Fighter Pilot

by Christina Olds

  Briefing the brass on this idea was my mission that morning as we climbed those bloody stairs. No wonder my boss seemed bemused and a trifle distant. I couldn’t blame him for wanting to avoid any of my wild thoughts rubbing off on him before he determined what the reception would be on the E Ring.

  I knew the colonel sensed my thoughts when he stopped on the third-floor landing and said, “Robin, I confess I had thought of you as a lightweight flyboy. My opinion sure has changed. This briefing of yours shows a lot of deep and original thought. I’m impressed.”

  So was I, not knowing if I was being damned by faint praise or being humored in my madness.

  The briefing was given, eyes glazed over, heads nodded, and I was sent on to the next large desk for further briefing and seed sowing. After a week or so of being shunted from office to office, and trying to worm my way onto the thickest carpets before the largest desks, I had to give up. I hadn’t expected anyone to jump up and shout, “That’s the way to go! We’ll run with it!” The needed technology was too far in the future and hadn’t even been imagined. The idea fell on deaf ears.

  Years later, we had “Star Wars.” It didn’t go far, as the threat changed and the technology never quite met the challenge. At least my version of “Star Wars” hadn’t cost the taxpayers anything but my salary.

  Life at home swung through ups and downs that resembled life in the Pentagon. Which world was more real, and how did they manage to coexist in the same time frame? Nuclear holocaust or connubial crisis? Ella, Chris, Susie, and I lived in a nice townhome on P Street in Georgetown, with all the amenities of Washington, D.C., social life close at hand. I had a workshed-garage out in back of our long, high-walled garden and spent hours there working on projects. Little Chris was often by my side. Together we built birdhouses and shelves. I let Chris hammer away at things and asked her to take measurements. This was a sly way of grilling her on her math homework. It kept her occupied and also meant she wasn’t climbing trees or walking along the top of the brick garden wall. Susie was often in the garden, too, and the girls devised a playhouse under a tall holly tree. Truth be told, all three of us were out of the house together as often as possible. I even started going to Christ Church just two blocks away. I’d walk my daughters to their Sunday school class, then sit through the service. It was a refuge for me, though not a religious one. After church, we’d walk slowly home, always stopping at the corner drugstore for ice cream or the comic books forbidden by Ella. Both girls promised they wouldn’t divulge our secret. I took them to nearby Rock Creek Park, to the Georgetown Public Library, or to walk the path along the Potomac Canal. I read to them at night and got them off to school in the morning. I made breakfast while Ella slept in. Pancakes, scrambled eggs, and raspberry jam smeared on the morning funny papers—that was our happy routine.

  Ella and I often had cocktail parties. Mixing my military cronies, her Hollywood pals like Jack Benny and Jimmy Stewart, our D.C. socialite friends, and the requisite New York psychiatrist often provided hilarious results. Ella also liked formal dinners. I dreaded them, but admitted they gave beneficial table-manners training to the children. Sunday nights were sacred and the only real time we spent together as a family. It was meat loaf and macaroni in front of the TV in my den watching Lassie, Bonanza, Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, and The Ed Sullivan Show. Comfort food and comfort TV.

  We had one old dog and a collection of Siamese cats regularly entertaining us. During one of those formal school-night dinners, one of the cats tore across the top of the dining room table foaming at the mouth, scattering silverware, wineglasses, and women in all directions. Ella screamed, “Rabies, rabies!” and dragged the girls out of the room. I went for the barbecue gloves and chased that damned frothing cat all over the house. I could hear the drama unfolding in the upstairs bathroom as Ella poured bottles of French perfume over the girls to decontaminate them. Chris was pleading, “Wait, Mommy, wait, don’t let Daddy kill my cat! Please, no!” I finally cornered our hissing, foaming feline, stuffed it into a pillowcase, and took off for the vet hospital. When I phoned home to call off the alarm and report the foam was just toothpaste, Ella replied that Chris had brushed the cat’s teeth. Ella was furious. I laughed. Better than nukes any day.

