“Hey, this is nice.” Ray smiled. “Ask that guy where we should put our baggage.”
The guy he was referring to was walking quietly toward us, a sergeant wearing a white helmet and bright armbands. But we were no longer trainees and had no need to be afraid.
“Say, Sergeant,” I asked amiably, “where should we put our luggage?”
“Luggage?” He flinched at the civilian word. Neither Ray nor I had on uniforms.
“Uh, yeah. We have to check in before five, and we need a place to change into our uniforms.”
“You’re candidates?” he asked calmly, quietly, with the ill-hidden contempt I had witnessed so many times before in basic training.
“Uh-huh.” I nodded, bracing myself.
“What the fuck are you doing driving around here in civvies? You think you’re tourists?”
“No—”
“You get that car over there in that lot. Now! You will carry your luggage back here, double time! Now, git!”
“Yes, Sergeant,” I said automatically. As I backed away, the sergeant watched, glaring, fists on hips.
“Turn the car around,” said Ray.
“Not enough time.” I backed all the way to the parking lot.
“Oh, shit,” said Ray. “This is not gonna be a picnic.”
Neither of us had suspected that the army taught people how to fly helicopters the same way they taught them to march and shoot. But they did.
The 120 candidates in our class were known as WOCs—for “warrant-officer candidates.” A warrant officer is appointed, not commissioned, and specializes in a particular skill. There are electronic-technician warrants, supply warrants, and warrant-officer pilots, among many other specialties. The warrant ranks—WO-1, CW-2, CW-3, and CW-4—correspond to second lieutenant, first lieutenant, captain, and major, and warrant officers receive the same privileges and nearly the same pay as commissioned officers.
When I first heard of the warrant-officer-aviator program, I was a civilian and cared little what the rank meant. All I knew was that they flew.
The flight program was nine months long. It began with one month of preflight training and four months of primary flight training at Fort Wolters, followed by four more months of advanced flight training at Fort Rucker, Alabama. Preflight training was a harassment period designed to weed out candidates who lacked leadership potential. If you made it through that initiation, you got to the flight line and actually began to learn to fly. Then they tried to wash you out for mistakes or slowness in flight training, on top of the regular hassles in the warrant officer program.
Preflighters ran wherever they went, sat on the front edge of their chairs at the mess hall, and had to spit-shine the floors and keep precisely arranged clothing in their closets. We were allowed to leave the base only for two hours on Sunday, to go to church. It was the same kind of bullshit I had gone through in basic training, except worse.
The TAC sergeants assigned us to various slots in a student company: squad leaders, platoon leaders, first sergeant, platoon sergeants, and so on. One of us would be the student company commander. We would hold these positions for a week while the instructors tried to drive us crazy and graded our reactions. Unfortunately I was assigned to be the first student company commander.
Some seasoned army veterans had volunteered to be flight candidates. Others, like Ray and me, were just out of basic. To be fair, God should have put one of the experienced guys in the company-commander slot. But God, personified in the form of TAC Sergeant Wayne Malone, was seldom fair.
My first official act as the student CO was to get the company to the mess hall, four blocks away. Pretty simple stuff. Attention. Left face. Forward, march. Stop. Eat.
But Sergeant Malone, his fellows, and the senior classmen created obstacles. They stood directly in front of me, yelling in my face, while I tried to tell the company to come to attention.
“Well, candidate. Are you going to the mess hall or not?” screamed a senior classman whose nose almost touched mine.
“Yes, sir. If you’d get out of my way, I‘ll—”
“What?” Shock and disbelief. “Get out of your way!” Immediately my antagonist was joined by others.
“Candidate, you can’t talk to your superiors like that!”… “Get this mob to the mess hall before they close the place!”
“Yes, sir!” I could barely hear my own voice. “Company, attention!” I yelled. No one heard me over the screaming TAC sergeants and seniors.
“They can’t hear you,” yelled a senior, his breath blasting into my face.
I tried again. Still, no one could hear. I raised my arm straight up and back down and heard a student platoon leader yell, “Attention!” Command hand signals?
As soon as my classmates came to attention, some seniors leapt among the ranks, yelling,. “Did you hear him call attention, candidate? Then why did you come to attention, candidate? There are no arm signals for attention, candidate!” And so on. Eventually, because the mess hall would close, they allowed my commands to get through.
Then it was double time to the mess hall, and chin-ups and push-ups outside. Inside, we sat on the edge of our chairs and ate with our forks rising vertically from the plate and making a right angle to the mouth. Harassment is common to all officer-candidate schools, but what did it have to do with flying? The answer is that everybody in the army is a soldier first, his specialty second. It was going to be a long nine months.
During that first week, I had to get us to classes on time, see that our rooms were perfect, and God forbid anyone had a dirty belt buckle. I never broke down and cried during the hazing, as some did, but my reaction was still unsatisfactory. I returned the glaring screams of the hazers with glaring screams of my own. Resistance plus obvious inexperience got me a poor grade for my turn at command. Sergeant Malone, who kept a plaque in his office inscribed Woccus Eliminatus, would often whisper in my ear while I stood in formation, “You’ll never make it, candidate.” And when the four weeks of preflight ended, Malone had indeed put me on the list of twenty-eight candidates who would go before the elimination board.
I remember feeling sick in a dim hallway the night before I was to see the board. I had failed before I had even gotten a chance to sit in a helicopter. If they washed me out of flight school, I would have to serve my remaining three years of enlistment as an infantryman. The embarrassment was intolerable. Ray Ward and I had come through basic and advanced infantry training to get to flight school, and I had failed in the first month. Ray had encouraged me before the list was posted, telling me that I had really done well, that they weren’t going to eliminate me. I remembered Malone’s whispered threats. Also, a TAC officer announced that I was definitely not pilot material, based on his analysis of my handwriting. I knew I’d be on that list. I was.
Patience and I had decided that she and our one-month-old son, Jack, would live with my parents in Florida until I had made it past preflight. Then they would come out to Texas and live near the base. I almost called to tell her I had blown it. I couldn’t. I decided to wait until after the elimination board.
The next day, the board called in the twenty-eight doomed candidates one by one. By the time my name was called, after lunch, I was numb. I remember walking into the board room tingling with fear and energy. I sat on the edge of a chair in the middle of the room. A major looked at me for a few moments and then at the report in front of him. Seven other members of the board watched me closely. A stenographer’s fingers moved at a machine when the major spoke.