by Tom Clancy
A more accommodating airfield seemed like a good idea.
A replacement for the B-47s appeared in the late fifties, when Charles de Gaulle ordered U.S. fighters to leave France; and in 1960, the 48th Wing, then stationed at Chaumont Air Base east of Paris, pulled up stakes and moved to Lakenheath. In the process of the move, personnel who were close to the end of their overseas tours went home early. This in turn resulted in unusually large numbers of new people being assigned to the wing. This had a downside: Every week six or seven lieutenants with the bare minimum of flying time showed up at each of the wing’s three squadrons. Since Horner was in the first wave, he became a flight leader almost immediately. For a young pilot to become a flight lead is an honor and indicates rare confidence from the squadron leaders — or else it means there aren’t any experienced pilots in the squadron and you use what you have and hope for the best. In Horner’s case, it was the latter. The blind were leading the blind; and the accident rate proved it. In the first three months he was assigned to the wing, six aircraft and four pilots were lost (Horner didn’t actually contribute to any of these accidents, but he came close). Since the tour was for three years, that meant he stood an excellent chance of going home early in a pine box. On the other hand, young Chuck Horner was having a very good time, and learning a great deal about flying fighter aircraft.
Second Lieutenant Horner got quite a shock, however, when he first walked into the squadron. He had 100 hours of F-100 time, had never flown in really bad weather (a daily occurrence in England), and expected to be led around by the hand for six months or so to learn the ropes. The ops officers smiled, got him a local area check-out and a Stan Eval check ride to certify he could sit alert, then stamped him flight leader and hoped he made it.
When Horner arrived at Lakenheath, among the first people he met was his new squadron commander, Major Skinny Innis — one of the wildest members of a profession that tries to corner the market on wildness. Innis, like many others, had gone off to World War II before he finished college. During that war, pilots of his age group had operated almost without rules — the name of the game had been to get the job done. The downside was that a lot of them had died in accidents and not as a result of enemy fire. Innis had survived that war, and Korea, by means of brains, energy, flying talent, and luck.
In the two worlds that make up the military — field and headquarters — Skinny Innis was at the far extreme of the field orientation. One earned points there for being outrageous, and Skinny had acquired just about as many outrageous points as it was possible to accumulate. All he wanted to do was fight wars and have fun in the downtime. He was profane, inelegant, not only un- but antidiplomatic, and often wrongheaded; but he deeply loved his nation, flying, and the Air Force; he made it fun to serve with him; and he kept his pilots looking at the enemy instead of worrying about their own careers.
Skinny hated to be supervised. In practice that meant that he and the wing director of operations, Colonel Bruce Hinton (who was called “Balls” Hinton and had had several kills in Korea), often had fistfights when they had a difference of opinion. Since they had both served in World War II and Korea, lived with adjoining backyards, and were friends as well as antagonists, however, they tolerated each other’s wild behavior.
Even though Skinny hated authority, he was loyal to senior commanders, which meant he worked their problems and did the mission they laid out for his squadron. He ran the squadron the way he wanted to, however, which today would not be politically acceptable, and he specialized in making flamboyant statements.
At the officers’ club at Lakenheath, a large bell was mounted over the bar. When you walked in, you had to buy drinks for everyone at the bar if someone could ring the bell before you got your hat off. Skinny turned the game upside down. He bought bowler hats for all the 492d Squadron, declared them the Mad Hatters, and “ordered” them to wear their hats in the bar. If they didn’t, they had to buy the bar a round. (The bowler rule was in effect only when you wore a civilian jacket and tie; uniform was excepted.)
Then Skinny decided that wasn’t enough. His squadron also needed to be different from the other two squadrons at work, so he bought them glengarries, the traditional Scottish hats, to wear with their flight suits. When Bruce Hinton tried to stop this change in uniform (correctly judging it against the uniform rules), they had another fight, and Skinny won. Thus, for the three years Horner was at Lakenheath, everyone in Skinny’s squadron wore a glengarry, with his rank on it, with his flying suit.
There was a serious point behind the apparent silliness. Skinny’s goal was to create an elite unit, the 492d Tactical Fighter Squadron, within an elite unit, the 48th Tactical Fighter Wing. His methods probably went too far by today’s practices; but back then, in the shadow of World War II and Korea, commanders had a great deal of latitude. During Vietnam, Horner and the other pilots at the bases at Korat and Ta Khli in Thailand wore nonregulation Aussie hats for the same reason.
Horner’s initiation into the Skinny Innis leadership style came on the day of his first mission at Lakenheath.
That morning, he looked out the window at fog thick enough to cut with a knife. Believing that prudence was a wise course for junior officers, he reported to Major Innis in a military manner and calmly informed him that since he had never flown in actual weather, let alone the kind of fog they had outside, the major might consider finding someone else to take the mission. Major Innis looked up from the paper he was reading, glared at Horner, and snapped, “Get your ass in the air. You don’t think I’m going to fly in shit like this, do you?”
It was a case of learn or die, and he learned.
