Solo

by Clyde Edgerton

  And if nuclear war came, hundreds of other aircraft were about to take off—from both sides.

  My antimilitary inclinations in the late 1960s, and those of many of my buddies, took a gentle form. In Japan my refrigerator in the BOQ was decorated with a large peace symbol. On my wall was a poster of Snoopy, from Peanuts, who danced in hippie attire above the quotation “Groovy.” Another poster had these words under a big flower: “War is not healthy for children and other living things.” We were split in our thinking: While some of us would never have considered leaving the Air Force or not going to war when called, we felt a hazy empathy with the antiwar movement back in the States. But our Air Force culture allowed no discussion of the topic. Clearly, others of us would be adamantly opposed to the antiwar movement.

  The nearest I came to nonmacho personal statements at Yokota were found on my refrigerator—about thirty quotations written in red Magic Marker: “People is people, but a frog is a friend forever.” “Everything is mighty comfortable on a raft.” “Jesus was a nonconformist.”

  AS FAR AS I KNOW, I was the only English major in the group. In Korea I took an on-base English course on Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson. My dream, beyond my five years in the Air Force, was to return to North Carolina and teach high school English. None of my pilot buddies understood. And besides all that, I was a would-be poet. I was confident in my own abilities—and in those of a popular poet named Rod McKuen. To real poets, McKuen was the quintessential fake. But I didn’t know that then. I had bought and read McKuen’s book Listen to the Warm. It was a wildly popular best seller.

  One night while on alert, several pilots sat quietly in the card room as I read a few of McKuen’s poems aloud. The pilots had been chosen carefully: my front-seater, Sean Tuddle, twenty-seven and already married three times; Fireball Kelly, who’d once escaped from an F-4 that was burning on the ground; and Cam Knight, the “bubble check” front-seater. As they sometimes say in graduate English classes, we “explicated.”

  “I like that ‘hidden country of your smile,’” said Cam.

  “Why?” said Fireball.

  “I don’t know. I just do. Read that part again.”

  I read it again.

  “What the hell does that mean?” asked Fireball.

  “It’s just a way of saying ‘mysterious smile’ without saying ‘mysterious smile,’” I said.

  “Why can’t he say ‘mysterious smile’?”

  “Well, he can. It’s just that he doesn’t want to use a cliché. He wants to make it new and different.”

  “Cliché. Ha-ha.”

  “‘Hidden country of your smile’ is a hell of a lot better,” said Sean. “Use your imagination, Fireball.”

  “I just don’t know what’s wrong with ‘mysterious smile.’ ‘Hidden country’ could be anything. Hell, it might even be ‘hidden country.’ Cliché, my ass.”

  And it went on like this for a while. But just that once. Explicating poetry didn’t catch on.

  I tried to learn poker, a popular pastime while we were sitting alert, but I was slow and untrained, and these guys played hardball. After saying “Clover leaves or shovels?” instead of “Clubs or spades?” I was escorted from the room by glares. But I did get a few of us noncardlayers onto the game Botticelli. You guess the identity of a famous person with the only initial clue being the last letter of his or her last name. We played for hours at a time while sitting alert, waiting to carry out our part of Armageddon.

  IN KOREA WE SOMETIMES flew over the ocean just out from a popular beach and, fuel permitting, performed aerobatics at a safe distance from the beachgoers, hoping they were enjoying the show.

  My favorite maneuver was a four-point aileron roll. Flying straight ahead, I pulled the nose up about ten degrees and slammed the stick to the right (or the left) and then quickly back to center so that the aircraft paused with the wings perpendicular to the ground; then another slam and pause, leaving me inverted, with wings parallel to the ground; then another slam and pause, with wings again perpendicular to the ground; and then another, bringing me back where I’d started, flying straight and level. If it came out about right, I’d do another roll, perhaps an eight-point roll, all the while imagining what it looked like from the ground, certain that the beachgoers appreciated the performance. It never occurred to me to think otherwise.

