Stranger to the Ground

CHAPTER FOUR

“Rhein Control, Air Force Jet Two Niner Four Zero Five, Spangdahlem, over.” From my capricious radio I do not know whether or not to expect an answer. The “over,” which I rarely use, is a wistful sort of hope. I am doubtful.

“Jet Four Zero Five, Rhein Control, go ahead.”

Someday I will give up trying to predict the performance of a UHF radio. “Roger, Rhein, Zero Five was Spangdahlem at two niner, flight level three three zero assigned instrument flight rules, Wiesbaden at three seven, Phalsbourg next. Latest weather at Chaumont Air Base, please.” A long pause of faint flowing static. My thumb is beginning to be heavy on the microphone button.

“Roger your position, Zero Five. Latest Chaumont weather is one thousand overcast, visibility five miles in rain, winds from the west at one zero knots.”

“Thank you, Rhein. How about the Phalsbourg weather?” The static is suddenly louder and there is a light blue glow across the windscreen. St. Elmo’s fire. Harmless and pretty to watch, but it turns low-frequency radio navigation into a patchwork of guesses and estimates. The radiocompass needle is wobbling in an aimless arc. It is good to have a TACAN set.

“Zero Five, Phalsbourg weather is garbled on our machine. Strasbourg is calling eight hundred overcast, visibility one-half mile in heavy rain showers, winds variable two zero gusting three zero knots, isolated thunderstorms all quadrants.” Strasbourg is to the left of course, but I could catch the edge of their thunderstorms. Too bad that Phalsbourg is out. Always seems to happen when you need it most.

“What is the last weather you had from Phalsbourg, Rhein?” A garbled teletype weather report is really garbled. It is either a meaningless mass of consonants or a black jumble where one weather sequence has been typed on top of another.

“Latest we have, sir, is two hours old. They were calling five hundred overcast, visibility one-quarter mile in . . .” he pauses, and his thumb comes off the microphone button. It comes on again “. . . hail—that might be a misprint—scattered thunderstorms all quadrants.” Quarter-mile visibility in hail. I have heard that nocturnal thunderstorms can be violent, but this is the first time that I have heard the direct report as I fly on instruments in the weather. But the sequence is two hours old, and the storms are isolated. It is rare for storms to hold their violence for a long time, and I can get a radar vector from a ground station around active storm cells.

“Thank you, Rhein.” The air is very smooth in the stratus, and it is not difficult to hold the new heading at 093 degrees. But I am beginning to think that perhaps my detour did not take me far enough around the severe weather.

I am well established in the routine of the crosscheck now, and occasionally look forward to the liquid blue fire on the windscreen. It is a brilliant cobalt, glowing with an inner light that is somehow startling to see at high altitude. And it is liquid as water is liquid; it twists across the glass in little rivulets of blue rain against the black of the night weather. The light of it, mingling with the red of the cockpit lights, turns the instrument panel into a surrealist’s impression of a panel, in heavy oil paint. In the steady red and flickering blue of the electrical fire on the glass, the only difference between my needles and the painter’s is that a few of mine are moving.

Turn back.

The air is smooth. The needles, except for the wobbling radiocompass needle and the rolling numbered drums of the distance-measuring equipment, move only the smallest fractions of inches as I make the gentle corrections to stay at 33,000 feet. The airplane is flying well and the UHF is back in action.

There are storms ahead, and this airplane is very small.

My crosscheck goes so smoothly that I do not have to hurry to include a look at the fuel flow and quantity gages, the pale green oxygen blinker blinking coolly at me as I breathe, the utility and flight control system pressure gages, the voltmeter, the loadmeter, the tailpipe temperature. They are all my friends, and they are all in the green.

I will not live through the storms.

What is this? Fear? The little half-noticed voices that flit through my thought like scurrying fireflies might warrant the name of fear, but only if I stretch the definition until it applies to the thoughts that scurry before I begin to walk across a busy highway. If I reacted to the half-thoughts, I would have quit flying before I made my first flight in the light propeller-driven trainer that first lifted me away from a runway.

The Florida sky is a gay blue one, puffing with the high cumulus that prevails in southern summers. The metal of my primary trainer is hot in the sun, but before my first flight in the United States Air Force, I am not concerned with heat.

The man who settles himself in the rear cockpit of the airplane is not a big man, but he has the quiet confidence of one who has all power and knows all things.

“Start the engine and let’s get out of here,” are the first words that I hear in an airplane from a flight instructor.

I am not so confident as he, but I move the levers and switches that I have studied in the handbook and call, “Clear!” as I know I should. Then I touch the starter switch to start, and feel for the first time that strange instant awareness of my ability to do everything that I should. And I begin to learn.

I discover, as the months pass, that the only time that I am afraid in an airplane is when I do not know what must be done next.

The engine stops on takeoff. Whistling beneath my airplane is a swamp of broken trees and hanging spanish moss and alligators and water moccasins and no dry ground for wheel to roll upon. At one time I would have been afraid, for at one time I did not know what to do about the engine failure and the swamp and the alligators. I would have had time to think, So this is how I will die, before I hit the trees and my airplane twisted and somersaulted and sank in the dark green water.

But by the time that I am able to fly the airplane by myself, I know. Instead of dying, I lower the nose, change fuel tanks, check the fuel boost pumps on and the mixture rich, retract the landing gear and wing flaps, pump the throttle, aim the airplane so that the fuselage and cockpit will go between the tree stumps, pull the yellow handle that jettisons the canopy, lock the shoulder harness, turn the magneto and battery switches off, and concentrate on making a smooth landing on the dark water. I trust the shoulder harness and I trust my skill and I forget about the alligators. In two hours I am flying another airplane over the same swamp.

I learn that it is what I do not know that I fear, and I strive, outwardly from pride, inwardly from the knowledge that the unknown is what will finally kill me, to know all there is to be known about my airplane. I will never die.

My best friend is the pilot’s handbook, a different book for each type of airplane that I fly. Technical Order 1F-84F-1 describes my airplane; every switch and knob of it. It gives the normal operating procedures, and on red-bordered pages, the emergency procedures for practically any critical situation that can arise while I sit in the cockpit. The pilot’s handbook tells me what the airplane feels like to fly, what it will do and what it will not do, what to expect from it as it goes through the speed of sound, procedures to follow if I suddenly find myself in an airplane that has been pushed too far and has begun to spin. It has detailed charts of my airplane’s performance to tell just how many miles it will fly, how quickly it will fly them, and how much fuel it will need.

I study the flight handbook as a divinity student studies the Bible. And as he goes back time and again to Psalms, so I go back time and again to the red-bordered pages of Section III. Engine fire on takeoff; after takeoff; at altitude. Loss of oil pressure. Severe engine vibration. Smoke in the cockpit. Loss of hydraulic pressure. Electrical failure. This procedure is the best to be done, this one is not recommended.

