Boyd (6 page)

In 1950, after Ris graduated, Boyd made the varsity team. In later years when Boyd talked about his experiences as a swimmer
at Iowa, he always said Coach Armbruster “played favorites.” Boyd had been a favorite of Art Weibel and was the favorite of
Frank Pettinato. But at Iowa he was not picked out of the crowd. His bitterness toward his college experience was such that
for the rest of his life he referred sarcastically
to Iowa as “the corn college” and insisted, “I don’t know why I went there. I got nothing out of it.”

John Boyd met Mary Ethelyn Bruce when both were juniors. She was a prim and petite brunette from Ottumwa, Iowa, and made no
secret of the fact she was at college to find a husband. Boyd and Mary met at the Veterans Club. She was there with one of
Boyd’s fraternity brothers. Mary must have made more of an impression on Boyd than Boyd made on her because when he called
a few days later asking for a date, she didn’t remember him. After searching through the annual and finding his picture, she
decided he was “not bad looking” and agreed to meet him.

In the beginning it seemed they had much in common.

Both had worked as lifeguards. Both came from families of five children—three boys and two girls. Both had mothers who were
German Presbyterians, widows who were strong and domineering women. Both came from families that, because of the death of
a father, had money problems.

Mary had no trouble finding out all there was to know about Boyd. He told her that she looked like Jeanette MacDonald and
then talked mostly of himself. He told her of Japan and how he led a revolt against the officers. He told her of being a champion
swimmer back in Erie and he told her of the great Frank Pettinato. He told her how close his family was and how loyal they
all were to one another. He said, “In my family we had a tough life. But it didn’t bother me. I am not a whiner. I move on.”
And when he talked he talked loudly and waved his arms and embellished the simplest of stories and made the world new and
interesting and exciting.

Iowa was overflowing with older men who had been in the war and there were so many to choose from. But Boyd was different.
He made life an adventure. His enthusiasm and joie de vivre mesmerized her. Soon she was dating no one else. Slowly, she told
Boyd the story of her life. She was the fifth child of Elizabeth and Albert Bruce. Her mother, Elizabeth Bonar, grew up on
an Iowa farm and married Albert Weyer Bruce, a mechanic. Albert was a gentle man whose wants were few. He wanted to work on
cars and he wanted to please his wife. But he found he could not do both.

Elizabeth was the antipode of Albert, as hard and dominating as he was soft and accommodating. She had seen enough dirt and
grime on the farm and she wanted a different life for herself and for her children. She wanted her family to have a certain
social standing in Ottumwa. She wanted Albert to clean the grease from his fingernails and become an executive. Under her
ceaseless prodding, he became a consultant and then a superintendent in a company that manufactured equipment for poultry
processing plants—equipment that stripped feathers from chickens. And there he was an unhappy man. He did not want to be an
executive, even a low-level executive; he yearned to be a mechanic. He died of a heart attack when Mary was eleven and his
widow wondered for years if she was the reason. “I wonder if I pushed him too hard,” she sometimes said.

These moments of introspection were rare for Mrs. Bruce. She was a woman who had to be in charge. The poultry processing plant
sent her monthly checks, but it was not enough to raise five children. She moved the children to the unheated attic and turned
the Bruce home into a boarding house that she ran with the efficiency of a military operation.

Mrs. Bruce dictated Mary’s life to such a degree that Mary had few opinions of her own. She thought whatever her mother wanted
her to think. She was a passive person, one of those who stands still and waits to see what life has in store. She almost
never argued with anyone; if there was a disagreement, she nodded and agreed but then dug in her heels in small passive-aggressive
ways.

When Mary graduated from high school, she attended Parsons College, a small religious school in Fairfield, Iowa. She was there
for only a year before transferring to the larger, man-rich University of Iowa, where she majored in home economics. And because
she felt she was misunderstood, because she felt there was something wrong in her thinking and how she looked at the world,
many of her electives were in psychology.

