The Warbirds

by Richard Herman

  “I thought we’d finish this today,” Waters said.

  “Brace yourself,” Gomez told him. “You’ll have to brief the chiefs of Operations and Intelligence before you brief the Big C. They always make changes. It’s a real bucket of worms getting a brief put together.”

  Waters agreed with him, and an hour later the briefing was complete, to the surprise of the captains. Gomez congratulated Waters as they walked to his car. “It’s a damned good brief…Muddy. You work well with Sara and Don. Why don’t you stay at my place tonight? Beats the hell out of the Boiling VOQ.”

  “Thanks, I’d like that. They really are a matched pair of whiz kids, aren’t they? I like them, but can’t say the same about Eugene.” He paused. “You know, I found Sara a little…distracting. It wasn’t easy to keep my mind on business, and I’m an old bird of—forty-six.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Gomez said. “You should see her in a pair of tight jeans. We’re required to wear civvies when we work on weekends unless we have to wear a uniform for a meeting or something like picking you up at Andrews. Sara makes the most of it. I made the mistake when I first got here of looking at her and not listening to what she had to say. She’s got plenty of smarts to go with the rest of her…”

  Over a Saturday night pitcher of martinis at Gomez’s home, Waters confessed that Sara and Don had put together a much better briefing than anything he could have created. “Why can’t one of them brief the Old Man and get the credit for what they’ve done?”

  “Sundown prefers colonels. He likes to eat them for breakfast.”

  They spent the rest of the evening swapping tall stories about war and peace and destroying martinis.

  The next morning Gomez led Waters through the labyrinth of corridors to a small briefing room next to Cunningham’s office, where Blevins was waiting. A few minutes later, two generals joined them. Waters walked to the podium at the front of the small room and nodded at the projectionist’s booth to start the thirty-five-millimeter slides.

  “Hit the advance button on the right side,” the sergeant running the slide projector called, figuring the tall colonel was off to a very bad start if he didn’t know that.

  Waters found the button and noticed an engraved plaque on the podium that cautioned: “Never miss a golden opportunity to keep your mouth shut.” Good advice, he thought, but a little too late for me.

  Blevins sat quietly at the rear, content to see another officer being readied for the slaughter. But much faster than Gomez or Blevins expected, the generals accepted what they saw, only directing that one slide be changed to correct a misspelled word. The projectionist bolted from the booth before the generals could change their mind, amazed that only one slide had to be changed. Normally half the briefing slides were scrapped or modified.

  Gomez admired Waters’ cool but decided to give him some advice. “Don’t let him rattle you. Don’t start the briefing until he tells you. He likes to stare at briefers to intimidate them. God knows what else he’ll pull. Sundown has a bag of tricks. Whenever we think we’ve seen them all, he comes up with a new one. But he won’t use them on junior officers; he’s partial to colonels. I’ve been in briefings where I have actually felt sorry for some bastard I can’t stand. They tell a story here about the Russian pilot that defected with the Backfire bomber. He was the only man ever to stare the Big C down.”

  “Thanks, Tom. I’ve briefed him before,” Waters said. “He was a colonel then and his wing was at Red Flag. I had run them through one hell of an exercise, the most demanding I could think of. His crews did okay, but you would have thought they had personally lost World War Three. This guy only settles for total victory. The out-brief was a major conflict in itself.” After a pause he asked, “What does the bastard accomplish by it? Does he think fear is the spur? Well, hell, I guess this is part of what we get paid for.”

  A young colonel, Cunningham’s aide, entered the room. “Gentlemen, the commander,” and the room sprang to attention.

  Cunningham walked quickly in, carrying a thin report. His eyes swept the room, pausing on Waters. He sat down in the center chair and started to read the report, ignoring the five waiting men. Waters returned to the podium and waited. Although he had met Cunningham before, he had forgotten how short the man was, a fact accentuated by the large overstuffed chair he sat in. His hair was almost totally white, with a few dark strands. The color of his hair blended with his pale complexion. The man is sick or needs some exercise and sun, Waters decided.

