Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign

Similar principles applied in bombing runs: just after a pilot released his bombs, he put both hands on the stick and pulled it back into his lap. He didn’t have to worry about over-geeing the aircraft, because the Thud was so solid, it didn’t seem to mind ten or twelve Gs. But if he didn’t immediately begin the recovery, he was sure to hit the ground.

Early F-105s had two seriously bad habits: they had a tendency to blow up in the air; and if the pilot wasn’t alert, they slammed into the ground.

They blew up because of a design problem. At times fuel got trapped between the hot section of the engine and the fuselage. After a while, a fire got going back there, which in time would melt through hydraulic lines (no flight controls then) or a fuel cell (a small fire instantly became a very big fire and the pilot was the marshmallow).

They hit the ground because of mistakes in Air Force tactics. In the erroneous belief that one would avoid enemy defenses that way, tactics in those days emphasized flying at low level; but the Thud, being slow to pull out on a dive-bomb pass, needed more air under it than those tactics wanted to give it.

Still, the pilots came to love flying the F-105, especially after the design and tactical flaws were fixed. It was an honest aircraft; a pilot loves a jet that obeys his commands, and a jet that makes it easier to put the bombs on target. And if he wanted to strafe a target, he had an M-61 Gatling gun. With that, much of the time, he could expect to put every round through the target, for a 100 percent score. Today, many of the attributes of the F-105— such as stability and accuracy — are found in the A-10. On the other hand, the A-10 turns, but it won’t go fast. All things being equal, fighter pilots will tell you, “speed is life.”

? Horner had a good tour at Seymour Johnson. The 335th was a fine squadron, and there was a lot of excitement with firepower demonstrations and plans to attack Cuba — in those days there was well-justified fear that the Russians would install nuclear missiles on the island. On the other hand, the otherwise joyous squadron parties and deployments around the world were tempered by the F-105’s bad habits, blowing up in the air or slamming into the ground, either of which meant somebody had to erase a name off the pilot board, empty a locker, and return the pilot’s effects to his widow or parents.

That happened when Horner’s flight commander “bit it”—another one of those expressions people use when they don’t want to face the reality— when he flew into the water on the gunnery range off the coast of North Carolina. Parts of his body were recovered, and then came the ceremony of sitting with the grieving widow, taking care of the children, helping arrange for the funeral, and attending the memorial ceremony, with its missing-man flyby… By now, all this was a familiar routine for Chuck Horner, except this time it all hit him on the head with a powerful new insight.

At that funeral, I guess I was beginning to grow up; for I started to notice something about our warrior culture that I hadn’t really noticed before: the pain and agony of the widow.

Hey, fighter pilots are tough. When one of us died, we felt sad, got drunk, and made jokes, in an effort to laugh in the face of our own deaths. But without our knowing it, it was our wives who really suffered. Air Force wives are indoctrinated from the get-go, “Don’t make a big issue over a death. Don’t make a thing about the loss. Cover it over. Don’t get your own pilot husband upset. He needs to be alert and to concentrate when he’s flying his six-hundred-mile-an-hour jet.” And they do cover it over. Meanwhile, the wives, and not the warriors, know the real horror.

Among the American Plains Indians (so the story came to me), when a warrior died in battle, everyone was happy (dying in battle was about as noble an act as you could imagine)… everyone except the warrior’s widow. She tore her clothing, rubbed ashes in her hair, cut her arms with a knife, and wailed as though her soul had been torn out of her body. For the widow, it was more than losing her husband (Indian husbands not being famously loving, caring mates, anyway). Rather, with her husband dead, she no longer had standing as a human being in the tribe. Unless she remarried, she would cease to exist in the eyes of her former friends, and she would be left to fend for herself. When the tribe moved on to new hunting grounds, she’d fall behind, she’d have nothing to eat, and soon, she’d starve, or else weather or wolves would kill her. For the warrior’s widow, in other words, the death of a warrior husband was a sentence condemning her to a death that was lonely, slow, and shameful.

Our warrior society, I began to see, isn’t all that different. The husband would die. The widow would be comforted, food would be brought over, there’ d be tears and shared memories and that missing-man flyby that chilled all of our souls. But Monday would roll around, the pilots would go back to their jet aircraft mistresses, the wives would go back to raising kids and bonding with one another, and the movers would be pulling up to the widow’s house. She no longer qualified to live on the base; and her former pals, her inner circle, didn’t want their own husbands hanging around her, lest she snag a new husband. Worse, none of our warriors, husbands or wives, wanted her reminder of the death that lived seconds away whenever we strapped on our jet and took to the wild blue yonder.

It hit me then that, daily, our wives had to contend with the unspoken horror of all that. Not only did they dread our death, but just as real was the knowledge that their lives, as members of an extremely close interdependent society, also hung in the balance. And I came to appreciate the steel in their unspoken and unacknowledged courage — as opposed to our own drunken ribaldry, which we pretended was “guts”—in the ever- present face of death. The pilots were scared children who used booze, offensive behavior, and profane language to hold the awareness of their fragile mortality at arm’s length. But our women shared a gut-wrenching horror that someday the wing commander would show up at their front door to announce that they were now going to have to provide for and raise the children alone, that they were about to be turned out into the world to fend for themselves, and that their closest confidantes in the world would soon stare through them, lest they see what might be in store for themselves.

Service wives, especially fighter pilot wives, are the most underrated warriors in the world. Daily, they confront their own fears, staying home to change a dirty diaper and getting ready for the next move, while shoring up the inflated egos of their mates before they go off to chase around the sky. God bless and watch over them.

? Death came personally to Chuck Horner during his time with the 4th TFW.

One of the 4th’s missions was to deploy to Turkey and sit alert with a nuke on their F-105s. They flew gunnery training over the Mediterranean, air-to-ground at Koyna range in Turkey, and low level all over Turkey. While Horner was in Turkey around Christmas of 1964, his parents, his sister, Mary Lou Kendall, her husband Bill, and their three children were killed in a car accident in Iowa (Christmas was not a lucky time for the Horner clan; John Towner had been killed during the Christmas season of 1953-54).

Those deaths were terrible, and so was Horner’s grief. Despite them, however, there was a fascinating side story that made, and still makes, the horror and grief a little more bearable.

When Chuck Horner came back to the States for the funeral, he was a nobody captain with a lot of pain, yet the USAF took care of him royally — actually, they treated him like a warrior. They arranged transport that brought him from Turkey to Des Moines before his sister from San Diego could get there. Colonel John Murphy, his wing commander, even had the TAC commander’s personal T-39 transport meet Horner at McGuire AFB when he got off the military air transport system aircraft that brought him from Germany.

All of this cost a great deal of money. Nowadays, the media might even have a field day with the story of misuse of government jets. But the cost of that government jet that flew Chuck Horner from McGuire to Des Moines got paid back many times over during the next few years. There are some things you have to do for warriors.

After the 4th TFW, Horner’s next move was into combat in Vietnam.

2 The Big Lie