In cadet days, I studied the emergency procedures in class and in spare time and shouted them as I ran to and from my barracks. When I know the words of the red-bordered pages well enough to shout them word for word as I run down a long sidewalk lined with critical upperclass cadets, it can be said I know them well.

The shined black shoe touches the sidewalk. Run. “GLIDE NINETY KNOTS CHANGE FUEL TANKS BOOST PUMPS ON CHECK FUEL PRESSURE MIXTURE RICH PROP FULL INCREASE GEAR UP FLAPS UP CANOPY OPEN . . .” I know the forced landing procedures for that first trainer as well today as I knew them then. And I was not afraid of that first airplane.

But not every emergency can be put in a book, not even in a pilot’s handbook. The marginal situations, such as planning a flight to an airport that I know is buried in solid weather to its minimums, such as losing sight of my leader in a formation letdown through the weather, such as continuing a flight into an area of thunderstorms, is left to a thing called pilot judgment. It is up to me in those cases. Bring all of my experience and knowledge of my airplane into play, evaluate the variables: fuel, weather, other aircraft flying with me, condition of the runway, importance of the mission—against the severity of the storms. Then, like a smooth-humming computer, I come up with one plan of action and follow it. Cancel the flight until I get more rest. Make a full circle in the weather and make my own letdown after my leader has made his. Continue toward the storms. Turn back.

When I make the judgment I follow it without fear, for it is what I have decided is the best course of action. Any other course would be a risky one. Only in the insecure hours before I touch the starter switch can I see causes for fear; when I do not take the effort to be alert.

On the ground, if I concentrated, I could be afraid, in a detached, theoretical sort of way. But so far I have not met the pilot who concentrated on it.

I like to fly airplanes, so I learn about them and I fly them. I think of my job in the same light that a bridge builder on the high steel thinks of his: it has its dangers, but it is still a good way to make a living. The danger is an interesting factor, for I do not know if my next flight will be an uneventful one or not. Every once in a long while I am called to step on the stage, under the spotlight, and cope with an unusual situation, or, at longer intervals, an emergency.

Unusual situations come in all sizes, from false alarms to full-fledged emergencies that involve my continued existence as a living member of a fighter squadron.

I lower my landing gear on the turn to final approach. The little green lights that indicate wheels locked in the down position are dark longer than they should be. The right main gear locks down, showing its light. The left main locks down. But the nosewheel light is dark. I wait a moment and sigh. The nosewheel is a bother, but not in the least is it an emergency. As soon as I see that it is not going to lock down, the cautious part of me thinks of the very worst that this could mean. It could mean at worst that the nosegear is still locked up in its wheel well; that I will not be able to lower it; that I will have to land on only two wheels.

There is no danger (oh, once long ago an ’84 cart-wheeled during a nosegear-up landing and the pilot was killed), even if that very worst thing happens. If the normal gear lowering system does not work after I try it a few times again; if the emergency gear lowering system, which blows the nosegear down with a high-pressure charge of compressed air, fails; if I cannot shake the wheel loose by bouncing the main gear against the runway . . . if all these fail, I still have no cause for concern (unless the airplane cartwheels). Fuel permitting, I will circle the field for a few minutes and the fire trucks will lay a long strip of white foam down the runway, a place for my airplane’s unwheeled nose to slide. And I will land.

Final approach is the same final approach that it has always been. The fence pulls by beneath the wheels as it always does, except that now it pulls beneath two landing gear instead of three, and with a gear warning horn loud in the cockpit and the red warning light brilliant in the clear plastic handle and the third green light dark and the word from the control tower is that the nosewheel still looks as if it is up and locked.

The biggest difference in the final approach is in the eye of the observer, and observers are many. When the square red fire trucks grind to the runway with their red beacons flashing, the line crews and returning pilots climb to stand on the swept silver wings of parked airplanes and watch to see what will happen. (Look at that, Johnny, turning final with no nosewheel. Heard about an eighty-four that cart-wheeled on the runway trying this same trick. Good luck, whoever you are, don’t forget to hold the nose off as long as you can.) It is interesting to them, and mildly annoying to me, for it is like being pushed on stage without having anything to perform. No flames, no eerie silence of a frozen engine, a practically nonexistent threat of spectacular destruction, no particular skill on display.

I simply land, and the twin plumes of blue rubber-smoke pout back from the main wheels as they touch the hard concrete. I slow through 100 knots on the landing roll, touching right rudder to put the narrow strip of foam between the wheels. Then, slowly and gently, the unwheeled nose of the airplane comes down.

At that moment before the metal of the nose touches the runway and I tilt unnaturally forward in my cockpit and the only sight in the windscreen is the fast-blurred strip of white foam, I am suddenly afraid. This is where my control ends and chance takes over. A gust of wind against the high rudder and I will surely cartwheel in a flying swirling cloud of brilliant orange flame and twisted metal; the airplane will tumble and I will be caught beneath it; the hot engine will explode when the cold foam sprays up the intake. The ground is hard and it is moving very fast and it is very close.

Throttle off, and the nose settles into the foam.

White. Instant white and the world outside is cut away and metal screams against concrete loudly and painfully and I grit my teeth and squint my eyes behind the visor and know in a surprised shock that my airplane is being hurt and she doesn’t deserve to be hurt and she is good and faithful and she is taking the force of a 90-knot slab of concrete and I can do nothing to ease her pain and I am not cart-wheeling and the scream will never end and I must have slid a thousand feet and I am still slammed hard forward into the shoulder harness and the world is white because the canopy is sprayed with foam and get that canopy open now, while I’m still sliding.

The foam-covered sheet of plexiglass lifts as I pull the unlock lever, as smoothly as if nothing was the least unusual and there is the world again, blue sky and white runway sliding to a stop and grass at the side of the concrete and visor up and oxygen mask unsnapped and it is very quiet. The air is fresh and smooth and green and I am alive. Battery off and fuel off. As quiet as I have ever heard. My airplane is hurt and I love her very much. She didn’t somersault or cartwheel or flip on her back to burn and I owe my life to her.

The advancing roar of firetruck engines and soon we’ll be surrounded by the square monsters and by talking people and Say, why couldn’t you get the nosewheel down and That landing was a pretty good one boy and You should have seen the foam spray when your nose hit. But before the people come, I sit quietly in the cockpit for a second that seems a long time and tell my airplane that I love her and that I will not forget that she did not trap me beneath her or explode on the runway and that she took the pain while I walk away without a scratch and that a secret that I will keep between us is that I love her more than I would tell to anyone who asks.

I will someday tell that secret to another pilot, when he and I happen to be walking back from a night formation flight and the breeze is cool and the stars are as bright as they can get when you walk on the ground. I will say in the quiet, “Our airplane is a pretty good airplane.” He will be quiet a second longer than he should be quiet and he will say, “It is.” He will know what I have said. He will know that I love our airplane not because she is like a living thing, but because she truly is a living thing and so very many people think that she is just a block of aluminum and glass and bolts and wire. But I know and my friend will know and that is all that must be said.

