Chickenhawk: Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

Wolters seemed entirely different to me as I drove from the main gate to the flight line. For one thing, I was no longer a subhuman warrant officer candidate—known as a WOC. I was a warrant officer pilot now. People, at least enlisted people, weren’t fucking with me. Real officers believed warrants were kind of half-assed officers and allowed us our privileges because it was mandated. Any highest- ranking chief warrant officer, CW-4 (equivalent to a major), was outranked by any green second lieutenant. It’s a mysterious system. If I wasn’t a pilot, I wouldn’t be here.

A lot more people were bustling around than when I went through flight training in 1964. Because my Volvo had a blue officer’s parking sticker on the bumper, enlisted men and WOCs walking along the road saluted. The enlisted men’s salutes were grudging and slovenly, as was expected. The WOC salutes were snappy and sharp and made you wonder if they ever whacked their heads. They saluted like their lives depended on doing it right. They were correct. Doing everything right was a big concern for WOCs. Half of them wouldn’t make it through, and the prize for the runners-up was to be thrown out of flight school. They’d be sent to Vietnam as grunts, where they’d slog it out and get dirty, never mind killed. Dirty is bad; the Vietnam combat pilot’s motto was “Die clean.”

All this saluting was uncomfortable. In Vietnam anybody seen saluting in our aviation units was probably drunk or forced into it by a newbie field-grade officer trying to restore military discipline. I returned the salutes as I drove, feeling awkward.

I passed the post theater, the post library, the post craft shop, and the post commissary. As a WOC, I was only allowed in the commissary to buy necessities, like wax to shine my floor, my shoes, and my sink.

I barely knew the other places existed. Now that I was a human being I was interested in learning how to print photographs at the craft shop and build something at the wood shop. I’d done my war. As a stateside soldier, I wanted to coast, pursue mundane hobbies, and forget Vietnam. I still had some problems: I couldn’t sleep, had boils from some vicious jungle infection, and got profoundly depressed each night seeing the war reported on television in banal snippets of violence before the weatherman, while the center of national attention was the new pop series, Batman. I thought these problems would go away. Just needed a little time to readjust, was all.

Down the hill from the commissary I passed four new student dormitories. A platoon of candidates were doing push-ups out front while a TAC (short for tactical) sergeant harangued them. Thank God I wasn’t going to be a TAC officer. For a pilot, it was like a lobotomy. I was on the lookout for my old TAC sergeant, Wayne Malone, but hadn’t seen him. The day I graduated from flight school I wanted to come to Wolters, find Malone, and make him do eight hundred push-ups for harassing me unmercifully while I was a WOC. Now I just wanted to say hello.

I passed the WOC Club at the bend in the road, an old white wood-frame building in which the candidates were allowed to visit for a few hours on the weekends with their wives or girlfriends. They served beer inside, but the candidates were usually outside driving their ladies to deserted places on the immense post to get laid. Patience and I had a Volkswagen when I was a candidate. One of our fondest memories is the time we didn’t even make it to the car, stopping instead behind the big oak tree beside the club. It was the kind of scene in which you might imagine a large dog rushing up from nowhere to throw a bucket of water on us. I smiled when I drove past the tree.

As I drove along the road beside the main heliport, helicopters lurched into the air from the six takeoff pads and flew over me, flitting off in all directions over the central Texas hills. Twice a day, in the morning and afternoon training sessions, the school would put fifteen hundred aircraft in the air at the same time to crank out enough pilots to replace the ones getting killed in Vietnam. Wolters was dizzyingly crowded, and dangerous.

I had an eight o’clock aircraft orientation flight scheduled with Warrant Officer Gary Lineberry, a former classmate who had not yet gone to Vietnam. Actually, Lineberry hadn’t gone anywhere. They’d assigned him right back to flight school upon graduation from Fort Rucker, Alabama, the last stage of the Army’s helicopter course, because he was a superb pilot. While most of the rest of class 65-3 went to Vietnam, Lineberry became an instructor pilot (IP) and was now part of the Methods of Instruction (MOI) branch at Wolters that taught veteran pilots how to be IPs.