Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts

^EIGHT A DEPENDABLE BLUE-COLLAR PLANE ^{WITH AN AIR FORCE A-10 SQUADRON} Thailand, Winter 2006

After Iraq, it was back to the Pacific to embed with the Air Force. It would be my fifth trip to the Pacific Rim and my seventh to the PACOM area of responsibility in three years. On none of these trips did I bring a jacket and tie. I felt a bit incongruous on commercial airliners crossing the Pacific, wearing cargo pants, surrounded by men and women in the latest business attire, at a time in history when the words “Pacific Rim” signaled unprecedented economic growth. Yet it was precisely because of its surging economies that the Far East was also seeing extraordinary military buildups.

The world of men and guns might have been an afterthought to my fellow passengers. Trade, finance, and the burgeoning consumer power of India and China dominated media coverage of Asia. At the conferences I had attended around the world in the 1990s, military matters were relegated to a briefing or two by a retired general, even as dozens upon dozens of seminars were devoted to political and economic issues. It was an age when the elites of America, Europe, and Asia had, in the main, little or no experience—let alone meaningful social contacts—with the uniformed ranks of their respective countries. Intellectually, they might have grasped the importance of military transformation in Asia, especially as it concerned the problems of Taiwan and North Korea. Still, it was human nature to see reality in terms of one’s own daily experiences and the people one encountered.

To see how trade and technology were transforming Asia you didn’t necessarily have to travel in well-heeled circles—it was all around you, and on every newsstand. Contrarily, the military situation lay hidden behind a screen of bases, and aboard ships, boats, and airplanes.

My plan was to link up with the 25th Tactical Fighter Squadron stationed at Osan Air Base in South Korea, and fly with it to Korat Royal Thai Air Force Base in Thailand to participate in Cope Tiger, an annual exercise that the air forces of the United States, Thailand, and Singapore had been conducting for thirteen years. The point of Cope Tiger (Combined Operation Exercise Tiger) was as much diplomatic as military. Again, it was about China. From a geostrategic standpoint, relatively strong countries enveloped China to the north, east, and southwest: Russia, Japan, Korea, and India. The easiest outlet for China’s ambitions was the relatively weak countries of Southeast Asia.¹

China was dominating trade in Southeast Asia through a new summit architecture. It was forging bilateral military relationships with longtime U.S. allies Thailand and the Philippines, protecting the military dictatorship in Burma, initiating a strategic partnership with Indonesia, putting all sorts of pressure on Singapore, and using trade as a wedge between the United States and Australia.² The growing Chinese business community in Bangkok had plans to build a canal across the Isthmus of Kra in Thailand, connecting the Andaman Sea with the Gulf of Siam and the South China Sea. The Chinese military saw not only Taiwan but also the Philippines as a potential forward base from which to project power farther out into the Pacific. “The Chinese are making the Filipinos increasingly dependent on their economy, and that will come back to haunt us,” a three-star Air Force general told me.

For the sake of a stable, regional balance of power, Cope Tiger was not the answer to managing China’s political and economic expansion in Asia. But given China’s rise, the exercise was, at the very least, a necessity.

Yet, American participation this year had been cut by half. A squadron of F-15s was to have participated from Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, Alaska. So were Marine F-18s that had been forward-deployed in the Pacific. Both cancellations hit the local economy in northeastern Thailand hard. The reasons given were lack of money related to the increased price of jet fuel—a pathetic excuse. It was ultimately because of Iraq, though no one would admit it officially.

Thus, the 25th would be the only American jet squadron participating. The Thais and Singaporeans could not have been pleased, especially as the A-10s flown by the 25th did not integrate well with their own F-16s and F-5s. If the reduced American presence at Cope Tiger became more than a one-year aberration, it would signify another small victory for Beijing, and would be a sign that America’s fragile virtual empire could handle many small wars and deployments, but not a messy large-scale one.

I had first been exposed to the Air Force in late 2004 during a windshield tour of American bases and austere outposts around the Pacific. Now I would embed with airmen for several weeks. The 25th Tactical Fighter Squadron, known as the “Assam Draggins,” was actually just what I had been looking for. Its first aerial combat mission was flying over the “hump” in 1942, from Assam in British India to northern Burma, to bomb the Japanese. The 25th saw intensive aerial combat in the Korean War with F-80s (the first fighter jets), and in the Vietnam War with F-4s. Since 1982 the squadron had been flying A-10 Thunderbolt IIs, nicknamed “Warthogs,” because they hunted low to the ground “in the dirt.” This was the same A-10 that had provided close air support (CAS) for Army Special Forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, which I had seen on the tarmac three years earlier at Bagram Air Base.³

Since 1975 the A-10 had been performing a role similar to that of the fabled Flying Tigers of the Asian theater in World War II. It was originally designed to operate in the crappy weather of the Fulda Gap in Germany, whose low cloud cover made it necessary to fly close to the ground in order to kill tanks. The plane’s bent-up, Hershey bar wings provided stability in heavy air. It was antiquated, and yet more up to date than the latest fighter jets in an age of counterinsurgency and unconventional war.[93] Rugged and relevant, at $10 million apiece it was a third the price of most fighter jets, and a twentieth of that of the F-22. Army Special Forces liked the plane much more than did the Air Force bigwigs, who were often former F-series pilots with a prejudice against the A-10. Nevertheless, such attitudes were changing in light of the A-10’s impressive performance in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The A-10 wasn’t fast and high-tech, and that was the point. A-10 pilots loitered over the battlefield, risking ground fire, and thus had real situational awareness. “We pride ourselves in being able to see the battlefield from the point of view of the commander on the ground,” one of the pilots told me. Army Special Forces considered Air Force A-10 pilots true warriors. A-10 pilots reciprocated with a mentality that was more joint and pro-Army than other branches of the Air Force.

A-10 pilots represented a Special Forces culture fitted to the air. After a high-ranking officer had upbraided two A-10 pilots for flying too low over an airfield, a third pilot came up to me and said, referring to the high-ranking officer, “He’s from the B-1 bomber community, he doesn’t know what ‘low’ is.” Then he went on, “We’re a culture that asks forgiveness after the fact, rather than permission before the fact. That’s the only way to accomplish our mission.”

The A-10 pilots of the 25th would be at the forefront of close air support in the event of any ground war on the Korean Peninsula. They were oak trees—cemented to the DMZ. Cope Tiger was a monumental change for them, the first time that they would train outside Korea.

Getting the A-10 squadron off the Korean Peninsula, even for a few weeks, was not a decision made lightly. It had gone all the way up the chain of command at the Pentagon. For years, the South Korean government had been increasingly restricting A-10 training sorties in order to satisfy domestic anti-Americanism. It had become a game. Aware that deployment times of such squadrons was a year, the South Koreans would keep delaying flight requests until a new squadron arrived and the process started again. At the same time, the South Koreans claimed to be providing the U.S. Air Force with all it needed to defend the country. By deploying the 25th to train in the less restricted airspace of northeastern Thailand, the U.S. Air Force had called a bluff, stating publicly in effect that Seoul could not provide it with what it needed to defend South Korea.

Embedding with the Air Force for the first time, I had to familiarize myself with a whole new bureaucratic hierarchy. For example, the rank above senior airman was staff sergeant; a plain sergeant did not exist in the Air Force. Nor were there warrant officers. Instead of a sergeant major, there was a chief master sergeant. Rather than battalions, regiments, and divisions, or fleets and carrier strike groups, there were squadrons, wings, and “numbered air forces.” An average squadron (if there were such a thing) comprised 50 planes and anywhere from 500 to 1,000 airmen, including logistics, maintenance, medical, and administrative elements. Three squadrons usually but not always formed a wing, which might comprise anywhere from 1,200 to 5,000 airmen. A wing was part of a numbered air force, essentially a war-fighting headquarters for a large geographical area. In this case, the 7th Air Force handled the Korean Peninsula with its two wings, the 8th Fighter Wing (“Wolf Pack”) stationed at Kunsan, and the 51st Fighter Wing (“Mustangs”) stationed at Osan. Nicknames of Air Force units did not hark back to the Indian Wars the way that those in the Army did.

Located at Osan, only forty-eight miles from the demilitarized zone with North Korea, the 51st Mustangs constituted the most forward-deployed, permanently based Air Force wing in the world. It comprised only two squadrons: the 36th Fighter Squadron, which flew F-16s, and the 25th, with its A-10s, with which I would embed.

