burned through my memory. It was the red-haired kid who was a couple of classes behind us. I had shot the breeze with him in the break room. He was the quintessential kid next dooralways smiling, always talking of home. And now he was dead. The Tweet, spinning out of control, had slammed into a wheat field. The red-haired kid had stayed with it too long. He had ejected too late. His body was found still strapped to the ejection seat.
For the next few days our mood was somber, and then the pressures of the program compelled us to look ahead and concentrate on the task at hand. But violent death would strike our band eventuallywe knew it. We just didn't talk about it.
By T-38 midphase I was reaching my stride. On my first formation flight I discovered one of flying's greatest joysto waltz the sky inches from another aircraft. I reveled in the challenge of absolute concentration and was truly at home on the wing. I dreamed of becoming a Thunderbird, flying one of the beautifully painted jets in the famous diamond formation, thundering across an azure sky; crowds looking up, shading their eyes in unbelieving awe. I don't know what it is that makes pilots want to impress surface dwellers with their thundering prowessjust ego, I guess. But I know that any pilot who doesn't have such a desire is probably minimally skilled anyway. And this 'shine-ass' tendency, as it's known, is the torment of commanders, who work hard to suppress it and to make examples of those who succumb to it. Yet a chosen few have both the means and the license to bathe crowds in thunder, to wash them with waves of wild delight and wonder. I should have been one of them. But Willy Mays was the one destined for Thunderbird blue.
We took our formation flight checkride together, he with a check pilot in his jet, me with an examiner in mine. I knew he was good, and I set about to bring it out. We were flying a standard USAF formation. I was leading and Willy was on my left side, or left wing. No matter what I didwhether I climbed, descended, or turnedhe stayed in his position, which was slightly low and slightly behind. From his vantage point, my left wing tip was superimposed on the circle-and-star symbol painted on my air intake. Keeping the wing tip on that star was his sole objective.
And there he sat, as if glued to some invisible bar between us, making us one instead of two, his wing tip only three feet out and behind mine. He was doing well, and I decided to challenge him. The signal for directing the wingman to change positions to the other side of the leader is a quick wing dip by the leader to the opposite side. To do this, the wingman reduces power very slightly and gently slips under and across to the opposite wing. But we had never been taught to do this except in level flight. We were in a 45 degree left bank when I swallowed hard and gave him the signal. I watched as Willy first hesitated, then slowly dropped low and crossed to the high side of the formation, resuming a perfect position on the right side. I rolled into a steep right bank and signaled him again to cross back to the left side. He was good, damn good. I challenged him again later, after signaling him to fall back into extended trail, by immediately starting a four-G loop. As soon as he had radioed that he was in his position 2,000 feet behind me, I jerked the stick back, pulled the T-38's long nose straight up, and continued the pull over the top into a giant 600-mile-per-hour loop. It was standard practice to give the wingman a little breather before starting such maneuvering, but again, I knew Willy could hack it.
Then it was his turn to lead, and I reaped what I had sown. I hung tight on the wing and stayed solid through the maneuvers. Then he signaled me back to extended trail. I took the spacing and settled back to follow him through the enormous loops. At one point during an almost vertical climb his jet entered a supercooled layer of air and began to 'conn.' It was as if a great white tentacle were reaching out from his tailpipes and racing toward me. I had the wild feeling that Willy had impossibly and instantly reversed his course and was screaming straight at me. I flinched when the vapors hit. No drug could ever duplicate the euphoria of the spectacle. It was no trivial expression that the words 'naturally high,' a slogan concocted by Willy Mays, were embroidered on our class patches.
We finished the ride and climbed onto the crew bus, soaked with sweat in midwinter, as our check pilots wondered aloud why we hated each other. But it wasn't so. We grinned at one another. And we both passed with high marks.
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
