Viper Pilot: A Memoir of Air Combat (4 page)

Through a combination of Boolean equations, black magic, and an honest attempt to predict operational needs, a small number of each type of aircraft would be apportioned to each graduating class. We were handed three fighters, so the top three names got them. The two poor bastards who were above the FAR line, but not in the top three, got to stay behind and become FAIPs. Every pilot had filled out a “dream sheet” with his top choices of aircraft and location. So the rankings and student preferences were matched up with the types of aircraft the Air Force had dealt out for that assignment cycle. The results were revealed during Drop Night.

This rite of passage took place on a Friday evening at the Officers Club. It was the first order of business for the night—before the effects of an open bar, music, and female groupies could take hold. The new pilot’s name was called, and, in conjunction with some properly embellished tales from his training, a picture of his next aircraft was shown on the screen. Sometimes, as a spirit-crushing joke, another plane would be flashed just to see the reaction. I mean, if you’re expecting a fighter, you’d slit your own throat if you thought you were getting a lumbering C-130 or a trainer. Remember, this night was the culmination of lifelong dreams, four years of college and a year of UPT. They put up a T-38 for me initially, and as my soul fled my body in shame, I remember actually grabbing the chair so I wouldn’t stagger. But amid the guffawing, hoots, and screams, there appeared a picture of a beautiful F-16. In the end, with lots of backslapping, each dazed pilot would walk to the front, shake hands, and receive his official orders. You got what you earned—I had a great night.

I left Vance after that year, considerably skinnier but with silver wings on my chest. As with most military programs, you soon realize that you actually haven’t finished anything, because there’s always the next course or school to attend. Everything you complete just opens a new door. For an aspiring fighter pilot, there was another full year of various training programs before you got to your first operational squadron.

First came the three-month Lead-In Fighter Training (LIFT) course at Holloman AFB, New Mexico. This was conducted in AT-38 aircraft, and the instructors were all fighter pilots. Actually, the real point of this course, and what made it great, was to teach the young punk
how
to be a fighter pilot. So, besides the obvious flying stuff like dropping bombs, strafing, and dogfighting, they taught other essentials—drinking games at the bar, hymns like “Sammy Small” and “Dear Mom, Your Son Is Dead.” We were stripped of all Air Training Command patches and issued Tactical Air Command (TAC) name tags and patches. It was a true mark of distinction to walk into any Officer’s Club bar wearing a TAC shield and a squadron patch with the initials TFS—Tactical Fighter Squadron.

We also went through centrifuge training here. Think of the little seat that got spun around the room at 400 miles per hour during
The Right Stuff
or
Spies Like Us,
and you’ve got the picture. See, we were really part of the first generation of fighter pilots going into high-G aircraft, and no one was certain about the long-term effects. When blood drains from the head during high-G forces, the brain goes to sleep. Obviously, in a jet fighter traveling at 900 feet per second, this is a bad thing, and too many pilots were getting killed. Where planes like the T-38 and older fighters could
instantly
pull, say, seven Gs, the engine and airframe couldn’t hold it very long. The Gs would “bleed off” to a very manageable four or five Gs. The danger in the F-16 was that it could
sustain
eight or nine Gs long past the point that the pilot could remain conscious. So the physiology folks, flight surgeons, and paper-pushers all had their panties in a wad over this, and the centrifuge training was supposed to acclimate a pilot to the sensations of high, sustained G forces. That means they strapped you in the seat and spun you till you passed out. Guys like me didn’t care. What’s one more risk in a profession built on them?

Actually, the biggest threats at LIFT were the “Holloman widows.” These gals, usually divorced from enlisted men, had been left there when their ex-husbands moved on. They were determined to do it right the second time around and marry an officer. Think of slightly older women from
An Officer and a Gentleman,
maybe with a kid or two, and you’ve got it. Since I couldn’t spell
matrimony
and had absolutely no desire for a wife and instant family, I avoided them like the plague.