All this bureaucratic terminology mattered because it was central to the Air Force’s identity, and as such was referred to by airmen constantly. Though begotten by the Army following World War II, the Air Force was more easily compared to the Navy than to the other services. Both the Air Force and the Navy served as transportation systems for the Army and the Marine Corps. Indeed, among the four armed services under the Pentagon’s domain, there was a further division: between the Navy and Air Force on the one hand, and the Army and Marines on the other. The world of the first two was dominated by technology to a greater degree than that of the second two. With obvious exceptions, like the Navy’s über-macho SEALs, sailors and airmen were simply less physical than soldiers and marines. More than their Army and Marine brethren, the self-images of sailors and airmen were determined by the technology they had mastered more than by the number of push-ups they could do, or by the number of guns they owned. Sailors and airmen, again as a generality, seemed at first glance to be less ancient and warrior-like than Army and Marine grunts.

Because they did not occupy territory, navies and air forces were thought to be inherently more democratic than the other services. As I mentioned earlier, navies had been a tool of diplomacy in ways that armies had not. Navies and air forces needed to occupy only a limited amount of territory to project power, whereas for armies, taking territory was the whole point. Yet air forces could travel faster and dominate even more territory than navies, and also required more highly centralized, global coordination. Thus, it remained to be seen whether air forces (and the space forces that would follow later in the twenty-first century) would prove to be quite as politically benign as navies. Because it took so long for navies to get somewhere, navies urged on the diplomatic process, rather than short-circuited it.⁴

A recent visit I had made to the Air Force Academy in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, outside the conservative, evangelical bastion of Colorado Springs, evinced a radically different atmosphere than the East Coast–based service academies. Compared to that of West Point and Annapolis, the architectural ambience of the Air Force Academy was alienating, austere, and technological. The combination of extreme isolation, a nearby evangelicism, and a heavy, science-based curriculum carried the danger of an authoritarian mindset. Yet when I actually got to know academy cadets and graduates on an individual basis, I realized that such a danger was still theoretical. Yes, faith was something emphasized by the chaplains, but that was to be expected, since a cadet could not get through such a tough four-year curriculum without something deep inside him or her.

The Air Force was created by Congress in 1947. Had there been no Air Force, the old Army Air Forces would have executed tactically oriented land campaigns and naval air wings strategic ones, like covering oceanic spaces and protecting sea-lanes, as well as conducting littoral operations.[94] But even before Vietnam and Iraq, the Korean War had shown the value of this new armed service, which, together with naval air, provided the principal military means of forcing the North Korean communists to the negotiating table. By the turn of the twenty-first century, the Air Force had evolved into a global bus system for the U.S. military, deploying to 182 out of 210 countries annually, holding exercises with 65 countries, and assisting 98 in humanitarian crises. The Air Force was now central to peacekeeping operations in 20 countries. It had identified mass graves in Bosnia and Kosovo, and proved indispensable in both the Balkan and Iraq wars. It also operated 700 space-based satellite systems, which provided surveillance for the entire earth. Even as it was still young and without the tribal tradition of the Marines, the United States Air Force was, in military and planetary terms, ubiquitous.

Concerning the Pacific, just as the Navy wrestled with China’s submarine expansion, the Air Force wrestled with China’s exponential increase in the acquisition of fourth-generation jet fighters like the MiG-29 and Su-30, and of double-digit SAM missiles. This complicated the Air Force’s basing schemes. Even from Guam, places like Taiwan, Korea, and Okinawa were still three to four hours’ flying time away, with all the gas guzzling that entailed. Aerial tanker requirements were going through the roof. Consequently, there was a need to park planes in places such as Thailand, the Philippines, and Japan. That meant building relationships, as well as gathering intimate knowledge of local conditions in obscure airfields—where private contractors who had gone native came in. “Whatever you pay one of these guys isn’t enough,” remarked one officer.

The Air Force needed a more expeditionary mindset. Col. Jeff LeVault of Thomasville, Pennsylvania, told me, “It’s about figuring out billeting and force protection in each site, about who you can call and be on a first-name basis with in such and such a country. We need to land, say, in Colombo [Sri Lanka]. Well, who do we know on the ground there? What are the airfield conditions? Flying is easy, it’s the logistics tail that’s hard. The tsunami was like a big exercise,” he went on. “We got access we never dreamed of in remote parts of Indonesia. We got the State Department to fund repairs of Indonesian C-130s. The next step should be doing exercises with the Indonesians. It’s drills like Cope Tiger, Cope Taufan in Malaysia, and Cope India where, tactically speaking, the rubber meets the road for PACAF [the Pacific Air Forces].”

As technological as the Air Force was, as with the other armed services, it was human skills on the ground that had never been in such high demand.

Osan Air Base lay twenty-five miles south of Seoul. It was in Osan in early July 1950 where American Army units had first seen combat and began to form up for the retaking of South Korea, after North Korea’s late June invasion of that year. And it was from Osan in January 1951 that the U.S. Army began to repel the second invasion of the South, this time by Chinese communists. The Delta and blast barriers I noticed driving into the base were the first I had seen in the world that were not there for protection against terrorists, but for protection against the special operations forces of a national army—of North Korea in the event of another invasion of the South.

I had only a day in Korea, since the 25th Fighter Squadron would fly the next day to Thailand for Cope Tiger. It would do so by way of Kadena Air Base in Okinawa. Showtime was 2:45 a.m. for the 8 a.m. liftoff to Kadena. There was a brief about filling out departure cards for South Korean customs. “Remember, your nationality is American, not Black or Caucasian.” Otherwise it was quick and straightforward, not the elaborate video brief for idiots that the Army was famous for.

I passed the wee hours at an all-night pancake house with four enlistees, part of the maintenance crew accompanying the pilots. They were white: from northeastern Pennsylvania, northwestern Idaho, central Nebraska, and southern Georgia. The two from Nebraska and Georgia had grown up on family farms, and had joined the Air Force to escape home and learn a profession. One waxed nostalgic about his favorite place in the world, the woods outside Alaska’s Elmendorf Air Force Base: stripping down, tying your clothes in a garbage bag, jumping naked into a glacier-fed stream and floating the bag across to the other side to shoot a bear; taking care not to drink from the stream or risk getting beaver fever—the worst form of shits. “Why did I join the Air Force? What other job pays you to live in Alaska?”

Whether I was in boats, ships, or Stryker combat vehicles, it made no difference: in all these situations I encountered the manifest representation from the interior of rural America, and the absolute love of Alaska as a last frontier. The very repetition of these things made them significant for an observer. What was commonplace provided a fairer description of an institution much more than what was rare.

Six A-10s and a KC-10 Extender would take part in Cope Tiger. I flew to Kadena with the maintenance team in the KC-10, which was basically a DC-10 modified for air-to-air refueling. In service since 1981, the KC-10 was another Air Force mainstay, like the B-52 and C-130. It had flown 409 refueling missions during Operation Allied Force, the effort to push the Serbian military out of Kosovo in 1999. The two-hour flight southwest to Kadena Air Base in Okinawa entailed a refueling of the A-10s. I sat in the observation seat of the KC-10, facing backward in the bottom rear part of the plane, and watched.

The procedure was strangely ordinary and quite undramatic, masking the skills required to execute the operation, as one A-10 after the other appeared through the large window in front of me, as if on puppet strings, to get gas over the East China Sea. The boom was lowered with its attached wings that stabilized the boom in the winds of 14,000 feet. The boom’s inner telescope then slid out, as the A-10 pilot traveling at 210 knots crept forward to meet it. I felt as if I could reach out and touch the pilot. Because the telescope could eject as much as 12,000 pounds of fuel per minute, depending upon the type of aircraft it was servicing, it took only a few seconds for each plane to be topped up.

Latching the telescoping probe to the A-10’s receptacle was akin to latching a sailboat to a mooring in rough seas. Staff Sgt. Michael Hinton of Grafton, Iowa, instructed Airman 1st Class Michael Meitz of St. Louis on how to do it. On one occasion, it took about twenty attempts to attach the probe to an A-10. Over the communications system nobody sounded frustrated, though. The voices were quiet to the point of being disembodied. “Just hold steady,” Staff Sgt. Hinton said, as Airman Meitz worked the two sticks controlling the massive boom inches from the plane. In the Air Force, speaking dully and calmly in a “radio voice,” especially in the worst situations, was a sign of machismo.

Finally all the planes were topped up. “Pilsung,” one of the pilots announced, Korean for “certain victory,” the motto of the 25th. We descended through silken cloud strands to the sight of encrusted atolls, the Ryukus and Okinawa. The nine-hour flight the next day to Thailand would see six separate refueling operations. Each A-10 required enough fuel all the time to get to the nearest friendly base in case of an emergency, and by all means without having to land in China.