“Actually, I majored in ‘looking for a husband,’” she said. She knew exactly what she wanted. Because her two favorite older
brothers were not athletic and not popular, she wanted to marry what she termed a “big jock.” She thought an athlete would
be easy and accommodating and that after graduation he might become a coach
and they could lead a simple life in a small Iowa town. She would be a member of the local Presbyterian church and sing in
the choir and life would be uncomplicated.

Boyd fit the bill. He was tall and handsome and dark-haired, just like her brothers. But he was an athlete and very popular
as well. She did not question the depth of his faith or whether or not he lived his religion as she did. She was a good Presbyterian
and thought he was the same. For her, the world was black and white, good and bad, right and wrong. There were only absolutes,
rigid lines that could never be crossed. She looked upon Boyd and put him into a neat and tightly wrapped little box.

The only part that didn’t fit her image of him as a “big jock” was that he read so much. He always carried books, not just
class books, but books on history and war and philosophy. Mary shrugged this off and considered it a rather quaint affectation.
And then there was the military thing. At the beginning of his junior year, Boyd signed up for the Air Force Reserve Officers
Training Course. He said it was purely financial, as he needed the monthly twenty-eight dollars that ROTC students received.
Whatever his reason, he took to ROTC with a passion. He barked orders and took charge of virtually every gathering until the
other ROTC students began calling him “Captain Boyd.” He was becoming much more assertive, what the military calls a “take-charge
guy.” He was coming into his own as a man.

When Mary asked Boyd what he wanted to do after graduation, he told her he wanted to go into the Air Force and fly jets. Her
brow wrinkled. But she shouldn’t worry, he would fly only for a few years and then he would do something else.

After their junior year, ROTC students go to a summer camp that serves as an indoctrination course for young men about to
become military officers. Boyd was en route to summer camp in June 1950, when North Korea invaded South Korea. Suddenly America
was in another war, this time against Communism. It was the first conflict of the Cold War and it was seen as a contest of
good versus evil.

Boyd’s last year of college was like his last year in high school, in that he knew when he graduated he was going to war.
He decided early on he would go as a fighter pilot. He said in his Air Force Oral History interview that he knew bomber pilots
were “a bunch of truck drivers” and “I did not want to be in a crowded bus and have a bunch
of people continually telling me what to do.” He went to Omaha to take the physical examination and the psychological tests
that determined whether or not a person had the capability to become a pilot. He passed them all.

Now that he was accepted for pilot training, he talked to Mary at great length of the airplanes he would fly. After December
1950, there was only one for him—the F-86 Sabre jet.

On December 17, a Sabre had shot down a MiG near the western end of the Yalu River, over a town called Sinuiju, and it made
headlines across America. The F-86 suddenly was the most romanticized instrument of war in history, a flashing streak of silver
whose guns spoke for America.

By 1950 America had largely forgotten that the Luftwaffe had jet fighters near the end of World War II. And most did not remember
that the XP-80, America’s forerunner to the venerable F-80, flew in 1944. After World War II, both the Soviets and Americans
had access to Germany’s research on jet fighters, and both countries went into production on jets based in large part on the
German research. The Soviet MiG-15 and the American F-86 Sabre were remarkably similar. Both had swept wings and were about
the same size, the MiG being slightly smaller.

Aesthetically the a Sabre was the most appealing jet imaginable, with its swept wings and bubble canopy and, in the “D” model,
the beak over the air intake that gave it a menacing and aggressive appearance. Here was an aircraft not pulled by a propeller
but pushed by fire and thunder. A
jet
. Even the name had a hard new magic about it. In the Sabre, America saw Newton’s Third Law in all its glory: light the fire
and stoke the burner and the opposite reaction is a burst of amazing speed in a jet that slices through the heavens. Few aircraft
had ever gripped America’s imagination as did this one.

In what was then considered an amazing display of brute power, the F-86 climbed at a forty-five-degree angle. It flew 680
mph and broke every existing speed record. It was sleek and beautiful and in the skies of Korea it became the very symbol
of America’s new love affair with jet fighters, of the newly independent U.S. Air Force, of America in the battle against
Communism. And it was the last truly great fighter aircraft the Air Force had until almost twenty years later, when Boyd was
instrumental in designing a better one.

