Book One Excerpts

“As I returned to the flight room, word had already spread of my check ride bust. As I had seen with many others who had left the program, a pall of disaster now surrounded me, an aura of defeat and impending course failure I had seen envelop many others. I was crestfallen. I’d come so far, and now classmates spoke to me with a tinge of pity in their voice, suggesting perhaps I, too, would be gone soon.

I returned to the Webb pattern, shot an instrument approach, and requested the closed (close in) visual pattern to get another quick landing. As I rolled out on final, I noticed the controls were behaving very strangely. I had to use huge control stick movements to get my desired response from the plane. As I pondered this, the RSU officer came up on tower frequency and asked, “T-38 on final, confirm no-flap?”

AAAAAAH! I had forgotten to put the flaps down to improve lift for the slow final approach and now, belatedly, realized I was about to stall the plane a few hundred feet above the ground, something that could have fatal consequences. I slammed the throttles forward into full afterburner, orange flames shot out the back of the plane’s engines, and I felt a blessed power surge that pressed me back into my seat.

The rear cargo door came down, and Santa emerged. The troops cheered and whistled. Then the Donut Dollies came down the ramp and the troops went joyously berserk, but not in a nasty or lewd sense. They spun around in the same frantic ecstasy of a pet dog when you pick it up from the vet or when you hold its dinner bowl over its head to make it dance. No group of children ever carried off the fantasy so well.

I didn’t get nervous until nightfall as I sat outside my bunker looking across the Phu Cat runway at the hills beyond the far side of the base about a mile away. Occasionally the perimeter guards would fire phosphorus flares into the night above the wire barriers to light them up, checking for sappers or infiltrators. The flares would pop to life a few hundred feet in the air and float down slowly on tiny parachutes providing a harsh white light that shifted as if a giant lantern were slowly swung back and forth above the jungle. I thought of these flares as the torches carried by demons lighting the stairway to hell.

As we rolled down the runway, we barely made our acceleration check, a certain speed that must be reached by a certain elapsed time or the takeoff must be aborted to stop in the remaining runway.

This alarmed me because we usually beat the time easily. After eating up eight thousand feet of the eleven-thousand-foot runway, we remained thirty knots below rotation speed and were barely accelerating. Something was terribly wrong. I had pulled several of the throttles back slightly to match the prescribed takeoff power setting, but I now shoved all of them to the firewall. At least they’d know we gave it everything we had if we didn’t make it. I looked down the remaining runway at the pine forest off the end, where it seemed we were about to meet a fiery and apocalyptic end.

When (my navigator’s wife) arrived, I sat her at one end of my dining room table while I sat at the other end with a good six feet of table between us. Distressingly for my task, however, she wore a thin, form-fitting sweater that accentuated her figure.

She asked if I knew why she was there, and I said I most certainly did. And with that, I launched into my concise, cogent, logical treatise of why this could not, and would not—happen, that such a sexual liaison would threaten the crew and my career and would be a brazen betrayal of her husband, my friend and crewmate. I expected her to hang her head, feel ashamed, and apologize profusely when I finished upbraiding her.

Midway through my diatribe, however, I saw things were not going well. Nav wife measured me with the eyes of a poker player who knew she had the winning hand. My blistering, telling arguments appeared to have no effect. She seemed to already know all I would say, and it seemed not to matter. I ended by righteously avowing I would not betray her husband, and I was aghast she would do so in such a manner.

She paused a moment, looking down at the table for dramatic effect, then raised her sparkling eyes to mine with the faint smile of the cat about to swallow the canary, which told me a coup de grace was coming. “You don’t have to worry about betraying my husband,” she said. “He knows I’m here. He sent me.”

As the copilot leveled off at eight hundred feet, and I was busy reviewing my low-level chart, the aircraft suddenly snapped nose down ten degrees, a horrendous and panic-inducing loss of control that promised to kill us all in about ten seconds as the moonlit pine forest below us filled the windscreen and rushed toward us.

In the near distance 33,000 feet below us, the ground glowed red, eerily, from explosions from preceding bomber formations. A mist hung over the terrain that gave the area the look of a graveyard in a horror movie. The radar navigator began the countdown, “Ten . . . nine . . . eight,”—the apparitional voice continued his drunken soliloquy on the radio—“Three . . . two . . . one . . . bombs away!”