotted for another pilot to tune the radios in the weather or make the calls to air traffic control centers or to help with the emergency procedures or to call off the airspeed down final approach. There is no one else to break the solitude of a long crosscountry flight. There is no one else to make decisions. I do everything myself, from engine start to engine shutdown. In a war, I will face alone the missiles and the flak and the small-arms fire over the front lines. If I die, I will die alone.

Because of this, and because this is the only way that I would have it, I do not choose to spend my time with the multiengine pilots who live behind the lines of adventure. It is an arrogant attitude and unfair. The difference between one pilot in the cockpit and many on the flight deck should not be enough to cause them never to associate. But there is an impassable barrier between me and the man who prefers the life of low and slow.

I ventured, once, to break the barrier. I talked one evening to a pilot in a Guard squadron that had been forced to trade its F-86H’s for four-engine transports. If there ever was a common bond between single- and multiengine flying, I could see it through the eyes of this man. “How do you like multi after the Sabre?” I had asked, lights dancing on the pool beside the officers’ club.

I had picked the wrong pilot. He was new in the squadron, a transfer.

“I’ve never flown an eighty-six and I have no desire to fly one,” he said.

The word “eighty-six” sounded strange and foreign in his mouth, words not often said. I discovered that there had been a complete turnover of pilots in that squadron when its airplane changed from fighter-interceptor to heavy transport, and that my partner in conversation had a multiengine mind. The silver wings above his pocket were cast in the same mold that mine had been, but he lived in another world, behind a wall that has no gate. It has been months since that evening, and I have not since bothered to speak with a multiengine pilot.

Every so often a single-engine pilot is caught in a web of circumstance that transfers him from a fighter squadron into the ranks of multiengine pilots, that forces him to learn about torque pressure and overhead switch panels and propeller feathering procedures. I have known three of these. They fought furiously against the change, to no avail. For a short while they flew multiengine airplanes with their single-engine minds, but in less than a year all three had been released from active Air Force duty at their own request.

The program that switched fighter pilots into transports had once been quite active, affecting hundreds of single-engine pilots. Shortly after, perhaps by coincidence, I had read an article that deplored the loss of young Air Force pilots to civilian life. I would gladly have bet that some interesting statistics awaited the man who first probed the retention rate of fighter pilots forced to fly multiengine aircraft. The code of the Air Force is that any officer should be able to adapt to any position assigned him, but the code does not recognize the tremendous chasm between the background and attitude of single- and multiengine pilots.

The solitude that each fighter pilot knows when he is alone with his airplane is the quality that shows him that his airplane is actually a thing of life. Life exists in multiengine airplanes, too, but it is more difficult to find through the talk of crew on interphone and how are the passengers taking the rough air and crew chief can you pass me up a flight lunch. It is sacrilege to eat while you fly an airplane.

Solitude is that key that says that life is not confined to things that grow from the earth. The interdependence of pilot and airplane in flight shows that each cannot exist without the other, that we truly depend upon each other for our very existence. And we are confident in each other. One fighter squadron motto sums up the attitude of fighter pilots everywhere; We can beat any man in any land in any game that he can name for any amount that he can count.

In contrast, I read on the wall of Base Operations at a multiengine base: The difficult we approach with caution. The impossible we do not attempt. I could not believe it. I thought that it must have been someone’s idea of a joke for the day. But the sign was neatly lettered and a little grey, as if it had been there for a long while. It was joy to spin the dust of that runway from my wheels and to be out again in a sky designed for fighter pilots.

It is from pride that my arrogance comes. I have a history of sacrifice and of triumph and of pride. As the pilot of my Thunderstreak, in charge of an airplane built to rocket and bomb and strafe the enemy on the ground, my history goes back to the men who flew the P-47’s, the Thunderbolts of the Second World War. The same hills that are buried beneath me tonight remember the stocky, square-cut Jug of twenty years ago, and the concrete silos that were flak towers still bear the bulletholes of its low-level attack and its eight 50-caliber machine guns.

After the Jug pilots of Europe came the Hog pilots of Korea to face the rising curtain of steel from the ground. They flew another Republic airplane: the straight-wing F-84G Thunderjet, and they played daily games of chance with the flak and the rifle bullets and the cables across the valleys and the MiGs that crept past the ’86’s on the patrol. There are not a great many ’84G pilots of Korea who lived through their games, as, if a war breaks out in Europe tomorrow, there will not be a great many ’84F pilots surviving.

After me and my Superhog are the F-100D Super Sabre pilots that have waited out the years of cold war on a

lert all around the world. And after them, the men who fly the Ultimate Hog, the F-105D Thunderchief, who can attack targets on the ground, through weather, by radar alone.

My airplane and I are part of a long chain from the mist of the past to the mist of the future. We are even now obsolete; but if a war should begin on the imminent tomorrow, we will be, at least, bravely obsolete.