  The general raised his eyes from the report and appraised Waters, who returned the general’s stare, wondering how long this would go on and what purpose it served. All the stories he had heard about Sundown’s habits replayed through his mind and he caught himself half-smiling at his own predicament.

  “What’s so funny, Colonel?”

  “An irrelevant thought, sir.”

  “If you’re going to give a briefing I suggest you be very relevant,” Cunningham said, breaking eye contact and looking around the room.

  Gomez gave Waters a look of congratulations at the results of round one.

  Waters keyed the forward button as the lights dimmed. “Stifle it, Waters,” the general snapped. “I’ll run the slides.” He hit a button on the arm of his chair.

  Cunningham scanned one slide after another in silence. Waters had heard the general could read at a high rate of speed, but he wondered how much the man could understand at the rate he was running through the slides. Abruptly the screen was blank, a condition reflected in Gomez’s face. Every man in the room knew that the briefing was far from over. The traditional words of British sea captains on Men-of-War about to receive a broadside flitted unbidden to Waters and another smile started to form.

  Again Cunningham caught it. “Another irrelevant thought, Colonel?”

  Waters caught himself, decided to play it straight. “I was thinking of an old prayer, General. ‘For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful.’”

  For a moment the general said nothing. Then: “Colonel, you probably managed to compromise the monitoring capabilities of my most sophisticated reconnaissance platform by downlinking. And now you make jokes. You’ve got thirty seconds to justify that compromise.”

  Waters leaned over the podium, knuckles turning white as he clenched the edges. His voice, however, was calm and his face did not betray the emotion he felt. “Sir, the decision was right because of the results. Five crewmen and one C-130 recovered, one Flogger splashed, and it was the first time an Air Force pilot has made a kill since Vietnam.”

  Cunningham liked the way the colonel thought. “And is that important, Waters?” He deliberately filled his voice with danger, testing, and also liking the way the colonel was standing up to him.

  “Yes, sir. Very important. At least you know your Air Force can still fight.”

  “I thought our job was to fly and fight.”

  “There were many people who never fly that were part of that engagement,” Waters replied.

  “Such as?”

  “The crew chiefs, the launch controller, the GCI controller—”

  “You say it was important even if the Egyptians are protesting to Allah, the State Department and God knows who else, not to mention thinking about boating us out of Egypt. Do you also presume to play at geopolitics? You, a colonel? Northern Africa was stabilizing for the first time in years. Egypt and Libya were showing signs of getting along, which is a good thing considering they’re neighbors. The U.S. needs a broader sphere of stability in the eastern Med and this incident has set that development back.” Cunningham paused, waiting to hear the colonel’s response.

  “General, if the situation was developing along those lines, why were those MiGs up there in the first place?”

  “To embarrass the U.S.’s presence in Egypt, Colonel, nothing more, nothing less. Besides, I could have taken the loss of a C-130 easier than the compromise of what your RC-135 can do.”

  Push a little harder, Wate
rs thought, but not to the point of insubordination. “We watch Soviet activity very closely to see if they’ve got a clue about what we can do. So far, we’ve no indication that any compromise has taken place. Also, sir, an Apple Wave is a focused transmission wave, much like a laser. When I downlinked, we bashed the message the long way around, away from Soviet monitoring activity.” Waters kept his gaze on the general, still wanting to appear respectful and not betray what he felt.

  The general rolled an unlit cigar in his mouth. “You bashed the message the ‘long way ‘round’? Right over the entire Middle East and China. And you don’t think a compromise took place?”

  “General, I focused the transmission over the South Pole, downlinking through Hawaii, not east or west.”

  Cunningham almost smiled. So, you like to win, he thought, and don’t mind setting me up to make your point about no compromise taking place. Well done, Waters. And where the hell have you been hiding? I need people like you.