Though it had its moment of fear and though it opened the door of understanding a little wider, the nosegear failure is an incident, not an emergency. I have had a few incidents in the hours that I have spent in the little cockpit, but so far I have never experienced a real emergency or been forced to make the decision to pull the yellow ejection seat handles, squeeze the red trigger, and say a quick farewell to a dying airplane. Yet that sort of thing is what the newspapers would have me believe happens every day in the Air Force.

At first, I was ready for it. When the engine sounded rough during those first hours alone, I thought of the ejection seat. When a tailpipe overheat light came on for the first time in my career, I thought of the ejection seat. When I was nearly out of fuel and lost in the weather, I thought of it. But the part of my mind that is concerned with caution can cry wolf only so many times before I see through its little game and realize that I could easily fly through my entire career without being called upon to blast away from an airplane into a cold sky. But still it is good to know that a 37-millimeter cannon shell is waiting just aft of the seat, waiting for the moment that I squeeze the trigger.

If I ever collide with another airplane in the air, the seat is waiting to throw me clear. If I lose all hydraulic pressure to the flight controls, it is waiting. If I am spinning and have not begun to recover as the ground nears, the seat is waiting. It is an advantage that conventional aircraft and transport pilots do not have, and I feel a little sorry for them at their dangerous job.

Even without passengers to think about, if they are hit in the air by another airplane, transport pilots do not have a chance to crawl back to the trap door on the floor of the flight deck and bail out. They can only sit in their seats and fight the useless controls of a wing that is not there and spin down until their airplane stops against the ground.

But not the single-engine pilot. Climbing or diving or inverted or spinning or coming to pieces, his airplane is rarely the place that he dies. There is a narrow margin near the ground where even the ejection seat is a game of chance, and I am in that margin for five seconds after the end of the runway has passed beneath me. After that five seconds I have accelerated to a speed that allows a climb to a safe ejection altitude; before that five seconds I can put my airplane back down on the runway and engage the nylon webbing and steel cable of the overrun barrier. When I engage that barrier, even at 150 knots, I drag a steel cable and the cable drags a long length of anchor chain and no airplane in the world can run on forever with tons of massive chain trailing behind it. The five seconds are the critical ones. Even before I retract the flaps after takeoff, I can eject if the engine explodes. And no engine explodes without warning.

Flying is safe, and flying a single-engine fighter plane is the safest of all flying. I would much rather fly from one place to another than drive it in that incredibly dangerous thing called an automobile. When I fly I depend upon my own skill, not subject to the variables of other drivers or blown tires at high speed or railroad crossing signs that are out of order at the wrong moments. After I learn my airplane, it is, with its emergency procedures and the waiting ejection seat, many times more safe than driving a car.

Four minutes to Wiesbaden. Smooth crosscheck. Smooth air. I relax and drift with the smoothness across the river of time.

When I was a boy I lived in a town that would last from now to now as I fly at 500 knots. I rode a bicycle, went to school, worked at odd jobs, spent a few hours at the airport watching the airplanes come and go. Fly one myself? Never. Too hard for me. Too complicated.

But the day came that I had behind me the typical history of a typical aviation cadet. I did not make straight A’s in my first college year and I thought that campus life was not the best road to education. For a reason that I still do not know I walked into a recruiting office and told the man behind the desk that I wanted to be an Air Force pilot. I did not know just what it was to be an Air Force pilot, but it had something to do with excitement and adventure, and I would have begun Life.

To my surprise, I passed the tests. I matched the little airplanes in the drawings to the ones in the photographs. I identified which terrain was actually shown in Map Two. I wrote that Gear K will rotate counterclockwise if Lever A is pushed forward. The doctors poked at me, discovered that I was breathing constantly, and all of a sudden I was offered the chance to become a United States Air Force Aviation Cadet. I took the chance.

I raised my right hand and discovered that my name was New Aviation Cadet Bach, Richard D.; A-D One Nine Five Six Three Three One Two. Sir.

For three months I got nothing but a life on the ground. I learned about marching and running and how to fire the 45-caliber pistol. Every once in a while I saw an airplane fly over my training base.

The other cadets came from a strangely similar background. Most of them had never been in an airplane, most of them had tried some form of higher education and did not succeed at it. They decided on Excitement and Adventure. They sweated in the Texas sun with me and they memorized the General Orders and Washington’s Address and the Aviation Cadet Honor Code. They were young enough to take the life without writing exposés or telling the squadron commander that they had had enough of this heavy-handed treatment from the upper class. In time we became the upper class and put a stripe or two on our shoulderboards and learned about being heavy-handed with the lower class. If they can’t take a little chewing out or a few minutes of silly games, they’ll never make good pilots.

LOOK HERE MISTER DO YOU THINK THIS JOKE’S A PROGRAM? ARE YOU SMILING, MISTER? ARE YOU SHOWING EMOTION? MAINTAIN EYE-TO-EYE CONTACT WITH ME, MISTER! DON’T YOU HAVE ANY CONTROL OVER YOURSELF? GOD HELP THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA IF YOU EVER BECOME AN AIR FORCE PILOT!

And then, suddenly, Preflight Training was over and we were on our way to become the lower class at a base where we began to learn about airplanes, and where we first breathed the aluminum-rubber-paint-oil-parachute air of an airplane cockpit and where we began to get a tiny secret idea, shared in secret by every other cadet in the class, that an airplane is actually a living thing, that loves to fly.

I took the academics and I loved the flying and I bore the military inspections and the parades for six months. Then I left Primary Flight School to become part of the lower class in Basic Flight School, where I was introduced to the world of turbine and speed and spent my first day in Basic Single-Engine Flight School.

Everything is new fresh exciting imminent tangible. A sign: Cadet Club; rows of tarpapered barracks; close-cut brown grass; weedless sidewalks; hot sun; bright sun; blue sky, ceilingless and free above my polished hatbill and stripeless shoulderboards. A strange face above white-banded boards and a set of white gloves. “Fall in, gentlemen.”

A flight of four sun-burnished silver jet training planes whistle over the base. Jets. “Let’s expedite, gentlemen, fall in.”

In we fall. “Welcome back to the Air Force, gentlemen, this is Basic.” A pause. Distant crackle of full throttle and takeoff. “You tigers will get your stripes here. It’s not a lot of fun or a no-sweat program. If you can’t hack it, you’re out. So you were Cadet Group Commander in Primary; you let up, you slack the books, you’re out. Stay sharp and you’ll make it. LaiUFF, HAICE! Ho-ward, HAR!”

