Boyd

by Robert Coram

  Boyd shrugged and said, “We lived in that house rent free.”

  It was the only house Boyd would ever own.

  Chapter Ten

  IF Nellis was the most remote and isolated Air Force base in America, Eglin ran a close second. But Eglin did not have the throbbing and pulsating city of Las Vegas; Eglin had the lethargic hamlet of Valparaiso, called Val-P, and nearby wide spots in the road such as Fort Walton Beach, Shalimar, and, yes, Niceville. Eglin was so bucolic that white-tail deer grazed along the base’s main road. Eglin’s primary connection to the outside world was Southern Airways and the two DC-3s it flew each day into the Okaloosa County Airport. The civilian airport and Eglin shared the same runways.

  Eglin has hundreds of thousands of sandy acres covered in pine trees to the north and west of the base. To the south is the Gulf of Mexico. The remoteness of the base made it the perfect place to test guns, bombs, and rockets. Some of the most secret missions of the American military have been practiced at Eglin and the little ancillary bases squirreled away in the pine forests. In World War II, Jimmy Doolittle came here and trained his B-25 crews for the raid against Tokyo. Tactics used to destroy German rocket installations were developed here. A few years later, a mission to rescue POWs in Vietnam was practiced here.

  The very attributes that make Eglin such an ideal place to test munitions, develop tactics for delivering those munitions, and practice top-secret missions make it a terrible base for the spouses and children of military personnel. The nearest town of any size to the east is Tallahassee. To the north is Montgomery, Alabama. New Orleans is about two hundred miles west. All in all, in the summer of 1962, the western end of the Florida panhandle was a sleepy backwater of America that was virtually untouched by the outside world and influenced by little except the relentless heat of the southern sun.

  Tactical aviation was in serious trouble when Boyd arrived at Eglin. Bomber generals, hanging on to the coattails of General LeMay, were at the peak of their power. They boasted of having the biggest and fastest and most high-flying long-range bombers. They were increasingly dogmatic about strategy: one airplane, one weapon, one enemy. The Air Force leadership in 1962 had essentially the same guiding philosophy as did the Air Force leadership in 1947; in existence only fifteen years, the Air Force was ossified.

  But things were about to change. President John F. Kennedy had been profoundly influenced by Maxwell Taylor’s book The Uncertain Trumpet, in which Taylor asserted that the Massive Retaliation approach to war, the Eisenhower Doctrine, actually increased the possibility of conventional war. Taylor said because the United States lacked a capability for conventional warfare, it would be extremely cautious about risking nuclear war on trivial matters. The book so influenced Kennedy that he decided America must have a more balanced approach to warfare; America needed options, and conventional warfare must be a big part of future plans. Replacing the doctrine of Massive Retaliation with one of Flexible Response put the bomber generals and the Kennedy Administration on a collision course. Already Secretary of Defense McNamara and his Whiz Kids had cancelled the F-105 program; no more of the low-level, high-speed nuclear bombers would be built. McNamara had ordered the Air Force to buy F-4 Phantoms. But Phantoms originally were built for the Navy; they were interceptors designed to take off from a carrier and shoot down whatever might be threatening Navy vessels. Air Force pilots ridiculed it as a “Band-Aid aircraft” and said every bend in its wing and every angle in its tail covered a design flaw (which was true). It had two engines and two crew members—one too many of everything. And its shape—my God, that bulky, fat fuselage with the bent wings and angled tail! Air Force pilots said the F-4 proved that with enough power, anything could be made to fly, that if it were pushed sideways through the air, the drag coefficient was no different than in normal flight.

  Having a Navy aircraft, a “saltwater airplane,” forced on it was the most humiliating thing that ever happened to the Air Force. So it was decided that the Air Force must have a new fighter, one designed by Air Force people to fit the Air Force mission. In the back rooms the generals began planning a new fighter, something called the F-X.

