Stranger to the Ground

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.