The cockpits of the little silver dots in front of the long white contrails are not manned only by the young and impractical. There is many an old fighter pilot still there; pilots who flew the Jugs and Mustangs and Spitfires and Messerschmitts of a long-ago war. Even the Sabre pilots and the Hog pilots of Korea are well-enough experienced to be called “old pilots,” and they are the flight commanders and the squadron commanders of the operational American squadrons in Europe today. But the percentage changes a little every day, and for the most part the line pilots of NATO fighter squadrons have not been personally involved in a hot war.
There is a subtle feeling that this is not good; that the front-line pilots are not as experienced as they should be. But the only difference that exists is that the pilots since Korea do not wear combat ribbons on their dress uniforms. Instead of firing on convoys filled with enemy troops, they fire on dummy convoys or make mock firing passes on NATO convoys in war games a few miles from the barbed-wire fence between East and West. And they spend hours on the gunnery ranges.
Our range is a small gathering of trees and grass and dust in the north of France, and in that gathering are set eight panels of canvas, each painted with a large black circle and set upright on a square frame. The panels stand in the sun and they wait.
I am one of the four fighter airplanes called Ricochet flight, and we come across the range on a spacing pass in close formation, echelon left. We fly a hundred feet above the dry earth, and each of the pilots of Ricochet flight is concentrating. Richochet Lead is concentrating on making this last turn smoothly, on holding his airspeed at 365 knots, on climbing a little to keep from scraping Ricochet Four into the next hill, on judging the point where he will break up and away from the other airplanes to establish a gunnery pattern for them to follow.
Ricochet Two is concentrating on flying as smoothly as he can, to give Three and Four the least amount of difficulty in flying their formation.
Ricochet Three flies watching only Lead and Two, intent on flying smoothly smoothly so that Four can stay in close to fly his position well.
And as Ricochet Four I think of staying in formation and of nothing else, so that the flight will look good to the range officer in his spotting tower. I am acutely conscious that every other airplane in the flight is doing his best to make the flying easy for me, and to thank them for their consideration I must fly so smoothly that the credit will be theirs. Each airplane flies lower than Ricochet Lead, and Four flies closer to the ground than any of them. But to take even a half second to glance at the ground is to be a poor wingman. A wingman has complete total unwavering unquestioning faith in his leader. If Ricochet Lead flies too low now, if he doesn’t pull the formation up a little to clear the hill, my airplane will be a sudden flying cloud of dirt and metal fragments and orange streamers of flame. But I trust the man who is flying as Ricochet Lead, and he inches the formation up to clear the hill and my airplane clears it as though it were a valley; I fly the position that I am supposed to fly and I trust the Leader.
As Ricochet Four, I am stacked back and down to the left so that I can see up across the formation and line the white helmets of the other three pilots. That is all I should see and all I care to see: three helmets in three airplanes in one straight line. No matter what the formation does, I will stay with it in my position, keeping the three white helmets lined on each other. The formation climbs, it dives, it banks hard away from me, it banks toward me; my life is dedicated to do whatever is necessary with the throttle and the control stick and the rudder pedals and the trim button to stay in position and keep the helmets in line.
We are over the target panels and the radio comes to life.
“Ricochet Lead breaking right.” The familiar voice that I know well; the voice, the words, the man, his family, his problems, his ambitions; is this instant the sudden flash of a swept silver wing pitching up and away to begin a pattern of gunnery practice, to develop a skill in a special brand of destruction. And I have only two helmets to line.
When Lead pitches away, Ricochet Two becomes the formation leader. His helmet flicks forward from watching the first airplane to look straight ahead, and he begins to count. One-thousand-one, one-thousand-two, one-thousand-break! With his own sudden flash of smooth metal wing, Ricochet Two disappears, and I have the luxuriously simple task of flying formation on only one airplane. Whose pilot is now looking straight ahead. One-thousand-one, one-thousand-two, one-thousand-break! The flash of wing happens to Three, only a few feet from my own wing, and I fly alone.
My head locks forward with Three’s break, and I count. One-thousand-one isn’t it a pretty day out today there are just a few clouds for a change and the targets will be easy to see. It is good to relax after that formation. Did a good job, though, Two and Three held it in well one-thousand-two good to have smooth air this morning. I won’t have to worry about bouncing around too much when I put the pipper on the target. Today will be a good day for high scores. Let’s see; sight is set and caged, I’ll check the gun switch later with the other switches what a lonely place for someone to have to bail out. Bet there’s no village for ten miles around one-thousand-break!
In my right glove the control stick slams hard to the right and back and the horizon twists out of sight. My G-suit inflates with hard air, pressing tightly into my legs and stomach. My helmet is heavy, but with a familiar heaviness that is not uncomfortable. The green hills pivot beneath me and I scan the brilliant blue sky to my right for the other airplanes in the pattern.
There they are. Ricochet Lead is a little swept dot two miles away turning onto base leg, almost ready to begin his first firing run. Two is a larger dot and level, following Lead by half a mile. Three is just now turning to follow Two; he is climbing and a thousand feet above me. And away down there is the clearing of the gunnery range and the tiny specks that are the strafing panels in the sun. I have all the time in the world.
Gun switch, beneath its red plastic guard, goes forward under my left glove to guns, sight is uncaged and set to zero angle of depression. The gunfire circuit breaker is pushed down under my right index finger. I twist the thick black throttle with my left glove to bring the computed range for the gunsight down to 1,000 feet. And my grip on the control stick changes.
With the gun switch off and the gunfire circuit breaker out, I fly formation holding the grip naturally, right index finger resting lightly on the red trigger at the front of the contoured plastic. Now, with guns ready to fire, the finger points straight ahead toward the instrument panel in an awkward but necessary position that keeps glove from touching trigger. The glove will stay off the trigger until I swing my airplane in a diving turn that brings the white dot on the sight reflector glass over the black dot painted on the strafing panel.
It is time to put the finishing touches on my attitude. I tell the audience behind my eyes that today I am going to shoot better than anyone else in this flight, that I will put at least 70 percent of my bullets into the black of the target, with the other 30 percent left to be scattered in the white cloth. I run through a picture of a good strafing attack in my mind; I see the black dot growing larger under the white dot of the gunsight, I see the sight-dot stay smoothly in the black, I feel the right index finger beginning to squeeze on the red trigger, I see the white now fully inside the black, I hear the muffled harmless sound of the guns firing their 50-caliber copperclad, and I see the powdered dust billow from behind the square of the target. A good pass.