  If the Air Force was in trouble, so was Boyd. In his Oral History interview, Boyd recalled that when he finished Tech he wanted to return to Nellis but found himself in a “skunk fight” with a general who insisted he come to Eglin. He recalls that the general called and said, “You are going to get court-martialed unless you stop that shit.… Drop all that goddamn other hanky-panky you are playing.” The general finally grew tired of Boyd’s wrangling and asked Boyd if he were able to choose the base he wanted, “Will you stop all that crap you are pulling?” Boyd says he then picked Eglin.

  This story is another example of how Boyd embroidered reality. First, Boyd knew that inherent in the AFIT program was the follow-on directed assignment to a base in the Air Force Systems Command. Second, generals do not negotiate assignments with captains. Third, Mary says that months before Boyd finished at Tech, they had discussed his next assignment and that Eglin was their first choice. The reason was as simple as it was personal: Warm Springs was only a six-hour drive.

  When Boyd arrived at Eglin, he was bounced from job to job, from standardization and training to the operations staff to a job briefing distinguished visitors. For a while he was the base locator—the man in charge of housing assignments. But his overriding interest was in developing this theory he had begun back at Tech. Every officer who came to him for a housing assignment heard of his work. When Boyd briefed distinguished visitors, he delivered a tumbling cascade of ideas about how to maneuver jet fighters. He waved his arms so vigorously that he pulled his uniform shirt from out of his trousers. Little wonder he was pushed from job to job—each boss thought Boyd was trouble and wanted to move him along to someone else. Eventually he was assigned to maintenance, a job that fighter pilots consider one step up from sweeping floors, and he responded with, “Bullshit. I did not come down here to spend four years in maintenance.” He told the colonel he worked for, directed assignment or not, bad ERs or not, he was going to work himself out of the maintenance assignment and in six months would have another job.

  About this time the first copy machine came to Eglin. Until then, in order to make multiple copies of a document, secretaries cut a stencil and ran it through a mimeograph machine. Now a document could be placed in the new machine, a button pressed, and out came numerous copies. When Boyd first saw the new machine, he stared, thought for a moment, then said, “What do you call this machine?” This is a copy machine, he was told. He shook his head and said, “No, that’s an antisecurity machine.” Boyd instantly sensed that people who would not go to the trouble to cut a stencil to make copies of a document could now easily make copies, or, as Boyd called them, “little brothers and sisters.” And he was right. Ultimately the copy machine had more to do with opening up government than did the Freedom of Information Act.

  After a day at whatever his present job might be, he went home and worked on his yellow legal pads far into the night, developing equations, asking questions, refining what he called his theory of “excess power.” Lunch hours and weekends were devoted to endless hours on the legal pads trying to reduce the theory to a simpler form. He used legal pads by the dozens. Around Eglin he was getting the reputation of a man who might not have both oars in the water.

  Spradling and Catton received updates several times a week—always in the wee hours of the morning. Fighter pilots from Nellis and throughout TAC often came to Eglin to test weapons. Boyd grabbed them and talked for hours of how airplanes could maneuver against each other, about how he was trying to quantify their performance. In the middle of a conversation he suddenly would stop, pull out a scrap of paper, and scratch out an equation or a few notes. The more he talked, the more he understood about what he was trying to do. Each soliloquy was another step toward wherever it was he was going.

  Boyd was metamorphosing from Forty-Second Boyd into the “Mad Major.” H
e knew there were enormous holes in his work, glaring inadequacies that he could not resolve. He spent weeks testing an equation only to find in the end it was wrong. At this pace it would take years to refine and crystallize the research. He could see the far shore but could not reach it. What he needed was a computer to crunch the numbers, to quickly test a theory. Then, if it did not work, he could come up with new numbers and crunch them again. But the Air Force was just beginning to use computers and access was limited. Boyd went to the civilian who controlled the computers and asked for access. He wanted several hundred hours of time, maybe more. The civilian held a rank equal to that of a one-star general. He stared at Boyd in disbelief. “Major Boyd, what is your job here at Eglin?” he asked.

