The Fist of God

Don Walker eased down on the brake pedal and the ’63 vintage Corvette Stingray paused for a moment at the main entrance to Seymour Johnson Air Force base to let a couple of campers pass before emerging onto the highway.

It was hot. The August sun blasted down up ahead on the small North Carolina town of Goldsboro so that the tarmac seemed to shimmer like moving water. It was good to have the top down and feel the wind, warm though it was, running through his short blond hair.

He maneuvered the classic sports car over which he had lavished so much attention up through the slumbering town to Highway 70, then pulled onto Highway 13 heading northeast.

Don Walker, that hot summer of 1990, was twenty-nine years old, single, a fighter jockey, and had just learned that he was going to war. Well, maybe. Apparently it would depend on some weird Arab called Saddam Hussein.

That same morning the wing commander, Colonel (later General) Hal Hornburg, had laid it out: In three days, on August 9, his squadron, the 336th Rocketeers of the Ninth Air Force of Tactical Air Command was shipping out to the Arabian Gulf. The orders had come through from TAC command at Langley Air Force base in Hampton, Virginia. So it was on. The elation among the pilots had been ecstatic. What was the point of all those years of training if you never got to fire the goodies?

With three days to go there was a mess of work to get through, and for him as squadron weapons officer more than most. But he had begged for just twenty-four hours’ furlough to go and say good-bye to his folks, and Lieutenant Colonel Steve Turner, chief of weapons, had told him if there was one tiny detail missing on August 9 when the F-15E Eagles rolled, he—Turner—would personally kick ass. Then he had grinned and told Walker if he wanted to get back by sun-up, he had better get moving.

Walker was hammering up through Snow Hill and Greenville by nine that morning, heading for

the chain of islands east of Pamlico Sound. He was lucky his parents were not back in Tulsa, or he could never have made it. Being August, they were taking their annual vacation at the family beach house near Hatteras, a five-hour drive from the base.

Don Walker knew he was a hotshot pilot, and he reveled in it. To be twenty-nine and do the thing you love best in the world and do it supremely well is a good feeling. He liked the base, he liked the guys, and he adored the exhilaration and power of the McDonnell Douglas F-15E Strike Eagle that he flew. It was, he thought, the best piece of airplane in the whole U.S. Air Force, and the hell with what the men on the Fighting Falcons said. Only the Navy’s F-18 Hornet might compare, or so they said, but he had never flown the Hornet, and the Eagle was just fine by him.

At Bethel he turned due east for Columbia and Whalebone, which was where the highway turned into the island chain; with Kitty Hawk behind him to his left, he turned south toward Hatteras, where the road finally ran out and the sea was on all sides. He had had good vacations at Hatteras as a boy, going out to sea in the early dawn with his grandfather for bluefish, until the old man got sick and could not go anymore.

Now that his dad was retiring from the oil job in Tulsa maybe he and Mom would spend more time at the beach house and he could get down there more often. He was young enough that the thought that he might not come back from the Gulf, if there was a war, did not cross his mind.

Walker had graduated from high school in Tulsa at the age of eighteen with only one burning ambition—he wanted to fly. So far as he could recall, he had always wanted to fly. He spent four years at Oklahoma State, majoring in aeronautical engineering, and he graduated in June 1983. He had done his time with the ROTC, and that fall he was inducted into the Air Force.

He underwent pilot training at Williams AFB, near Phoenix, flying the T-33 and the T-38, and after eleven months, at wings parade, he learned he had passed as a distinguished graduate, fourth out of forty pupils. To his abiding joy, the top five graduates went to fighter lead-in school at Holloman AFB, near Alamagordo, New Mexico. The rest of the pupils, he thought with the supreme arrogance of a young man destined to fly fighters, would be sent to become bomb-droppers or trash-carriers.

At the replacement training unit at Homestead, Florida, he finally quit the T-38 and converted to the F-4

Phantom, a big, powerful brute of a plane, but a real fighter at last.

Nine months at Homestead ‘terminated with his first squadron posting, to Osan in South Korea, flying the Phantoms for a year. He was good and he knew it, and so apparently did the brass. After Osan, they sent him to the Fighter Weapons School at McConnell AFB in Wichita, Kansas.

Fighter Weapons runs arguably the toughest course in the USAF. It marks out the high-fliers, career-wise. The technology of the new weapons is awe-inspiring. Graduates of McConnell have to understand every nut and bolt, every silicon chip and microcircuit of the bewildering array of ordnance that a modern fighter plane can launch at its opponents, in the air or on the ground. Walker emerged again as a distinguished graduate, which meant that every fighter squadron in the Air Force would be happy to have him.

The 336th Squadron at Goldsboro got him in the summer of ’87, flying Phantoms for a year, followed by four months at Luke AFB in Phoenix, then converting to the Strike Eagle with which the Rocketeers were being reequipped. He had been flying the Eagle for more than a year when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.

The Stingray turned just before midday into the island chain; a few miles to his north stood the monument at Kitty Hawk where Orville and Wilbur Wright had hauled their string-and-wire contraption into the air for a few yards to prove that man really could fly in a powered airplane. If they only knew ...

Through Nag’s Head he followed the crawl of campers and trailers until they finally petered out and the road emptied past Cape Hatteras onto the tip of the island. He ran the Stingray onto the driveway of his parents’ timber-clad frame house just before one. He found them on the porch that faced out over the calm blue sea.

Ray Walker caught sight of his son first and let out a shout of pleasure. Maybelle came out from the kitchen, where she had been preparing lunch, and rushed into his embrace. His grandfather was sitting in his rocking chair, looking at the sea. Don walked over and said:

“Hi, Grandpa. It’s me, Don.”

The old man looked up and nodded and smiled; then he looked back at the ocean.

“He’s not so good,” said Ray. “Sometimes he knows you, sometimes he doesn’t. Well, sit down and tell us the news. Hey, Maybelle, how’s about a couple of beers for some thirsty guys?”

Over the beers, Don told his parents he was off to the Gulf in five days. Maybelle’s hand flew to her mouth; his father looked solemn.

“Well, I guess that’s what it’s for, the training and all,” he said at length.

Don swigged his beer and wondered not for the first time why parents always had to worry so much.

His grandpa was staring at him, some kind of recognition in his rheumy eyes.

“Don’s going off to war, Grandpa,” Ray Walker shouted at him. The old man’s eyes flickered with life.

All his career he had been a Marine, joining the Corps straight out of school many, many years before, in 1941 he had kissed his wife good-bye and left her with her folks in Tulsa, along with their newborn baby, Maybelle, to go to the Pacific. He had been with MacArthur on Corregidor and heard him say, “I shall return,” and he had been twenty yards away from the general when MacArthur did return.