Falling to Earth Read online

  In the end I chose the air force because I thought I would get promoted faster than in the army. That’s what those tactical officers told me. It turned out to be totally false—complete sales talk. But damn them, it worked. It wasn’t the last time I would run across those guys either. One of them, an officer named Jim Allen, would offer me some great advice a couple of years later, when I felt like quitting the military altogether.

  We all gathered to choose our service specialty in a process called branch drawing. Not everybody got his first choice. Instead, we lined up in a big theater in order of academic standing. Starting with the top guy, we chose different branches of the army or air force. Because they did not have their own academy graduates yet, one-third of the graduates went to the air force. Army engineering went fast, as the bright guys took those places. Once the number of slots for each branch was filled, they were crossed off the board. By the end of the process, the last guys had nothing to choose from.

  That day, the process was overseen by the superintendent of the academy, a formidable army general named Blackshear Bryan. He was a real blood-and-guts soldier, not long back from the Korean War, and bald as a billiard ball. As far as he was concerned, the infantry was the Queen of Battle and, by God, that was the way it would always be. He did not want anything to do with the air force, and forced air force officers stationed at West Point into out-of-the-way offices.

  Perhaps it was a reflection of changing times, but that day the air force slots were chosen as fast as the army engineering slots, until about one hundred and fifty graduates remained—the bottom guys—who had no choice but to stay in the army and serve in the infantry. Feeling sorry for the general but also a little amused, I watched him as the selections were made. As, one by one, we chose the air force, I watched a flush of red rise up the back of his neck and spread across the top of his head, until he looked like he was going to explode. Before the selection process ended, he jumped to his feet and stormed out of the theater, completely disgusted. The times were changing, and he hated it.

  In just a few years, I had come a long way from the farm. I had married, joined the air force, and was about to begin a flying career. I hoped like hell that I would be able to learn how to fly aircraft, enjoy the experience, and survive. I had made a big career decision with little to base it on. My total time piloting an airplane at that moment? Zero. For all I knew, I was going to be the worst pilot the air force had ever attempted to train.

  CHAPTER 3

  AVIATOR

  The air force first sent me clear down to the border with Mexico, in south Texas. I was assigned to Moore Air Base, a private field just west of the town of Edinburg. On a warm and clear June morning, Pam and I loaded up our new Chevrolet convertible, put the top down, and headed south from her parents’ home on Long Island.

  Pam and I had married so that we could be together during my training. We had already decided to spend our lives together, and we didn’t want that commitment interrupted. Why wait, we reasoned? We’d been dating long enough that marriage seemed like a natural step.

  America was at peace when I joined the air force. The Korean War had ended in 1953 while I was still at West Point, two years before I graduated. It was clear, however, that America could be pulled into a conflict with another country at any time: the era of the Cold War always felt tense.

  The base wasn’t where I wanted to be assigned. When we left West Point, we were allowed to suggest three choices of training bases. I chose locations in Florida and Arizona and didn’t even consider Moore, but they assigned me there anyway. Once in Texas, we found a tiny apartment in hot, dusty Edinburg. For the next six months I traveled thirty miles to the base every morning as part of a carpool of pilots, so Pam could have the car during the day. We couldn’t live any closer; the air base was pretty isolated.

  But there wasn’t much for Pam to do in Edinburg even with a car; it was not our idea of a great place to live. It was a typical little Texas town with a small square, a movie theater, and not much else. The nearest interesting place was Monterrey, but that city was located deep into Mexico, and it was hard for Pam and me to escape there other than for an occasional weekend. More often, we’d just drive a few miles south of home to the Mexican border town of Reynosa for some of the best steaks I have ever had in my life. The only other “entertainment” in that border town wasn’t the kind a newly married man should be involved in, so I steered clear of that.

  It was a very different life for both of us, which left little time to get to know each other better. But during my training, in the hurried moments I had to reflect on it, I believed that Pam was adjusting to military living just fine. We tried to make time at the end of every day to have dinner and talk for a while, see a movie, or maybe visit some friends. She quickly made new friends in town and kept busy with them, especially a group of women she would invite over to play bridge. One day I came home to find all of them standing on chairs in the living room, and Pam had a broom in her hand. A rodent had snuck into the house and thrown their quiet afternoon into disarray. I had to catch it and throw it out. A mouse was one of the less dangerous creatures that ran around in that desert region. Every morning, as I drank a cup of coffee in my kitchen, I was guaranteed to see a scorpion walk across our doorstep. They never came in so we left them alone, but we checked our shoes before putting them on, just in case.

  I started a new round of ground school and flight training classes with civilian piloting instructors who prepared me for my first flights. If I thought they would take it easy on us beginners, I was wrong.

  When we showed up in the morning, three of us would sit with one instructor so we could discuss the training for that day. I was assigned to one of the most fearsome guys I ever met. His call sign was “Bendix,” after the brand of washing machines, because he was a scary, tough guy with a reputation for washing out students. He looked like an old crop duster, wrinkled by the sun, leathery, and tough.

  Bendix learned to fly the hard way, cleaning airplanes as a kid in Mississippi in exchange for flying lessons. His philosophy was, if it had been tough for him, by God, it would be tough for us, too. He seemed to have no desire to help us learn and pass the course, only to constantly test us. Of the three guys originally assigned to his table, I was the only one who made it through the training.

