MiG Pilot: the Final Escape of Lt. Belenko

In tactics, the cadets studied mostly the methods of the Americans, the Main Enemy, whom they primarily were being trained to confront. A professor who had flown MiGs in Korea and served as an adviser to the North Vietnamese was frank in his characterization of U.S. pilots. They were professionally skilled and personally brave. Even when ambushed by larger numbers of MiGs jumping up at them from sanctuaries in China, they would stay and fight rather than flee. They drove on toward their targets no matter how many missiles, how muck flak was fired at them. The Americans were quick and flexible in adapting to new situations or weapons, and they were ingenious in innovating surprises of their own. You never could be sure of what to expect from them except they always loved to fight.

The students asked a number of questions, as they were encouraged to do, and one wanted to know why the Americans were so good.

The professor explained that over the years they had perfected an extremely effective training program. They had developed psychological tests that enabled them to identify candidates with the highest aptitudes for flying and combat. Their recruits already had attended universities and thus began training with a «strong theoretical base.» And virtually all their instructors had a great deal of actual combat experience because the Americans always were fighting somewhere in the world.

Yes, but how can such a rotten and decadent society produce pilots so brave?

A political officer supplied the answer. «Oh, they do it for money. They are extraordinarily well paid. They will do anything for money.»

I wonder how much they pay them to make them willing to die.

His analysis of the case of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam probably disturbed Belenko most of all. Political officers proclaimed the slaughter of more than a hundred Vietnamese men, women, and children at the village of My Lai the ultimate example of American inhumanity and degeneracy. To demonstrate that the mass murder had actually occurred, they quoted verbatim from numerous American press accounts reporting the atrocity in macabre detail. There could be no doubt about it. The Americans themselves publicly had charged one of then: own officers with the killing of 109 innocent civilians. *

But why are the Dark Forces putting him in jail? If they are pure and true Dark Forces, he did just what they wanted. They should be giving him a medal. And why do the Dark Forces allow their newspapers to tell about аll this? Every society has its animals. I myself have seen some of ours in Rubtsovsk. Our newspapers won't even report one murder. But the Americans are shaming themselves in front of the whole world by reporting the murder of one hundred nine men, women and babies. Why?

His disquietude, however, receded before the prospect of flight. Belenko and some ninety other cadets were transferred to an air base eight miles outside Grozny near the Caspian Sea. Grozny was an ancient city of nearly 400,000, and undoubtedly it once had been lovely. The baroque architecture, ornate buildings, and cable cars gliding through narrow brick streets still made it somewhat attractive. But it stood in a valley which captured and held the smoke, pollutants, and stench discharged from surrounding oil refineries and chemical factories, and the river running through the city was an open sewer of industrial wastes.