The B-4 bag is heavy in the right hand. Dust on shined shoes. Hot air doesn’t cool as I move through it. Black rubber heels on dusty asphalt. Away, a lone jet trainer heads for the runway. Solo. I am a long way from Primary Flight School. A long way from the chug of a T-28’s butter-paddle propeller. And a long way still from the silver wings above the left breast pocket. Where are the hills? Where is the green? The cool air? In Primary Flight School. This is Texas. This is Basic.

“. . . program will require hard work . . .” says the wing commander.

“. . . and you’d best stay sharp in my squadron . . .” says the squadron commander.

“This is your barracks,” says the whitegloves. “There are T-33 pilot’s handbooks in every room. Learn the emergency procedures. All of them. You will be asked. Another whitegloves will be around later to answer questions.”

Questions.

“Inspections every Saturday?”

“Are the classes tough?”

“What is the airplane like?”

“When do we fly?”

A cold night in a white-collar bed. Cold twinkle of familiar stars through the window. Talk in the dark barracks.

“Just think, boy, jets at last!”

“So it’s tough. They’ll have to throw me out. I’ll never quit because it’s hard.”

“. . . airspeed down final with the gun bay doors open is one twenty plus fuel plus ten, right?”

“Let’s see, Johnny, is that ‘climb to twenty-five thousand and rock wings’? Twenty-five thousand feet! Man, we’re flying JETS!”

“Never thought I’d make it to Basic. We’ve come a long way from Preflight . . .”

Behind the quiet talk is the roar of night-flying turbines as the upper class learns, and the flash of landing lights bright for an instant on the wall opposite my open window.

Tenuous sleep. Upperclass voices by the window as they return in the night. “I never saw that before! He only had ninety-five percent and his tailpipe was bright red . . . really red!”

“. . . so then Mobile told me to climb in Sector One to thirty thousand feet. I couldn’t even find the field, let alone Sector One . . .”

My glowing Air Force watch says 0300. Strange dreams. The beautiful blonde looks up at me. She asks a question. “What’s your airspeed turning base leg with three hundred and fifty gallons of fuel on board?” A crowded and fantastically complex instrument panel, with a huge altimeter pointing to 30,000. Helmets with visors, red-topped ejection seats, instruments, instruments.

Sleep soaks away into the pillow and the night is still and dark. What do I do with a zero loadmeter reading? Battery off . . . no . . . battery on . . . nono . . . “activate electrical device” . . . Outside, the green beam and the split white beam of the beacon on the control tower go round and round and round.

But once again the days pass and I learn. I am concerned with ground schools and lectures; with first flights in the T-33; and after ten hours aloft with an instructor in the back seat, with flying it alone. Then with instruments and precise control of an airplane in any weather. With formation. With navigation.

It would all be a great deal of fun if I knew for certain that I would successfully finish Basic Training and wear at last the silver wings. But when instrument flying is new, it is difficult, and my class that numbered 112 in Preflight is now cut to 63. None have been killed in airplane crashes, none have bailed out or ejected from an airplane. For one reason or another, for academic or military or flying deficiencies, or sometimes just because he has had enough of the tightly-controlled routine, a cadet will pack his B-4 bag one evening and disappear into the giant that is the Air Force.

I had expected some not to finish the program, but I had expected them to fail in a violent sheet of flame or in a bright spinning cloud of fragments of a midair collision.

There are near-misses. I am flying as Lead in a four-ship flight of T-33’s. With 375 knots and a clear sky overhead, I press the control stick back to begin a loop. Our airplanes are just passing the vertical, noses high in the blue sky, when a sudden flash of blurred silver streaks across our path, and is gone. I finish the loop, wingmen faithfully watching only my airplane and working hard to stay in their positions, and twist in my seat to see the airplane that nearly took all four of us out of the sky. But it is gone as surely and as completely as if it had never been. There had not been time for reaction or fear or where did he come from. There had simply been a silver flash ahead of me in the sky. I think about it for a moment and begin another loop.

A few weeks later it happened to a lowerclass cadet, practicing acrobatics alone at 20,000 feet. “I was on top of a Cuban Eight, just starting down, when I felt a little thud. When I rolled out, I saw that my right tiptank was gone and that the end of the wing was pretty well shredded. I thought I’d better come back home.”

He didn’t even see the flash of the airplane that hit him. After he had landed and told what had happened, the base settled down to wait for the other airplane. In a little more than an hour, one airplane of all the airplanes on mobile control’s list of takeoffs failed to have an hour written in the column marked “Return.” Search airplanes went up arrowing through the dust like swift efficient robots seeking a fallen member of the clan. The darkness fell, and the robots found nothing.

The base was quiet and held its breath. Cadet dining halls were still, during the evening meal. Not everyone is home tonight. Pass the salt please, Johnny. The clink of stamped steel forks on mass-fired pottery. I hear it was an upperclassman in the other squadron. Muted clinks, voices low. Across the room, a smile. He should be calling in any minute now. Anybody want some more milk? You can’t kill an upperclassman.

The next day, around the square olive-drab briefing tables in the flight shack, we got the official word. You can kill an upperclassman. Let’s look around, gentlemen; remember that there are sixty airplanes from this base alone in the sky during the day. You’re not bomber pilots here, keep that head on a swivel and never stop looking around.

And we briefed and flew our next mission.

Then, suddenly, we had made it. A long early morning, a crisp formation of the lower class in review as we stand at parade rest, a sixteen-ship flyby, a speech by a general and by the base commander.

They return my salute, shake my hand, present me a cold set of small wings that flash a tiny beam of silver. I made it all the way through. Alive. Then there are orders to advanced flying training and the glory-soaked number that goes F-84F. I am a pilot. A rated Air Force pilot. A fighter pilot.

The German night is full around me, and in my soft earphones is solid hard static from the blue fire that sluices across the windscreen and across the low-frequency antenna in the belly of my airplane. The slim needle of the radiocompass is becoming more and more excited, jerking to the right, always to the right of course; trembling for a second there, swinging back toward Spangdahlem behind me, jerking again toward my right wingtip. I am glad again for the TACAN.

The air is still and smooth as velvet glass, but I tighten again my safety belt and shoulder harness and turn up the cockpit lights. Bright light, they like to say in the ground schools, destroys night vision. Tonight it does not make any difference, for there is nothing to see outside the plexiglass, and the bright light makes it easier to read the instruments. And in the brightness I will not be blinded by lightning. I am strapped in, my gloves are on, my helmet chin strap is fastened, my flight jacket is zipped, my boots are firm and comfortable. I am ready for whatever the weather has to offer me. For a moment I feel as if I should push the gun switch to guns, but it is an irrational fleeting thought. I check again the defroster on, pitot heat on, engine screens retracted. Come and get me, storm. But the air is still and smooth; I have minute after minute of valuable weather time ticking away, adding to the requirement for an advanced instrument rating.

