Boyd

by Robert Coram

  Catton’s home squadron from Cannon rotated to Nellis for training about the same time Catton arrived at the FWS. He had been on base only two or three days when he met several squadron mates in the Stag Bar and proceeded to knock back a few beers. Then everyone decided to drive into Vegas for a night of barhopping and dancer-watching. Catton lit a cigarette and jumped into his red Corvette and tore through the main gate. The sentry did not salute, probably because the Corvette was only a blur when it passed by. Catton locked the brakes, skidded to a stop, then reversed at high speed, gravel flying. He chewed out the sentry and was off again, the Corvette’s rear end skidding as he turned left onto Las Vegas Boulevard and accelerated. As he raced into North Las Vegas, he reached to pull the cigarette from his mouth. But the cigarette stuck to his lip and his fingers slipped toward and closed on the lighted end, burning him and scattering embers all over his beloved Corvette. He whipped across traffic into a service station and leaned down to find the ashes. When he looked up, a policeman was standing beside the car. The cop had the temerity to ask Catton if he had been drinking. Catton was indignant. Nevertheless, the police officer invited Catton to the station. Once there Catton continued to protest but lost all credibility when he puked on the floor.

  The police called the duty officer at Nellis and Catton was hauled back to base. The next morning Catton, rumpled and hung over, was standing tall before Colonel Newman and learning the full dimensions of the expression “chewing out.” Two things were working against him: the Air Force was cracking down on anyone charged with what then was called DWI—driving while intoxicated—and the city of North Las Vegas was complaining that drunk fighter pilots were endangering local citizens by speeding down Las Vegas Boulevard. The Air Force was being pressured to make examples out of a few pilots. After a lengthy lecture on how Catton had embarrassed himself, his home squadron, the FWS, and the U.S. Air Force, Newman pulled a set of papers from a drawer and threw them atop his desk. His eyes, blue and as cold as arctic ice, stared at Catton. “Know what these are, Lieutenant?”

  “No, Sir.”

  “They’re court-martial papers.”

  Catton’s breath stopped. If he stood before a court-martial, it would be the end of his flying and the end of his Air Force career.

  The commandant stared at Catton for what seemed like an eternity. Then he said that Catton’s squadron commander was a close friend who had saved his life in World War II. “I don’t want to embarrass my old friend,” he said. He was not going to press the court-martial—not yet. He asked for the keys to Catton’s red Corvette. Catton passed them over.

  “Lieutenant, henceforth you will walk every place you go,” the commandant said. “For the remainder of your tour on this base—and that might not be long—you will not drive, you will not accept a ride from anyone. You will not even put on a pair of roller skates. Except for an F-100, you will ride in nothing with wheels. One more screwup, Lieutenant, just one and…” He tapped the court-martial papers.

  It was a shaken young man who left the commandant’s office.

  He stepped outside, looked up at the bright Nevada sky, and wondered how his career could have taken such a perilous turn in such a short time.

  By the end of that day, everyone in the FWS knew of his misad-venture and was laughing about how he threw up at the police station. He was wounded, and a wounded man has little chance in the FWS. Competition is brutal. He knew what was ahead: students and instructors alike would treat him like a pariah. His fellow students would offer no help and instructors would go out of their way to see that he busted out. There was little chance that he would wear the patch, much less wear the black-and-gold checkerboard scarf. What could he do? Who could help him? There was only one person. Catton stumbled down the street, cursing the hot sun and cursing every beer he had drunk the night before. That took a while. He entered the academic building and knocked on Boyd’s door.

  “Enter.”

  Catton stepped inside and saluted. “Sir, Lieutenant Ronald Catton requests permission to speak with the captain.”

  Boyd nodded.

  “Sir, I have a problem,” Catton began.

  “That’s what I hear.”

  Catton told Boyd his dream and asked what he could do to salvage that dream. For a long moment Boyd did not speak. He turned in his chair and held up his pencil and stared at the tip as if he were looking through a pipper. Then he spun around and looked at Catton. “No one has ever gone through this school with a perfect academic record. I don’t know if you have the smarts to do that, Catton. But if you do, you will get their attention. If you don’t, you can forget your dream.” He paused and repeated. “Nobody has gone through this school with a perfect record.”