  The family escaped from Washington, D.C., each summer to stay at Laurance Rockefeller’s ranch in the Tetons of Wyoming. Those were languid days of fishing, horseback riding, pack trips, and water-skiing followed by pleasant evenings at the main lodge with good friends. Larry and his wife, Mary, were the sweetest people in the world, and gracious hosts. There was always a passel of children visiting with their parents, so all the kids ran off to play while the adults spent relaxing evenings together. The time was magical for all of us, albeit short for me. One week at a time was all I could manage away from the Pentagon, but the girls stayed on. Those summer visits seemed to heal and soothe our various ills in a special way.

  I was assigned to the Joint Staff and spent two more years in the Pentagon fussing against the system but content to at least be where a man got to do something meaningful. JFK put his name on the Bay of Pigs during that time and the Cuban missile crisis the following year. I was in the thick of things at work while my children were practicing how to “duck and cover” beneath their desks at school.

  My final year in Washington was spent at the prestigious National War College at Fort McNair, where the seminars with army colonels and navy captains kept us philosophically arguing with one another for ten months. The man who made the most sense in the whole school was George Viney, a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, who stoutly maintained we could fight a war in Europe without involving nukes. I wasn’t sure I could swallow that, but everything George said about the need to keep our conventional swords sharp was in total agreement with what I had been thinking.

  Finally, toward the middle of 1963, my name was plucked for a prime assignment: wing commander of the 81st Tactical Fighter Wing at RAF Bentwaters, England. Flying again! Never mind that it was still in a “defense” posture. The air force had really ratcheted back on training fighter pilots, so I looked with a great deal of envy at the navy. Boy, they really had their shit together in training elite guys for combat. There was something very wrong with that picture. The navy was training fighter pilots and the air force was planting bombs in missile silos. Shouldn’t weapons in or on the ground be controlled by the army?

  Leaving Washington wouldn’t be well received by Ella. This time it would be harder to uproot the girls, now ten and eleven, from established friendships and familiar classmates, but the promise of living in the land where some long-haired band called the Beatles dwelt persuaded them that it might be tolerable. We sailed to England on the Queen Elizabeth II and then settled, for our first time together, into officers quarters on base. Ella wasn’t happy, but I was wing commander and she relented to take a stab at being an air force wife. Colonel Daniel “Chappie” James was my deputy commander for ops, and his family lived just across the street. Chappie and I became good friends. Little did we know how our lives would later intertwine.

  The 81st TFW had changed in the late fifties from fighter-interceptor to fighter-bomber operations, carrying both conventional and nuclear weapons on F-101C “Voodoos.” We operated three squadrons, the 78th, 91st, and 92nd TFS, in support of USAFE and NATO. The mission was clear: Train pilots for low-altitude delivery of nuclear weapons on a Soviet or Eastern European target. Our nuclear reach was significantly extended, but it was understood that it was likely to be a one-way mission. Our guys were being trained extensively in escape and evasion techniques once they ejected behind enemy lines. The prognosis seemed to be escape and evade capture but succumb to radiation. It was a hell of a scenario and I didn’t like it one damned bit. Yet the job itself was demanding and challenging and the guys were a great bunch. RAF stations Bentwaters and Woodbridge were neighboring bases with many shared facilities, so there were double the number of good folks making the fighter business run for
me and my next-door counterpart. I thrived on the smell of jet fuel and pilot camaraderie.

  Our daughters were happy with their gang of subteen friends on base but unhappy with a brief stint at Ella’s insistence in an English school in nearby Ipswich. They switched to the RAF Bentwaters-Woodbridge public middle school. Susie did well, but Chris, at twelve, had started pushing back at Ella, expressing teenage independence. The fights raging through our house were horrific. It didn’t take long for me to realize that everyone’s sanity rested on separating the two. We made the decision to put Chris into an English boarding school in High Wycombe. I drove my weeping child to Wycombe Abbey, and it did no good to reassure her she’d be safe and happy with the possibility of meeting Robin Hood, or maybe Friar Tuck. It wasn’t quite being banished to a nunnery, but it may have seemed so to the twelve-year-old. The imposing old buildings and grounds had served as the headquarters of the 8th AF when I was at Wattisham. The familiar location was reassuring and comfortable only to me.

  On November 22, 1963, the “red” phone in my home office rang while we were having dinner. Not a good sign. I answered it and returned to the table with the terrible news of President Kennedy’s assassination. Chris was the only American in a school of three hundred English girls, and we brought her home for a few days. Sadness enveloped the base, and all of us felt very far from home, but I had to do my job. Grim times.

