Stranger to the Ground

I am not a superman, but flying is still an interesting way to make a living, and I bury the thought of changing into a steel butterfly and stay the same mortal I have always

been.

There is no doubt that the pilots portrayed in the motion pictures are supermen. It is the camera that makes them. On a screen, in a camera’s eye, one sees from without the airplane, looking into the cockpit from over the gunports in the nose. There, the roar of the guns fills the echoing theater and the sparkling orange flames from the guns are three feet long and the pilot is fearless and intense with handsome narrowed eyes. He flies with visor up, so one can see his eyes in the sunlight.

It is this view that makes to superman, the daring air-man, the hero, the fearless defender of the nation. From the other side, from alone inside the cockpit, it is a different picture. No one is watching, no one is listening, and a pilot flies in the sun with his visor down.

I do not see gunports or orange flames. I squeeze the red trigger on the stick grip and hold the white dot of the gunsight on the target and I hear a distant sort of pop-pop-pop and smell gunpowder in my oxygen mask. I certainly do not feel like a very daring airman, for this is my job and I do it in the best way that I can, in the way that hundreds of other tactical fighter pilots are doing it every day. My airplane is not a roaring silver flash across the screen, it is still and unmoving about me while the ground does the blurring and the engine-roar is a vibrating constant behind my seat.

I am not doing anything out of the ordinary. Everyone in a theater audience understands that this gage shows how much utility hydraulic pressure the engine-driven pumps are producing; they know perfectly well that this knob selects the number of the rocket that will fire when I press the button on top of the stick grip; that the second button on the grip is a radar roger button and that it is disconnected because it is never used; that the button that drops the external fuel tanks has a tall guard around it because too many pilots were pressing it by mistake. The audience knows all this. Yet it is still interesting to watch the airplanes in the motion pictures.

The ease of flying is a thing that is never mentioned in the motion pictures or on the recruiting posters. Flying a high-performance military airplane is exacting and difficult, men, but maybe, if you take our training, you will become a different person, with supernatural power to guide the metal monster in the sky. Give it a try, men, your country needs fine-honed men of steel.

Perhaps that is the best approach. Perhaps if the recruiting posters said, “Anyone walking down this street, from that ten-year-old with his schoolbooks to that little old grandmother in the black cotton dress, is able to fly an F-84F jet fighter airplane,” they wouldn’t attract exactly the kind of initiate that looks best on a recruiting poster. But just for fun, the Air Force should train a ten-year-old and a grandmother to fly quick aileron rolls over airshows to prove that the tactical fighter pilot is not necessarily the mechanical man that he is so often painted.

There is little to do. I have another six minutes before the wide needle of the TACAN will swing on its card to say that the little French city of Laon has been pulled by beneath me. I drag my tiny cone of thunder behind me for the benefit of the hills and the cows and perhaps a lonely peasant on a lonely walk through the cloudy night.

A flight like tonight’s is rare. Normally, when I fit myself into the cockpit of this airplane, there is much to be done, for my job is one of being continually ready to fight. Each day of the week, regardless of weather or holidays or flying schedule, one small group of pilots wakes earlier than all the others. They are the Alert pilots. They awaken and they report to the flight line well before the hour that is Target Sunrise. And each day of each week a small group of airplanes are set aside to wait on the Alert pad, power units waiting by their wing. The airplanes, of course, are armed for war.

After the innocuous flying of the Air National Guard, it is chilling at first to spend the dawn checking the attachment of thousands of pounds of olive-drab explosive under my wings. The Alert procedure sometimes seems an impossible game. But the explosive is real.

The day wears on. We spend an hour studying the target that we already know very well. The landmarks about it, the conical hill, the mine in the hillside, the junction of highway and railroad, are as familiar to us as the hundred-arch viaduct that leads to Chaumont. We have in our minds, as well as on the maps stamped SECRET, the times and distances and headings to the target, and the altitudes we will fly. We know that our target will be as well-defended as anyone’s, that there will be a massive wall of flak to penetrate and the delicate deadly fingers of missiles to avoid. Oddly enough, the flak does not really bother us. It does not make a bit of difference whether the target is defended from every housetop or not at all . . . if it is necessary to strike it, we shall go along our memorized route and strike it. If we are caught by the screen of fire, it will be one of those unfortunate happenings of war.

The siren blows, like a rough hand jerking sleep away. My room is dark. For more than a second, in the quick ebb of sleep, I know that I must hurry, but I cannot think of where I must go. Then the second is past and my mind is clear.

The Alert siren.

Hurry.

Into the flight suit, into the zippered black jump boots, into the winter flying jacket. A hurried toss of scarf about throat, leave the door swinging closed and open again on my tousled room and join the rush of other Alert pilots in a dash down the wooden stairs and into the waiting Alert truck. The square wooden buildings of Chaumont Air Base are not yet even silhouettes against the east.

There is a husky comment in the darkness of the rattling truck: “Sleep well, America, your National Guard is awake tonight.”

The truck takes us to the airplanes that wait in the dark. The maintenance Alert crew has beaten us to the airplanes, and the APU’s are roaring into steely life. I climb the ladder that is chipped lemon in the daytime and invisible in the night, a feel of aluminum rungs more than a ladder-being. “Power!” the lights blaze in the cockpit, undimmed by the little night-shields that close off most of their light for flying in the dark. The light from them shows me the parachute straps and the safety belt ends and the belt release lanyard and the G-suit and oxygen hoses and the microphone cables. Helmet on, oxygen mask on (how can rubber get so icy cold?), radio on. Night-shields down on the warning lights, twist the rheostats that fill the cockpit with a bloody glow. “Hawk Able Two,” I say to the microphone, and if my flight leader has been faster strapping in than I, he will know that I am ready to go.

“Roj, Two.” He is fast, my flight leader.

I do not know whether this is a real-thing alert or another practice. I assume it is another practice. Now I tend to the finer points of getting ready to go; checking circuit breakers in, bomb switches set in safe positions, gunsight properly set for the delivery that we will use.

“Hawk Able Four.”

“Roj, Four.”

Check the battle damage switches all down where they should be. Turn the navigation lights on to bright flash. We will turn them to dim as we approach the target.

“Hawk Able Three.” Three was awake too late last night.

“Roj, Three. Parsnip, Hawk Able flight is ready to go with four.”

In the combat operations center, the time is checked as we call in. We checked in well before the maximum time allowed, and this is good.

“Hawk Able, Parsnip here. This is a practice alert. Maintain cockpit alert until further notified.”

“Roj.”

So much meaning can be packed into three letters. Hawk Able Leader didn’t just acknowledge the notice, he told the combat operations center that this is a ridiculous dumb stupid game to be played by grown men and good grief you guys it is THREE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING and you had just better have orders from high headquarters to call this thing at this hour or you will not be getting much sleep tomorrow night.

“Sorry,” says Parsnip, into the silence. They must have had the orders from high headquarters.