  Catton swallowed hard. Nobody had jumped across the Grand Canyon either. And what Boyd was asking him to do was the equivalent. The bust-out rate at the FWS proved it was the toughest course in the Air Force. Pilots were smart guys; they had to be to master the disciplines involved in flying the Hun. But most of them considered themselves lucky to graduate from the FWS. This school had humbled dozens of college graduates, and Catton had received his commission as an aviation cadet; he had only two years of college.

  Boyd waggled a finger. “They will be watching you.”

  Catton left, wondering how he could accomplish the task Boyd had set before him. He would not think about the full academic curriculum; he would not think about the course on air-to-ground, bombs and fuses, gun sight, computations, or the course on missiles and rockets. He would not think about any of them, especially the dreaded final course on nuclear weapons. He would think about only one course at a time. And right now he was studying air combat maneuvering, Boyd’s course on aerial tactics. It was one of the toughest, designed to weed out every man who was not a tiger. For each hour spent in Boyd’s class, a student spent at least two hours studying. Catton settled in. He forgot his squadron mates. He forgot the Stag Bar. He got up at 2:30 A.M. and studied until breakfast. He studied between breakfast and class. He flew in the afternoon, had an early dinner, and studied late, then arose again at 2:30 to start all over again. He was a man possessed.

  When he flew with Boyd, he was amazed by the extreme nature of how Boyd handled the Hun, especially the low-speed, high-angle-of-attack flying—the most difficult part of the flight regime for the F-100. But Catton learned. He learned well.

  Boyd was right about the lieutenant being watched. Catton saw the looks every day and he knew the other students and the instructors considered him a screwup. Sure, he was a good pilot, but good pilots were a dime a dozen at Nellis. Every time Catton took to the air, he had to fly better than he had ever flown before. One error in judgment and he was gone. He had already shown his judgment was not the best. But to become an instructor, a man who taught other pilots how to deliver nuclear weapons, he had to be the very personification of good judgment. And he knew the instructors did not believe he had what it took to wear the patch. They were waiting, watching for one miscue. It was a lonesome time for First Lieutenant Ronald Catton.

  He took the exam in air combat maneuvering. Boyd smiled as he handed Catton the test results. Catton had a perfect score—the only one in the class.

  So far so good. Now Catton saw a grudging difference in the eyes of others. “That screwup Catton got a hundred in Boyd’s class. You believe that?”

  He finished the course on air-to-ground. Another 100. The flight-line instructors softened a bit. But Catton was still a screwup—just a smarter screwup than anyone had thought.

  By the time he took the course on bombs and fuses, word was getting around in the FWS that the guy who got drunk in his Corvette and puked at the police station and was under the threat of a court-martial had made 100 on two courses. He was still laboring over the exam when Colonel Newman called Catton’s instructor and asked, “How did Catton do?”

  Moments later the instructor called him back and said, “Sir, Catton made one hundred.”

  Catton and Boyd f
requently passed in the hall, and each time Boyd smiled and nodded. The two had a secret; they were the only ones at Nellis who knew what Catton was trying to do. And while Catton did not know it, Boyd was privately defending him with other instructors. “Catton’s not a bad guy,” he said more than once. “You got him wrong. Wait and see.”

  After all, Boyd had enormous compassion for the underdog, having been one most of his life. When he saw the instructors and students at the FWS arrayed against Catton, he had to defend the young officer. He saw promise in Catton, just as Frank Pettinato had seen promise in him, and he liked the idea of a man fighting against impossible odds. Plus, he had an old-fashioned belief, instilled in him by Art Weibel and Frank Pettinato, that hard work can overcome all obstacles.

  Catton made 100 in the course on the lead-computing gun sight and followed it up with a 100 on missiles and rockets. The word was all over the FWS: Catton’s going for 100 in every course. Now rather than ostracizing him the instructors and other students were encouraging him. No one had ever come from so far behind. No one had ever made this many perfect scores in the FWS. Catton had a shot at doing the impossible.

  But there was still the last test, the toughest one, the one that consistently lowered a student’s academic average. In the dreaded nuclear weapons course, students had to learn not just how to deliver tactical nuclear weapons, but how to arm and disarm them. The course covered the physics and the electronics and the principles upon which nuclear weapons worked. When a pilot finished the nuclear weapons course, he could damn near build an atomic bomb.