As it turned out, after Horner had been in the squadron a couple of months and proved he could hack it, Skinny let him know that he had gone to high school in Iowa with his cousin Bill Miles and had been one of his closest friends. They had both joined the Air Corps together, and gone on to get their wings.
Years later, in 1964, Innis — now a colonel — was in Saigon flying old, broken-down B-26s over South Vietnam. In those days, the U.S. government was pretending that Innis and the other Air Force people in the country were “advising” the VNAF, though, in fact, they were doing much of the fighting. Some of Skinny’s friends loved being there, because that was where the action was, and when Chuck Horner heard about that, he did what he could to get himself into the war.
When he wrote Innis to ask for his help, however, Skinny advised him to stay as far away from Vietnam as he could. Even then, Innis realized the war was destined to collapse into disaster.
★ The mission of the 48th TFW was primarily nuclear strike, backed up by conventional air-to-ground and air-to-air. That meant that the pilots primarily trained in the delivery of nuclear weapons and sat alert in the European version of the SIOP (the Single Integrated Operations Plan for conducting a one-day nuclear war), just as SAC pilots did in bombers back in the States. In order to qualify in nuclear weapons delivery, they had to drop a certain number of practice bombs every six months and certify on their target. They also had to describe to a board how the weapon worked, talk through their mission, and know command and control cold — that is, they had to know who could release them to go on the mission, what procedures had to be followed in order to arm the bomb, what kind of code words they could expect, and so on.
Each training period, pilots also flew a few air-to-air and air-to-ground conventional-weapons training sorties, but they were only required to be familiar in those events — they didn’t have to qualify by achieving a specific bomb score average.
★ This is how a typical nuclear delivery training sortie might go — a two-ship air-to-ground:
The lead and the wingman brief two hours before takeoff, check the weather and notices, suit up, and step to the jets about twenty minutes before start engine, which is twenty minutes before takeoff time (which is predicated on range time). After preflighting the jet and starting and checking out the systems, the two taxi to the arming area
at the end of the runway. There the weapons troops take out the safety pins on the practice bomb dispenser and arm the guns by rotating a live round into the chamber and connecting the electrical plug that provides current to the bullet primer. From there the two taxi onto the runway and close the canopies. After a head nod, the brakes are released. After a second head nod, they light the afterburners and take off. A third head nod is the signal for gear up, followed by flaps up. They then turn out of traffic on the air traffic control frequency and fly a departure route, climbing to 1,000 feet on top (that is, in the clear on top of the overcast).
Since the lead planned a low level in France, they now head for the let-down point. In the meantime, the lead moves his wingman out to about 4,000 to 6,000 feet, meaning that the lead is not looking into the sun and he can clear his wingman’s six o’clock (his tail) without himself having to squint into the light. After he reaches the let-down point, he rocks his wings, which signals the wingman to join up on his wing. The wingman lines up the light on the lead’s wingtip with the star on the lead’s fuselage in order to maintain forward and aft reference, and down the two go into the weather.
The lead breaks out at 1,000 feet above the ground and kicks his wingman out by fluttering the rudder. The wingman then takes up a chase position off to one side and slightly high, about 500 feet aft of the lead’s jet. From there he can look through the lead to clear the air for other airplanes that might appear in his path. The lead’s job, meanwhile, is to fly the route and arrive at the range at the scheduled range time.
The navigation is not easy. The lead must maintain the planned speed and heading, while using a map to locate an identifiable point on the ground. If it comes into view at the precise time and the precise place that had been planned, then they are not lost. (They must not try it the other way. That is, they must not find a point on the ground and then try to find it on the map. Doing that means they are lost.)
At the Initial Point (IP) to the range, the lead switches the flight over to range frequency and calls the range officer for clearance. The wingman now splits off and makes a 360-degree turn, which will leave him about two minutes spacing on the lead’s aircraft for a nuclear over-the-shoulder delivery. Meanwhile, the lead arms his switches, gets clearance, pushes up to delivery speed, and heads toward the range.
What follows is a variation on what he practiced earlier at Nellis:
The bull’s-eye is a set of concentric circles on the ground: the outer circle is 2,000 feet in radius, the next is 1,000 feet, the next is 500, and the smallest is 100. The lead’s immediate task is to fly over a spot upwind from the bull’s-eye. For example, if he has a wind from the northeast at 20 knots and he is heading north on the run-in, he lines up his jet over the ground to the right of the bull’s-eye, waits until he is past the bull’s-eye at the prescribed offset point, lights the afterburner, and presses the pickle (the bomb-release button on top of the stick). At that point, he starts an Immelmann. At a preset angle, nose up (which primarily depends on the outside temperature and wind velocity at release point), the bomb is automatically released. Sometimes this is a twenty-five-pound practice bomb, but often it is a 2,000-pound bomb shaped like a nuclear weapon (when he releases one, his aircraft bounds like a kangaroo). The bomb then climbs to more than 30,000 feet above the ground, runs out of speed, and turns around and heads to earth. When it strikes the ground, a shotgun shell filled with white phosphorus puts out a large puff of smoke. This allows the range crew to score the hit by referencing it to the circles. Since the pilot is dropping a simulated nuclear weapon, a satisfactory score is well over 1,000 feet.