  Waters gauged Cunningham to be even more a cold-blooded bastard than he’d suspected, too willing to sacrifice a C-130 against using the capabilities of his reconnaissance platform. No question, he had done the right thing by downlinking.

  Cunningham stood now and headed toward the door. As he went through the opening he turned and looked at Waters standing at the podium. “You, Gomez and Blevins. My office.”

  The three colonels instantly followed Cunningham into his office and stood at attention, while he settled behind his large oak desk, lit his cigar and waved the men to seats.

  “Waters,” he began, “downlinking was the correct thing to do. But I wanted to know if it was merely dumb luck or a deliberate, calculated risk on your part. I like the way you analyzed the situation. We’re going to get heavily involved in that part of the world and there are some definite lessons to be learned from what happened. I want you”—Cunningham nodded at Waters—“to work up a detailed after-action report. I want it circulated through Command and Control, Operations and Intelligence.”

  Cunningham folded his hands together and leaned forward over his desk, an unfamiliar look on his face, concern in his voice. “We’ve got to have our act together, but I’m worried. To give you an example, the Phantoms launched without missiles. We made a major commitment when those birds were retrofitted to handle the AIM-9L, the best Sidewinder in our inventory. I want to know what happened. Start your report by taking a look at the 45th. Also, I want you to have the 45th develop a plan for deployment into the Persian Gulf. I’ll send more down in a memo outlining what I want before you leave tomorrow. Blevins, you go with Waters. Take along one of those whiz kids who works in the Watch Center. Good experience for him. Gomez, you stay here and find out how quickly the Priority Three warning was handled when it was sent out. I want that in the after-action report. That’s all for now, gentlemen.”

  The three colonels left the room in a state of shock.

  “I’ll be damned,” Tom said as they walked back to the Watch Center. “I didn’t expect anything like that, I was sure we’d get the get-the-hell-out-of-here-by-sundown routine. I always thought he was in the tertiary stage of syphilis, and here he goes acting like a human being.” Waters shook his head and smiled.

  Blevins walked with the two men in silence, an inner anger boiling…I should have given that briefing; I know more about what went on than anyone and I made the critical decisions. If anything had gone wrong, Sundown would have crucified me, not him. And now this jet-jockey gets all the attention…

  Actually Cunningham had given Blevins high marks for what he saw in the battle cab of the Watch Center. To the general’s way of thinking, making decisions was what colonels were hired to do, and Blevins had done better under pressure than many other colonels he had seen. He had missed Tom Gomez’s prodding Blevins into action. After the three had left his office, Cunningham hit a button on the intercom, summoning his aide. The colonel who had escorted Cunningham into the briefing room immediately appeared. “Dick,” the general began, “have you gotten any feedback from State about what’s got the Egyptians upset over the Grain King affair?”

  “My contacts over at Foggy Bottom are working under the assumption that the Egyptians think we set up the Libyans with the C-130 and forced an engagement. So far our ambassador hasn’t been able to convince them otherwise.”

  “What do you think?” the general asked.

  Dick Stevens shook his head. “Sorry, General, I can’t offer any better explanation right now. But I’ll keep working it.”

  Cunningham grunted, accepting his aide’s answer.

  The relationship between the two would have left most of the Air Force staff in the Pentagon dumbfounded, for Stevens knew Cunningham as a thoughtful, even polite, commander. As a young up-and-coming officer, Cunningham had developed a philosophy of leadership he had practiced and refined as he moved through the ranks of command. He believed most officers in the Air Force possessed the necessary intelligence to do the job but were uneducated. To him, the majority of officers hadn’t been taught to think under pressure or respond to rapidly changing circumstances. The men he valued had neither of these faults, and Dick Stevens was one of them. Once a promising candidate passed through the crucible of Cunningham’s scrutiny, he was admitted into the general’s inner circle, promoted and respected.

