My celebration of the aced formation checkride was short-lived. For the first time since we started, Steve Hart was having trouble. He just couldn't seem to hold the wing tip on the star. He began to sweat each ride, and we all helped and encouraged him as best we could, but his instructor would not recommend him for his checkride. Soon the 88 came, then the 99. Within weeks of graduationalmost a year since a glorious beginningSteve washed out. He said his goodbyes and was gone. It was as if our friend had crashed somewhere out there on the prairie. We mourned his departure as if he were dead. It wasn't fair, we lamented. Steve was a good flier. Maybe he wasn't cut out for formation flight, but he could have been a valuable asset to the Air Force as a bomber or transport pilot. It just wasn't fair.
Eventually the Air Force would wise up and discard the idea of training all pilots in a fighter preparation format. In 1993, UPI began to implement changes that divided students into fighter or transport tracks at the end of the T-37 phase. Those destined for fighter-type jobs would continue in the T-38, and those chosen for the "heavies" would continue their training in a transport-type trainer. But the change was twenty years too late for Steve.
In the last days the much-heralded assignment block arrived. The flight commander handed the list to me and asked me to write it on the training board. As I did so, my classmates stood behind me, examining each entry, murmuring and buzzing with excited speculation. Seven of the twenty-seven assignments were fighter jobs.
I had already picked mine out, an RF-4 to Shaw AFB, South Carolina. That was my dream assignmentto fly fast, low, and alone, with only a navigator for company, photographing hostile positions. The RF-4 was armed only with a camera. I wasn't keenly interested in dropping bombs. And I also reasoned that since the Alabama Air Guard flew RF-4s, I could build good credentials for an eventual job there. I listed the two single-seat fighters, the A-7 and F-106, as second and third, then the F-4s. The T-38 had made me completely forget about my original desire to fly the C-141.
The next day the picks were announced. The RF-4 had been taken by someone who ranked above me. I was going to Tucson to fly A-7s.
Willy got an F-4, Pete a C-130. But never again would I have such an enviable choice. It wasn't just a once-in-a-lifetime choice; it was a once-in-a-million-lives choice.
Eleanor took leave of her senses and consented to take up with an Air Force bum and follow him God knew where. We were married the day after graduation. But before we left for Arizona, I borrowed a hacksaw and sawed my new wings in two. I had a promise to keep.
While the year of UPT was one of the finest of my life, the one that followed ranked as one of the worst. The instructors in A-7 school were combat veterans, fresh from a war that frustrated them and thwarted their will to fight and win. They loathed a government that had mandated not just defeat but disaster. And as usual with military instructors, they did not relish coming home to teach.
It was not the happiest of environments in which to learn the fighter pilot's trade. At times I felt that the instructors were taking their frustrations out on me, and I suppose I invited such treatment. I wasn't tremendously interested in bombing and strafing, and I guess it showed.
A few weeks after we had settled in at Davis-Monthan, the phone rang; it was Willy calling from F-4 school up at Luke AFB in Phoenix. "Have you heard about Phil Molina?" he asked. I knew from his tone that Phil was dead. A member of our UPT class, Phil had gone home to fly C-130s in the Air Guard. He had been flying copilot when it happened. A blade from one of the early electric propellers had separated and sliced through the fuselage, cutting hydraulic lines and control cables. The craft had plummeted to the ground. Visions of Phil's grinning face immediately flashed across my memory. I wondered how many times I would have to endure this experience. But the worst was yet to come.
I made it through A-7 school and was assigned to the 358th Tactical Fighter Squadron, the Lobo Wolves, a proud unit with a great heritage of honor and courage. In the years that followed, I flew the A-7 across the southwestern deserts and the jungles of Thailand, bombing and strafing until I had had enough. I wasn't cut out to be a career fighter pilot. At my zenith I made the squadron Top Gun board one month, but finally I had to admit it. I had the right stuff, or else I wouldn't have been there. What I didn't have was the right heart. I put in my papers, and Ellie and I packed up and headed for a new life of which we knew little.
Within two years, after a couple of interim jobs and some graduate school, destiny led me to Jackson, Mississippi, for what appeared to be a long and thrilling career as a petroleum geologist. The hunt for oil had its own brand of excitement. And what's more, the Mississippi Air Guard had invited me to join them flying C-130s. Scott and Brad were born, and Ellie and I thought we had finally found our place in the sun.
On January 19, 1982, I sat down and opened the evening newspaper. I stared in horror and disbelief at the photographs of the four Thunderbird pilots who had crashed while performing a practice air show maneuver in the Nevada desert. The entire diamond formation had slammed into the ground, following the leader whose flight controls, it was later determined, had malfunctioned. The four dead included Captain Willy Mays, Thunderbird Two, from Ripley, Tennessee.
For days I was cast into that vaporous domain where cries of "why?" and "what if?" continually strafe and dive-bomb you. It's a feeling painfully familiar to fliers when they lose one of their own. I sat idly at my desk in the office, staring out the window, useless to anyone. And still it was not to be the last time I would have to deal with such a loss.
The time I spent flying C-130s was some of the best years of my flying career. I truly had the best of both worlds: an interesting, challenging, well-paying job and an open opportunity to fly almost whenever I wished. But in the mid-1980s the oil business fell on hard times, and I took on the title of consulting geologist, which was a smoke screen for unemployed geologist. I jumped from retainer to retainer, never having more than a year or two of security, and supplemented my income by flying heavily with the Guard.
I began to take all the training courses and extra duty the Guard and Air Force could offer. During one such period while I was TDY at Maxwell Air Force Base, Montgomery, Alabama, I suddenly confronted my past in an incredible encounter. I was walking down a sidewalk near the Air University when a sergeant saluted me and stopped.
"Wait," he said, closely examining my name tag. "Do you remember me, sir?" I didn't. He extended his hand. "I'm Mike Johnsonthe guy you sent half your wings to!"
I was awestruck. It had been years since I sawed the wings. I hadn't thought of him in a long time. We talked and caught up with one another's lives. It was a warm feelingalmost like a family reunion. This man had never been able even to approach the fulfillment of the wing, yet he had understood what it meant to me. He had received the half wings; they had been forwarded to him in Viet Nam. And to that day, they were proudly mounted in a display case in his den.
I'll never forget this man who had made such a profound difference in my life. I've saluted him many times with a snappy aileron roll, up high where almost no one notices.
We all loved the C-130 beyond comprehension. We flew the "Hercs" down low over the catfish and cotton farms, in formation. On Tuesday and Thursday evenings motorists on Interstate 20 would marvel at the sight of our three-ship formations crossing at what must have seemed treetop level, giving birth to billowing parachutes on Bull Run Drop Zone near Edwards. We practiced landings on short runways, and flew to places all over the countryand a few out of the countryin support of other active and reserve units. It was the ultimate flying club.