Meanwhile, at release he calls, “Off on top wet,” which means that a release light lit in his cockpit, and the bomb is in the air headed for the ground. He then rolls out so his wingman can start his run. As he comes off on top, they both enter the bombing and strafe pattern. After they expend all their bombs and bullets, they join up and start for home.
As they cross the Channel, the lead checks in with the British, so the cousins don’t scramble a fighter on them, and enter the holding pattern at Hopton beacon on the English coast (which served as the initial fix for airfields in East Anglia), until the expected approach clearance time, EAC.
When control informs him that he is cleared to penetrate, the lead switches to the Lakenheath GCA frequency and contacts the controller, who talks him down. He breaks out into the fog at 300 feet above the ground a half mile off the end of the runway, touches down, deploys his drag chute, and gingerly steps on the brakes as the jet slips and slides on the always wet runway. He turns off on the end and jettisons his drag chute. The armorers then disconnect the gun plugs and put safety pins in any remaining bombs. About this time, the wingman lands. The lead waits for him to get safetied, and then he taxis back to the ramp in front of the squadron, shuts down the jet, climbs out, and stops by maintenance debriefing. Then he goes back to the squadron and stows his gear.
After that, he and his wingman spend maybe half an hour debriefing the flight: what went right, what went wrong, why the bombs were good or bad.
No small part of the discipline of a fighter pilot derives from the debriefings after a mission.
Since these can be brutal, the lead makes very sure that in the mission he follows the game plan, and if he’s made a mistake during the mission, he had better be the first to admit it. If he doesn’t, or if he wasn’t aware that he had made a mistake, or if he tried to cover up his mistakes with self-serving excuses, he was probably dead meat in the debrief.
Debriefings in operational units often involve heated debate, for the stakes are incredibly high, and the participants have strong and differing opinions about what will survive and work in combat and what is just fanciful thinking. On the other hand, the debriefings in combat crew training units tend to be much more structured and much less heated. The students do not have the experience to know what is functional and dysfunctional, and the missions themselves are usually very structured. However, since every mission includes unexpected events, there is always room for differences of opinion.
The most respected pilots are the ones who can identify their own shortfalls and learn from them. And the best instructors are the ones who can tell them the root cause of their failures in the air and give them tools to avoid them — either new physical techniques or different thought processes.
★ Another typical mission out of Lakenheath was called a night MSQ. This was a single-ship mission in Germany. Ground radars with very accurate beams had been placed near the East German border, in order to direct a fighter in wartime to a point in space for bomb release of a nuclear weapon. The bomb would then fly a predictable route to the target.
On an MSQ mission, a pilot might take off single-ship near the end of the day and fly at 40,000 feet to a contact point on the East German border. At the contact point, he’d call in the blind; that is, he’d broadcast without receiving an answer. Meanwhile, in the upper-left-hand side of his instrument panel was a four-inch-round dial on which were a number of small symbols, windows, and icons. One arrow pointed to the left, another arrow to the right; one window said one minute, and another said thirty seconds; and at the top of the dial was a single red light. When that one lit, he knew the radar was locked on to his jet. Then he followed the instructions it was sending him, which were relayed through the arrows, windows, and icons on the dial. Most frequently, they sent you north along the western edge of the East German border. To be on the safe side, the pilot would also tune the low-frequency navigation set on the floor between his legs to a series of twenty-five-watt navigation beacons. These gave him a cross check to make sure he didn’t stray over the border.
Meanwhile, in the darkening sky, he would see the contrails of a Russian fighter shadowing him, hoping the pilot would stray over the border so he could try to shoot him down.
Soon, the one-minute light would come on, meaning that the pilot had sixty seconds to release. At the same time, he would be getting left or
right arrows, while maintaining his altitude and airspeed at the prebriefed values. Then the thirty-second light would come on, and thirty seconds later, he’d hit his bomb button. This would cause his radio to emit a tone, which the radar site would score. (Both the pilot and the radar site were given a score.)
Afterward, he’d turn away to the west and either return to the contact point for another run or head for home, hoping to hit his bed by midnight, because he had to be at work at 4:00 A.M. for a six o’clock takeoff the next day.
★ Fighter pilots never get enough of air-to-air training — dogfights — yet, for some reason, probably having to do with the nuclear delivery mission, U.S. pilots in the late fifties and early sixties were given very little air combat training; and what they were allowed was rudimentary. As a result, they all went underground. They practiced against other NATO fighters that happened to be in the air at the same time they were.
So, for example, if a pilot was flying the nuclear delivery profile above, a Mirage fighter might well start a practice intercept run on him. When the pilot saw the Mirage, he tried to do what he would do in actual combat. He’d push the power up and turn into the attack. Then he and the Mirage pilot would conduct a series of maneuvers aimed at foiling the other while winding up at his six o’clock for a heat-seeking missile or gun attack. All of this was unbriefed and there were no rules. In fact, it was illegal. Worse, you were often in a dangerous configuration, carrying, say, four external fuel tanks and a practice nuke bomb, which made the fighter apt to go out of control.