  Catton studied harder than ever. When he wasn’t in class or flying, he was laboring over texts on physics and electronics and explosives. Then came the test. Students finished and waited while the instructor, Captain Mark Cook, graded their papers. Several pilots grimaced as they realized they were not as smart as they thought. After students received their grades, they stood in the back of the classroom and in the hall, watching Catton. Instructors stuck their heads in the door, their raised eyebrows asking the question. “He’s not finished,” they were told.

  The commandant called three times to ask how Catton did. He knew most men would have folded long ago under the pressures the lieutenant faced. They would have busted out and their careers would have ended. But he also knew that a few men, only the best, could grow up and blossom and realize their potential when they were put to the fire. Such men exemplify the highest qualities the FWS seeks to instill in its students. They not only deserve to wear the patch, they honor the patch.

  Catton finished and handed the test to Captain Cook. The other students moved forward and instructors crowded into the room. Slowly Catton’s instructor checked off the correct answers. The students began to smile and elbow each other. The instructors looked at one another in amazement.

  Down the hall Boyd sat in his office, moving papers around, listening to the buzz of conversation. He waited.

  Captain Cook reached the last question, checked the answer, and froze. The answer was wrong.

  Silence gripped the room.

  Cook asked Catton to explain his answer to the final question. Catton had computed the release gyro settings for a nuclear weapons delivery based on the aircraft being an F-100F, a two-seater, while Cook wanted an answer based on the F-100D, a single-seater with a different center of gravity and thus different gyro settings. But the test had not specified the type of aircraft; it simply said F-100.

  Cook nodded and reread the way he had phrased the question and rechecked Catton’s answer. The answer was correct for the F-100F.

  Cook ignored everyone in the room as he talked himself through what had happened. No one spoke. No one moved. The classroom waited. Cook decided it was he who had made the mistake. He made a mark on the test and handed Catton the paper. “I’m giving you a hundred.”

  Students cheered and gathered around Catton, congratulating him and slapping him on the back. The instructors smiled and nodded in approval. They had been present at an event that no one thought they would ever see. Catton pushed through the crowd and walked down the hall toward Boyd’s office. He knocked on the door.

  “Enter.”

  The two men stared at each other.

  “I heard,” Boyd said. He smiled. “You cleaned them out.”

  Catton bit his lip and nodded. He could not speak.

  “Way to go, Tiger.”

  Catton turned away. A fighter pilot doesn’t cry, especially if he has just become the first fighter pilot in history to ace every academic course at the Fighter Weapons School.

  Catton graduated and was given a trophy for having the best academic record in his class. He was awarded the patch. Then he drove his red Corvette back across the desert to Cannon AFB in Clovis, New Mexico.

  A few months later he received the call.

  In early 1960 Boyd stopped dictating. Spradling carefully edited the document. But Boyd was not happy and spent weeks doing further editing, revisions, and more editing. Every sentence had to be right. Every maneuver had to be in the proper sequence. He agonized for hours over single words. He rewrote endlessly. After Spradling sent the document to the printer, Boyd still revised. Dozens of one-page corrections were sent to the printer. When Boyd finally, reluctantly, finished, he had a 150-page single-spaced manual that he called the “Aerial Attack Study” by “Capt. John Boyd.”

  “Are you going to put that on the cover?” Spradling asked. “Aren’t you going to say it is the ‘United States Air Force Aerial Attack Study’?”

  “To hell with them,” Boyd said. “They wouldn’t give me time to do it. They made me do it at night, on my own.”

  Despite his anger, Boyd was, as he put it, “… as proud as a goddamn new father” when he delivered the manual to Newman. The colonel nodded, tossed the manual aside, and said, “We’re not going to use this in the school.”

  “Why not?” Boyd asked.

  The colonel showed him a much smaller document—Boyd estimated it was ten or fifteen pages, though it probably was considerably longer—and said it had been prepared by the Training Research and Development (TR&D) section of the FWS and that it was the publication the school would use to teach tactics.

