validating flight test objectives. Heady stuff for a recent college graduate and the next best thing to being in the cockpit. This experience would serve me well later when I sat with the backroom guys and reviewed data on our space missions. At a glance I learned to identify the essentials and put the story together.
The months passed rapidly, and then it was time to pack up and report to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, for preflight training. As of March 1955, I was now on active duty and assigned to pilot class 56M.
Other than St. Louis, I had never been west of the Mississippi River, and I soaked in the scenery as I drove through western Missouri and down into Oklahoma. My vision of Texas was crushed when I crossed the Red River. I had been expecting the sandy desert, cactus, and rattlesnakes of the movies, but I saw rolling hills starting to green up. I was sure that would change as I neared San Antonio.
I was wrong. This wasn’t the lonesome prairie, the Texas of parched land and skeletal oil rigs. A scenic river wound its way through San Antonio, and the blend of Mexican and western culture gave the city a gentle and festive character. I was a willing believer in Texas charm and hospitality as I drove through the gates of Lackland Air Force Base. There I would have twelve weeks of preflight training, a good part of which taught you confidence by putting you through some pretty physically demanding exercises out in the boonies. I also learned the essence of leadership through being given responsibility for raw recruits who were wearing a uniform for the first time and were badly in need of understanding why the military demands order in everything from the state of your locker to the crispness of a salute, instant compliance with commands, and other basic military cultural imperatives. As the song puts it, “by your pupils you’ll be taught.” It would take some twelve weeks for them to transform me from college student to officer, one hell of a speedy transition. It was the NCOs (noncommissioned officers) who taught me the basics— and my respect for the sergeants on the line grew with every passing year.
My travels in the Air Force next took me to Spence Air Base in Moultrie, Georgia, where Jack Coleman, my primary flight instructor, opened the world of flight for me and taught me much more. In the hot steamy air over southern Georgia he tested my skills, but in the briefing rooms and on the ramp he taught teamwork and the belief that “There is no such thing as good enough. You, your team, and your equipment must be the best. That is how you will win victories.” The day he turned me loose to solo, he taught me that the teacher’s role is to instill the confidence to fly at the edge of peak performance. Your primary flight instructor is the man you never forget. Coleman’s lessons helped me in my years at Mission Control. I could empathize with what the controllers felt during the brutally demanding debriefings after a mission and tactfully handle the one-on-one critiques after a simulation. He taught me, by example, how to train my controllers, build their confidence, and turn them loose when they were ready. Coleman also gave me an appreciation of the fundamental importance of teamwork and mutual trust among team members.
Of course, some lessons can only be experienced, not taught. One of these is dealing with fear, which comes to every pilot, like a bolt from the blue. Fliers and fighters alike have referred to this as looking into the eye of the tiger. I looked into mine one night on my first solo cross-country flight, over the blackness of Georgia’s Okefenokee swampland.
I had turned to a new course over the town of Alma and looked down to change my radio frequency. Moments later, when I raised my eyes, the lights of the town seemed to fill the cockpit like tiny diamonds. For a few seconds I was mesmerized, then confused, as the sound of my engine and my rapidly accelerating aircraft snapped me out of my reverie.
In whatever part of my brain was still working, I put it together: I had rolled upside down over the city and was diving, inverted, toward the heart of Alma. I rolled visually away from the lights, into total darkness, all sounds diminishing as I approached a stall. Fighting vertigo, I recovered and flew on instruments, not trusting my senses, all the way back to base.
The next night, when it was time for my second solo cross-country, fear was in my bones like a winter chill. I realized it was either conquer the fear and fly, or wash out of training. I delayed going to my aircraft, chain-smoking cigarettes. Then someone started testing the flight line loudspeakers for the Saturday parade. The music of John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” soaked into the Ready Room and something almost mystical happened.
My desire to fly overcame my fear. I picked up my parachute and walked to my plane and aced my second night solo flight. From that day forward, whenever I found myself looking into the eye of a tiger, the cadence of “Stars and Stripes Forever”—if only in my head—got me through it. I have a record and tape collection of over twenty versions of the march. It became a key element of my way of life.
