Solo (13 page)

I converted seawater to drinking water with a purification tablet. I found suntan lotion in the survival kit and applied it to exposed skin. I thought about home, about the war, about friends, about what I was going to do that night.

Then I sat in the raft for several hours, there in Biscayne Bay, not far from Miami, Florida, looking to the
horizon, trying to spot any of the other guys who were out there with me, imagining that if this adventure were real, I’d be picked up and flown to waiting reporters as a hero.

I heard the drone of the rescue helicopter. I’d been taught the routine: wait for the helicopter to hover nearby and drop the rescue device, which was attached by a metal line, and then after the device hit the water and released static electricity, climb out of my raft, float (with my underarm floats) over to the device, fold down one of the three seats, climb onto it, hold on, and give a thumbs-up to be pulled up into the helicopter and flown back to the Air Force base.

While at Homestead, we were allowed to request our next assignments—where we wanted to go to fly the F-4: Vietnam, Japan, or the States. This was late summer 1968. Pilots were being shot down regularly over North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and Laos. I was in no special hurry to go to war. I asked for Japan as my first choice, then the States, and then Southeast Asia (known in Air Force literature as SEA). It was common knowledge that if our first assignment wasn’t SEA, then the second one would be.

But I didn’t bother to think that far ahead.

I got my first preference and was on the way to Yokota Air Base, Japan.

I
ARRIVED AT
Y
OKOTA
in the fall of 1968. From the hallway window just outside my door in BOQ 16 (bachelor officers’ quarters) at Yokota Air Base I could see Mount Fuji on clear days. Though the roar of departing jets sometimes broke the tranquillity of the scene, that didn’t bother me at the time. An F-4 fighter wing—two squadrons, about forty pilots in each—was stationed on base. My squadron was the Thirty-fifth TFS (tactical fighter squadron). The other was the Eightieth.

Our mission in Japan worked like this: One squadron would leave Yokota and spend five weeks at Osan Air Base in South Korea. The other squadron would relieve that one, and the first would return to Yokota. The second squadron would spend five weeks in Osan and then return, and both squadrons would be on base at Yokota together for five weeks while an F-4 squadron from elsewhere served in Korea.

A pilot in the Eightieth TFS, Jim Butts, had been in my
training class at Laredo, though not in my squadron, so I didn’t know him well. We would become roommates for my eighteen months in Japan—and close friends to this day. Since he was in the other fighter squadron on base, he and I would be rooming together in the BOQ in Yokota for five weeks, and then I’d be gone to Korea for five weeks, and when I got back, he’d be gone for five weeks.

Soon after arriving in Japan, before I had had an opportunity to fly any training missions, I was shipped to Korea. During our five-week tours in Korea, for several four-day stretches at a time, I’d be among a group of eight pilots living in the “alert shack,” a large two-story brick building with living quarters upstairs, and eating and lounging facilities downstairs. The alert shack was near the alert hangars, where our four aircraft were waiting, each with a nuclear bomb strapped underneath. South Korea is close to Russia, and we were prepared to strike Russian military complexes.

When not sitting alert in Korea, we’d fly normal training missions, like those we’d flown in Florida. Our mission, besides nuclear alert, was to stay combat ready for either conventional (nonnuclear) air-to-air or air-to-ground combat.

I didn’t sit alert right away, and my first mission was flown with Captain Cam Knight, a spark plug from South Carolina. He and I would play many games of Ping-Pong in the months to come. I rarely won.

The Korean landscape we flew over looked rich and green. Villages of thatched-roof huts dotted the countryside.

As our flight of four was coming in to land after an air-intercept mission (we were the lead in a flight of four), Captain Knight, flying the aircraft, said to me, “We need to do a bubble check.”

“What’s a bubble check, sir?”

“Stand by.”

As we neared the base, Captain Knight called the tower and asked permission for a bubble check. Permission was granted.