  The TR&D people had a mandate to prepare a manual; Boyd did not. His long hours and intensive work of the past four months were in vain. To complicate matters, his manual was classified “secret,” which severely limited its circulation. Boyd fought the classification, but since his manual contained both tactics the U.S. Air Force would use in the event of war and specific details on how to avoid missiles, the classification remained in force.

  Boyd then took an action that could have ended his career. He went over the colonel’s head and sent both the TR&D manual and his manual to a friend at the Tactical Air Command headquarters, a man who could overrule Newman on what was used to teach tactics. His friend preferred Boyd’s manual but said to avoid any impression of favoritism, both manuals would be submitted to an independent panel for review.

  A request came down from TAC for five copies of each manual—a dead giveaway to Newman. The angry colonel confronted Boyd and demanded to know why Boyd had gone over his head when he already had given his support to the TR&D manual. But then word came down from TAC that Boyd’s work would be used as the official training manual at the FWS.

  In his Oral History interview, Boyd recounts that he told Newman, “You ought to be glad. This way you are ending up with the better book. It is a better reflection on you as the commander. Why are you protecting a bunch of goddamn losers over there who cannot even do their homework? You know they did not do as good of a job as me. They are losers.”

  “Get out,” the colonel ordered.

  But the next day the colonel called Boyd to his office. “I want to apologize to you,” Boyd quotes him. “I really never read your manual before last night. Yours really is much better than the one from TR&D.” Boyd said the colonel then called TR&D and “ate their ass out” for doing such shabby work.

/>   Several weeks later Ron Catton was passing through flight operations when he saw Boyd and the wing commander, General John Ewbank, standing against the wall. Boyd was smoking his cigar, waving his arms, and talking loudly and in an angry manner to the general. Catton doesn’t remember what the conversation was about, only that he was astonished to see a captain publicly haranguing a brigadier general. Then Boyd began poking Ewbank in the chest, jabbing with the hand holding the cigar and dribbling ashes down the front of the general’s flight suit.

  “General Ewbank put up with a lot from John,” Catton said. “If I’d been a brigadier general and he did that to me in public, I’d have court-martialed him.”

  In 1960 the “Aerial Attack Study” became the official tactics manual for fighter aircraft, and fighter aviation was no longer a bag of tricks to be passed down from one generation of pilots to another. For the first time the high-stakes game of aerial combat was documented, codified, and illustrated. While all other fighter pilots used their hands, Boyd used mathematics.

  The “Aerial Attack Study” was seized upon by Boyd’s detractors (and by now they were growing in number) as proof that he was a one-dimensional officer, that all he cared about was air-to-air combat at a time when the primary mission of fighter aviation was to be a “baby SAC.” Boyd, they claimed, cared nothing for air-to-ground or nuclear-weapons delivery or high-altitude intercepts or promoting the new missiles or anything else except air-to-air combat. Decades later, senior Air Force generals would still paint Boyd as someone who simply never understood that the Air Force had moved beyond the air-to-air mission.

  But their own closed-mindedness blinded them to Boyd’s staggering accomplishment. Before Boyd published the manual, fighter pilots thought the game of air-to-air combat was far too complex to ever fully understand. They believed the high-stakes death dance of aerial combat was too fluid to master. The “Aerial Attack Study” showed this was not the case. When a pilot goes into an aerial battle, he must have a three-dimensional picture of the battle in his head. He must have “situation awareness”; that is, he must know not only where he and each of his squadron mates are located, but also where each enemy aircraft is located. In a swirling furball of jet combat, which can range from 40,000 feet down to the ground and back again, this seems almost impossible. But situation awareness boils down to two things: first, the pilot must know the enemy’s position, and second, he must know the enemy’s velocity. (Boyd would later change “velocity” to “energy state.”) The amount of airspeed or velocity or energy available to the enemy dictates what that enemy is able to do, which maneuvers he can perform. Boyd was the first to understand the cognitive aspect of aerial combat, that it was possible to isolate not only every maneuver a fighter pilot could perform but also the counters to those maneuvers. And the counter to the counter. This meant that when a fighter pilot bounced an enemy pilot, he could know, depending on the altitude and airspeed and direction of the attack, every option available to the enemy pilot. And he knew the counter to each option. And if an enemy pilot bounced him, whether it was a high-side or low-side or head-on attack, he knew every available counter and every available counter to his counter.