  Other than participating in unauthorized dogfights, we normally stayed within all flying guidelines. Safety issues were hammered in through lectures and notices that followed all accidents and incidents (little accidents) Air Force–wide.

  Occasionally one of our flying infractions occurred in front of the wrong person. My good friends Johnny Hobbs, a front-seater, and Bob Padget (“Poo”), his backseater, were preflighting their F-4 after refueling at Kunsan Air Base in Korea when an F-102 performed an afterburner climb-out on takeoff.

  The ground crewman asked Johnny, “Will your airplane do that?”

  Johnny, not knowing that an Air Force general was watching takeoffs, said something like, “Oh, I think it might.”

  On takeoff, Johnny and Poo not only did a burner climb (permissible), but at a few thousand feet up, still in afterburner, they performed a slow 360-degree roll (not permissible). The general saw this, went inside, and got on the phone, and when Johnny and Poo landed at Osan they were told to report to our commander, Colonel Bennington.

  With a general looking over his shoulder, Colonel Bennington was in something of a tight spot. He took Johnny and Poo off flight status and sent them home to Japan to await a reprimand or a court-martial or something—something bad.

  Grounded at Yokota, Johnny and Poo partied. And partied, and partied. They’d been there for about a week when a North Korean aircraft shot down an American military aircraft (in April 1969) off the coast of South Korea, near the border with North Korea.

  All of us flying F-4s at Osan were issued North Korean target maps. We held combat briefings. Armament would be conventional, not nuclear. I remember that my front-seater, Sean Tuddle, and I were scheduled to be number four in a flight of four in a large contingent of aircraft. This was not good. We would be the last of the four aircraft to drop bombs on the same target, and by the time number four came in, the guns below would be blazing and would likely be more accurate than when number one rolled in.

  Besides being ready to fly combat missions from Osan, members of our squadron were now flying two aircraft in shifts in a large racetrack pattern off the northern coast of South Korea—twenty-four hours a day. These new missions were boring, though tense. Our radar was constantly scanning the coastline, ready and waiting for an attack from North Korean fighter aircraft. Sitting there, armed, we were in effect daring the North Koreans to attack us. Finally, after years of training, I was close to combat. We’d fly the racetrack for about two hours until we were low on fuel, and then we’d refuel from a C-135 tanker and fly another two hours before being relieved by two fresh aircraft. I remember looking down at the ocean far below, wondering what it would be like if we were attacked. And since they had just shot down one of our planes, why wouldn’t they try it again?

  Johnny and Poo were still in Japan, partying. But given the emergency, they were quietly placed back on flight status. We needed all the pilots we could muster. They caught a cargo hop to Osan. Luckily war did not come, and the tension gradually dissipated. In the hubbub, Johnny and Poo’s transgression was somehow forgotten. They heard no more about their incident. We told them we had started a war to get them out of trouble.

  “LET’S STEAL THE base commander’s car,” said Fireball. Several of us were sitting in the bar at Osan—not drinking, because we were on alert—listening to a radio broadcast that had just announced a fund-raising scheme for an off-base orphanage. Items could be confiscated, or a person could be voluntarily kidnapped and taken to the radio station. A ransom sum would be decided. If the owner of the item or a friend of the kidnappee called the station and pledged a ransom from a base organization, then th
e location of the confiscated item would be revealed or the kidnapped person would be released.

  A new base commander, after a few weeks of command in mid-1969, was threatening to change the dress rules at the officer’s club. His plan was to ban flight suits in the officer’s club after 5:00 p.m. In both Japan and Korea—and on any other air base, as far as we knew—a pilot could go directly to the club in his flight suit and unwind after a flight. At any time of day.

