loose with how they wore their uniform, got their hair cut, or shined their shoes also came in for close scrutiny from the new wing commander; and if they needed to be sharpened, I stuck them verbally in the sharpener — to include also their NCO supervisors (in the event they had forgotten what we were all about).
For a while, the wing went silent, while everyone decided if I was a good or bad commander. If I was to get their trust or loyalty, I had to earn it.
The first breakthrough came one day when one of the best NCOs in the unit pulled me aside and told me to keep it up. I asked what that meant, and he told me that I must be doing good, because of what he saw when he stopped for a beer in the Tiger Inn, the bar just outside the back gate at Nellis. While any of the NCOs might stop there for a beer en route home, it was a pretty wild place. The folks who usually hung out there were the malcontents and young men looking to get thrown in jail or out of the Air Force. So this good NCO told me that I must be doing it right because the walls of the bathroom cubicles were filled with graffiti about how much of a shit Colonel Horner was. “Colonel,” my confidante said, “at least you are pissing off the right people.”
To this day I am certain that I made mistakes. However, the wings I commanded all had measurably higher output, aircraft in commission rates, more sorties flown, and better inspection results, to name a few, so I must have been right more times than I was wrong. I know in my heart that at each base I had the NCO corps solidly behind me, making up for my lack of experience and providing the leadership I was not able to provide.
What I had was a deep desire to make the unit better. I walked the flight line day and night. When I saw something that needed to be fixed, I made sure the person I gave the job to had the resources to get the job done. I used to lobby at the headquarters for construction supplies. I challenged my own maintenance people to fix their own work spaces so they were neat and clean. You’d be amazed how it makes people more productive if they have a shiny floor to work on in the hangar. The light is better under the aircraft, and people don’t get oily when they have to go down on the floor. Same for dining halls, same for clubs, dorms, offices, every aspect of the work and housing area. You start at the flight line so everyone knows what is most important in the Air Force: getting the aircraft and pilots ready to go to war. But then you also pay attention to the toilets, so the troops have a decent place to relieve themselves. Ditto for the dorms; they have to be clean too, and we had a program to fix up the dorm rooms so they were not dingy, moldy, and overcrowded, with rusty showers, broken blinds, and missing fixtures and light covers. I expected very high performance standards from the troops, but only because that is what they wanted from themselves.
I made sure I was their servant, and I made sure my officers felt the same way. It was a no- harm, no-foul environment. I listened to the NCOs, but was never afraid of them or unwilling to say, “Thank you very much for your view, I will take it under consideration. In the interim, get your ass out there and lead,” and they did. All of us were working so hard to get the job done that we didn’t worry about who was in charge. In reality, they were in charge, since they were the only ones who could bring about success.
Officers are different from NCOs in a lot of ways. First of all, they stand out more, so it’s easier to see how they are performing, and then there are several classes of officers:
To start with, there are the young ones whom you’re grooming, the lieutenants and the captains with a future in the Air Force. So you’ll want them to be energetic. You want them to make mistakes, but you want to keep close supervision on them.
Then there are the career officers who rose up from NCO and who went to officers’ training school. Though they might be smart and talented, their careers have time limits. They’ll almost certainly never be promoted to command ranks, just because they don’t have enough time. Even so, they’re proud of being officers. It’s a big deal for them, because they’ve done it on their own (nobody in their family ever went to college or had anything like a professional career). So if you treat them honorably and with great respect and encouragement, they’ll give you fine, steady work. When they do screw up (or anyone else, for that matter), you chew their ass (I tried never to let a screwup go unpunished; letting them go creates apprehension and leaves things hanging out of balance).
Then you have the fast movers. You’re hard as hell on them, because if they’re worth a damn, they can withstand your withering blasts and profit from them. If they’re not worth a damn, if they bullshit their way, you need to destroy them. You need to push them so hard that they fail, and fail totally. You want to get them the hell out of there, and they want to get the hell out of there and go someplace where they can suck up to somebody and get ahead.
? By the time Chuck Horner was given his first command, the Horner family had grown to five: Susan had been born at RAF Mildenhall, in Suffolk, England; John at Seymour Johnson; and Nancy Jo came while Horner was serving in Washington. While the Air Force does not officially admit it, wives (and now spouses) are an integral part of their society. This is not a formal thing. Each wife is expected to find her own niche, and yet, even though the commanders’ wives are not in charge, the younger ones tend to look to them for leadership. Life in the unit is much easier when the commander’s spouse promotes harmony among the nonmilitary side of the community.
Over the years that Chuck was growing as an Air Force officer, Mary Jo grew as an Air Force wife. During that time they’d frequently run into wives of senior officers who tried to wear their husbands’ rank. That didn’t work. Back when they came into the Air Force, there was still a stiff and formal relationship based on rank. Wives were expected to conform in such ways as wearing hats and gloves to the teas at the officers’ club or to some senior wife’s house when she was hosting a coffee. That pretty much died out during the sixties.
Mary Jo had a different approach. As they moved around from base to base to base, everyone liked her, because she was spontaneously enthusiastic and genuinely liked other people. She was strong enough not to put up with any guff from her commander — and later senior commander — husband, yet she was and remains a loving wife and capable mother. People came to bare their troubles to her, because they knew they wouldn’t get the conventional response from her or a moralizing lecture. Often at night she would share their pain with Chuck — a husband got passed over for promotion, or Chuck had fired him, or the couple was facing a long separation because of a remote assignment. In a very real sense, they were in the job together, and each had a role to play.
Chuck Horner learned never to discount the role of the spouse in the military community. “You know immediately,” he says, “when you have a dysfunctional spouse at work, especially if she is the wife of the commander. Common sense says you don’t make a big deal of it, but you can’t help but be aware. Sure, you always try to pick the best person for the job — man, woman, married, unmarried, working spouse, whatever. Still, if you are choosing between two equal men to make a subordinate commander, and one has a wife who promotes harmony, and one has a wife who (for whatever reason) is constantly causing trouble, you may select the former, just because you have too much to do already and don’t need any headaches caused by strife in the distaff side of the house.”
Over the next years Horner commanded at four different bases, two air divisions, the Air Defense Weapons Center, and finally Ninth Air Force.
After commanding the 474th, he was promoted to brigadier general, and from 1981 to ’83 he was a division commander over two wings at Holloman AFB in Alamogordo, New Mexico.
From Holloman, he moved to Tyndall AFB in Panama City, in the Florida Panhandle. There he commanded the Southeast Air Defense Regional Air Division. As division commander of the southeast region, he had responsibility for U.S. air defense from New Jersey to Texas. Active-duty and Air National Guard fighter squadrons under his command sat alert at bases along the coast from Houston to Cape May, while radar sites every two hundred miles or so were collocated with FAA radars and were netted to provide an air picture at the command headquarters in a large building in Tyndall.
Three months after starting the job at Tyndall, he was moved over to command of the Air Defense Weapons Center (also at Tyndall), a more interesting and important job. It involved transitioning the wing from F-106s to F- 15s, operating the radar controllers school, operating the Gulf air-to-air missile testing ranges, conducting Red Flag-type air defense exercises, called Copper Flag, and operating a large fleet of T-33s for air targets and F-