My training next took me into jets and an assignment farther west in Texas at Laughlin Air Force Base. Flight training is partly about the fear of failing, and partly about firsts. The top graduates got the best assignments. I wanted to fly the hottest fighter in the Air Force—the F-86 Sabre. In order to get the chance to fly fighters I had to be the best. To be the best I had to go all-out, reach into myself for every resource I had to meet the challenge. In the process I determined what my real capacity was and discovered that for much of my life I had just been coasting along.
My competition for the Sabre assignment was First Lieutenant Anthony (Zeke) Zielinski, who had made his way through the ranks. He had won the wings of a navigator as a sergeant flying over Korea in B-29s and was described as a natural-born pilot.
The competition between us extended to the social, as he tried to cut in on the girl I was dating. We got our pilot wings, graduated with identical scores, and both qualified for the Sabre. Later I aced him, however, for I would marry a wonderful Texas girl, Marta Cadena, whom Zeke also wanted to date. Marta pinned the wings on my chest. Zeke, a true wingman, would be my best man.
Zeke and I headed to Nellis AFB, near Las Vegas, to fly the world’s best and fastest fighter aircraft. Six weeks after I arrived at Nellis I climbed into the cockpit of an F-86H Sabre. After a takeoff and climb-out that felt like it would never stop, I started getting ahead of the power curve, just a bit, with this beautifully maneuverable airplane. An instructor flying alongside me put me through the flight. We landed, debriefed and refueled, then took off again and climbed to 35,000 feet, did some steep turns and a bit of trail formation. At this point my instructor told me to perform a split-S, roll out into a 45-degree dive, and call out the readings on the Mach meter. (The Mach meters in those days didn’t go a hell of a lot higher than Mach 1—the speed of sound.) I rolled inverted, picked up the dive angle, and was quickly at .95 Mach, where the nose wanted to pitch up. The instructor then told me to trim out the pitch-up stick force and comment on the aileron forces. Wing heaviness increased and the Mach meter rose to 1.0 and hung there. I had the feeling that I was skiing down a steep mountain bowl, pushing a lot of powder, and that it was impossible to go any faster. I throttled back, recovered, and followed the instructor’s lead in a high- speed spiral descent. It took me a moment to realize that I had just broken the sound barrier, a big deal with the airplanes we had in the 1950s.
But that was the bright and shiny side of military life. While I was at Nellis I broke my left wrist in a stupid accident (with the help of a goodly amount of beer) and managed to get myself grounded on September 6, 1956. This gave me ample time for reflection, during which I realized I was in love with the girl from Texas who had pinned on my wings. Since leaving Texas, where Marta and I had first met and started to date, I dated a few other girls but none of them measured up to Marta. I still had her phone number and the good sense to call her. She was still interested so I started to commute between Nellis and Marta’s home in Texas. The weeks passed too quickly and soon my duty at Nellis was over.
Upon completion of advanced training at Nellis, Zeke and I were stationed at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Myrtle Beach was a base in name only, parts of it still under construction. The only good part of the deal was that eventually we would have shiny new (they were still on the production line when I reported in) F-100 Super Sabres to fly. During long-distance phone conversations, Marta could always raise my morale thanks to her good humor and indomitable spirit. I wanted her to meet my family, so she came to Toledo during my Christmas leave. On Christmas Eve I asked Marta to marry me. We set the date for April 27 of the following year at Eagle Pass, Texas, where we had first met—fifty miles from Laughlin AFB but a commute I never minded making! It was one year to the date she had pinned on my wings. It started to snow as we left the chapel where I had proposed and we started to sing Christmas carols, wishing the magic of the moment would go on forever. We were on top of the world, and there was no question that whatever we faced in the future, we would face it together, and we would emerge victorious.
In courting Marta, I had been at a serious disadvantage, unable to communicate with her mother, Pura, who spoke only Spanish. Marta’s parents were born in Mexico and came to the United States after the revolution of