Because Korat Air Force Base did not have K-loaders for the pallets, we landed at the Royal Thai Naval Air Station at Utapao to unload them, and truck the pallets up to Korat. The plane door opened at Utapao and there was my old friend Dan Generette, the private contractor who made it all happen between the U.S. and Thai militaries at Utapao. Dan wore a ball cap, a gas station shirt with “Dan” inscribed over the pocket, and a big smile.

“You’re good,” he told the pilot in his soothing voice. “No hassles here.” He dealt with one issue after another in the space of two minutes: pallets, customs, buses, ATM machines, restaurants, and “entertainment”—everything required for a memorable night in Thailand for an American airman—even as he fielded cellphone calls from his Thai contacts.

A few weeks after I had left Dan in November 2004, he got a text message on his cellphone saying, “Massive tidal wave.” Within days the tarmac at Utapao was packed with American military aircraft, and Dan’s staff was working 24/7 as marines poured in to execute tsunami relief.

“Did the marines behave themselves?” I asked.

“There were a few scrimmages at the bars in Pattaya, fighting over something there’s plenty of in Thailand—beautiful women. See that Navy C-4?” Dan continued, changing the subject. “There is a sailor in my office who’s there to guard it. The Navy of all the services insists there be U.S. eyes on its aircraft all the time. Do you know what kind of condescending message that sends to the Thais? That their security is not good enough. In many little ways we’re ugly Americans, and it’s these details that are just killing us around the world,” Dan said with the same smile.

Dan pointed out an Air Force master sergeant in civilian clothes driving a K-loader. “He’s new. JUSMAG [the Joint United States Military Assistance Group for Thailand] is making Utapao an official OL [operating location]. The people at JUSMAG are cool, but I worry that we’ll become too conspicuous here. Less is more, keep it low-key. Washington never understands that.”

The bus ride north to Korat took over four hours, through a raggedy carpet of coconut palms, banana and tapioca groves, and secondary-growth forest mixed together with gas stations, iron-roofed markets, and Buddhist shrines, before ascending into smoky hills. As soon as we arrived in Korat there was another brief:

“If you bring a girl back to the hotel, you’ll have to register her in the logbook at the reception desk, and pay a 500-baht joiner’s fee. That means there will be a paper trail that could find you later in life. When you get her up to your room, and you’ve exhausted yourselves discussing world politics, and nature takes over, as nature tends to do, and you reach into her pants and find something that you did not expect to find, and she turns out not to be a she…, just kick her or it out, and pay the five hundred baht. It’s not the time for an argument. All that’s going to be hurt is your ego. By the way,” the briefer continued, “every kind of STD [sexually transmitted disease] exists here including HIV-AIDS, and the chances of getting something is high. So practice abstinence. DOD [the Department of Defense] says that human trafficking is illegal. Do I make myself clear?”

Meanwhile, several boxes of condoms had been brought down on the pallets.

I went out to a local bar with the pilots: cans of Red Bull mixed with bottles of Tennessee Jack Daniel’s. The caffeine kept you awake, allowing you to drink more. “We’re not the trim, in great shape, penny loafer–or topsider-wearing F-15 pilots,” I was told. “We’re the sloppy, relaxed, sometimes a little overweight, whatever guys who fly A-10s, the bastard children of the Air Force.” And yet, as Maj. Chris Price of Schererville, Indiana, added, while we were still on our second drink, “You don’t get to be a pilot if you don’t have your shit together. Part of that shit is faith and spirituality.” Being a warrior meant being a believer; the two were inseparable to him.

Price was thin, gawky, ate all the time, and rifled through his briefs with a voice huskier than his physiology suggested. Having just pinned on major, he was consciously intense. Like a lot of these guys, he didn’t look Hollywood, which showed how inaccurate Hollywood was.

Maj. Price’s grandfather was a master chief petty officer in the Navy at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. His dad, too, was in the Navy, and his brother also in the Air Force. “I was brought up to love the military,” he told me. “And I wanted to help the guys fighting on the ground. There was never any doubt that I’d fly an A-10.” Price, thirty-three, did ROTC at Purdue, and would later fly A-10 missions over Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iraq, during Operation Iraqi Freedom 1, the Marines marched up the right side of the Euphrates and the Army the left, meeting in Baghdad. “The Marines were flexible,” Price said. “Even if there was no immediate tasking, they’d find stuff for you to bomb. They were always thinking ahead, of what they needed taken out on the ground a week in advance even. Because they had their own air component, they were more efficient at using air than the Army. The first time I dropped ordnance over a live target I was too busy trying not to screw up to think about it.

“Afghanistan was like the baseball season,” he went on. “Fighting would start in April and wind down in early November. In Afghanistan, unlike Iraq, the A-10s were nearly the only show in town. It wasn’t large infantry that we were supporting, but small teams, SF. We were basically a QRF [quick reaction force]. The terrain along the border with Pakistan was, well…” He couldn’t find words, but his eyes spoke of majesty. He told me stories about hiding on one side of a mountain and flying down the other side for a bombing run: loiter and hide, loiter and hide.

“It was constant TIC [troops in contact],” he said. “Some days we worked so hard it was ‘Winchester,’” meaning the A-10s had run out of ordnance. “But everyone else in that squadron [the 75th out of Pope Air Force Base, North Carolina] has better stories than mine, and did a hundred times more than I did.”

Keith Bonser was a fair, red-headed, thickly set, almost flabby first lieutenant from the Ridgewood section of Queens, New York, the pilot who had had trouble attaching his plane to the boom the day before—the first time he had been refueled by a KC-10. I vaguely knew the area where he had grown up. Bonser, twenty-nine, had played baseball in the Catholic youth leagues in Rees Park. His brother was a cop, working the beat in “Bed-Stuy” (the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn). His father worked a forklift at a steel factory in Brooklyn. His mother cleaned the house of late Mafia boss John Gotti in the Queens neighborhood of Howard Beach. “My parents were broke as a joke,” he told me. “They were married twenty-six years before they owned their first home.” Bonser went to Arizona State after turning down a bowling scholarship from Oklahoma State. (He had several 300 games to his credit, and had actually bowled 272 once with a ten-pound house ball.) He claimed that it took him eight years to graduate. “The guys who went to the Air Force Academy, they’re no fun, they don’t know life. They’re programmed too early. You have to screw around for a few years first to have your shit together.” He was joking—well, somewhat. Almost half of his A-10 buddies in Thailand had gone to the academy.

Bonser’s half brother was killed in the World Trade Center on 9/11. “That’s why I joined up. I had an uncle who was an Air Force colonel. He was the distant relative I never talked to, then he suddenly became important to me.” Bonser went to Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama for officer training, and then listed the A-10 at the top of his dream sheet. “It was a plane without airs,” he said over blasting country music in the bar, as if describing himself. He would be flying A-10s in Afghanistan the following autumn while his wife was giving birth.

Each of these pilots had a call sign that was his real identity: “Thrill,” “Bull,” “Rage,” “Turk,” “Tex,” “Sniper,” “Binford.” Choosing a call sign for a pilot was a ceremonial event. The other pilots would kick you out of the room and propose a name for you based on some buffoonery in the jet. Precisely because it was new, the Air Force emphasized ritual. To wit, pilots wore their flight caps slightly crunched at the top to commemorate the days when the hats were squashed by headsets.

Pilots in other air forces also had call signs. Some of the names of the Thai and Singaporean pilots I met: “Stuntman,” “Exciter,” “Chucky.” But whereas the Thais and Singaporeans named themselves, the American pilots had their call signs chosen by their fellow pilots, and they were meant more in the way of ridicule than as a macho thing. “Our call signs are ego-deflating. They commemorate an instance where we screwed up,” one pilot named “Ape” explained.

“Sniper” was so named because the first time he fired the A-10 Gatling gun he was so scared he got off only one round. “Turk” was an ethnic Greek. “Thrill” was quiet except when drinking. “Smash” tripped in a bar in Denmark and pulled down a TV that exploded. “OLE” was an acronym for a pilot who had demonstrated Obsessive Love for Elvis. “Gyro” had argued that it was his flight lead who was upside down in the air, when in fact it was he. “Tex” really had nothing to do with Texas, but with an incident very embarrassing for a male. According to Tex, “a call sign should be cool enough to get you laid at a bar, yet bring laughter to your fellow pilots who know the story of how it came about.”

The call sign for Capt. Brandon Kelly of Cairo, Georgia, was “Custer,” because his wife was half Indian “and she beats my ass every day.” Capt. Kelly’s extended family, he told me, hot-rodded and made moonshine. Quite a few of his relatives were cops. “It’s a military family with service from the Civil War to Vietnam. We have a lot of pride in country,” he said purposely.