I am foolish. Here I am as nervous as a cat, thinking of a storm that has probably already died away off course. And above 30,000 feet even the worst storms are not so violent as they are at lower altitudes. As I remember, it is rare to find much hail at high altitudes in storms, and lightning has never been shown to be the direct cause of any airplane crash. These elaborate precautions are going to look childish after I land in half an hour at Chaumont and walk up the creaky wooden stairway to my room and take off my boots and finish my letter home. In two hours I will be sound asleep.

Still, it will be good to get this flight over with. I would never make a good all-weather interceptor pilot. Perhaps with training I could become accustomed to hours and hours of weather and storms, but at this moment I am quite happy with my fighter-bomber and the job of shooting at things that I can see.

I have heard that interceptor pilots are not even allowed to roll their airplanes: hard on the electronic gear. What a dismal way to make a living, straight and level and solid instruments all the time. Poor guys.

I might, just a little, envy the F-106 pilot his big delta-wing interceptor. And he might, just a little, envy me my mission. He has the latest airplane and an engine filled with sheer speed. His great grey delta would make a good air combat plane, but he flies day on day of hooded attacks toward dots of smoky green light on his radar screen. My ’84F is older and slower and soon to be changed from sculptured aluminum to a seamless swept memory, but my mission is one of the best missions that a fighter pilot can fly.

FAC, for instance. Pronounced fack. Forward Air Controller. The blast of low-level and gunsight on the truck columns of the Aggressor. FAC. “Checkmate, Bipod Delta here. I’ve got a bunch of troops and two tanks coming toward my position. They’re on the high ground just south of the castle on the dirt road. You got ’em in sight?”

The greening hills of Germany below me, the chessboard in another war game. What a job for a fighter pilot, to be a FAC. Stuck out with the Army in the mud with a jeep and a radio transmitter, watching your friends come in on the strikes. “Roj, Delta. Got the castle and the road in sight, not the target.” A sprinkling of dots in the grass by the road. “As you were, got ’em in sight. Take your spacing, Two.”

“What’s your armament, Checkmate?”

“Simulated napalm and guns. First pass will be the napalm.”

“Hurry up, will you? The tanks are pouring on the coal; must have seen you.”

“Roj.”

I melt into stick and throttle, my airplane leaps ahead and hurls itself in a sweeping burst of speed at the road. There are the tanks, feathers of dust and grass spraying long behind their tracks. But it is as if they were caught in cooling wax, I move fifteen times faster than they. Take it down to the deck, attacking from behind the tank. In its wax, it begins to turn, grass spewing from beneath its right track. I bank my wings, ever so slightly, and feel confident, omnipotent, as an eagle plunging from height to mouse. Men are riding on the tank, clutching handholds. They do not hear me, but they see me, looking back over their camouflaged shoulders. And I see them. What a way to make a living, clinging with all your strength to the back of a 50-ton block of steel hurtling across a meadow. In the time it takes me to count three, the tank, frozen in its turn, frames itself for a moment in my windscreen, and the lowest diamond of my gunsight flicks through it and my thumb has released tanks of jellied gasoline from beneath the wings. Wouldn’t be a tank driver in wartime for all the money in the world. Pull up. Hard turn right. Look back. The tank is rolling to a stop, obedient to the rules of our game. Two is snapping his black swept shadow over the hatch of the second tank. Tanks make such easy targets. I guess they just hope that they won’t get caught in an air strike. “Nice job, Checkmate. Work over the troops, will you?” A friendly request, from a man who is seeing from the ground the sight that so often has been caught in his forward windscreen. In the war we would worry now about small-arms fire and shoulder-mounted antiaircraft missiles, but we would already have decided that when our time comes, it will come, and the worry would be a transient one. Down on the troops. Most unwarlike troops, these. Knowing the game, and not often having the chance for their own private and special airshow, they stand and watch us come in. One raises his arms in a defiant V. I bank again, very slightly, to hurtle directly toward him. He and I have a little personal clash of wills. Low. I climb up the slope of the long meadow toward my antagonist. If there are telephone wires across the meadow, I will have plenty of clearance going beneath them. In war, my antagonist would be caught in the hail of Armor Piercing Incendiary from six Browning 50-caliber machine guns. But though this is not real war, it is a real challenge he throws to me. I dare you to make me duck. We are all such little boys at heart. I make one last tiny adjustment so that my drop tanks will pass on either side of his outflung hands if he does not duck. I see the arms begin to falter as he flicks from sight beneath the nose. If he hasn’t ducked, he is due for a flattening burst of jetblast. But he does have determination, this man. Usually we scatter the troops like flocks of chicks around the hilltops. I turn on another pass from another direction, looking, from sudden height of my pullup, for my friend. One dot looks like another.

Another pass, carried perhaps a little too low, for my friend dives for the ground even before I pass over him. That is really very profound. One dot looks like another. You can’t tell good from evil when you move 500 feet per second above the grass. You can only tell that the dots are men.

On one FAC mission near the hem of the iron curtain we were asked to fly east for two minutes in order to find our Controller. Two minutes east would have put us over the border and into Soviet airspace. Enemy airspace. The Controller had meant to say “west.” The hills did not look any different on the Other Side. As we circled and turned west I had looked across into the forbidden land. I saw no fences, no iron curtains, no strange coloring of the earth. Only the green rolling of the constant hills, a scattering of little grey villages. Without my compass and map, with the East-West border heavily penciled in red, I would have thought that the villages of men that I saw in the east were just as the villages of the west. Fortunately, I had the map.

“How about a high-speed run for the troops, Checkmate?”

“Sure thing,” I say, smiling. For the troops. If I were a fighter pilot marooned on the ground with the olive-drab Army, nothing would ease my solitude quite so much as the 500-knot rapport with my friends and their airplanes. So, a pass for the troops. “Open her up, Checkmate.” And throttle full open, engine drinking fuel at 7,000 pounds per hour. Across the meadow, faster than an arrow from a hundred-pound bow, heading this time for the cluster of dots by the radio-jeep of the FAC. 510 knots and I am joy. They love my airplane. See her beauty. See her speed. And I, too, love my airplane. A whiplash and the FAC and his jeep are gone. Pull up, far up, nose high in the milkblue sky. And we roll. Earth and sky joyously twined in a blur of dwindling emerald and turquoise. Stop the roll swiftly, upside down, bring the nose again through the horizon, roll back to straight and level. The sky is a place for living and for whistling and for singing and for dying. It is a place that is built to give people a place from which to look down on all the others. It is always fresh and awake and clear and cold, for when the cloud covers the sky or fills the place where the sky should be, the sky is gone. The sky is a place where the air is ice and you breathe it and you live it and you wish that you could float and dream and race and play all the days of your life. The sky is there for everyone, yet only a few seek it out. It is all color, all heat and cold, all oxygen and forest leaves and sweet air and salt air and fresh crystal air that has never been breathed before. The sky whirs around you, keening and hissing over your head and face and it gets in your eyes and numbs your ears in a coldness that is bright and sharp. You can drink it and chew it and swallow it. You can rip your fingers through the rush of sky and the hard wind. It is your very life inside you and over your head and beneath your feet. You shout a song and the sky sweeps it away, twisting it and tumbling it through the hard liquid air. You can climb to the top of it, fall with it twisting and rushing around you, leap clear, arms wide, catching the air with your teeth. It holds the stars at night as strongly as it holds the brazen sun in the day. You shout a laugh of joy, and the rush of wind is there to carry the laugh a thousand miles.