  The 81st continued its mission with pilots routinely rotating to Wheelus for weapons training. The F-101s stood alert, weapons loaded and ready for nuclear war. Each day that passed without the nuclear balloon going up was counted as a silent victory. By 1965, things were running well. All was quiet. The 81st had passed all the latest wing inspections, the aircraft in-commission rate was where it should be, our maintenance schedule was flowing, the flying training was proceeding without any hitches, and my people at both bases were pleased with themselves, proud of the wing and proud of one another. So what was bugging me?

  It was a war, a growing fracas on the other side of the world in a place called Vietnam. I had missed Korea, and I’d be damned if I was going to miss this one. Reports drifting in told us the action was heating up; our fighter squadrons were striking targets around Hanoi and there was heavy opposition. I sat comfortably in England with the best assignment an air force colonel could hope for, and I wanted to be somewhere else. I wanted a piece of the action. Rotation was coming up in August. Maybe something would happen.

  The phone rang in May. It was an acquaintance calling from the Pentagon. He got right down to business and whispered, “Don’t say anything to anyone, and don’t say who told you, but you’re on the List.”

  “Oh God,” I gulped, “Er, ah, thanks for warning me. No, I don’t mean that, thanks for the alert. Damn, that doesn’t sound right either. How about just ‘Thanks’?” We hung up and I leaned back bitterly. That blew it for sure. A general. Who wanted to be a general? Generals didn’t fight, not since Custer anyway, but that was a brevet rank and he reverted to lieutenant colonel for his most noteworthy battle. What was I to do? What could I do? If I told the air force I didn’t want to be a general they’d say, “Fine. What retirement date would suit you?” Hell, that wasn’t what I wanted either.

  An idea suddenly popped into my head. I had to make my boss in London so mad at me that he’d take my name off that promotion list. Something bad enough to get noticed, but not so bad as to have General Disosway at Wiesbaden want to court-martial me; not too hot, not too cold, just right. So what to do? Hmmm. All right, I’d lead a formation acrobatic show for the upcoming Open House Day. Since every American flying base in the UK would be open to the public, there’d be press coverage. The boss would see a write-up about the air show at Bentwaters, and if I knew him, he’d blow his stack because I didn’t ask his permission. I had time to form a team and get in some practice. Boy oh boy. No one had ever done such a thing in F-101s. I guess no one was ever dumb enough to think of it. The bird was wonderful to fly, but acrobatic? No way! One look at the tiny wings would tell even a Piper Cub pilot that close-in acrobatics would be out of the question. Reading the flight manuals and more than a few accident reports on the airplane would reinforce that high-g maneuvering was dicey in almost all situations. I wondered what we could demo that wouldn’t get anybody killed while still getting me in just enough hot water.

  From my own evaluations of talent plus a lot of help from the squadrons, I picked C. R. Morgan, Ski Fantaski, and Tom Hirsch to be my team. Ski would be Four and fly the slot. Our first practice went well until I called for the bomb-burst maneuver. We burst all right, but it took quite a while to find one another afterward. I screwed up the countdown for the recovery, and deeply ingrained fighter pilot survival instincts of each guy took over. Then I called Bentwaters tower for permission to make the high-speed, low-altitude pass, and went right down the runway at Woodbridge. Wrong airfield! OK, so that’s why you practice. The debrief was bloody, with everyone contributing to the critique in order to get it done right the next time.

  On the Saturday of the show we took our turn for a programmed Open House pass over nearby RAF Mildenhall. Our timing was thrown off by the parachute demonstration, but we did a nice, safe formation barrel roll down the runway and headed for the real show back at home. Our rolls and loops there went as smooth as glass, not a bobble. For the finale, the bomb-burst maneuver was perfect. At its finish we met simultaneously head-on as we crossed the center of the runway from four different directions, 100 feet off the deck. After landing, I looked at Ski’s vertical stabilizer and saw it was black from my exhaust smoke, just as a slot man’s rudder should be. What a job those three had done! If memory serves, no one else ever had the gall to put on such a show in the F-101 Voodoo. The spectators, including my family, were all thrilled. No one had a clue it was a no-no.

  My transgression produced the desire effect. That same day, an angry two-star general called me at home. He had watched the show at Mildenhall and was suitably pissed!