“It’s about pride in country,” Custer repeated. “I always knew I’d be in the military. I cried when President Reagan died. I know how lucky I am to be flying an A-10, and yet I know how much the wife sacrifices when I’m away.” Service before self was not some hokey concept. It was what these A-10 pilots lived by, declared the squadron commander, Lt. Col. Scott Caine of Vero Beach, Florida. Lt. Col. Caine’s father was a farm boy in New Hampshire’s Connecticut River valley who had enlisted in the Air Force during the Korean War. He went on to become an officer and flew 258 combat missions over Vietnam. Lt. Col. Caine graduated from Georgia Tech as an electrical engineer but found civilian life uninspiring. “My father never pushed me toward the Air Force,” he told me. “I came to it on my own.”

Unlike the other services, in which enlisted men did most of the fighting, in the Air Force it was the pilots—the officers, that is—who put iron on targets. In an Army or Marine infantry battalion of under a thousand men, there were only about ten captains, and only about four or five of them were company commanders.[95] Captains were rare in the infantry, surrounded as they were by hordes of enlisted men whom they led into battle. You didn’t normally encounter a group of captains together. But the Air Force was radically different, since the pilots were usually captains or first lieutenants, with an occasional major or second lieutenant thrown in, all commanded by a lieutenant colonel.[96]

Officers simply mattered more in the Air Force. Whereas in the Army and Marines, captain was the highest real field, in the Air Force it was lieutenant colonel, for the squadron commander flew just another jet. And because in the air a lieutenant colonel might take orders from a lieutenant, rank mattered less here. You heard call signs like “Tex” and “Custer,” or simply “dude,” much more than you ever heard “sir.”

Of all the officers, Custer Kelly had been pointed out to me as truly brave, not because of what he had done in the air, but on the ground. To understand how better to support ground troops, A-10 pilots frequently worked as forward air controllers, embedded with Army ground troops to provide close air support. After flying A-10 missions in Afghanistan, Custer became a forward air controller in Iraq south of Baghdad. He lived with an Army sniper team a few feet from the Euphrates, in a power plant where there never was any power, on MREs and cold showers in the autumn of 2003, mortared every night.

“An RPG came across my head, the dude behind me was hit by an IED, another dude said to the officer, ‘Sir, they’re shooting at us.’ ‘Yes they are,’ the officer said, ‘feel free to shoot back.’ It was as normal as that. A specialist was killed in his soft-skinned Humvee and we did a ceremony with his boots, rifle, and helmet. It was fucked up,” Custer continued. “The up-armor we needed for the Humvees was still in Bosnia. But nobody I knew complained. We had it made. We were in combat, fighting for our country.”

They say not to trust the stories you hear in a bar, no matter who tells them. I disagree. Emotions, perceptions, attitudes honestly rendered are more important than facts. And who said the facts I heard were wrong?

Custer Kelly spoke in a mild, melodic drawl next to my ear, as though ducking under the loud American country music, with Thai hostesses squirming around him. “I was embedded with the 1st Battalion of the 32nd Regiment of the 10th Mountain Division, based out of Fort Drum, New York, and fragged out to the 82nd Airborne Division,” he related, knowing how important these facts were to those with whom he had been an Air Force embed. “That’s what I do, that’s my identity. I am an Air Force pilot who serves the Army. Providing CAS for the 10th Mountain Division was the defining moment of my life. I befriended and loved people, and saw them killed. I was a new captain and there was this very experienced first lieutenant who would never call me anything other than ‘sir.’ That does something to you. He had been married for a few weeks and then was killed by an IED.”

Cope Tiger began the next morning. Like military bases I had seen in Colombia and the Philippines, only more so, Korat Air Force Base was neat to the point of perfection, with modern facilities in all respects. Joint air exercises required partners who were economically and technologically developed enough to fly jets. That meant a high level of education, which, among other things, translated into cleanliness. This wasn’t the Marines or Army Special Forces living in the Sahara amid frogs and scorpions. The mess hall at Korat served excellent Thai food.

Counting the two briefings before we left Korea, we now got the fifth on sex, this one from a grizzled contractor. More about logbooks, joiner’s fees, two-hundred-Baht girls who failed their STD test at the massage parlor and were working the streets, and about reaching down and finding something you never expected to find. For the times when you did find what you expected to find, the sixth briefer, who had followed the contractor, in a moment of honesty, said, “Cover up. Your member, I mean.”

In the morning the pilots were different people. They had drunk hard only because they weren’t flying today; instead, they were getting oriented to an airfield from which they had never flown. There was a rule for flying—no alcohol within twelve hours of entering the cockpit.

“At an altitude of 790 feet, I’ve added an additional 890 feet to your BDU mils,” began Capt. John “Tex” Lesho of Newnan, Georgia, in a brief to the other pilots. “It will be a 180-degree run-in for DMPIs the first day of the exercise. I’ll get you some good pop references. In the high TDAs, the air mass is thinner, so you’ll pick up a lot of smash. We don’t know yet what the DMPIs will be, so the possibility exists to shack chassis.”

Translation: BDUs were bomb demonstration units, practice bombs that would be used in Cope Tiger. Mils were a sight setting in the pilot’s HUD (heads-up display). There were 17.45 mils per degree in a circle.[97] DMPIs were the desired mean points of impact. Pop meant popping up steeply from low altitude and rolling out to the other side of a hill to hit the enemy by surprise. TDAs were target designated areas. Smash was speed. Chassis meant old tanks or cars that might be the targets themselves. To shack meant to bomb.

This was one of the easiest parts of the brief for a layman to follow. The language of fighter jet pilots, a combination of slang and technical jargon, was as abstruse as that of submariners. But whereas in the sub-surface Navy, war was reduced to math since you couldn’t see anything, and thus became totally cerebral, fighter pilots remained gunslingers, who flew by seat-of-the-pants hand-eye coordination equal to that of major league hitters. They had to translate an extraordinary amount of data into arm and finger movements with a stick and trigger buttons. It was no accident that Ted Williams was an ace pilot in both World War II and the Korean War. This was especially true of A-10 pilots, whose only radar was, in Custer’s words, “our Mark One eyeballs.” Popping up from one side of a mountain to the other was not what they concentrated on; they did that by instinct. What they concentrated on was shacking the target.

Flying was nothing they thought much about. To use another sports analogy, whereas spectators marveled at the skating skills of professional hockey players, the players themselves thought only about passing and hitting the puck.

Fighter pilots represented the last stage of the physical warrior before war was relegated to moving a mouse on a screen. And of all combat pilots, A-10 pilots remained the most physical and low tech. They were truly an extension of the infantry, operating an airframe and technology that were essentially three decades old.

“All I ever wanted to do was fly a Hog [A-10 Warthog]. It was the plane I played with as a little boy,” Capt. Tex Lesho told me. He had just finished a brief to three Thai pilots, apologizing to them that he didn’t speak their language and hoping that they would understand. Tex had grown up Southern Baptist in Georgia. His mother was a math teacher and his father an electrical repairman. His educator-mother forbade him to “speak southern” in the home. She was the factor that ultimately got him to the Air Force Academy, where he was exposed to the other fighter jets. He wanted none of it.

Here’s what he said: “The F-16 is cool in air shows, but it’s limited on gas. Take away its air-to-air capabilities and all it can do on the ground is kill a couple of targets. The Hog can do a lot more damage. As for F-15C pilots, you’ve heard of type A personalities. They’re AAA. The F-15E is a two-seater, and I’m a rebellious loner. Only the Navy and Marines fly F-18s, and I joined the Air Force because I didn’t want to be on a boat [aircraft carrier]. The F-22 I love, but not as a job. The debriefs for all these planes are too theoretical. With the A-10, you hit the target or you don’t, nothing to argue about. Basically, what I really wanted to do was fly a gun, not a plane, to help soldiers on the ground. And the Hog is a flying gun, the Gatling.”

Tex’s point could not be emphasized enough. The Air Force was not—or at least should not be—primarily about flying. It should be about killing from the air. The A-10 really was a plane fitted to a gun: the GAU-8/A Gatling gun, whose seven barrels fired 3,900 30mm rounds per minute, designed by a bunch of guys in a bar writing on a napkin. Opening the airframe from the bottom, you saw how the massive barrel extended from the nose all the way past the plane’s midpoint.