  In ten minutes we were driving in our alert truck by the base commander’s residence, which was on top of a hill in the middle of the base. Big house. And sitting placidly in his driveway, just outside of his garage, was his car—a big black sedan. We’d had to drive through a guarded gate to get to his residence, and we would have to drive back out the same way. But because we were in a U.S. Air Force alert truck and an officer was driving (the other two of us were hidden down on the back floorboard), our truck had been saluted and waved on in. We didn’t know if driving the general’s car out would be so easy.

  I was selected to see if keys were in the ignition. I walked casually to the car and looked in the window. Yes—and the door was unlocked. I returned to our truck and told the boys. Piece of cake. Fireball and I approached the car, I got in and put the car in neutral, and then we pushed it out the driveway and into the street. I jumped in and cranked it as Fireball got on the floor in the backseat. Of course the guard at the gate knew this car. We hoped that he wouldn’t stop us.

  He didn’t.

  So where do you hide a general’s car? It was a nice automobile. We drove around on base for a while. It was about 10:30 p.m. We found ourselves on a dead-end road that ended in a small field with trees. We drove out onto the field. The field was wet, and toward the trees it became very muddy. We drove the car into the mud. The alert truck stood by in case the Klaxon sounded and we were called to nuclear war. The car was good and stuck.

  “We shouldn’t have two sets of footprints leaving the car,” said Fireball from the backseat.

  “Why?”

  “Conspiracy. They’ll figure it out. It needs to seem like a one-man job.”

  “How are we going to leave one set of footprints?”

  “You get out. I climb on your back.”

  “You just don’t want to get your damn boots muddy. I think we ought to—”

  By this time I was out of the car with my back to the front door. Fireball was climbing on.

  When we got back to the club, I called the radio station to let them know what was up. I told the announcer that the base commander’s car had been stolen and it seemed to me that the ransom should be very high. He agreed and then asked me what unit I was with.

  “What unit?” I answered.

  “Yes. What unit?”

  “Why do you need to know that?”

  “We’re keeping records. We just need to know.”

  “Do I have to tell you?”

  “Well, sure.”

  “What if I don’t?”

  “Then I guess you’ll have to work all this out on your own. In order to make the announcement on the air, we have to have all the information.”

  “Okay. The Thirty-fifth Tac Fighter Squadron.”

  “What’s the ransom amount?”

  “A hundred bucks.”

  I went back into the bar and sat down with my buddies. In about five minutes we heard this announcement: “And we’ve just got this one in. The base commander’s car has been stolen by members of the Thirty-fifth Tactical Fighter Squadron . . .”

  Everybody looked at me. “Why the hell did you say who we were?!” somebody said.

  “. . . and the sum of the ransom we’re placing on the car can be decided by our generous commander, but our suggested amount is one hundred dollars. Hats off to members of the Thirty-fifth Tac Fighter Squadron.”

  We waited for the hammer to fall, but it never did. And the new flight suit rule never went through, though our effort probably wasn’t the reason.

  WE DID HEAR WORDS from the base commander on another occasion, a month or so later.

  Near a side door to the officer’s club at Osan were two parking spaces marked ALERT VEHICLE. I’d never seen any vehicle except ours parked in these spaces. One night, as we approached the officer’s club, I noticed a car in one of the reserved spaces. An alert truck would have to park elsewhere. I was thinking, Who the hell is that? A closer inspection told me: it was the same car we’d kidnapped. Rather than do the brave thing—find the general and ask him to move his car—I phoned the air police and told them about the unauthorized car in an alert-vehicle parking place at the officer’s club. They asked for my name. I thought, I don’t have a damn thing to hide; I am so right on this and he is so blatantly wrong.

  Next day, a meeting was called. I remember that Major Newsome, one of our senior officers, was in charge of the meeting. He said word had come down that a lieutenant in our squadron had reported the base commander for illegal parking and that the base commander had met with our squadron commander and operations officers and, by golly, so-and-so and so-and-so. I remember only one phrase from the speech: the base commander had said that he had “slept under enough wings” in his time not to be called to task about where he parked his car. After that meeting, my front-seater, Sean, was called in and told to have a meeting with me, the culprit, and lay down the law. Sean told me about all this with a smile—at the bar—and said, “We’ve had our meeting. And next time don’t say who you are, dummy.”

