Stranger to the Ground

We fill the squares of our training board with black X’s in grease pencil on the acetate overlay; X’s in columns headed “Low-level navigation without radio aids” and “Combat profile” and “Max-load takeoff.” Yet we are certain that we will not all survive the next war.

Coldly, factually, it is stated that we are not only flying against the small-arms and the cables and the flak, but against the new mechanics in the nose of a ground-to-air missile as well. I have often thought, after watching the movies of our ground-to-air missiles in action, that I am glad I am not a Russian fighter-bomber pilot. I wonder if there is also a Russian pilot, after seeing his own movies, with thanks in his heart that he is not an American fighter-bomber pilot.

We talk about the missiles every once in a while, discussing the fact of their existence and the various methods of dodging them. But dodging is predicated on knowing that they are chasing, and during a strike we will be concentrating on the target, not on worrying about the fire or the flak or the missiles thrown up against us. We will combine our defense with our offense, and we will hope.

Speaking factually, we remind ourselves that our airplanes can still put almost as much ordnance on the target as any other fighter available. It does it without the finesse of the F-105’s radar, we say, but the fire eventually reaches the target. Our words are for the most part true, but there is a long mental battle to submerge the also-true words that our airplane is old, and was designed to fight in another era of warfare. We fly with a bravely buried sense of inferiority. As Americans, we should fly modern American airplanes. There is no older or slower ground support airplane in any NATO Air Force than ours.

The French fly F-84F’s, but they are transitioning now into Mirages and Vautours built for modern sky. The Luftwaffe is flying F-84F’s, but they are well into the task of converting to Maltese-crossed F-104G’s. The Canadians are flying Mark VI Sabres, contemporary with the ’84F, and they are changing now to their own CF-104G.

We fly our ’84F’s and the never-ending rumors of airplanes to come. We will get F-100D’s soon. We will get F-104’s soon. We will get the Navy’s F4H’s soon. We will be in F-105’s before the year is up.

There is, somewhere, a later airplane scheduled and waiting for us. But it has not yet shown its face and we do not talk about our shortcomings. We make do with what we have, as the P-39 pilots and the P-40 plots did at the beginning of the Second War.

The pilots in my squadron today are as varied a group of men as could be netted at a random stroke into the waters of civilian life. There is a young second lieutenant, a house-wares salesman, just accumulating the first fine scratches on his golden bars. There is a major who flew Mustangs and Jugs on long-ago fighter sweeps into Germany. There is a lawyer, practice established; a computer engineer; three airline pilots; two bachelors whose only income came from Guard flying. There are the successful and the unsuccessful. The unruffled and the volatile. The readers of books and the seekers of adventure.

If you looked closely you would find constants that many share: most are within five years of 30, most are family men, most have served their years of active duty with the regular Air Force. But one constant, without exception, they are all men of action. The most introspective pilot in the squadron leaves his book, carefully marked, in his BOQ room, and straps himself each day to 25,000 pounds of fighter airplane. He leads a flight of four airplanes through patterns of bombing and strafing and rocket firing and nuclear weapon delivery. He makes wing takeoffs into 500-foot weather ceilings and doesn’t see the ground again until he breaks out of the ragged cloud and freezing rain two hours and 900 miles from his takeoff runway. He alternates his letters to his family with an occasional review of airborne emergency procedures, and, occasionally, puts them to use when a red warning light flares in his cockpit, or his nosewheel fails to extend when it is time to land. There are those who speak loudly, and perhaps with too little humility, but those same back their words with action every time they step into an airplane. There are nights in the officers’ club when whiskey glasses splinter against the rough stone walls, there are colored smoke bombs thrown into the closed rooms of sleeping comrades, there is a song, not altogether complimentary, sung of the wing commander.