Boyd told anyone who would listen that this was the only aircraft for him.

Mary listened to all this with one ear. She knew by then that Boyd was the man she would marry. She thought he had been about
to propose, but then this war in Korea came along and now all he talked about was jets, jets, jets. After graduating in February
1951, she went home to Ottumwa to await his proposal. She rented an apartment and began looking for a job. She finally became
an assistant to a local doctor, giving shots and handling menial chores. And she waited.

Living by herself was lonely and after only a few weeks she moved back home with her mother. She was grown now, but that did
not stop her mother from ordering her about. “I did not like mother telling me what to do,” Mary said. “But it was comfortable.”
She took driving lessons and, at twenty-two, had her first driver’s license.

Mary and Boyd often talked by phone. He came down on the bus from Iowa City almost every weekend. He graduated in June 1951
and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Air Force. Elsie and Ann came to Iowa for his graduation. Mary was also there.
She had awaited this event for months, thinking that when Boyd graduated he would propose. She remembers being intimidated
by Mrs. Boyd. Mary tried to be nice and solicitous, but Elsie walked about with such a stern expression on her face and with
such bold penetrating eyes that it seemed she was angry at everyone except her son. She made it quite clear she thought her
son could have done better in his choice of a girlfriend.

Mary had never been around anyone with a physical disability and was terribly uncomfortable watching Ann limp. It was not
a good weekend for her. And it was made all the more unpleasant by the fact that Boyd did not propose.

Boyd was ordered to Albuquerque, New Mexico, until the next flight training class opened, and Mary returned to Ottumwa. Maybe
Boyd would propose soon. But what if he met someone else? What if he waited until his flight training was over and then he
was sent to Korea? The chances of finding a husband in Ottumwa were slim.

Mary would wait.

S
ECOND
lieutenants, called “butter bars” because of the single gold bar they wear as an insignia of rank, often are given the most
menial of jobs, tasks that must be done by officers but that higher-ranking officers would not deign to perform. This is particularly
true for second lieutenants about to begin flight training. These young men believe they are Godlike beings, and to nonrated
officers they are not only insufferable but will grow more so once they complete flight training and pin silver wings over
their left-breast pocket. If there is any group on Earth with healthier egos than fighter pilots, they have yet to be discovered.
Bureaucrats who run the Air Force personnel system believe that a menial job might teach humility to these fledglings. Over
the years they have discovered this belief is founded more on hope than on reality—no fighter pilot ever has been or ever
will be humble. But the bureaucrats keep trying.

When Boyd was commissioned, there was a need for an assistant secretary in the officers’ dining room at Kirkland Air Force
Base (AFB) in Albuquerque. So Boyd went to New Mexico. He was there only a month, but it must have seemed an eternity.

On August 1, he was ordered to report to the 3301 Training Squadron at Columbus AFB, Mississippi, where he would begin
flight training. Flying-school classes are numbered according to when the students are scheduled to graduate. Boyd was a member
of 52-F. Because experienced Air Force pilots were needed in Korea and were considered too valuable to waste their time teaching
basic flying, the instructors at Columbus were civilians. Boyd’s instructor was C. Wayne Lemons, an employee of California
Eastern, the charter and freight airline that won the Air Force contract to teach young men how to fly. Boyd first went on
what was called the “dollar ride,” an orientation flight over northeastern Mississippi, where he would be flying for the next
several months. He was shown the numerous unpaved auxiliary strips, some of them narrow slices down the middle of a cotton
patch. Then he began his classroom work in aeronautics, meteorology, the theory of flight, navigation, cross-country flying,
morse code, radio procedure, and a host of other arcane disciplines.

Boyd was in a class of about forty lieutenants who had received their commissions through ROTC, and about one hundred ten
aviation cadets. The forty lieutenants all knew each other after a few weeks, and the camaraderie of learning to fly and the
knowledge they soon would be going to war welded them into a tightly knit band of brothers. Many would go on to become high-ranking
officers or would achieve great things in combat; some would become legends in the Air Force. But for the remainder of their
lives, they would be tied together as members of 52-F.