  “Olds, you were late for your pass! You were too high! And you did an unauthorized barrel roll! What have you got to say for yourself? That was a crass exhibition of irresponsibility. I can’t believe your incompetence.…” And he ranted on at me.

  Oh boy, I thought. Wait till he hears about the show at Bentwaters! Then the shit will really hit the fan. When the general saw the London papers on Sunday, his telephone call was classic. I really felt a bit guilty and hoped he wouldn’t have too severe a heart attack as he thundered at me. The culmination of the chewing out was an order to appear in his office the following day, before he slammed the receiver down.

  I headed to London by train and spent the time penciling an outline of the bawling out I knew was coming. It turned out I was right on track. I sat on a couch in the general’s office, facing his desk. My head was lower than his and I watched as he theatrically read me the riot act. He waved his finger and waggled his wattles as he warmed to the task. After the initial verbiage, he opened the right-hand drawer of his desk and pulled out my Effectiveness Report. As he waved it at me I could see most of the X marks were over on the wrong side of the paper, a sign in those days tantamount to the kiss of death for any aspiring officer. I marveled that the general had even had time to prepare it. Maybe some staff officer had done his bidding. The general then pulled another paper from his desk and told me it was the Legion of Merit I was to have been presented on my departure from Bentwaters. I had to admire his dramatic flourish as he tore it in two and threw the pieces to the floor, but the pièce de résistance was the next paper he waved at me. It was small and I didn’t recognize it.

  “This, Olds, is a 505 Form, which all general officers fill out on the colonels working for them. I’m forbidden to show it to you, but I’ll tell you this. It says you will NEVER be promoted! NEVER!” His face grew red and his voice shook. His finger punctuated every exclamation. Then came the shocker.

  He bellowed, “And you, Olds, you’re exactly the kind of officer who shou
ld be in Southeast Asia!”

  With that I rose, saluted smartly, and said, “Thank you, sir. I was hoping you’d say that, sir!” He was still shouting at me as I did an about-face and walked out. To tell the truth, I’ve never been proud of my actions at that time, but what the hell, I didn’t get promoted. They shipped me off to 9th AF headquarters at Shaw in Sumter, South Carolina, two months later. In a way, it was a punishment and I knew it. I also knew I was going to Southeast Asia right from Shaw. I’d got what I’d wanted in the first place.

  The assistant deputy ops assignment at the 9th went well, and the year passed quickly and quietly. Ella lived in D.C. again. Chris spent her eighth-grade year as a boarding student at Holton-Arms in Bethesda. Susie lived with me and went to seventh grade at the Shaw AFB school. We had a great time and gave each other lots of freedom. I took up golf. Life at home was casual and stress-free: simple cooking, favorite TV shows, a cat, friends over, base picnics, swimming at Myrtle Beach. Chris visited during school vacations. Ella and I talked on the phone and exchanged some letters. I was flying. Who could complain?

  The job was interesting. The 9th AF had control over all fighter squadrons in the eastern United States, and we shuffled pilots through the pipeline of combat training before heading them off to Nam. My boss and I dealt with a challenging problem. HQ got a message announcing a new policy for air force fighter pilots. Every aircrew member would go to SEA once before anybody would have to go twice. It was the dumbest thing we’d ever heard; there were navy guys on carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin who had rotated through three or four times. The CO and I sat down one night to figure out how long it would take to run through every fighter pilot in the tactical forces: PACAF, USAFE, and TAC. Each guy was given a year and we’d allow six months for the one-hundred-mission tour, the “counter” thing for missions over North Vietnam. How long would it be before we ran completely out of pilots, figuring two to an F-4 cockpit? Just two and a half years! Maybe less. How could we use up our talent like that? That meant SAC and MAC guys would have to be trained to do the job of fighter pilots to fill in, and we were sorely behind even on that task. TAC guys were volunteering for another tour, but it certainly took a real hard-nosed guy to come home to his wife and say, “Well, honey, I just volunteered to go back.” Guys didn’t want to do that! It’s just not good psychology on the home front. Yes, it’s a lot easier to go home and say, “Gee, the bastards just ordered me back!” Then he looks like the helpless good guy to his wife, but he gets to go fly. Lots of pilots were willing to go, but the air force didn’t have the guts to order them.