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.
Then, in 1986, an old dream was suddenly resurrected. On a Saturday UTA, Colonel Bailey asked for a show of hands from all of us who wanted to switch to C-141s. Mine was one of the few that went up. But despite the lack of enthusiasm from the crews, the announcement was made public. Senator Stennis, seeking more jobs for his constituents, threw some heavy political weight around and made us give up our almost new C-130s to become the first Air Guard unit to be equipped with the C-141B Starlifter. I had come full circle at last.
The '141 was a big four-engine jet transport with a worldwide strategic airlift mission. Suddenly there was no more low-level flying, no air drops, no formation flying, no short runways, and very few nice weekend cross-country trips. Bull Run DZ was shut down.
Although the jets were beautiful and sported a modern, streamlined appearance, they were oldolder than some of those who were flying them. They were maintenance headaches, and the transition to our new global mission was not easy for the crews. Suddenly it wasn't a very suitable part-time pursuit anymore. An operational trip to Europe and back took a minimum of four days. It was tough for most guys to get off from their jobs for that amount of time. Great changes began to develop among us. Those who couldn't do it dropped out. Those who took their place had jobs that were more flexible. Our ranks began to swell with airline pilots and self-employed people. Some didn't have jobsGuard bums, we called them. They volunteered for all the flying that the scheduler would give them and made a decent living at it.
Again I went back on active duty, this time for six weeks to check out in the Starlifter. It was an opportune time, as I was again between retainers. The course was designed as a refresher for people who had previously been qualified in the Starlifter but who had been in a desk job or some other pursuit that had taken them out of the cockpit. The 'short course' wasn't intended to check out pilots who had never flown the C-141there was a twelve- week course for that purposebut the Guard had persuaded the Air Force that we could hack it. After all, the C-130, to which we were so accustomed, was, like the C-141, a Lockheed product. There shouldn't be too much difference. But in fact there were tremendous differences, we would discover.
My stick partner and longtime friend Hugh Stevens was the argumentative sort. A computer programmer by trade, he always kept one eye scrutinizing detail, and when I displayed disrespect for certain minutiae, Hugh mounted an intensive campaign to educate me. It was not uncommon for Hugh to burst into my room, through the connecting kitchenette, armed with a 'Dash-l,' gleefully documenting some minute fact that had been in dispute and about which I had ceased to care. During the long debriefings after our simulator flights, Hugh invariably engaged the instructors in protracted discourses over some morsel of flying knowledge, while I sat back and yawned, fidgeted, and tried unsuccessfully to subvert the debates. For six weeks he dogged and niggled me unmercifully, but finally we graduated and happily returned to Jackson to become the pioneers of a new concept of strategic airlift in the militia. And as the oil business grew steadily worse, I found myself increasingly plying the world's skyscapes in the big jets to make ends meet.
In 1989, I gave up on the oil business and joined United Airlines, commuting to Chicago to fly Boeing 727s. My life was completely dominated by airplanes at that pointmaybe too many. I had to keep up with, and devote time to, three aircraft: the C-141, the 727, and my own Grumman AA-5.
By then I had spent fifteen years 'flying the line' for Uncle Sam. Had I still been on active duty, maybe as much as half of that time would have been spent flying a desk. Young Air Force pilots often complained of the incessant pressure to 'broaden' one's career. Most of them wanted nothing else but to fly, to be the best they possibly could, maybe to command a squadron and pass their knowledge on to the next generation. It seemed rational, but the Air Force continued to insist that all pilots become managers, bean counters, and upwardmoving professional administrators.
It has been changing more in favor of pilots recently, but I remember when a visiting general was speaking at Officer's Call at Altus Air Force Base while I was in C-141 school. He was asked why the Air Force couldn't establish a career track for those who wanted exclusively to fly for twenty years.
'Oh, but we have' was his response. 'That career track you speak of is called the Air Force Reserve and Air National Guard.'
I'm exceedingly glad that reserve component funding came from Capitol Hill and not from the Pentagon. Otherwise the militia would have been neglected stepchildren. As it was, pork barrel politics worked in our favor. The politicians whom we sent to Washington were big on the Guard. 'Nothin's too good for my boys down thea. I want 'em to have the best tanks and arrowplanes money c'n buy.' And for the most part, we got them. Life was good.
Our unit, in particular, had done well. We were the 172nd Military Airlift Group, Mississippi Air Guard' The Wings of the Deep South' we'd called ourselves. We had been the first militia unit back in the early 1980s to get brand new 'H' model C-130s; the first such unit to respond to the Hurricane Hugo devastation; the first into earthquakeravaged Soviet Armenia; the first of any Guard or Reserve unit to plunge into Operation Just Causethe liberation of Panama; and the first unit in the entire history of American airpower to log twenty-five years of accident-free flying. Our unit drew its strength from a vast population of Mississippians to whom the slogan 'Duty, Honor, Country' was much more than just poetic words uttered from the lips of a fading old soldier. Mississippians had never heard that 'patriotism' was supposed to be an outdated and unfashionable thing. And it was no secret that the Mississippi Air Guard was a proud, shining star over a state that abounded in problems both real and imagined. Mississippians had invested their trust and pride in us, and we carried the banner of the Magnolia Militia the world over. Even foreign radar controllers recognized the call sign 'Ruler.' One thickly accented German controller had once asked me on a congested frequency, 'Rula Eight Fife, are you from Mizzizzippi?'
'Citizen Airmen' the recruiting pitches called us. It meant that you held a regular job (maybe), or you were a student, using the Guard to work your way through college (a smart idea), or maybe your wife worked while you bummed it at the Guard Base. Whatever you did, at least once a week you had about an hour after work to make the transition from whatever job you normally toiled at, to the cockpit of a military jet. You had to give Uncle Sam