“The other planes are high-priced Lamborghinis,” Tex went on. “I’m a redneck from Georgia. I want an American muscle car,” Tex continued in a self-mocking manner. “Think of the Hog as a ’69 Ford Mustang, or a Dodge Charger. It’s like the original 1952 Russian SKS [machine gun], a real dependable, blue-collar plane. There’s no better feeling in the world than smelling the gun gas in the cockpit after you’ve fired the Gatling. You remember the Highway of Death where we bombed those Iraqi troops fleeing Kuwait in Desert Storm? That was all Hog. On Assignment Night at Columbus [Mississippi] Air Force Base, after you’ve finished most of your T-38 training and you stand up in front of your family and declare what you want to fly, I said, ‘I want a Hog.’”

A noncom working maintenance put it more succinctly: “If you’re in the Air Force, why would you want to be associated with a plane that doesn’t blow shit up?”

The A-10 Thunderbolt II, alias the Warthog, was the plane that the Air Force brass had wanted to kill after the first Gulf War. So the Army said, Okay, you don’t want it, we’ll take it. The Air Force quickly changed its mind. The plane constituted an argument against beauty. It could loiter amid enemy gunfire because it was tough. It was tough because it had so much built-in redundancy: separate engines, separate hydraulic systems, double tails, and double everything almost. If one part faltered, another took its place so that the pilots could make it to “good-guy land.” The two engines were mounted high so that the wings shielded them somewhat from ground fire. Because the engines were mounted high, they were less susceptible to foreign objects like gravel. That was one reason the A-10 could work out of dirt airstrips.

All this made the A-10 ugly but trustworthy. Right/left interchangeable parts allowed it to be serviced easily from austere bases with limited facilities. Its retractable crew boarding ladder made it unnecessary to have a ladder on hand to get the pilot into the cockpit. As planes went, it was quiet, giving the A-10 the element of surprise. If the fuel tanks were hit by bullets, the foam inside expanded, plugging holes and minimizing damage. Cheap, old, and reliable, it was suited to an era of low-tech, irregular maneuver warfare. Of all the fighter jets, it was what Rudyard Kipling called “the cheaper man,” whom the odds often favored. Yet because it had only one seat, influential generals and civilian defense officials couldn’t experience a ride in one, making it hard to impress people who controlled budgets.

The A-10s of the 25th were more properly designated A/OA-10s, because the squadron’s mission was not just combat, but forward air control. That’s what Tex and Rage did.

Rage was Capt. Colin “Rage” Donnelly of Utica, New York. I caught Rage during a brief he gave to two Singaporean pilots, whose call signs were “Diablo” and “Furby.”

“You understand the term ‘shit-filter’?” Rage asked the Singaporeans.

“Yes,” they responded, smiling.

“A FAC [forward air controller] is a shit-filter. I expect him to filter all the shit coming from the AWACS [E-3 Airborne Warning and Control System]. Shit are all the targets, threats, and other information not specifically related to our mission. The FAC gives the other pilots the 9-line [location, elevation, description, egress point, etc.] for the target. But I’m not going to demand all nine points of the line from Marine and SOF dudes who need us to immediately deliver fire. The FAC is not loaded down to the gills with weapons, or raging around at max speed. He’s conserving gas so he can deconflict and rack-and-stack the next group of fighters, and the next, arriving on scene.”

The forward air controller orchestrated the entire battle from the air. In addition to all the other information coming at him in compressed bursts, and the instincts he required simply to fly and pop, he had three radios going: one to the ground FAC embedded with the soldiers or marines, another to the airmen on the AWACS, and the third to the pilots themselves whom he was directing. He managed everything through cadence. For example, there was TTFACORB (targets, threats, friendlies, artillery, clearance, ordnance, restrictions, battle damage), the order in which you mentally processed the battlespace situation. There was a cadence for everything. Cadence allowed you to prioritize. Since as Tex had explained, “as a FAC you’re always entering a busy traffic circle at high speed in fog and writing numbers with a grease pencil on the windshield at the same time.” Never for a split second could you get flustered and say to yourself, “What do I do next?” It got as simple as, the first thing you did was fly the plane. That was, in the basic brief, called “Motherhood.”

The air, like the sea, was a blank space that both pilots and submariners drew road maps on, with superhighways, intersections, and holding points. To them there was nothing empty or abstract about it. “Hold in a block and keep your head down in the drool cup,” one pilot explained, in reference to being “stopped” in the sky. Indeed, there were similarities between flying and being on a sub: the time spent in the air was short compared to that spent in small windowless rooms on long briefs and debriefs, with columns of data and instructions to go over.

Tex and Rage were four-ship flight leads, meaning they were mini-FACs for four planes. Capt. James “Sniper” Krischke of Chatham, Illinois, explained it to me: “Think of a bar fight. The FAC is the guy who goes outside to call for help on the pay phone. When his buddies arrive, the flight lead tells them where the pool cue is to use as a weapon.” Being a four-ship flight lead was exponentially more complicated than being a two-ship flight lead because you had to vertically split the sky in order to manage egress and deconfliction issues for two groups of two.

At Korat, during the two weeks of flying sorties, I moved back and forth from the pilots’ hangout to the flight line. As the A-10 was a one-seater, I couldn’t fly.

I noticed that it wasn’t only the pilot who had his name painted on the side of each A-10, but the dedicated crew chief and his assistant, too. These were the maintainers, the airmen who serviced the engines, hydraulics, and weapons systems, and signed their names to everything they did so that there was a paper trail in case of a malfunction. Consequently, there was a lot of stress. “I’m a character and a half,” Staff Sgt. Stephen McDonough of Lehighton, Pennsylvania, told me. “I’m the class clown because everything has to always be done perfect, and if you didn’t have fun on the job you’d simply worry yourself to death.”

“Why did you join the Air Force?”

“My real dad was in the Navy. I raced stock cars in high school and my friend, who was retired Air Force, died of cancer the day I won a race. He had been a C-5 engine mechanic and willed himself to live long enough to see me win. I joined in his memory.”

Working on the flight line was not easy. In the winter, it was the windiest place imaginable, and in the summer the hottest. A common uniform for the crew chiefs was woodland camouflage trousers and black T-shirts “for a farmer’s tan” on your arms and neck. Often you couldn’t wear “cover”—caps, that is—because they might get swept off your head and sucked into the jet engines. (Throughout the military, unless you had on a helmet with straps, it was considered bad form to wear any kind of cover on an airfield.) Of the eighty-five airmen from the 25th participating in Cope Tiger, only fourteen were pilots. The rest were maintainers.

There was Tech. Sgt. Larry Driver of Carrollton, Georgia, a big, towering kid with a baby face and a tattoo of a flying black Vulcan on his left arm. Tech. Sgt. Driver had twelve years in the Air Force. In a rapid-fire southern accent, moving his fingers to show me each part, like a gas station mechanic diagnosing a problem to a customer, he explained how the weapons store on the A-10 wing was released: “This is an impulse card. It generates gas pressure which works the entire rack. Two of these cards go into a cartridge block. When the pilot pickles [presses the trigger button], he electronically signals two firing pins in the back of the cartridge block to send gas pressure that actuates the slave piston, causing the bell crank to rotate. This rotation causes linkages to retract the hooks. These retracted hooks release the remaining gas pressure, which splits into two tubes. The tubes go through orifices that regulate the pressure downwards. That, in turn, pushes down the ejector feet, and the weapon is released

“It’s a down-and-dirty plane, the A-10 is,” he continued, slapping the wing, ending his oration and eyeing the black gun gas smeared all over the airframe’s belly. Every time a pilot began to taxi out to the runway, the crew chief would touch the end of the wing as it moved forward under him for good luck.

Tech. Sgt. Driver was the fifth rural Georgian I had met thus far here. They included a master sergeant from Fitzgerald, Georgia, and a staff sergeant from Cairo, Georgia, the same hometown as Custer. There was only one high school for Custer’s entire county with a few hundred students, and two from Cairo had ended up in this squadron. The staff sergeant, William “Cleetus” Davis, was from a family of peanut and cotton farmers, saw no future in it, and like so many others just wanted to get away. There were other rural Georgians in the squadron I still hadn’t met.

Noncoms like Larry Driver helped rekindle the spirit of adventure in me. Only on the surface were their lives monotonous. Adventure is relative; the most jaded and depressed people I ever met were in the business-class cabins of intercontinental flights. But take Tech. Sgt. Walt Mardis of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, who fixed jet engines for the A-10. I discovered him in the middle of diagnosing an engine problem.