But you can count on the coming of the dawn, and with it the concussion of engine start in the cold wind. Take First Lieutenant Roger Smith, for instance, who last night deftly introduced four lighted firecrackers into the wing materiel officer’s room. Grounds, really, for court-martial. But in the confusion he was not identified, and this morning he flies number Two in a ground support mission against the Aggressor Force at Hohenfels. You cannot tell him, under oxygen mask and lowered visor, from Captain Jim Davidson, flight leader, calling now for radar vector to the target area. Davidson spent the night writing to his wife, and telling her, among other things, that he did not have any real reason to believe that the squadron would be released from active duty before the assigned year of duty was finished. In close formation the two swept fighters drop from altitude, indicating the same 450 knots on identical airspeed indicators. “Tank column at ten o’clock low,” Davidson calls. And they turn together to the attack.

Men of action, and every day, new action. In the gloved right hand, the possibility of life and death.

The loud slurred drawl harassing the multiengine pilot at the bar belongs to a man named Roudabush, who, a year ago, against all regulations, landed a flamed-out fighter at night, without electrical power and therefore without lights, at an airport in Virginia. He refused to bail out of his airplane or even to jettison his external fuel tanks over the city of Norfolk, and was reprimanded.

“You tell yourself that you’ll bail out if the thing quits at night,” he said once, “but when you look down and see all the lights of the city . . . kinda changes your mind.” A man like that, you don’t care how he talks. You fly with him, and it makes you proud.

Johnny Blair, leaning against the mahogany bartop swirling the icecubes in his glass and smiling faintly at Roudabush’s banter, has a little scar on his jaw. Shortly past noon on one day in his life he was beginning a LABS run, 500 knots toward the target, 100 feet in the air, when he heard a thud and the overheat and fire warning lights came on. He pulled up, heard another thud, and the cockpit filled with smoke. Without a word to his wingman, he shut down his engine, jettisoned the canopy, and squeezed the trigger on the right handgrip. For a few seconds in the afternoon he fought to release himself from the tumbling steel seat, 800 feet over a forest of pine. The automatic parachute release failed. That inward person immediately pulled the manual parachute release, with the world spinning green and blue about him. He swung one time in the harness before he dragged through the treetops and was slammed to the ground. He lost his helmet and mask in the bailout, and an anonymous tree-branch slashed his jaw. Then it was over, the inner man subsiding, the outward man spreading the parachute canopy as a signal to the helicopters, suffering slightly from shock, and telling the story very plainly and undramatically to whomever could benefit from it. Otherwise he does not talk of it, and except for the scar, he is the sort of person who would lead you to say, “Now there is a typical high-school geometry teacher.” Which, of course, is exactly what he is.

It takes a while to learn to know many of these men as friends, for many of them, in the fear of being thought braggart or self-styled supermen, do not tell of narrow escapes and brushes with disaster to anyone who inquires. Gradually, with much time, the newcomer to the squadron discovers that Blair had an interesting low-altitude bailout, that Roudabush “coulda kissed that bitch” when his airplane stretched its glide, in the dark, to the Virginia runway; that Travas ran into an air-to-air target in the days when they were made of plastic rag and steel bars, and dragged 70 pounds of steel and 30 feet of polyethylene home, imbedded in his wing.

And the squadron learns, gradually, that the newcomer has had his own share of experience in the world above the ground. A squadron is a swirling multicolored pool of experience, from which is painted the freewheeling sweep of life in the air, in individual brushstrokes. The brilliant shimmering brass of combat in the sun burns itself into the pilots in their cockpit; dark sky and dark sea soak their enormous blue into the man who guides his airplane between them; and, once in a very long while, the scarlet of a fireball against a mountainside glares to outshine all the other hues, in time breaking to tiny sharp sparkles of pain that never quite disappear.

I reach to my right in the red darkness and turn the volume of the radiocompass as low as it will go. It reports now only fragments of the Spangdahlem callsign behind me, and has become more of a thunderstorm indicator than a navigation radio. This is not bad, with the TACAN working well, and I am glad to have a thunderstorm indicator that is so reliable. There is a dim flash in the grey to my right, a momentary suggestion of light that is instantly gone again.