  MAJOR DODGE, THE COMMANDER of the air police squadron on base at Osan, was coming to know several of us by name. Incidents of loud noise and rowdiness had brought us together.

  I was rooming with Johnny Hobbs in the Osan Air Base BOQ, and on the night in question I had decided to stay in our room, alone, because I was on crutches from a motorcycle accident. (Two of us owned dirt bikes and I’d flipped mine.) I was talking into my portable tape recorder at about eleven o’clock when a group of nine tipsy pilots, including Johnny, Jake Brooks (with a guitar), Ted Graham, and Fireball Kelly walked into the room. They had just placed an Army officer’s motorcycle in the third-floor hallway. (In Korea we shared a three-story barracks with Army officers.)

  The boys made themselves comfortable and we started singing “Long, Tall Texan,” a popular song of the time. I pressed the record button on my handheld tape recorder. A box of brownies that had come by mail that day was passed around. Someone threw one. Another. Several more. More singing. Giggling. Peanut shells littered the floor. Someone stood, stepped on a brownie, then another. Fireball stomped a brownie. Funniest thing.

  A knock on the door.

  On the tape you hear the door creak open and then, “Staff Sergeant Cheek, sir. Air police. Major Dodge has authorized me to place you under house arrest until further notice.”

  Whoops.

  I stayed on my bed, and the tape recorder picked up pieces of the conversation. Members of our group argued with Sergeant Cheek, laughing the whole time.

  “We can’t leave the room? We can’t go to our own rooms?”

  “No, sir. Those are my orders.”

  Jake Brooks had a piece of paper and a pencil. “What’s your name, sergeant?”

  “Cheek, sir.”

  “How do you spell that? Is it C-h-e-e-k or C-h-e-a-k?”

  Sergeant Cheek didn’t see the humor.

  “Two e’s, sir.”

  “Can I make a phone call?” asked Johnny. (There was a pay phone in the hall.)

  “No, sir.”

  “Wait a minute! We’re allowed one phone call.”

  “You have to stay in the room, sir.”

  “Oh, my God, we’re under house arrest.”

  We settled back into the room and started singing again: “Well, I’m a long, tall Texan. I ride a big white horse.”

  On the recorder you hear talking, laughing, more singing, then another knock on the door. The singing continues. The door creaks open.

  It was Major Dodge. He stepped in. An unlit cig
arette hung from his lips, and a pair of pants that Johnny had thrown on a whim at someone else clipped the unlit cigarette in his mouth, so that the broken half dangled from the half still in his lips. We kept singing as if Major Dodge didn’t exist. “Yes, I’m a long, tall Texan . . .” I think I was the only one looking at him. He seemed startled, as if he had forgotten what he was going to say. He glanced around the room at nine singing pilots, then stepped back outside and closed the door. It was a scene for the movies—and I had only a tape recorder.

  When the singing finally stopped, someone in the room shouted, “Sergeant Cheek!”

  “Yes, sir” (from the hall).

  “Can we come out now?”

  “No, sir, you’re still under house arrest.”

  Ted Graham stood, walked over to the window by my bed, where I was propped up on pillows, and opened it, and when he climbed through, stepping out onto the ground, I started a running commentary into the tape recorder: “There are now only eight of us in the room. Graham just left through the—whoops, now there are seven of us . . . six.”

  In the background you hear singing, talking, and laughing, though it’s losing force.

  Jake was sitting in a chair, playing guitar and singing, Johnny was on his bed, singing, and I was sitting on my bed, counting into the recorder mic. “Four . . . three. There are only three of us left in the room.”

  If I hadn’t played the tape several times after the event, I’m sure I wouldn’t remember what happened next; nor would I remember the details of the foregoing. (Sadly, the tape is now long lost.)