The B-4 bag is heavy in the right hand. Dust on shined shoes. Hot air doesn’t cool as I move through it. Black rubber heels on dusty asphalt. Away, a lone jet trainer heads for the runway. Solo. I am a long way from Primary Flight School. A long way from the chug of a T-28’s butter-paddle propeller. And a long way still from the silver wings above the left breast pocket. Where are the hills? Where is the green? The cool air? In Primary Flight School. This is Texas. This is Basic.
“. . . program will require hard work . . .” says the wing commander.
“. . . and you’d best stay sharp in my squadron . . .” says the squadron commander.
“This is your barracks,” says the whitegloves. “There are T-33 pilot’s handbooks in every room. Learn the emergency procedures. All of them. You will be asked. Another whitegloves will be around later to answer questions.”
Questions.
“Inspections every Saturday?”
“Are the classes tough?”
“What is the airplane like?”
“When do we fly?”
A cold night in a white-collar bed. Cold twinkle of familiar stars through the window. Talk in the dark barracks.
“Just think, boy, jets at last!”
“So it’s tough. They’ll have to throw me out. I’ll never quit because it’s hard.”
“. . . airspeed down final with the gun bay doors open is one twenty plus fuel plus ten, right?”
“Let’s see, Johnny, is that ‘climb to twenty-five thousand and rock wings’? Twenty-five thousand feet! Man, we’re flying JETS!”
“Never thought I’d make it to Basic. We’ve come a long way from Preflight . . .”
Behind the quiet talk is the roar of night-flying turbines as the upper class learns, and the flash of landing lights bright for an instant on the wall opposite my open window.
Tenuous sleep. Upperclass voices by the window as they return in the night. “I never saw that before! He only had ninety-five percent and his tailpipe was bright red . . . really red!”
“. . . so then Mobile told me to climb in Sector One to thirty thousand feet. I couldn’t even find the field, let alone Sector One . . .”
My glowing Air Force watch says 0300. Strange dreams. The beautiful blonde looks up at me. She asks a question. “What’s your airspeed turning base leg with three hundred and fifty gallons of fuel on board?” A crowded and fantastically complex instrument panel, with a huge altimeter pointing to 30,000. Helmets with visors, red-topped ejection seats, instruments, instruments.
Sleep soaks away into the pillow and the night is still and dark. What do I do with a zero loadmeter reading? Battery off . . . no . . . battery on . . . nono . . . “activate electrical device” . . . Outside, the green beam and the split white beam of the beacon on the control tower go round and round and round.
But once again the days pass and I learn. I am concerned with ground schools and lectures; with first flights in the T-33; and after ten hours aloft with an instructor in the back seat, with flying it alone. Then with instruments and precise control of an airplane in any weather. With formation. With navigation.
It would all be a great deal of fun if I knew for certain that I would successfully finish Basic Training and wear at last the silver wings. But when instrument flying is new, it is difficult, and my class that numbered 112 in Preflight is now cut to 63. None have been killed in airplane crashes, none have bailed out or ejected from an airplane. For one reason or another, for academic or military or flying deficiencies, or sometimes just because he has had enough of the tightly-controlled routine, a cadet will pack his B-4 bag one evening and disappear into the giant that is the Air Force.
I had expected some not to finish the program, but I had expected them to fail in a violent sheet of flame or in a bright spinning cloud of fragments of a midair collision.
There are near-misses. I am flying as Lead in a four-ship flight of T-33’s. With 375 knots and a clear sky overhead, I press the control stick back to begin a loop. Our airplanes are just passing the vertical, noses high in the blue sky, when a sudden flash of blurred silver streaks across our path, and is gone. I finish the loop, wingmen faithfully watching only my airplane and working hard to stay in their positions, and twist in my seat to see the airplane that nearly took all four of us out of the sky. But it is gone as surely and as completely as if it had never been. There had not been time for reaction or fear or where did he come from. There had simply been a silver flash ahead of me in the sky. I think about it for a moment and begin another loop.
A few weeks later it happened to a lowerclass cadet, practicing acrobatics alone at 20,000 feet. “I was on top of a Cuban Eight, just starting down, when I felt a little thud. When I rolled out, I saw that my right tiptank was gone and that the end of the wing was pretty well shredded. I thought I’d better come back home.”
He didn’t even see the flash of the airplane that hit him. After he had landed and told what had happened, the base settled down to wait for the other airplane. In a little more than an hour, one airplane of all the airplanes on mobile control’s list of takeoffs failed to have an hour written in the column marked “Return.” Search airplanes went up arrowing through the dust like swift efficient robots seeking a fallen member of the clan. The darkness fell, and the robots found nothing.
The base was quiet and held its breath. Cadet dining halls were still, during the evening meal. Not everyone is home tonight. Pass the salt please, Johnny. The clink of stamped steel forks on mass-fired pottery. I hear it was an upperclassman in the other squadron. Muted clinks, voices low. Across the room, a smile. He should be calling in any minute now. Anybody want some more milk? You can’t kill an upperclassman.
The next day, around the square olive-drab briefing tables in the flight shack, we got the official word. You can kill an upperclassman. Let’s look around, gentlemen; remember that there are sixty airplanes from this base alone in the sky during the day. You’re not bomber pilots here, keep that head on a swivel and never stop looking around.
And we briefed and flew our next mission.
Then, suddenly, we had made it. A long early morning, a crisp formation of the lower class in review as we stand at parade rest, a sixteen-ship flyby, a speech by a general and by the base commander.
They return my salute, shake my hand, present me a cold set of small wings that flash a tiny beam of silver. I made it all the way through. Alive. Then there are orders to advanced flying training and the glory-soaked number that goes F-84F. I am a pilot. A rated Air Force pilot. A fighter pilot.
The German night is full around me, and in my soft earphones is solid hard static from the blue fire that sluices across the windscreen and across the low-frequency antenna in the belly of my airplane. The slim needle of the radiocompass is becoming more and more excited, jerking to the right, always to the right of course; trembling for a second there, swinging back toward Spangdahlem behind me, jerking again toward my right wingtip. I am glad again for the TACAN.
The air is still and smooth as velvet glass, but I tighten again my safety belt and shoulder harness and turn up the cockpit lights. Bright light, they like to say in the ground schools, destroys night vision. Tonight it does not make any difference, for there is nothing to see outside the plexiglass, and the bright light makes it easier to read the instruments. And in the brightness I will not be blinded by lightning. I am strapped in, my gloves are on, my helmet chin strap is fastened, my flight jacket is zipped, my boots are firm and comfortable. I am ready for whatever the weather has to offer me. For a moment I feel as if I should push the gun switch to guns, but it is an irrational fleeting thought. I check again the defroster on, pitot heat on, engine screens retracted. Come and get me, storm. But the air is still and smooth; I have minute after minute of valuable weather time ticking away, adding to the requirement for an advanced instrument rating.