  Boyd grinned that wide-open grin of his, waved his cigar, and said in effect, “Well, I’ve had several jobs since I got here. Right now I’m a maintenance officer. And I have some other duties. But I don’t intend to have any of these jobs much longer. Once the Air Force understands what I’m doing, they’re going to tell me to spend all my time developing these theories of mine. I’m going to change everything people think they know about aviation.”

  The civilian threw Boyd out of his office.

  The mind-numbing and trivial jobs humiliated Boyd. He had an engineering degree from Georgia Tech and the Air Force needed more engineers to compete in the Space Race, but he was being used as a goddamn maintenance officer. All the night hours with the yellow legal pads were for nought. His theory might die before it was fully born.

  Then Boyd met the “Finagler.”

  During Boyd’s life he became close friends with six men. They were his Acolytes. In many ways these six men are quite different. What they share is that all are extraordinarily bright, all have an almost messianic desire to make a contribution to the world in which they live, all are men of probity and rectitude, and all—while independent in the extreme—are devoted followers of Boyd. They are important because they were so close to Boyd that oftentimes their work cannot be distinguished from his. The story of Boyd’s life is by necessity the story of their lives.

  The first and in some ways the most important of these men is Thomas Philip Christie. Born May 28, 1935, Christie was the first of five children. He grew up in hard times. His father was a gambler, a drunkard, and an inveterate womanizer, and when drunk, he beat his wife. When Christie came to his mother’s defense, he, too, was beaten. The family was embarrassingly poor, raising chickens to get by. Christie missed out on the dating and parties that were part of growing up. As the child of an abusive alcoholic father, Christie learned survival techniques early in life, and he learned to keep from being noticed by those who could harm him. In spite of his difficult childhood, he managed to excel in the classroom and on the baseball field, and eventually escaped from Pensacola on a scholarship to Spring Hill College—a small Jesuit school in Mobile, Alabama, where he studied mathematics. In 1955 he graduated with honors, and soon after he applied for a civilian job at Eglin AFB, where he was hired immediately as a GS-5, earning $4,000 annually.

  Almost from the time Christie went to work at Eglin, he began taking graduate courses in math and statistics. The Air Force had the AFIT programs to encourage officers to seek higher degrees, but it offered little to civilian employees. In 1961 Christie became one of the few civilians picked by the Air Force to go to graduate school. The Air Force told him to choose any school and they would pay his way. Christie picked New York University and earned a masters degree in applied mathematics. When he returned to Eglin in 1962, he was assigned to the Ballistics Division of the Air Force Armament Center, where his first job would enable the Air Force to make its final break from the Army.

  The Air Force was still trying to find itself, to establish itself. Connections with the Army had been broken one by one, but the Air Force still used Army Air Corps bombing tables, the mathematically computed trajectory of bombs dropped from various altitudes with the variables of wind and speed and temperature figured into the equation. These complicated formulae were reduced to tables used by bombardiers. Christie’s job was to develop bombing tables for the Air Force so the old Army tables could be tossed in the waste can and the Air Force could, at long last, be free of its most embarrassing tie to the Army.

  In the beginning Christie had a junior officer and one civilian assigned to him. But that would change. An organization would grow around him. He was young and relatively inexperienced in the ways of the bureaucracy, but already he had mastered the system. It was almost intuitive. He was the adult child of an alcoholic and he knew how to operate below the radar of those who could shoot down his projects. While older and senior Air Force officers fumed at their failures, Christie quietly achieved his goals. His voice was so soft and his manner so self-effacing that few saw him as a potential rival. He was such a brilliant navigator of bureaucratic swamps that one of his nicknames was the “Finagler.” He could get anything done. And he could do it in such a gentle unobtrusive way that few ever became angry or jealous.

  Christie was engaged to a Catholic girl from Pensacola and soon would be married. His life was good. But he was restless. He knew all there was to know about putting iron in the mud; after all, he had written the tables. But the tables were merely an update of what the Army Air Corps had done long ago. He wanted to work where no one had worked before. He wanted to move away from pure math and develop something new. He wanted a job that would tax his abilities, one that would enable him to make a contribution to science, to the Air Force, and to his country.

