Solo

by Clyde Edgerton

  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.

  THERE 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.

  NO 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 sho
t 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?!”

  FOUR 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.

  One apartment or another in the BOQ in Japan housed a big party several times a month. At the end of the officer’s club Go-Go Night on Saturday nights or Mexican Food Night in the dining room on Wednesday nights, you might hear over the intercom: “Party in room seven” (or one or fourteen).

  An international hotel that housed flight attendants from major U.S. airlines during layovers was located five minutes from the base. The officer’s club was a convenient outing for them, and many ended up at our parties.

  There was a large, empty grass lot just across from the BOQ. On weekends in spring and summer, in the late afternoon, we’d have coed touch-football games there that sometimes lasted until after dark. A blanket in the end zone nearest the BOQ held ice, drinks, and food, and long breaks in the games for rest and refreshments weren’t unusual.

  SOMETIMES PILOTS WOULD attempt “carrier landings” in the officer’s club. Several large tables would be cleaned off and placed end-to-end. Beer was poured on their surfaces to reduce friction. A pilot backed away from the table as far as possible—sometimes into an adjoining room—took a running start, and dove headfirst onto the tables, arms pinned to his side (this was mandatory) to see how far he could slide before coming to a stop. Injuries were not uncommon. Especially if you were going fast enough to continue off the far side of the carrier.

  Normally our wing and squadron commanders overlooked the antics of younger pilots, especially those of us in BOQ 16. But on one occasion just after a new base commander had arrived, we threw an unusually active party during which our building was damaged. Seven or eight of us were ordered to headquarters for questioning. The commander, accompanied by a mystery guest, sat with us around a table in a lush meeting room.

  “Who lives in room sixteen?” he asked.

  We looked at one another. Butch Henderson and Lynn Snow were in Korea for their five-week tour.

  “They’re in Korea,” someone said.

  “Okay, here’s the deal,” said the commander. “This man sitting beside me is a military attorney. He handles my legal matters, and if this kind of destruction of property happens again, the ones responsible will be off this base like shit through a tin horn.”

  We toned down. Interesting turn of phrase. I’d never heard it before—and haven’t since.

  AN AIR FORCE PILOT automatically accrued the informal status of the aircraft he flew. While the status of any particular aircraft can be argued about endlessly, a general ranking went something like this: fighter pilots were at the top of the heap, along with pilots of the A-1E, an old single-engine tail dragger. The A-1E could sustain hits from ground fire, was slow enough to have a low-radius turn, and could make many gunnery passes in a short time, and it was thus used regularly in efforts to rescue downed pilots in Southeast Asia. The tier below fighter pilots included pilots of Gooney Birds—the old C-47s from World War II, a big tail dragger with twin engines (like the airplane you see at the end of Casablanca). One of the pilots in my Laredo pilot-training class who finished high enough to choose a fighter, chose a Gooney Bird instead. It was a sentimental favorite. There was buzz about a new airplane designed for the war in Vietnam, the OV-10. It was a small, powerful turboprop aircraft with a cockpit designed like a fighter jet’s. It was used for reconnaissance and directing air strikes, and in a pinch it could transport up to six soldiers in a cargo bay.

  In the next echelon were big cargo planes, and at the top of that batch was the C-130, designed to make low passes over jungle strips and drop cargo from the rear of the fuselage.

  At the bottom of all mental lists that I ever knew about was the B-52, mentioned earlier.

  Beneath all pilots (in the eyes of the pilots) were navigators, regardless of the aircraft they navigated. Most pilots who washed out of pilot training went to navigator-training school, and there was no shortage of navigator jokes. Navigators, on the other hand, considered themselves the brains of any flying mission. They left the steering to the dummy called the pilot, and they had their jokes too.

  Backseat F-4 pilots held a unique position. Most were lieutenants just out of pilot training who’d been promised a quick upgrade to the front seat. But about the time I came along, the promise of an upgrade to front seat after six months became a joke. In most cases it didn’t happen, and then by the time it did, an extra two-year commitment (beyond the basic five years) came with it.

  Because backseaters often flew the aircraft (I flew most of the formation flying during my flights), we were afforded fighter-pilot status, but among F-4 front-seat pilots we were merely GIBs—the guy in back. The back-seater’s standing joke was, “Remember that GIB spelled backwards is BIG.”

  Backseat was a worthwhile position for a young fighter pilot. I navigated, controlled the radar, and was able to learn from the
front-seater. Though I normally flew with the same front-seater, I occasionally flew with someone new, giving me the opportunity to observe a range of flying styles and talents.

  At one time or another, most of us had occasion to take an F-4 up for a test flight. After repair service, an aircraft sometimes needed to be put through the motions, including supersonic flight. On a normal flight with either an external centerline fuel tank or bombs and rockets hanging under the wings, supersonic flight was not permitted, but test flights were usually flown “clean.” On one test ride, my front-seater and I decided that after breaking the sound barrier (a requirement of that test flight), we’d see how fast we could go. A Machmeter indicates your speed in relation to the speed of sound. I was piloting. I climbed to about thirty thousand feet, lowered the nose, and moved the throttles into afterburner. We got our little bump as we went through Mach 1. We continued to accelerate until our speed was Mach 2.4, over sixteen hundred miles per hour.

  “SITTING ALERT” IN KOREA was not practice. It was the real thing. I look back on that time—my four-day slots every few weeks in Korea—with a kind of amazement. No one expected that we would really drop a nuclear bomb on Russia. On the other hand we were prepared to do just that—or thought we were. At any time while we were sleeping in the alert shack, or playing Ping-Pong or cards there, or making audiotapes from the large selection of LPs, the Klaxon could go off.

  When the Klaxon sound came blaring through the bullhorns, we scrambled and then ran for the crew trucks waiting outside with keys in the ignition. Four pilots to a truck. There would be two trucks, eight pilots for four airplanes. This was during the cold war. We assumed each time was practice, but we could never be absolutely sure until we were in our cranked aircraft listening to coded instructions on our radio. In our flight packets were maps with a Russian target clearly marked. Our helmets were fitted with gold-plated sun visors to protect our vision when our bomb detonated. I don’t remember the particular targets near the city I was always slated to bomb, Vladivostok. But our four aircraft were possibly on the way to kill thousands of innocent people. People who’d never lifted a finger to harm me—and never would.