In my climbing roll away from the FAC, I love everyone. Which, however, will not prevent me from killing them. If that day comes.

“Very nice show, Checkmate.”

“Why, feel free to call on us at any time, Bravo.” So this is joy. Joy fills the whole body, doesn’t it? Even my toes are joyful. For this the Air Force finds it necessary to pay me. No. They do not pay me for the hours that I fly. They pay me for the hours that I do not fly; those hours chained to the ground are the ones in which pilots earn their pay.

I and the few thousand other single-engine pilots live in a system that has been called a close fraternity. I have heard more than once the phrase “arrogant fighter pilots.” Oddly enough as generalizations go, they are both well chosen phrases.

A multiengine bomber pilot or a transport pilot or a navigator or a nonflying Air Force officer is still, basically, a human being. But it is a realization that I must strive to achieve, and in practice, unless it is necessary, I do not talk to them. There have been a few multiengine pilots stationed at bases where I have been in the past. They are happy to fly big lumbering airplanes and live in a world of low altitudes and long flights and coffee and sandwiches on the flight deck. It is just this contentment with the droning adventureless existence that sets them apart from single-engine pilots.

I belong to a group of men who fly alone. There is only one seat in the cockpit of a fighter airplane; there is no space allotted for another pilot to tune the radios in the weather or make the calls to air traffic control centers or to help with the emergency procedures or to call off the airspeed down final approach. There is no one else to break the solitude of a long crosscountry flight. There is no one else to make decisions. I do everything myself, from engine start to engine shutdown. In a war, I will face alone the missiles and the flak and the small-arms fire over the front lines. If I die, I will die alone.

Because of this, and because this is the only way that I would have it, I do not choose to spend my time with the multiengine pilots who live behind the lines of adventure. It is an arrogant attitude and unfair. The difference between one pilot in the cockpit and many on the flight deck should not be enough to cause them never to associate. But there is an impassable barrier between me and the man who prefers the life of low and slow.

I ventured, once, to break the barrier. I talked one evening to a pilot in a Guard squadron that had been forced to trade its F-86H’s for four-engine transports. If there ever was a common bond between single- and multiengine flying, I could see it through the eyes of this man. “How do you like multi after the Sabre?” I had asked, lights dancing on the pool beside the officers’ club.

I had picked the wrong pilot. He was new in the squadron, a transfer.

“I’ve never flown an eighty-six and I have no desire to fly one,” he said.

The word “eighty-six” sounded strange and foreign in his mouth, words not often said. I discovered that there had been a complete turnover of pilots in that squadron when its airplane changed from fighter-interceptor to heavy transport, and that my partner in conversation had a multiengine mind. The silver wings above his pocket were cast in the same mold that mine had been, but he lived in another world, behind a wall that has no gate. It has been months since that evening, and I have not since bothered to speak with a multiengine pilot.

Every so often a single-engine pilot is caught in a web of circumstance that transfers him from a fighter squadron into the ranks of multiengine pilots, that forces him to learn about torque pressure and overhead switch panels and propeller feathering procedures. I have known three of these. They fought furiously against the change, to no avail. For a short while they flew multiengine airplanes with their single-engine minds, but in less than a year all three had been released from active Air Force duty at their own request.

The program that switched fighter pilots into transports had once been quite active, affecting hundreds of single-engine pilots. Shortly after, perhaps by coincidence, I had read an article that deplored the loss of young Air Force pilots to civilian life. I would gladly have bet that some interesting statistics awaited the man who first probed the retention rate of fighter pilots forced to fly multiengine aircraft. The code of the Air Force is that any officer should be able to adapt to any position assigned him, but the code does not recognize the tremendous chasm between the background and attitude of single- and multiengine pilots.

The solitude that each fighter pilot knows when he is alone with his airplane is the quality that shows him that his airplane is actually a thing of life. Life exists in multiengine airplanes, too, but it is more difficult to find through the talk of crew on interphone and how are the passengers taking the rough air and crew chief can you pass me up a flight lunch. It is sacrilege to eat while you fly an airplane.

Solitude is that key that says that life is not confined to things that grow from the earth. The interdependence of pilot and airplane in flight shows that each cannot exist without the other, that we truly depend upon each other for our very existence. And we are confident in each other. One fighter squadron motto sums up the attitude of fighter pilots everywhere; We can beat any man in any land in any game that he can name for any amount that he can count.

In contrast, I read on the wall of Base Operations at a multiengine base: The difficult we approach with caution. The impossible we do not attempt. I could not believe it. I thought that it must have been someone’s idea of a joke for the day. But the sign was neatly lettered and a little grey, as if it had been there for a long while. It was joy to spin the dust of that runway from my wheels and to be out again in a sky designed for fighter pilots.

It is from pride that my arrogance comes. I have a history of sacrifice and of triumph and of pride. As the pilot of my Thunderstreak, in charge of an airplane built to rocket and bomb and strafe the enemy on the ground, my history goes back to the men who flew the P-47’s, the Thunderbolts of the Second World War. The same hills that are buried beneath me tonight remember the stocky, square-cut Jug of twenty years ago, and the concrete silos that were flak towers still bear the bulletholes of its low-level attack and its eight 50-caliber machine guns.

After the Jug pilots of Europe came the Hog pilots of Korea to face the rising curtain of steel from the ground. They flew another Republic airplane: the straight-wing F-84G Thunderjet, and they played daily games of chance with the flak and the rifle bullets and the cables across the valleys and the MiGs that crept past the ’86’s on the patrol. There are not a great many ’84G pilots of Korea who lived through their games, as, if a war breaks out in Europe tomorrow, there will not be a great many ’84F pilots surviving.

After me and my Superhog are the F-100D Super Sabre pilots that have waited out the years of cold war on alert all around the world. And after them, the men who fly the Ultimate Hog, the F-105D Thunderchief, who can attack targets on the ground, through weather, by radar alone.

My airplane and I are part of a long chain from the mist of the past to the mist of the future. We are even now obsolete; but if a war should begin on the imminent tomorrow, we will be, at least, bravely obsolete.

We fill the squares of our training board with black X’s in grease pencil on the acetate overlay; X’s in columns headed “Low-level navigation without radio aids” and “Combat profile” and “Max-load takeoff.” Yet we are certain that we will not all survive the next war.