The pilot had noticed fluctuating RPMs (revolutions per minute) on his gauge. Avionics changed the gauge. The problem persisted. The pilot’s only choice was to abort the mission. Tech. Sgt. Mardis, a tall, hovering presence with a serene and sympathetic manner, ambled onto the flight line and plugged his Panasonic Toughbook into a terminal underneath the plane. Downloading data from the EPU (electronic processing unit), he saw that there were no RPM readings at all, which had to be wrong since the engine was spinning. So he took his Toughbook into the cockpit, where he could read what the engine was doing in “real time” by circumventing the gauge system. This allowed him to compare the Toughbook’s numbers to those on the cockpit display.

Seeing Mardis in the pilot’s seat with headphones on was funny because even on commercial flights, as he told me, he got airsick. The Toughbook indicated that the RPMs were all over the place, from 63 percent of optimum normal to 4,000 percent. That was impossible. Mardis decided that the tachometer generator was spitting out bogus signals and needed to be replaced. At least he hoped that was the problem. The “tach” generator could be replaced quickly, whereas if it was a wiring problem it would take hours to fix and he might have to miss the weekend elephant ride to a waterfall he had signed up for.

Mardis had been marking time at North Idaho College when his dad developed cancer. The only family member at home who could drive, Mardis would regularly take his dad for therapy to the hospital in Spokane, Washington. “That’s when I grew up. Life becomes serious when one of your parents gets sick.” His dad eventually healed and Mardis decided to join the Air Force, to get away and do something with his life. His decision was not out of context. He had a brother in the Marines, and three other brothers and a sister in the Army.

After basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, and technical training at Chanute Air Force Base in Champaign, Illinois, he was sent to Barksdale Air Force Base near Shreveport, Louisiana, to fix engines on B-52Hs. For the next nine years through 2001, Mardis fixed engines at Barksdale and at Pope Air Force Base in Fayetteville, North Carolina. He was happy. He assumed that’s all there was to do in the military. It was about what he expected when he had enlisted in Idaho.

“Then came 9/11, OEF, and OIF,” in his words. Mardis was eating with a friend in a restaurant in Fayetteville when they got the “recall”: be ready to deploy in twenty-four hours to Iraq. His friend’s squadron deployed first, his followed a few months later in the summer of 2003.

“It was a time I’ll never forget,” he began wistfully. “The C-130 popped flares after takeoff from Kuwait and did a combat landing in Iraq. They took our pictures for the various IDs we’d need on the flight line. They gave us mosquito nets and assigned us a tent, and we dragged our B-bags to it. Nine of us in that tent for five months. We scrounged for livables. I used a poncho as a curtain. I was so nervous and scared the first days in Iraq. But I’m really glad I did it. Once there was an explosion. It sounded so close, but the car bomb was miles away. That was all the violence I ever experienced there.”

Not much of a story. For a journalist, let alone a fighter pilot or infantryman, Mardis’s experience didn’t count. It was so in the rear as not to be worth a line in a reporter’s notebook. But it did count. To him. To judge by the way he spoke, the dust in the tent, the very strangeness of it all, made it extraordinary, and thus he had remembered every detail of his arrival in Iraq.

Next he went to Afghanistan, where every night he was mortared. “But then I got home and went to a NASCAR race, and realized that while I and my buddies in the military were at war, the country wasn’t,” he reflected. Later he was deployed to South Korea, and was now in Thailand—in his case, an epic adventure. “I never thought I’d get around so,” he said.

Life in the Air Force, as in the other services, meant drifting from base to base. Sailors and marines were always on the coasts. The Air Force, by contrast—even more so than the Army, with its forts on the Great Plains that were legacies of the Indian Wars—inhabited the large and empty spaces that not by accident happened to be in deeply conservative parts of the country. There was the complex of Eglin and Tyndall Air Force bases, and Hurlburt Field, all in the Florida Panhandle of the central time zone, George Bush territory in the 2000 Florida recount: then Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama; Vance Air Force Base in Enid, Oklahoma; Barksdale Air Force Base near Shreveport, Louisiana; and Nellis Air Force Base outside Las Vegas, Nevada—all places where airmen spent years of their lives.[98] Yes, there were big global transport hubs near Dover, Delaware, and San Francisco; and National Guard and Reserve outposts in places like Springfield, Massachusetts, and Hartford, Connecticut, but those places did not constitute the world of active-duty combat pilots. The effects of location had something to do with why troops thought the way they did politically, even if they didn’t get off the base much. Sailors and marines might have been on the coasts, but usually not in the fashionable parts; in the hotel gift shops of Norfolk, Virginia—the Navy’s biggest hub—there was always chewing tobacco on sale.[99]

Nevertheless, pilots weren’t as redneck as they talked, or rather as they aspired to be or joked about. Only two of the fourteen in the squadron chewed tobacco. And despite their claims, they didn’t curse nearly as much as marines or Army infantrymen. All had high SAT scores. Almost half had graduated from the Air Force Academy, and had that clean-cut, intense manner common to graduates of the service academies.

They fondly referred to the Air Force Academy as the “Zoo,” because visitors there were always looking in and gawking at the cadets as they ate in the dining facility. Capt. Zach “Thrill” Laird of Billings, Montana, who went on to get a master’s degree in Russian from Indiana University, had this story:

“Walking between classes one day I saw a visitor. ‘Oh, look at the cute cadet,’ the girl called to me. ‘Can I take your picture?’ I said sure. After all, she was pretty. Then she threw me a candy bar, like I was an animal in a real zoo. I thanked her. Hey, I was hungry.”

What defined the pilots was their closeness to one another. Call signs and a conscious attempt to preserve Air Force history enhanced the bonding. For example, Capt. Jeremiah “Bull” Parvin of Rocky Mount, North Carolina, a big guy with a bald head, had a “Misty” patch on his arm. “Misty” was the call sign for A-10 FACs in the Korean Peninsula today. It commemorated the Misty call sign used by FACs flying over North Vietnam and Laos between 1967 and 1970. Bull Parvin explained it to me:

Nothing was more dangerous for a pilot during the Vietnam War than to be a FAC. Other pilots dropped their bombs over enemy airspace and got out. FACs loitered for hours over enemy airspace directing the raids. The Air Force had been losing too many O-1s and O-2s (slow single-and twin-engine Cessnas), so it created a program, Operation Commando Sabre, a FAC program using reliable F-100Fs. The F-100F pilots would spend eight hours daily over North Vietnam and Laos, searching for convoys, SA-2 missiles, and “triple-A pieces [anti-aircraft artillery].”

The leader of Commando Sabre, who would later be shot down and spend years in the so-called Hanoi Hilton, the infamous North Vietnamese prison, was Maj. George E. “Bud” Day of Sioux City, Iowa.

When Bull mentioned the name Bud Day, I had a shock of recognition. A few months earlier I had been at the Jacksonville Naval Air Station in Florida and happened to walk in on the middle of a speech that Bud Day was delivering to Navy pilots. It was an inspirational speech about never giving in, laced with colorful profanities. Day was old and repetitive. It wasn’t the greatest speech I ever heard, but the Navy fliers were deeply moved by it. After all, they knew exactly who he was, a Medal of Honor winner who had been tortured for years by the North Vietnamese. Bud Day had undergone a mock execution, escaped, and hiked over twelve days alone in the jungle back toward South Vietnam, only to be recaptured. Once when guards burst in on him and other POWs during a clandestine religious service, he stared into their muzzles and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

After his speech at the naval air station, Day sold copies of his book, Duty, Honor, Country, brought out by a small publisher.[100] He took payment in cash for each copy. The book wasn’t listed on Amazon even. I thought it demeaning for him, especially as it was infinitely more significant than so many memoirs brought out by major publishers.

Bull showed me a coin commemorating the Misty FACs of the Vietnam War, with Bud Day’s name on it. It was a tradition in the squadron that the youngest and oldest members always carried the coin on their person. Whenever there was a reunion of Misty FACs from Vietnam, held usually in the Florida Panhandle, where Bud Day now lived, the pilots of the 25th sent a representative.

The Korean and Vietnam wars held special meaning to the Air Force because they were the first wars in which it fought as its own service. This feeling was particularly strong in the case of Vietnam, because so many of the prisoners of war at the Hanoi Hilton had been Air Force pilots.

Though one should not overestimate the living memory of Vietnam as a means for bonding among pilots. Unlike the Army and Marines, as I’ve written, the Air Force was more technology-than tradition-oriented, because technology drove tactics to a far greater extent in the air than on the ground. The Army might still glean lessons from the Spartan victory at Plataea in the Peloponnesian War or from Napoleon’s ill-fated invasion of Russia. But for today’s Air Force, there were almost no lessons to be gleaned even from the air battles of World War I.

