Stranger to the Ground

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.