Coldly, factually, it is stated that we are not only flying against the small-arms and the cables and the flak, but against the new mechanics in the nose of a ground-to-air missile as well. I have often thought, after watching the movies of our ground-to-air missiles in action, that I am glad I am not a Russian fighter-bomber pilot. I wonder if there is also a Russian pilot, after seeing his own movies, with thanks in his heart that he is not an American fighter-bomber pilot.

We talk about the missiles every once in a while, discussing the fact of their existence and the various methods of dodging them. But dodging is predicated on knowing that they are chasing, and during a strike we will be concentrating on the target, not on worrying about the fire or the flak or the missiles thrown up against us. We will combine our defense with our offense, and we will hope.

Speaking factually, we remind ourselves that our airplanes can still put almost as much ordnance on the target as any other fighter available. It does it without the finesse of the F-105’s radar, we say, but the fire eventually reaches the target. Our words are for the most part true, but there is a long mental battle to submerge the also-true words that our airplane is old, and was designed to fight in another era of warfare. We fly with a bravely buried sense of inferiority. As Americans, we should fly modern American airplanes. There is no older or slower ground support airplane in any NATO Air Force than ours.

The French fly F-84F’s, but they are transitioning now into Mirages and Vautours built for modern sky. The Luftwaffe is flying F-84F’s, but they are well into the task of converting to Maltese-crossed F-104G’s. The Canadians are flying Mark VI Sabres, contemporary with the ’84F, and they are changing now to their own CF-104G.

We fly our ’84F’s and the never-ending rumors of airplanes to come. We will get F-100D’s soon. We will get F-104’s soon. We will get the Navy’s F4H’s soon. We will be in F-105’s before the year is up.

There is, somewhere, a later airplane scheduled and waiting for us. But it has not yet shown its face and we do not talk about our shortcomings. We make do with what we have, as the P-39 pilots and the P-40 plots did at the beginning of the Second War.

The pilots in my squadron today are as varied a group of men as could be netted at a random stroke into the waters of civilian life. There is a young second lieutenant, a house-wares salesman, just accumulating the first fine scratches on his golden bars. There is a major who flew Mustangs and Jugs on long-ago fighter sweeps into Germany. There is a lawyer, practice established; a computer engineer; three airline pilots; two bachelors whose only income came from Guard flying. There are the successful and the unsuccessful. The unruffled and the volatile. The readers of books and the seekers of adventure.

If you looked closely you would find constants that many share: most are within five years of 30, most are family men, most have served their years of active duty with the regular Air Force. But one constant, without exception, they are all men of action. The most introspective pilot in the squadron leaves his book, carefully marked, in his BOQ room, and straps himself each day to 25,000 pounds of fighter airplane. He leads a flight of four airplanes through patterns of bombing and strafing and rocket firing and nuclear weapon delivery. He makes wing takeoffs into 500-foot weather ceilings and doesn’t see the ground again until he breaks out of the ragged cloud and freezing rain two hours and 900 miles from his takeoff runway. He alternates his letters to his family with an occasional review of airborne emergency procedures, and, occasionally, puts them to use when a red warning light flares in his cockpit, or his nosewheel fails to extend when it is time to land. There are those who speak loudly, and perhaps with too little humility, but those same back their words with action every time they step into an airplane. There are nights in the officers’ club when whiskey glasses splinter against the rough stone walls, there are colored smoke bombs thrown into the closed rooms of sleeping comrades, there is a song, not altogether complimentary, sung of the wing commander.

But you can count on the coming of the dawn, and with it the concussion of engine start in the cold wind. Take First Lieutenant Roger Smith, for instance, who last night deftly introduced four lighted firecrackers into the wing materiel officer’s room. Grounds, really, for court-martial. But in the confusion he was not identified, and this morning he flies number Two in a ground support mission against the Aggressor Force at Hohenfels. You cannot tell him, under oxygen mask and lowered visor, from Captain Jim Davidson, flight leader, calling now for radar vector to the target area. Davidson spent the night writing to his wife, and telling her, among other things, that he did not have any real reason to believe that the squadron would be released from active duty before the assigned year of duty was finished. In close formation the two swept fighters drop from altitude, indicating the same 450 knots on identical airspeed indicators. “Tank column at ten o’clock low,” Davidson calls. And they turn together to the attack.

Men of action, and every day, new action. In the gloved right hand, the possibility of life and death.

The loud slurred drawl harassing the multiengine pilot at the bar belongs to a man named Roudabush, who, a year ago, against all regulations, landed a flamed-out fighter at night, without electrical power and therefore without lights, at an airport in Virginia. He refused to bail out of his airplane or even to jettison his external fuel tanks over the city of Norfolk, and was reprimanded.

“You tell yourself that you’ll bail out if the thing quits at night,” he said once, “but when you look down and see all the lights of the city . . . kinda changes your mind.” A man like that, you don’t care how he talks. You fly with him, and it makes you proud.

Johnny Blair, leaning against the mahogany bartop swirling the icecubes in his glass and smiling faintly at Roudabush’s banter, has a little scar on his jaw. Shortly past noon on one day in his life he was beginning a LABS run, 500 knots toward the target, 100 feet in the air, when he heard a thud and the overheat and fire warning lights came on. He pulled up, heard another thud, and the cockpit filled with smoke. Without a word to his wingman, he shut down his engine, jettisoned the canopy, and squeezed the trigger on the right handgrip. For a few seconds in the afternoon he fought to release himself from the tumbling steel seat, 800 feet over a forest of pine. The automatic parachute release failed. That inward person immediately pulled the manual parachute release, with the world spinning green and blue about him. He swung one time in the harness before he dragged through the treetops and was slammed to the ground. He lost his helmet and mask in the bailout, and an anonymous tree-branch slashed his jaw. Then it was over, the inner man subsiding, the outward man spreading the parachute canopy as a signal to the helicopters, suffering slightly from shock, and telling the story very plainly and undramatically to whomever could benefit from it. Otherwise he does not talk of it, and except for the scar, he is the sort of person who would lead you to say, “Now there is a typical high-school geometry teacher.” Which, of course, is exactly what he is.

It takes a while to learn to know many of these men as friends, for many of them, in the fear of being thought braggart or self-styled supermen, do not tell of narrow escapes and brushes with disaster to anyone who inquires. Gradually, with much time, the newcomer to the squadron discovers that Blair had an interesting low-altitude bailout, that Roudabush “coulda kissed that bitch” when his airplane stretched its glide, in the dark, to the Virginia runway; that Travas ran into an air-to-air target in the days when they were made of plastic rag and steel bars, and dragged 70 pounds of steel and 30 feet of polyethylene home, imbedded in his wing.

