"GUNS, GUNS, GUNS."
Dave knew far more than I about aerodynamics, flight theory, and suchhe had an aerospace engineering degreebut he simply had no experience in air combat science. He rolled out of his breaking turn, and after a minute of silent straight flight, he keyed his radio.
"How'd you do that?"
Later, over Mountain Dew, I explained it, as he nodded in pensive analysis.
A couple of years later, Dave had succeeded in finding his coveted fighter job: an F-106. The '106, or "six pack," was said to be the Cadillac of the fighters, definitely the prettiest fighter plane ever made, and unlike the ponderous brown and green tactical fighter that I flew, it was designed to defend the homeland against bomber attack.
Later in its years, during dissimilar air combat training, the Six proved to be very adept at preying on other fighters, as well. This was Dave's big break, and he proceeded to make up for lost time.
We compared notes often. His mission and mine were acutely different. Dave was a liberal political thinker. The politics and tactics of the recently ended Viet Nam war was always a hot subject with us, and such discussions led him to remark that he could never drop bombs on folks, innocent or not. But he loved to vow, with a squinty-eyed grinas if it would be great funthat if a Soviet bomber ever threatened his mother or anyone else's, he wouldn't hesitate to "hose the sons-a-bitches down."
Once again, we were home on leave when I called him one morning and explained that I was flying my brother to Jasper and would return to attack the VOR at eleven o'clock. The VOR was an unmanned navigation station with a distinctive antenna that resembled a great inverted ice cream cone. It was a challenge to air combat, of course. No more needed to be said. But he allowed as how he planned to go water skiing and had no time for such games. I knew it was a smoke screen.
At about 10:45 a.m. as I approached Lake Tuscaloosa I tuned my radio to the control tower frequency and, sure enough, heard Grumman 5713L receive takeoff clearance. The cork had been sucked under, as I suspected. My juices started to flow. I retuned my radio to 122.75, the civil air-to-air common frequency, and dropped down low. I maneuvered to approach the station from the east. He wouldn't expect that, since the route down from Jasper was from the north. I began weaving left and right, with each turn "checking six": looking behind for signs of Dave's blue Yankee. He was not to be seen; the plan was working.
With the target almost in sight, it seemed I had a clear shot. Then with about a mile left and a good head of speed, I popped up to a thousand feet and began a left roll to bring my nose to bear on the station. As I rolled out in a shallow dive, my headphones erupted with his triumphant shouts.
"GUNS, GUNS, GUNS, YOU TURKEY!"
It was I who had taken the bait. Expecting him, and still I had been ambushed. It was indeed a turkey shoot. I needed to get back into this fight quickly, needed to salvage some dignity. I ignored his guns call and pulled up, broke hard and checked six. There was Dave about a thousand feet back, his nose pulling a deadly lead on me. I had fallen for the oldest trick in the proverbial book, allowing him to attack from out of the sun. I was aghast at my stupidity. But I pressed the fight, turning, breaking, rolling, yo-yoing to gain an inside advantage, all to no avail. He wouldn't be shaken loose. Then I began to realize that the playing field was more than even. Dave now thoroughly understood fighter tactics and spiced his performance with application of a superior understanding of his Yankee's aerodynamic characteristics. Countering my every maneuver, he zoomed higher, dove faster, and turned fighter than I could. I simply couldn't match him.
Cleanly whipped, I finally declared Mountain Dew time, and we recovered in a formation overhead pattern, to the delight of the weekend airport bums. We taxied the two petite Grummans onto the ramp and shut down, and Dave waited gleefully while I jumped out of the cockpit and vaulted over the leading edge of the wing, as Grumman pilots are disposed to do. Dave leaned against his Yankee with a smirky grin looking like the cartoon coyote gorged on roadrunner. We exchanged a few irrelevant clipped sentences, each waiting for the other to make the first comment about the fight. But then he unlatched his cowling and showed me the new 150 horsepower engine that had replaced the stock 108 horsepower, which is of course what I had. He was charitable enough to attribute his performance to the extra power, but I knew that I would never be equal to his skills, engines aside.
The years went by, and we all left the active duty Air Force. Gene eventually landed his dream job with Delta Airlines, and Dave became an instant Boeing 737 captain with an upstart no-frills airline called People Express (PEX). He joined a Guard unit but served only a couple of years.
Although he was flying his beloved F-106, Dave was unhappy in the New Jersey Air Guard. I never knew exactly why. He complained of the same things that he did on active duty ("too much paperwork, too much bullshit"), which puzzled me. I was in a Guard unit also and was very happy with it. I knew it was radically different from the active Air Force. He just didn't fit the military mold, I figured. But Dave had always been profoundly different, a self-proclaimed marcher to a different drummer.
Finally one day he up and quit the Guard. His story was classically DeRamus. He had flown his Yankee into Atlantic City Airport and called the Guard Base, asking them to come over from their side of the field and pick him up, as they usually did. But he waited for an hour, and becoming impatient, he impulsively decided to walk over to the personnel office, which was nearby, and file separation papers. He then crawled back into the Yankee and left the military forever.
He made the papers and TV when he flew PEX's inaugural flight into Birmingham. It was a godsend for him. He could then live in Birmingham and commute to his base in Newark, and the publicity seemed to him a warm invitation to come home to the South and settle. And despite his despondency about his new employer, Continental Airlines, which acquired PEX, he seemed to be happier than he ever had been. But something was happening to him.
I called him and learned that he had just gotten over a bout with pneumonia and was on extended sick leave from the airline. But he assured me that he was doing well and in fact welcomed the respite as a chance to begin writing a book. The book would be about flying, of course, a techno-thriller about a Russian bomber pilot. It was something he had been inspired to do after he had met Victor Belenko, the heralded Soviet pilot who had defected in a MiG-25 several years earlier.
I didn't think too much of the news of his illness but was a bit curious. He was not a sickly sort of person. But as the months went by, Dave didn't go back to work. He reassured me. "I'm doing well financially. I've saved quite a bit of money and my Loss of License Insurance is paying off. I'm in no hurry to go back to that rat race. The doc wants me to just take it easy for a while." Something was terribly wrong.
Then there was another stay in the hospital with a collapsed lung. I decided to go see him after he got out. But on my way up to Birmingham I stopped in Tuscaloosa and invited a friend to go along for the flight. I would introduce him to Dave, and the three of us would have lunch. When I saw Dave I regretted bringing the friend. He had lost weight. Curiously, his hair appeared to have grown out. I could see through his facade that he was ill. And with the stranger present he would be reluctant to talk candidly about his condition.
Yet there in that last visit with him, he remained the cocky overflowing DeRamus that he had always been: still poking fun at the military establishment; still talking of vast dreams; still adamant that he, Gene, and I would somehow come up with $100,000 each and buy Glassair IIIs to make a formation aerobatic air show team. I wanted to believe it. It would have been the ultimate of dreams come true.