After a year at Vance, Holloman was paradise. Well, Alamogordo, New Mexico, is hardly a metropolis, but, unlike Enid, it did not boast of eighty Baptist churches, nor did it have blue laws, and it
did
have the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Albuquerque was only a few hours away, and there was moderately good skiing in Ruidoso. It was positively cosmopolitan after Oklahoma.

Following LIFT, I was sent to Advanced Survival training at Fairchild Air Force Base in Washington State. In February. Part of the course included an escape-and-evasion situation, where you are plopped down on a mountaintop with only the survival equipment you’d have after an ejection. This is to say, not much.

After being given a suitable head start—about an hour—you were pursued by armed soldiers whose sole excitement in life was chasing officers through the wilderness. In those days, the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries were the big enemies, so that’s who these guys simulated. They only spoke Russian or German. Their uniforms, weapons, and attitudes were authentic. I think they all studied method acting in East Berlin.

I figured that trying to escape and evade in the snow, without snowshoes, while being chased by deranged sadists who intimately knew the terrain, just wasn’t going to work. It was, as we say, a nonstarter.

But what else could I do but try, right? So I thrashed my way down to a stream that was moving too quickly to freeze, and then, using a trick picked up from some bad western movie, I walked backward in my own boot prints to a tree. Swinging around to the side, away from my prints, I managed to pull myself up into the branches.

Okay. Maybe not the best of plans but it was all I could come up with at the moment and was certainly better than trying to blindly sprint through four feet of thick snow. And it actually did work.

At least long enough for me to start feeling cocky again.

I watched them pass my tree and stop at the riverbank. I was feeling quite pleased with myself as Hans, Fritz, and Yuri (or whatever they called themselves) looked puzzled for a few moments. They actually poked around in the bramble, looking for my body, before one of them took a closer look at my prints. I think he would’ve figured it out but the dogs arrived at that moment and beat him to it. No one was amused, except me, and that didn’t go over so well.

Once captured, I was thrown into a mock POW camp with all the others. “Mock” in the sense that they couldn’t really beat us senseless, electrify our gonads, or kill us. After a strip search and lots of shouting and shoving, I was tossed into a “cell” the size of a wall locker. There was no way to sit down, so the best you could do was to brace yourself against one wall and sort of sag. You could nap for maybe seven or eight seconds like this. It wasn’t much fun but was obviously no comparison to the real thing. However, to a young officer who’d spent the last few years getting a college degree, a commission, pilot wings, and a jet fighter assignment, it was a bucket of cold water in the face. I began to develop the small and thoroughly disconcerting notion that I wasn’t nearly as important as I thought I was.

The psychological games they played weren’t much fun either. Music and noise played over and over. And over. And it was not a light classical medley with some falling-water sounds thrown in for relaxation.

There was the opening line from “You Say It’s Your Birthday,” along with a witch’s laugh and my personal favorite—a baby crying. Over and over. And over. I think that put me off having kids for a good fifteen years.

There were also mind games and other physical abuse, though I think it was called “stressing.” But after my four years as a cadet in the Texas A&M Corps, there wasn’t anything along those lines that was going to get under my skin. I listened to Pavarotti in my head until they lost interest.

Besides the POW camp experience, there was useful training in all kinds of survival situations, evasion techniques, codes, and assorted other things designed to improve your chances of living through such an ordeal. I figured your luck would already be pretty bad to get into that type of situation, so I paid attention. These were all lessons that some poor guys had learned the hard way in Vietnam.

Unfortunately, as with much of military training, we were fighting the last war. Or, in this case, a war with Russia that had never happened. Still, I reasoned later, if we were trained to fight the Soviets, the Arabs weren’t going to cause much of a problem.

Following that cheerful interlude, I went off to the primary F-16 Replacement Training Unit. This was located, thank God, in beautifully sunny Phoenix, Arizona. Oklahoma had left me culturally starved and Washington gave me frostbitten testicles, so Luke Air Force Base was nearly heaven. After packing everything into a blue Stingray (I obviously didn’t own much), I showed up at Luke’s main gate thawed out and, again, very full of myself. I got over that quickly.