Normally a flight of four would fly directly above the runway in the direction of landing at fifteen hundred feet up and at an airspeed of 300 knots. The flight of four would fly in right-echelon formation (like the fingernails on your right hand if your index finger were longer than your middle finger, with the lead aircraft being the index-finger nail) to a point about halfway down the runway, and then the lead would suddenly break left (make a sharp, level, 180-degree left turn) while the other fighters kept straight ahead, wings level. After five seconds, number two would break left, and so on, until the four aircraft were in a straight line, one behind the other, for landing—each would land after making a final 180-degree descending turn to the runway. But as we neared the base, we were headed down the runway not at fifteen hundred feet, not at 300 knots. We were at fifty feet and 450 knots. And we were not in echelon formation; we were in fingertip formation. What was going on?

Our flight of four, in effect, buzzed the base, streaking down the runway as if we were the Thunderbirds (the Air Force aerobatic team, which flies in air shows).

Nothing was said and we reentered the normal pattern and landed without incident. On the ground I asked another backseater what the hell
bubble check
meant.

“Oh, in the old days a pilot would see if his compass was working by flying down a runway with a known heading. That’s all. Now it’s just a chance to show off.”

Later that same day an order came down from headquarters: No more bubble checks. I’d flown on the very last official bubble check at Osan Air Base, Korea. Such a maneuver would never have been made on a base in the States or in Japan, but flight restrictions in Korea were more relaxed than in other places I had flown and would fly, until Southeast Asia.

As mentioned earlier, one of the main reasons we went to Korea was to stand by for—and then if called, be a part of—nuclear war. The Air Force F-4 was one of the first fighter-bombers (as opposed to a bomber) used as a platform (military jargon) for dropping not only conventional bombs, but also nuclear bombs. The presence of two pilots rather than only one created a security umbrella: a single person could not take off with and then drop a nuclear bomb. Big bombers with large crews had this check in place.

T
HERE WAS SOME DELAY
in finding a regular front-seater for me, so I flew with a number of other pilots. I was granted Christmas leave (1968), and just before departing Japan, I was assigned to Captain Mike Tressler’s backseat. Tressler was a flamboyant sort—tall, blond hair. When sitting alert, he wore two pearl-handled
revolvers. I had flown with him a couple of times before I left for the States, never taking the opportunity to get the story behind the revolvers. Another backseater, new to the squadron, and whom I hadn’t met, was assigned to Tressler’s backseat temporarily.

At home I received a phone call from Japan. Captain Tressler and his temporary backseater, on a routine night mission in Japan, after a go-around from a missed approach, had flown into a low hill and had both been killed. I was stunned. I wondered who was flying. I remembered the time Colonel Poole had entered traffic from the wrong direction, when I might as well have been asleep in the backseat. I wondered if the backseater could have saved his and Mike’s lives.

Had I not been home on leave, I might have been dead.

I didn’t tell my parents what the call was about. I didn’t want to think about dying in an airplane, and there was nothing I could do about what had just happened. It was Christmas in North Carolina.

N
O ONE WOULD DARE
brief an illegal maneuver, and no maneuver was supposed to be flown that was not briefed (discussed by all the pilots) before the flight. This rule was generally followed, with one exception. The exception was especially prevalent in Korea. If a flight of four happened to be within visual sight of another flight of four, and no officer above captain or perhaps major was in either flight, then the chances of a free-for-all dogfight—one of our four-ships against the other—were high. Very soon after arriving in Korea, I found myself involved
in one. These dogfights were legitimate when the mission called for them and they were briefed, but impromptu dogfights were illegal. No one involved ever told, and there was the feeling that any commander would have turned a blind eye—unless an accident happened.

The chance of an accident during these events was not low. Each flight of four in a dogfight would have turned their flight’s radios to a “discrete frequency,” meaning that only that flight was talking on and listening to that frequency, and eight identical F-4s would be all over the sky, one group of four trying to score Fox 3s on the other four. Each flight would have split into two flights of two with a lead and a wingman. While the radio communication between aircraft in a flight was relatively heavy during these dogfights, the communication between front seat and backseat in an individual F-4 was almost constant, as with Colonel Poole and me back in F-4 training. The air duel was a chess game, and the object was to end up at your opponent’s six o’clock position (directly behind him), situated so that a burst of your gunfire would shoot him down. The long-distance missile shoot-down business didn’t count in these games. My guess is that many of us had old air-toair combat war-movie scenes unreeling in our heads.