  The opportunity came, as it almost always does, from an unexpected source and in an unexpected manner. One Friday night Christie and his staff were enjoying their weekly visit to the Officers Club when his attention was drawn to a group of men at the bar. They were in civvies but clearly were fighter pilots; no one else uses his hands the way fighter pilots do. And they acted as if they owned the bar. The center of attention was an older guy, tall and gangly, maybe in his mid-30s, waving a cigar and spewing profanities in a voice heard all over the club. Fighter pilots generally show deference to no man, but the look on the faces of the young pilots around this man could only be described as idolatrous.

  Christie walked over to an officer he knew and quietly asked, “Who is that officer at the bar?”

  The officer did not have to ask who Christie meant. “John Boyd,” he said, as if that explained everything.

  Christie’s eyebrows moved upward an eighth of an inch, for him quite an emotional display. “I’ve heard of him. He did some good work out at Nellis.”

  “You should have him brief you on what he is doing now,” the officer said, and offered to bring Boyd over.

  A moment later Boyd sat down at Christie’s table, leaned forward until he was nose to nose with him, and began talking as if Christie were across the flight line. His Dutch Master described circles in the air as he told Christie about his ideas regarding the trade-off in kinetic and potential energy and how he believed new tactics could be developed from this “excess power” theory.

  Christie nodded in agreement. “That makes sense,” he said.

  Boyd talked of the equations he was developing, equations that would quantify his theory, equations that would define a jet aircraft’s performance at various altitudes and various G-loads, equations that would reduce the entire performance envelope to a set of graphs.

  “I think you are right,” Christie said.

  Boyd said everyone told him that there was nothing new about his work, that it had been done before or it was not important. But goddammit he knew it was fresh and innovative. “I can’t get anybody else to go along with it,” he said. “I’ve been all over this base and they think I am nuts.”

  Christie sipped his beer and chewed on a handful of munchies. In his soft voice he said, “I haven’t heard anything like it before.”

  Boyd was surprised. He had found someone who not only understood what he was trying to do, but agreed with him about its importance. He lean
ed closer to Christie and asked, “Just what is it that you do here at Eglin?”

  Christie explained how he worked with tactical aircraft-performance data to prepare bombing charts and how he developed maneuvers for pilots to deliver nuclear bombs and then escape the blast. He worked in ballistics, studying bullets and bombs. He told Boyd of his collection of aircraft-thrust data, angle of attack data, computations about fuel and altitude and airspeed, and all the other variables of aircraft performance. It was the greatest collection of such information anywhere in the Air Force.

  Boyd nodded. “Falling bombs and active bullets. Ballistically they’re not that much different from an airplane in flight, are they?”

  Christie agreed. Bombs, bullets, and airplanes have only two kinds of energy: kinetic energy, the ooomph due to speed and motion, and potential energy, the ooomph due to altitude. “They’re pretty much the same,” Christie said.

  Boyd’s eyes widened. “Goddamn,” he said.

  Then Christie told how he was using computers to develop even more sophisticated aircraft-performance data. For him, an aircraft held no secrets. The computers revealed all.

  “Goddamn,” Boyd repeated.

  As Boyd remembered later, “I cleaned the shit off the tablecloth and began writing all over it. This was happening just like in the movies. I started laying out these equations and shit.” He wrote formulas and diagrams and charts on cocktail napkins and gave them to Christie. He insisted Christie hold on to them.

  Christie listened attentively. He knew nothing of air-to-air maneuvers. This could be the challenge he sought. The odds were insuperable, but that made it all the more interesting. And this Major John Boyd might be on to something. He appeared a wild man. His reputation was like the shock wave in front of an aircraft; it rode ahead of him and disturbed everyone it washed over. It left people rolling in its wake, confused and often angry. Boyd’s methods were the very antithesis of how Christie operated. And yet… there was something about him. Boyd was a man possessed. He had an idea bigger than himself—a cause. And that was what Christie wanted. A cause.