The Air Force was so future-oriented that even some of the pilots admitted that the Air Force’s life span would be the shortest of any service because sometime in the twenty-first century it probably would be converted to a space force.

And so the real way, aside from flying, that these pilots bonded was by carousing together. They visited strip joints that left you speechless, even though they were tourist traps compared to what was available in the Philippine Islands. The squadron, the Air Force, and U.S. troops in general adored Thailand, whose principal attraction was that it was not Korea. Thailand was tropical, whereas Korea this time of year had a foot of snow. The bases in Korea were on a permanent war footing for a war that never happened, meaning an operations tempo almost as grueling as in Iraq, but with many of the stupid, petty regulations that did not exist in Iraq, because the crucible of real conflict led to a Darwinian process of survival of the fittest in regard to bureaucratic rules. On bases in Korea such as Osan, you had to wear a reflector belt even when jogging during the daytime; nor could you get a haircut off base because you might get an infection from the barber. Some A-10 pilots told me that flying combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan was liberating compared to the daily grind in Korea, where during the frequent war exercises the squadron flew five sorties a day.

Capt. Rage Donnelly was constantly in demand by the Thais and Singaporeans to give briefings on close air support and CSAR (combat search and rescue), particularly close air support, because of the U.S. Air Force’s use of it in Afghanistan and Iraq. When there were boots on the ground in a theater of combat, A-10 pilots were busy, and that had been the situation since the autumn of 2001. Rage went through the steps necessary to avoid hitting friendlies. “Without confirmation from the ground, you don’t shoot. You’ll fire a round in a safe area and the ground controller will say something like, ‘Okay, fire twenty-five meters [about twenty-five yards] northeast of that hit.’ You bracket. You need to know the weapon’s footprint. If the footprint overlaps with the position of friendlies, the guy on the ground has to sign his initials to the order.”

Afterward there were no questions. Perhaps the Singaporean and Thai pilots were shy, just too polite and deferential. Maybe some of them did not sufficiently understand English and consequently had gone on auto-nod. Maybe they were in awe of the Americans for being veterans of combat for over four years now, the way the Americans had been secretly in awe of the Israelis decades back. Rage didn’t know. He knew only that after briefs in the U.S. Air Force, it was rank off, meaning a lieutenant could vigorously cross-examine and disagree with a lieutenant colonel.

The Thais and, to a lesser extent, the Singaporeans shared a common trait with airmen from South Korea and the former Warsaw Pact countries. They were scripted. They were used to getting exact instructions for everything. If it was a low deck (low cloud cover), and they hadn’t been briefed for it, rather than do a low show they would just cancel the mission. “I can read their eyeballs in advance,” one A-10 pilot told me.

There were other problems with the Thais, all related to the linguistic divide: ground controllers you couldn’t understand, vague and incomplete briefings on combat search and rescue, and the general confusion of an LFE (large force exercise), in which runways were stacked with dozens of F-16s having to take off every fifteen seconds and A-10s every twenty. If only one plane was late there was a cluster fuck. Meanwhile, a pilot would call, “Oscar, Oscar, Oscar [Thai ground control],” and sometimes no one would answer.

“The only way the communications gap is going to narrow is through more exercises and interactions like Cope Tiger,” said Jim Traywick of Anniston, Alabama, the private contractor who had, essentially, arranged Cope Tiger for the U.S. Air Force. Traywick, like Dan Generette in Utapao, was retired Air Force. Gray and overweight, with jeans and a fishing vest, he had settled in Thailand with a Thai wife, having first visited the country during the Vietnam War. He spoke basic Thai. “The first time I heard of Thailand was in high school,” he told me. “The teacher mispronounced it, calling it ‘Thigh-land.’ Well, that’s kind of really what it was. I mean, guys go crazy here. They arrive in this place and it’s like in The Wizard of Oz, when the black-and-white changes to Technicolor. I’ve seen guys divorce wives and marry the first local girl they meet on the street. But there is more to Thailand than Pat-pong and Soi Cowboy [the red light districts of Bangkok].”

I saw that Traywick, like Generette, was extremely calm. He spoke slowly in a monotone, to the point where his whole demeanor seemed to be on a lower RPM speed than other people’s. “What’s the trick to getting things done here?” I asked him.

“Patience,” he replied, smiling, pronouncing the word slowly in a Zen-like near whisper. “The Thais don’t understand why we do things the way we do, and we don’t understand them. They are never in a rush. It’s an attitude that’s worked well for them. The most you can do here is repeat your request with a slightly firmer voice. If you get angry, they just shut down and ignore you.

“Remember,” he continued, “they have to live here. They have to get along with the Chinese and their other neighbors. They want the American military here, but they don’t want to broadcast it.”

Traywick talked about getting more Thais to PACOM conferences in Honolulu and to more exercises like Cope Thunder in Alaska, “so they could observe us and how we operate among ourselves.” He wanted the Air Force to send more ethnic Thais on missions to Southeast Asia and to emphasize Thai language programs. Though this view was self-serving, he was right. He was simply calling for more area expertise. “The guy who’s gone native,” I heard one airman deride Traywick behind his back. But whenever there was a problem with the locals, he was usually the only one to whom you could turn.

“Misty” wasn’t the only call sign immortalized by the Vietnam War; so was “Sandy.” As Capt. Custer Kelly told me, “If you meet an old air guy from Vietnam and you tell him you’re a Sandy-4, he’ll buy you a beer. If you tell him you’re a Sandy-1, he’ll offer to put your kids through college.” Custer got real emotional about Sandys in Vietnam. He began to speak faster and his accent got more southern. He ticked off a list of books about the air war in Vietnam, which, like the names of books that soldiers and marines had given me about the ground war there, were just as heroic in a black-and-white sense as the books about World War II. Bud Day’s book was part of this different Vietnam library, read by a different geographical and cultural subdivision of American society than the one usually represented by major opinion-makers.

In Vietnam (and in A-10 squadrons today), Sandys essentially performed the same role in combat search and rescue as Mistys did in regular bombing missions. For example, in Vietnam, when a Misty like Bud Day had his plane shot down, it was a Sandy-1 who led the rescue operation, and who was the only pilot allowed to talk to “the objective”—the downed, ejected pilot, that is. (Sandy-2 was the flow manager, who coordinated the communications between the rescue planes. Sandy-3 and Sandy-4 arranged the rendezvous with the rescue helicopter.)

The second week of Cope Tiger saw a pre-planned combat search and rescue. It was eerie. The day was February 13, 2006, three years to the day that three American private contractors had been captured by narco-terrorists in southern Colombia while I was there. Had the Green Berets not been stalled twenty-four hours for diplomatic reasons from carrying out their own CSAR, those three contractors might well have been rescued hours afterward, rather than still being held hostage as they were.⁵

The CSAR brief was dull, not emotionally moving as a layman might expect. Nothing was said about a downed American pilot in enemy territory or anything like that. The brief was delivered by 1st Lt. Miya Rivera, an ethnic Chamorro from Guam.

“BUICK or one times F-16 was shot down at 6 a.m. by a Rapier SAM at the border of CT-6. The wingman had eyes on the landing location but bingoed out for fuel.” Translation: an F-16 pilot with the code name “Buick” was shot down by a surface-to-air missile in a geographical area previously gridded as CT-6. A fellow pilot saw where he landed but had to depart the scene to be refueled. The Thai and Singaporean pilots understood perfectly this code language, and in the Thais’ case, better than they often understood normal English. It was a civilian like me who had to have it explained to him.

Lt. Rivera continued: “The word for the day is DINGO. The letter is M. The number is 1. The color is blue. The duress word is BUDWEISER. The SARNEG is Blacknight, numbers one through nine.” Every time a pilot hopped into a cockpit, he was given a word, letter, number, and color that changed daily. Asking a pilot downed in enemy territory to recite these things was a way to verify that it was in fact he, not a bad guy who had overtaken him and was using his radio. It was like asking someone his mother’s maiden name and the last four digits of his Social Security number before executing a stock transaction. By working the duress word into a sentence, the downed pilot could communicate that somebody was holding a gun to his head. The SARNEG (search and rescue number encryption grid) allowed the pilot to transmit his GPS coordinates in code without giving away his location to anyone but the Sandys.