Tuning down the radiocompass was a short break, and the routine of the crosscheck continues. Straight and level. Attitude and airspeed. Needle and ball. No swerving from the target. As if I had a Shape under my wing.

There are Shapes and there are Bugs and there are Blue Boys, all names for the form that houses a few million tightly-controlled neutrons that make an atomic bomb. Or more properly, a Nuclear Device. It is always called a Device.

The first mission of many squadrons of tactical fighters is now a strategic one, and the numbers of many fighter wings are followed by the ominous letters SD.

SD stands for Special Delivery, and means that pilots spend hours studying targets of remote corners of the world and learning selected bits of nuclear physics and building their langu

age to include LABS and Shape and Nuke and the meaning of the T-Zero light. They fly a strange new bombing pattern in their practice, they fly it alone, and only the first bomb counts for score. A pilot away from a fighter cockpit since Korea would not recognize a full panel of switches and lights for the nuclear weapons delivery system. But it is an important panel, today.

Part of my job is to know how to deliver a Shape, and I practice it dutifully. The placing of Device on Target begins with a swirl of charts and dividers and angles and measurements. From that emerge a few highly-classified figures that are given for the nourishment of a pair of computers mounted in my airplane.

Normally, the missions are flown with only a small 25-pound practice bomb to record the effectiveness of the delivery, but once a year I am required to fly with a fullsize, full-weight Shape under my left wing. This is to remind me that when I carry a real atomic bomb, I will have to hold a bit of right stick-pressure to keep the wings level on takeoff.

A practice Shape is smooth and streamlined and not unpretty. The real Device, which looks exactly the same, is the ugliest mass of metal that I have ever seen. Blunt-nosed, olive-drab and heavy, it is like a greedy deformed remora attached to the smooth swept wing of my airplane.

With every other pilot in the squadron, I joined the Air National Guard because I like to fly airplanes. With strafing and rocketing and conventional bombing, of course, our mission passes the realm of mere airplane-flying and becomes one of destroying enemy machines and enemy troops. But the mounting of a Device on the airplane is, as far as the pilots are concerned, one step too many. I do not like it at all, yet the Shape is a part of my mission, and I learn to toss it and hit a target.

Hold the right stick-pressure, and gear up and flaps up and low-level to the target. The trees flick by below, the sky is the same French sky that I have flown for months, the cockpit is the same about me, and I cannot see the Device under my wing. But the lights on its control box glimmer dully in front of me, and I am acutely aware of its nearness. I feel as if I am standing near a lightly-chained gorilla as it awakens. I do not care for gorillas.

The lights tell me that the Device is awakening, and I respond by pushing up the proper switches at the proper moments. The Initial Point rushes in at me from the horizon, and I push my distaste for the monster to the back of my mind as I set another panel of switches in the last combination of steps that lead to its release. One hundred percent rpm.

The last red-roofed village flashes below me, and the target, a pyramid of white barrels, is just visible at the end of its run-in line. Five hundred knots. Switch down, button pressed. Timers begin their timing, circuits are alerted for the drop. Inch down to treetop altitude. I do not often fly at 500 knots on the deck, and it is apparent that I am moving quickly. The barrels inflate. I see that their white paint is flaking. And the pyramid streaks beneath me. Back on the stick smoothly firmly to read four G on the accelerometer and center the needles of the indicator that is only used in nuke weapon drops and center them and hold it there and I’ll bet those computers are grinding their little hearts out and all I can see is sky in the windscreen hold the G’s keep the needles centered there’s the sun going beneath me and WHAM.

My airplane rolls hard to the right and tucks more tightly into her loop and strains ahead even though we are upside down. The Shape has released me more than I have released it. The little white barrels are now six thousand feet directly beneath my canopy. I have no way to tell if it was a good drop or not. That was decided back with the charts and graphs and the dividers and the angles. I kept the needles centered, the computers did their task automatically, and the Device is on its way.