An aircraft closing from behind ours usually meant that the front-seater of my aircraft was about to pull the aircraft into a tight six-g (or greater) turn. This meant I was about to gray out or black out for a second or two. As soon as I was able, I was all talk again. “I don’t have him, I don’t have him. There he is. He’s at five o’clock! He’s overshooting. He’s overshooting . . . now! Reverse!” And if we were
very lucky, we could snap to the right—out of our hard left turn—pull, hit afterburner, be all over his ass, and say into the radio on a frequency that the other aircraft could hear: “Fox Three.”

If someone behind us called, “Fox Three,” while we were in a sharp turn and we could not see the belly of his aircraft, then he did
not
have the necessary lead through his sights to shoot us down, and on landing we could tell him that, nullifying the kill.

Most of the illegal dogfights were between F-4s, between those of us who knew one another. The stakes shot to the sky, however, when we came across a flight of F-102s, also based at Osan. The F-102s belonged to an air-defense group and were painted gray instead of camouflage. They were single-seat, single-engine fighters, designed strictly for air-to-air combat. Rarely did their pilots and ours socialize. They lost some status because our aircraft was more powerful and sophisticated than theirs. We lost some status because two of us flew the F-4, while only one pilot flew the F-102; we also lost status because we had an extra engine in case one failed. They had no backup. Whenever the opportunity arose in the air, we’d jump them, or they’d jump us. The rivalry was intense.

That there were no air-to-air collisions during any of these unauthorized dogfights (or during the authorized ones, which were a part of training) seems remarkable. I was once in a one-on-one dogfight with another F-4 and we lost sight of each other. A few minutes passed. I was craning around in my seat, looking everywhere, as was the front-seater. Suddenly I saw a speck directly in front of us.

It was getting larger.

“I think . . . I think . . . is that . . . that’s them! Watch—”

We were each going over four hundred miles an hour and closing fast—head-on. My front-seater swerved our aircraft. We learned later that they never saw us.

Back in Japan, our flying was more restrained. Additionally, we flew less in Japan than in Korea, but in Japan, on base, there was much more partying than in Korea. I quickly acclimated. There was always a big party in Japan just before the squadron left for Korea, and another on return.

My roommate, Jim Butts, and I ribbed each other fairly constantly. Jim kidded me about my furniture. I used a cardboard box for a bedside table in my room. He kidded me about my clothes. I had only two pairs of khakis. He was a bit more stylish. We each have tales about the other, and when I last saw him in 2004, we were still laughing at the same old stories.

Together, Jim and I bought a black sedan, a Cedric, with the steering wheel on the right. It was heavy, like a tank, and we double-dated in it, routinely confused when driving off base—on the left side of the road.

On one occasion I hid my portable cassette tape recorder—recording—under the front seat while we were out on the town.

“Watch it!” “Whoa, there.” “Don’t—what are you
doing?!
”

F
OUR OF US
put together an informal blues band. Sam Shelton, a backseater from my squadron, played harmonica; I played piano; Jerry Finnegan, a dentist, played
guitar; and Gary Amstead, a navigator, played tenor saxophone. Often just Sam and I played in the officer’s club bar, in Japan as well as in Korea. He kept a pair of drum brushes and a harmonica in a flight suit pocket below his knee, and somewhere in the officer’s club at Yokota and Osan he stored a round cardboard cutout that served as a drum surface. He’d find an aluminum lampshade for a cymbal. We played Ramsey Lewis’s “The In Crowd,” Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say,” and any number of Mose Allison and Mercy Dee Walton tunes. After a few songs, Sam would lay aside his drum brushes and play harmonica. He introduced me to the harmonica style of bluesman Sonny Terry, and when I later heard a Sonny Terry album for the first time, it sounded to me as if Sonny Terry had learned from my buddy Shelton rather than the other way around.