At that time, the F-16 was only nine years old; the newest and hottest fighter in the U.S. inventory. Incidentally, only the uninitiated call it a “Fighting Falcon.” Everyone else calls it a “Viper,” because (a) it looks snakelike when viewed from the front, or (b) it resembles the fighter from the old
Battlestar Galactica
TV series. Or both—take your pick.

Fielded in 1979 as a lightweight, daytime jet, the Viper quickly showed itself to be much more capable than imagined. This was largely due to a computerized, modular concept that permitted easy expansion as technology and weapons advanced. A lethal dogfighter, the F-16 can only fly by using computers to offset its aerodynamic instability. This designed instability is like starting a fistfight with your first swing nearly complete. The Viper’s engine is tremendously powerful and, coupled with the jet’s small size, it produces greater thrust than the fighter’s weight. Because of this power, the F-16 can sustain nine-G flight, which means it could outmaneuver any threat in the world. The F-16 also uses electronic signals, instead of conventional cables, to move the flight controls. This fly-by-wire system compensates against the instability and helps the pilot physically fly under sustained Gs. As mentioned, this is always potentially deadly to the pilot, as the sheer force of high Gs drains blood from the head, can snap cartilage and tear muscle.

For the next eight months, I learned how to dogfight with another jet at 500 miles per hour. The pain of pulling eight to nine times the force of gravity became a daily event. I learned how to fight as a pair and as two pairs. We slowly qualified in employing each type of weapon the F-16 could carry. General Purpose bombs, air-to-ground missiles, air-to-air missiles, and the cannon.

Every conceivable emergency that could happen in an F-16 was taught, practiced in numerous simulators, and etched forever in the forefront of my mind. All the systems on the aircraft were painstakingly dissected in classroom lectures and presentations until we knew how each component of the jet functioned. A roughly $40M jet fighter traveling at 500 miles per hour with a live human inside was a valuable commodity. We were instrument rated for bad-weather flying anywhere in the world, and we also became qualified to refuel in the air.

We were taught the basics of our various threats. We learned the strengths and weaknesses of enemy jet-fighters, anti-aircraft systems, and surface-to-air missiles. Our own onboard countermeasures and self-protection systems were thoroughly absorbed, as they’d likely save our lives one day. This would be done again, in much greater detail, when we eventually arrived at our combat squadron. It was a process that would be continually revised, updated, and repeated throughout a fighter pilot’s career.

At Luke, we experienced the fundamental realization that we, the pilots, were the weapons. The success or failure of fighter operations lay with the pilot. This was one of the many things that made a fighter pilot different from other types of military aviators. The jet was the horse to get us to the fight, but the fighting was up to us.

During the latter phase of RTU, we were given follow-on assignments to our operational fighter wings. This process was loosely based on what we requested, but mostly determined by where we were needed. However, unlike UPT, we’d already proven ourselves and had our wings, so some consideration was given to our wishes. My family came, as always, to my graduation. My grandmother even showed up, and when I took her out to see my jet, she astonished me by asking how long the pitot tube was. It wasn’t until years later, after her funeral, that I found a little piece of paper, covered in her tiny, neat writing, with facts about the F-16. This was a woman who had trouble getting a passport because she’d been born in the Indian Territory before it became part of a state.

I began UPT in a class of forty-one student pilots. Twenty-two graduated, and of those, three of us were selected for fighters. My RTU class started with thirteen pilots, and we graduated eleven. About half of these guys were married, and they generally wanted to stay at one of the bases in the United States. This was before the First Gulf War and the sweeping changes that would transform the military; at that time, there were no long-term deployments to nasty places. Squadron life was fairly predictable and consisted mainly of training and social events. I was single and had no ties to anyone in the States except my immediate family. I wanted to go overseas and see the world.

Germany sounded like a nice place, so I listed the three bases there that had F-16s. The first two, Hahn Air Base and Ramstein Air Base, had no vacancies during my assignment cycle, so I ended up with my third choice. I’d never heard of Spangdahlem Air Base, home of the 52nd Tactical Fighter Wing, but it didn’t matter. It was in Germany.