Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign

Later, Horner and members of a ground crew search party found the bodies and debris in a canyon about two miles away.

After the missing-man flyby, Lieutenant General Hartinger, the commander at Ninth Air Force, let Horner know that it was his negligence that had caused the accident. He had failed in his responsibility as the leader, and so had “murdered” the two crew members.

He was already feeling sorry for himself, loathing himself for his failure and for his part in the deaths. Hartinger’s condemnation made it worse. “I’m working as hard as I can,” he told himself. “And now this. This dumbass flight leader doesn’t take care of his wingman. And, shit, that kills my career.” But the self-pity only lasted until he realized that what “The Grr” had pasted on him was exactly right — an insight that was reinforced by Bill Kirk, who was the DO at Ninth Air Force at the time. Kirk gave it to him straight, and Horner had to agree, that he had flat-out failed, and that he could either give up, or pull himself up, admit his mistakes, and start over.

I was responsible for these deaths, for a variety of reasons, but mainly because I was the senior officer present. It’s not the flight leader’s fault. It’s mine. I should have ordered the second element to abort the flight and climb when they were in the clear and not assume they’d know what to do when they hit the weather. I was at fault; I should not have made the mistake of passive leadership.

If you want responsibility, if you want the tough jobs, then you better be ready to stand up and take the criticism and all the anguish when things go wrong. If you can’t take the blame — even for mistakes that are beyond your control — then you are not in a responsible job, no matter what the job title says. The big jobs involve risk of great personal criticism. The jobs worth having are the ones with the biggest downside, and if you don’t admit your own mistakes, you are not worthy of the trust given to you.

I couldn’t guarantee that I would never again fail. No one can. But I knew that to seek credit for a job well done while ducking the pain and disgrace of failure is not leadership. No more. I would not wear a hair shirt; that’s not my way. But whenever someone under my command was hurt or killed, it was my fault and no excuses would be offered. The only atonement I could make was to do my best to make sure we all learned why the accident occurred and to prevent it from happening again. The only way to give value to the sacrifice of a life either in combat or in peacetime training, the only way to salvage some good out of such a terrible loss, was to do everything in my power to see that it was never repeated.

I started to become a “hard” man about some things — especially about things that could get people hurt. I never minded risks to myself, but I sure minded unnecessary risks to anyone who came under my command. Others under my command died over the years, but I blamed myself first and then searched for ways to keep the same thing from happening again.

I was learning to lead.

? His next assignment was at Luke AFB (in Glendale, Arizona, near Phoenix), in 1979, where he was Colonel Pete Kemp’s vice commander at the 58th Fighter Wing.

Horner met Bill Creech for the first time at Luke, and the two men quickly discovered that they were both from Iowa — there are not too many Iowans in the Air Force. Other than that, it’s hard for Horner to say why he caught Creech’s notice. In fact, it’s hard to imagine two more different personalities. Creech is precise, careful, vain. Horner is wild, outrageous, and sloppy. But notice him Creech did.

Chuck Horner takes up the thought:

I have no idea what Creech liked about me. We were certainly never what I would call friends, or even had very much in common, other than a love for flying and the Air Force (Creech loved the joy of being a fighter pilot). So I avoided him as much as possible, and in the beginning, I even fought what he was trying to do. But when I realized he was actually showing us how to succeed and that is exactly what we wanted to do, I became one of his biggest advocates.

For his part, he was often very hard on me (which was good for me), and he was a giant pain in the ass (because he kept after details). Yet he gave me prime but challenging jobs, then made sure I worked my ass off. And in those jobs we did work hard to improve things — to have better-looking jets, cleaner facilities, and to take control of our own lives rather than ask for help without doing anything to make things better on our own hook. As the same time, I never tried to suck up to him and tried to be honest and admit mistakes to him I did not need to reveal. Though I think he liked that, I didn’t actually do it to impress him. That is just my way.

In the end, I think he judged me on the scorecard of our accomplishments, based on his awareness of what my NCOs thought of how I was doing. But I will never know.

? By the time Horner and Creech met, Creech was starting to make his presence felt. One of Creech’s notable qualities was his ability to know virtually everything going on in his command. He was simply a powerful listener (“You’ve got to get your ear down at the other end of the pipe,” he liked to say); he was always on the phone, or taking trusted sergeants and officers aside to get the straight story. His network of such people was vast. Thus, he was well informed about the situation at the 58th Fighter Wing when Colonel Chuck Horner first arrived there.

The immediate challenge at the 58th was that the wing was so large, encompassing F-104s, F-4s, F-15s, and F-5s, that it had to be split in two. Horner was to be the commander of one of these new wings, which he assumed would be the one containing F-4s and F-104s. Meanwhile, he assumed that the existing wing commander, Pete Kemp, who was current in the F-15, would get the far more modern F-15/F-5 wing.

Since the F-4s and F-104s were far older than the F-5s and F15s and needed better maintenance leadership, Horner worked hard to find the best possible people for those aircraft. He wanted the best for his wing.

But then on the day before the split occurred, Pete Kemp was told he was leaving for another job, and that Horner would command the F-15/F-5 wing (now called the 405th Fighter Wing). After watching Horner make all the right moves for the F-4s and F-104s, Creech had moved him on to the challenge of making himself proficient in the more up-to-date aircraft.

? In 1980, Horner was sent again to Nellis AFB, but now as the wing commander of the 474th TFW. In those days, the wing was equipped with long-out-of-date F-4Ds, but in a few months it was scheduled to receive the newest F-16As. That meant that, once again, Creech was offering Horner a large challenge, as well as the chance to make himself proficient in still another up-to-date, top-of-the-line fighter. He was to become one of the handful of pilots proficient in both air-to-air and air-to-ground in the two finest fighter aircraft in the U.S. inventory.

Meanwhile, the 474th offered many additional challenges. Not only were they switching over to the F-16s, but they were also taking on the very demanding Rapid Reactor commitment, because they were pledged to NATO. They had to be ready to deploy hours quicker than any other wing in the Air Force; then they had to be certified in all the mission areas required for a wing stationed in Germany; and at the same time they had to maintain all the other worldwide capabilities of any other wing. The wing successfully handled the commitment, as well as the F-16 changeover, and then six months after taking on their first aircraft and pilots, they won the TAC F-16 gunnery title, while taking an Operational Readiness Inspection and a Nuclear Assurity Inspection. “The results that followed these huge efforts were because of the entire wing effort and were not just a Chuck Horner thing,” Horner is quick to add. “I just had the privilege of being there at the time.”

In fact, Horner was taking command — a process as natural to him as flying.

I like a big challenge. That’s what motivates me. I like to be faced with a task that no one else can do — or at least do as well as I can in my own mind. On the other hand, I don’t care a hoot about small tasks, tasks that strike me as mundane or trivial (even though I also understand that the mundane may be as important as anything else; Jonas Salk must have conducted millions of mundane tests and observations to create his vaccine for polio). So I would much rather be given command of a wing in transition than a wing where things are going smoothly, and my challenge would be to make it better (without having a lot of room to make that happen). For instance, I was always happier to command a wing that was transitioning out of an old, difficult-to-maintain aircraft, like the F-4D, into a modern aircraft.