Thrill Laird got to be the downed pilot. Because it was an exercise, Senior Airman Tanya Suloff of Lincoln, Delaware, and I went along with him. The pilots tried to motivate enlistees by including them in exercises whenever they could, and Airman Suloff was the lucky one today. A Singaporean CH-47 Chinook helicopter deposited the three of us at a site in the forest, in the CT-6 area, where Thrill was to have landed by parachute. We jumped off the helicopter and followed Thrill away from the clearing, through thick brambles snapping across our faces, over boulders, and through a muddy stream, running for a full ten minutes, until Thrill located a bamboo thicket that we quickly crawled inside of. Smearing dirt over our faces, we lay silent as Thrill retrieved his AN/RRC-112 survival radio. We prayed that the sound of the Chinook had made the cobras and vipers scatter from the wider area. We really were trying to hide. Hunting us down were four JTACs (joint terminal attack controllers), airmen who specialized in survival on the ground, and who were usually embedded with ground units to provide close air support.

The forest around our ears was dark and screaming with animal and insect life. Spiders landed on our faces and the dirt was moving everywhere. We dared not budge, though, as we spotted two JTACs combing the ground nearby. It was more claustrophobic than being in a closet. The half-hour wait in that thicket seemed like hours. Living thus for weeks, which downed pilots had done in World War II and again in Vietnam, you could easily go insane. It was a humbling experience.

Using the survival radio, Thrill had Airman Suloff communicate our GPS location to Rage Donnelly, the Sandy-1. She got a bit confused working the radio, and Rage calmly walked her through the steps the way an expert who knew it all by heart walked you through a software problem over the phone. At the same time, he was the flight lead overhead, with all that that entailed. Rage, whose personality could be tense and severe at times, truly became himself when multi-tasking in the cockpit. He was a graduate of the Weapons Instructor Course at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, the equivalent of the Navy’s “Top Gun” school, though it went on for more weeks. As was typical with him, he never spoke about it. It was the other pilots who told me.

The JTACs never did find us. We found them in the clearing prior to being retrieved by a Thai UH-1H helicopter. They were dressed like Abu Sayyaf guerrillas, carrying big knives and wearing kerchiefs over their heads and necklaces with teeth. One of them had worked with Special Forces on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Thrill had used a mirror, catching the sunlight reflecting off Rage’s low-flying A-10, to bring the planes to our exact location. The Thai para-jumpers from the UH-1H put guns in our faces until we correctly recited the letter of the day and the other information. The CSAR was then over.

On the final day of Cope Tiger, Capt. Matt “Turk” Kouchoukos of Bloomingdale, Illinois, made his last A-10 flight as an active-duty pilot. He would be leaving the Air Force and joining the Air National Guard. After he climbed down from the cockpit, in keeping with tradition, the other pilots tackled him, bound him with duct tape, sprayed him with a fire hose, and poured Thai beer all over him—since they couldn’t find champagne. The fire hose wasn’t necessary, as a thunderstorm had unleashed gobs of rain and soon everyone was sliding on their backs on the tarmac. That night the American pilots entertained their Thai and Singaporean counterparts with old-fashioned beer hymnals. “I used to work in Chicago, in an old department store…”

If the loud and rude camaraderie was reminiscent of anything, it was the movie Memphis Belle, about the B-17 pilots of the Army Air Forces in World War II. As Tex, who was raised on Zane Grey novels in the Deep South, told me, “I’m old school. I believe in the kind of guys who don’t care whom they piss off. The older guys were the better aviators. They didn’t have GPS. The arts of old-fashioned flying and bombing are being lost.”

Just as there were different navies (surface, sub-surface, naval aviation, and the SEAL community), there were different air forces. And what I had been witnessing the past few weeks was a unique pilot community that, in terms of personalities, was a throwback to World War II.[101] These guys were spiritually as much a part of the old Army Air Forces as they were of the new Air Force. Indeed, at a quick glance, the ungainly A-10s lumbering out to the runways even resembled the B-17s that bombed Germany from bases in England.

Like the pilots of the Second World War, the A-10 pilots didn’t agonize about what they believed. Theirs was ultimately a world of black-and-white faith. It didn’t mean they were necessarily conservative (though most were), or that they didn’t get mad at their own government (they often did). In fact, their worst fear was that they might kill innocent civilians by mistake. It meant only that as a group they weren’t cynical, and retained a heroic, almost naïve outlook on life.

Their commander, Lt. Col. Caine, summed up their attitude for me by reciting almost by heart a passage from President Theodore Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena” speech, in which Roosevelt paid tribute to his forefathers who had settled the North American continent:

And of those in the arena, these pilots whom I befriended were, alas, not the best. “You want to see the best, the real Air Force?” one of the A-10 pilots admitted to me in a nightclub in Korat, in the wee hours after many drinks. “Hang with the F-15E pilots for a while. You want to know how to recognize the A-10 pilots at Nellis during Red Flag?[103] We’re the fat fucks.” Of course, none of them were fat and a few were quite lean. Again, it was a form of self-deprecation, as with the call signs.

The nostalgic world of the A-10 was definitely not about where the Air Force was going. The A-10 was a tactical instrument, which might have a future for a few more decades. But the Air Force, I knew, was ultimately about controlling the space above the planet, where technology would increasingly provide the means to hit targets on the ground, no matter how small and specific, with planes manned or unmanned, or with satellites. While you would certainly still need armies, air and space forces would over time be able to do more and more, more subtly, with less collateral damage.

I caught a glimpse of a whole other side of the Air Force a few feet from where the A-10 pilots were headquartered at Korat Air Force Base. There was a large, portable satellite dish with lines connecting it to two mobile trailer units. Inside the trailers was a computer array that ran Eagle Vision, a mobile satellite ground station that mapped a given area in real time and in tremendous detail from space, and could immediately transmit the images anywhere in the world that also had such facilities.[104] The development of Eagle Vision had been spurred by the Global War on Terrorism—the need to map and remap parts of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in order to identify the addition of even one new hovel. Yet, it had widespread humanitarian applications during natural catastrophes, when topographical features changed radically, and for the observation of refugee migrations and the growth of squatter camps.

Because this technology was available commercially, there were no classification issues. Thus, everything Eagle Vision offered could be shared with nongovernmental organizations. At the same time, there was little chance that another nation or group would soon be able to do with Eagle Vision what the Air Force could. That’s because this commercially available technology was useless in a fast-developing emergency without force protection, fuel bladders to run the portable generator, lift assets, and everything else that a military could do but civilians couldn’t to deploy such a unit into a zone of anarchy and keep it up and running.

The Air Force was offering Eagle Vision for indirect diplomatic advantage. Ostensibly, Eagle Vision had been deployed to Cope Tiger to help the pilots with their bombing targets. In truth, the Air Force saw the exercise in Thailand as an opportunity to exhibit its humanitarian products, as a stream of visitors from not just Thailand and Singapore, but also from India, Australia, and other countries in Asia filtered through the trailer units, interested in coping with future tsunamis and with monitoring piracy in the Strait of Malacca. Countering Chinese military expansion, I was told over and over again during Cope Tiger, was about intangibles, like building relationships on the ground.

En route home I stopped in Honolulu and met with Maj. Gen. Lloyd Utterback of Llano, Texas, vice commander of PACAF (the Pacific Air Forces). He told me: “Tsunami relief succeeded because the Air Force and Navy already had a close working relationship with the Thais, who provided basing facilities. Our relationship with the Indian Air Force is growing dramatically, so that in future humanitarian emergencies we may be able to stage out of India. The tyranny of distance in the Pacific will, at the end of the day, be shortened not by technology but by personal ties.”

The emerging situation in the twenty-first-century Pacific was the following. The United States Air Force, like the United States Navy, would need to upgrade its war-fighting capabilities to match any theater threat. At the same time, it would rely on disaster relief and humanitarian assistance packages that were second to none to give it a diplomatic edge over any emergent power.

Even so, great powers weren’t measured by their foreign aid budgets, but by their ability and willingness to use their comprehensive military, economic, and political power, helped by proximity, to force their will on their neighbors.⁶ In other words, it might turn out that the United States would provide the wet blanket of aid, even as Beijing would subtly force dependent political-economic relationships upon adjacent states.

China was the unstated organizing principle for everything I saw the Air Force do in the Pacific. When I had asked a member of the squadron if there was a future for manned air-to-air combat, as an A-10 pilot who concentrated on air-to-ground I expected him to say no. But his reply was, “Ask the Chinese; they’re quick learners, and increasingly will have the budgets to challenge us.”

In fact, just as we had sought détente and transparency with the Soviet Union for the sake of stability during the Cold War, Pacific commanders were now seeking the sort of exchange programs with the Chinese military that they had with the Thais and Singaporeans. They would have liked nothing better than to include China in Cope Tiger. One reason businesspeople could proclaim the Asian century was that military men and women were practicing a constructive brand of pessimism in regard to the region.