And the squadron learns, gradually, that the newcomer has had his own share of experience in the world above the ground. A squadron is a swirling multicolored pool of experience, from which is painted the freewheeling sweep of life in the air, in individual brushstrokes. The brilliant shimmering brass of combat in the sun burns itself into the pilots in their cockpit; dark sky and dark sea soak their enormous blue into the man who guides his airplane between them; and, once in a very long while, the scarlet of a fireball against a mountainside glares to outshine all the other hues, in time breaking to tiny sharp sparkles of pain that never quite disappear.

I reach to my right in the red darkness and turn the volume of the radiocompass as low as it will go. It reports now only fragments of the Spangdahlem callsign behind me, and has become more of a thunderstorm indicator than a navigation radio. This is not bad, with the TACAN working well, and I am glad to have a thunderstorm indicator that is so reliable. There is a dim flash in the grey to my right, a momentary suggestion of light that is instantly gone again.

Tuning down the radiocompass was a short break, and the routine of the crosscheck continues. Straight and level. Attitude and airspeed. Needle and ball. No swerving from the target. As if I had a Shape under my wing.

There are Shapes and there are Bugs and there are Blue Boys, all names for the form that houses a few million tightly-controlled neutrons that make an atomic bomb. Or more properly, a Nuclear Device. It is always called a Device.

The first mission of many squadrons of tactical fighters is now a strategic one, and the numbers of many fighter wings are followed by the ominous letters SD.

SD stands for Special Delivery, and means that pilots spend hours studying targets of remote corners of the world and learning selected bits of nuclear physics and building their language to include LABS and Shape and Nuke and the meaning of the T-Zero light. They fly a strange new bombing pattern in their practice, they fly it alone, and only the first bomb counts for score. A pilot away from a fighter cockpit since Korea would not recognize a full panel of switches and lights for the nuclear weapons delivery system. But it is an important panel, today.

Part of my job is to know how to deliver a Shape, and I practice it dutifully. The placing of Device on Target begins with a swirl of charts and dividers and angles and measurements. From that emerge a few highly-classified figures that are given for the nourishment of a pair of computers mounted in my airplane.

Normally, the missions are flown with only a small 25-pound practice bomb to record the effectiveness of the delivery, but once a year I am required to fly with a fullsize, full-weight Shape under my left wing. This is to remind me that when I carry a real atomic bomb, I will have to hold a bit of right stick-pressure to keep the wings level on takeoff.

A practice Shape is smooth and streamlined and not unpretty. The real Device, which looks exactly the same, is the ugliest mass of metal that I have ever seen. Blunt-nosed, olive-drab and heavy, it is like a greedy deformed remora attached to the smooth swept wing of my airplane.

With every other pilot in the squadron, I joined the Air National Guard because I like to fly airplanes. With strafing and rocketing and conventional bombing, of course, our mission passes the realm of mere airplane-flying and becomes one of destroying enemy machines and enemy troops. But the mounting of a Device on the airplane is, as far as the pilots are concerned, one step too many. I do not like it at all, yet the Shape is a part of my mission, and I learn to toss it and hit a target.

Hold the right stick-pressure, and gear up and flaps up and low-level to the target. The trees flick by below, the sky is the same French sky that I have flown for months, the cockpit is the same about me, and I cannot see the Device under my wing. But the lights on its control box glimmer dully in front of me, and I am acutely aware of its nearness. I feel as if I am standing near a lightly-chained gorilla as it awakens. I do not care for gorillas.

The lights tell me that the Device is awakening, and I respond by pushing up the proper switches at the proper moments. The Initial Point rushes in at me from the horizon, and I push my distaste for the monster to the back of my mind as I set another panel of switches in the last combination of steps that lead to its release. One hundred percent rpm.

The last red-roofed village flashes below me, and the target, a pyramid of white barrels, is just visible at the end of its run-in line. Five hundred knots. Switch down, button pressed. Timers begin their timing, circuits are alerted for the drop. Inch down to treetop altitude. I do not often fly at 500 knots on the deck, and it is apparent that I am moving quickly. The barrels inflate. I see that their white paint is flaking. And the pyramid streaks beneath me. Back on the stick smoothly firmly to read four G on the accelerometer and center the needles of the indicator that is only used in nuke weapon drops and center them and hold it there and I’ll bet those computers are grinding their little hearts out and all I can see is sky in the windscreen hold the G’s keep the needles centered there’s the sun going beneath me and WHAM.

My airplane rolls hard to the right and tucks more tightly into her loop and strains ahead even though we are upside down. The Shape has released me more than I have released it. The little white barrels are now six thousand feet directly beneath my canopy. I have no way to tell if it was a good drop or not. That was decided back with the charts and graphs and the dividers and the angles. I kept the needles centered, the computers did their task automatically, and the Device is on its way.

Now, while it is still in the air and climbing with the inertia that my airplane has given it, my job becomes one of escape. Hold the throttle at the firewall, pull the nose down until it is well below the horizon, roll back so that the sun is over my head, and run. If the Shape were packed with neutrons instead of concrete ballast, I would need every moment I could find for my escape, for every moment is another foot away from the sun-blast that would just as easily destroy a friendly F-84F as it would the hostile target. Visor down against the glare-that-would-be, turn the rear-view mirror away, crouch down in the seat and fly as fast as possible toward Our Side.

At the same moment, the Device has stopped in the air, at the very apex of its high trajectory. A long plumbline descended would pass through the center of the white pyramid. Then it falls. Subject only to the winds, impossible to halt, the bomb falls. If it were a real Device in a real war, it would be well at this time for the enemy to have his affairs in order. The hate of the enemy has been reflected in the hate of the friend, reflected through me and my airplane and the computers that it carries.

And it is too late. We may declare an armistice, we may suddenly realize that the people under the bomb suspended are truly, deeply, our friends and our brothers. We may suddenly, blindingly see the foolishness of our differences, and the means to their solution. But the Device has begun to fall.

Do I feel sorry? Do I feel a certain sadness? I have felt those from the moment I saw the first practice Shape lifted into position under my wing.

But I love my airplane more than I hate the Device. I am the lens through which the hatred of my country is focused into a bright molten ball over the home of the enemy.

Although it is my duty and my only desire in wartime to serve my country as best I can, I rationalize. We will never really use the Devices. My targets will be completely and solely military ones. Everyone who is consumed in the fire is purely evil and filled with hatred for freedom.

There is a point where even the most ardent rationalization is only a gesture. I hope, simply, that I will never have to throw one of the repellent things at living people.

The distance-measuring drum of the steady TACAN has turned down now to 006 and that is as far as it will go, for I am six miles into the deep night directly above the transmitter of the Wiesbaden TACAN station. I am a minute and a half behind schedule in a wind that came from nowhere. In 30 minutes my wheels will be touching the cold wet runway at Chaumont Air Base.

The thought would have been reassuring, but there are two quick flashes of lightning to the right, across my course.

Once again, ready the report, tilt the stick to the right, fly the instruments, fly the instruments, thumb down on microphone button.