  Stevens had been a junior major when he came to Cunningham’s attention, the commander of an airlift command element in Africa during the first Grain King relief operation. The corruption he had witnessed in the distribution of food supplies had deeply angered him, and his rage had built when his reports describing the situation were ignored. During the final days of the operation he received a belated message from Headquarters Military Airlift Command requesting information on any problems he had encountered in the distribution of relief supplies. In six short paragraphs he summarized the situation and fired off his reply.

  Which hit the bull’s-eye. Two days later he was briefing Sundown Cunningham. During that briefing a colonel criticized the junior major for not telling higher headquarters sooner. A mistake. In answer Stevens read one of his earlier messages detailing the corruption he had witnessed, a message that had been sent to the colonel’s office. The colonel, understanding it was over for him, stood and excused himself, to start packing. Shortly thereafter, Stevens was assigned to the general’s staff, where he had been ever since.

  Whenever Cunningham detected an “uneducated officer,” he personally completed the man’s schooling, and being an egoist he believed he could do it with the force of his personality and well-tested bag of tricks. Valuing efficiency, he always did it quickly. For those who got the message, no harm was done to their career. For the slow learners, civilian life was the only refuge. The back of Lawrence Cunningham’s mind was not a pretty place, but it was an extremely efficient locale, and filled with a blood lust toward the enemy that he fought to control.

  The general drew on his cigar, wishing the flight surgeon would let him smoke more of them, and considered the two problems before him: why were the Egyptians so upset, and was the 45th ready for a combat role in the Middle East? Normally he could have found an answer to the second problem by sending in an Inspector General team to conduct an Operational Readiness Inspection. But the cantankerous Egyptians would not give an IG team diplomatic permission to enter their country. He hoped Waters, the latest candidate for his inner circle, would find some answers to both questions.

  “Dick, I’m sending a team to Alexandria South to write an after-action report. Am I getting too involved with the nuts and bolts of the Air Force again?” Cunningham was aware of his difficulty in controlling his urge to tinker with small details and relied on his aide to keep him on track, dealing with policy.

  “Don’t think so, sir. An after-action report should furnish some answers.”

  “I’m taking a good look at Waters. Make sure word gets out that I’m doing detailed after-action reports now. Should liven up a few dead asses…How long has Shaw been
at Alexandria South?”

  “Fifteen months, sir.”

  “That’s about the average tour of duty for a wing commander. Maybe a new wing commander would be a bone to the Egyptians. Let’s be ready to try that. Tell General Percival at Third Air Force to start looking for a replacement for Shaw. Get a list of possibilities from him.”

  The 45th fell under the operational command of Third Air Force, headquartered at RAF Mildenhall in England. Cunningham wanted to keep the 45th in the Middle East as a counterforce to the increasing destabilization he saw developing in that area, especially in the Persian Gulf. Too many hotheads were trying to increase their power base at the expense of their neighbors and by controlling the flow of oil out of the Gulf. Experience had made clear that any disruption in that flow was a threat to the U.S. and its NATO allies.

  “I need a memo for Waters to take to the 45th. I want Shaw’s wing to put together a plan for sending one, two or all three of his squadrons into the Persian Gulf area on twelve-hour notice. I don’t want the usual deployment plan where they take everything they own. I need something that will get a small force package into the area. They’ve got to go in lean and mean, ready to fight and get out quick. We can’t do that with the Rapid Deployment Force. It takes too much support to defend that large a force. Figure one week autonomous operations before resupply. Fuel, munitions and billeting already in place.”

  Cunningham stopped for a moment. He was deeply frustrated by his planners, who seemed incapable of thinking of force packages less than a full-scale commitment of the RDF. Common sense told him the Air Force had to offer the President a smaller-force option for operations in that troubled part of the world. It was a much different matter to commit a squadron or wing of aging F-4s, and much easier to withdraw them than a prestigious commitment of F-15s or F-16s.