  Bendix took me up on my first flight, and all through it he yelled and screamed at me. He did it on my next flight, too; I realized that this was his teaching style. In fact, to call it “yelling” is an understatement. We were flying T-34s, which are little propeller airplanes ideal for students, and when they were all lined up at an airfield, engines running, they would make quite a noise. Bendix was louder. You could still hear him screaming at some poor student. He scared the crap out of us. It was like my first year at West Point all over again. I began to wonder, was this something I could really do?

  Everything Bendix did was for real. He didn’t fool around. I frequently came home exhausted from the ordeal and told Pam that this was not what I thought the air force was going to be. She was a patient listener and helped me though some stressful weeks. Luckily, there were also days when I could tell her I thought I would be okay. Yet it was always tough. Bendix did things in the air that frightened the hell out of me, like suddenly throttling the engine to idle and then telling me to land the airplane without power. I’d quickly search for a field that looked survivable and head on down. One time, I was coming in low without power when at the last moment we both noticed a herd of cows directly in our path. He quickly throttled up the engine, and we must have roared over those startled cows with no more than ten feet to spare. Bendix forced me, however, to think through all his yelling and screaming, and to concentrate on the airplane and my flying. I had to mentally set his voice off to one side and listen to what he had to say without being rattled by it.

  I have never been a stick-and-rudder type of pilot who flies by the seat of his pants. Instead, I began to feel a growing love for
the precision of flying. I liked the sense of freedom it gave me, combined with the discipline and knowledge that I needed to do it right. Despite all the yelling from my instructor, flying began to feel comfortable. It was as if the airplane had become a part of me. As I grew to understand how it all worked, I became increasingly in tune with the mechanical systems. I realized, with pleasure, that I had a knack for it. Once I could fly solo, I enjoyed it even more because I didn’t have to listen to that damn yelling on every flight.

  I was hooked. I loved walking out on the flight line in the morning and hearing the engines starting up. The T-34 was one of the prettiest airplanes I had ever seen, and as it started up it would make a buzzing noise like a sports car. Elsewhere on the field, other pilots would be starting the engines of their T-28s, a heavier, faster airplane with a big radial engine. They had a deep, throaty roar to them; the sounds of the two engines would merge into an all-permeating, gut-shaking rumble. It was an enticing call to strap in and go; the airplanes were urging me to take them up there.

  The other students at my table disappeared one by one as they asked to be assigned to other instructors or they washed out. But I just kept going, and Bendix kept on yelling. This lasted until the final part of the training, when we began instrument training. Then he became a totally different person. To teach me how to fly using only the airplane’s instruments, he placed a canvas hood over the front of the cockpit so I couldn’t see out. Then, seated behind me, Bendix very calmly and coolly told me what to do.

  Since he wasn’t shouting, I really paid close attention and did everything I was supposed to do. It turned out that instrument flying was the easiest part of the training for me. I really took to it, finally feeling that I could be a good pilot after all. I will always believe that Bendix was the reason I mastered instrument flying, which allowed me to gain the experience needed to become an astronaut. Although most days I hated the guy, I will always be grateful to him. He knew how to make pilots out of students who were willing to try hard and not buckle under his wrath.

  After six months of primary training, Pam and I were growing used to life in Edinburg. She’d made a tough adjustment to follow me, but we were doing okay. Of course, as soon as we had settled in, we had to leave. Where we would be assigned next depended on my chosen preferences and how well I had done in the class. Some of my fellow students would go on to train as pilots for multi-engine airplanes. I had done well enough to go on to a more coveted assignment: single-seat jet training.

  On graduation day, we celebrated at a local hall. We did not invite wives or girlfriends to this party, and as the drinks flowed, the night took on the feel of a bachelor party. Before long, we had a phone call from a classmate who had driven over to Mexico and hired a “dancer” for the celebrations. The border officials stopped him on the way back, insisting that allowing a stripper into the country for the evening would violate the Mann Act, because the visit would be “for immoral purposes.”

  Undeterred, we simply moved the party across the border into Mexico. We found the bar where our classmate had hired the dancer. It was a typical border town bar room with a live band, and we found plenty of girls there who would dance—for a fee. Our classmate, however, had already hired the most stunning woman there. She was a very good dancer. She pulled one of our classmates up onto the stage to dance and, as they moved together, they both began to strip. As each article of clothing came off, we became more and more mesmerized by this gorgeous girl. By the time she took off the last piece of clothing, we were all on the edge of our seats. And then, our jaws dropped. This gorgeous woman was, in fact, a man.

  Our classmate, half naked on the stage, turned a shade of purple that I have never seen before or since, grabbed his clothes, and left. We scuttled back across the border and never said a word about it again. Not a word, that is, until now.

  It was perhaps best, then, that we all went our separate ways to different assignments. This time, the move was at least blessedly short: about one hundred and fifty miles upriver along the Rio Grande to Laredo Air Force Base. Once again, we lived right on the border with Mexico. After my assignment to Moore, I hoped that I would be sent to a nicer location. But, like Moore, Laredo was another isolated spot. The only thing to do was train on the base. There was nothing else around.

  In 1956, Laredo had not yet caught up with the twentieth century. It was still a Wild West town. We rented a house on a dirt road close to the base; few of the roads in Laredo were paved back then. We soon got to know our neighbors, mostly Mexican. The guy who lived next door to us went fishing in the Rio Grande about once a month and had a great neighborhood barbecue in his backyard. He snared some of the largest catfish I’d ever seen, and they tasted delicious.

  Up until this time I had flown T-34 Mentor and T-28 Trojan propeller-driven training airplanes, but now I would transition into the larger Lockheed T-33 Shooting Star. At last I’d get to fly jets. Since there was very little in the area other than the base, we could do pretty much what we liked in the air; no one would be bothered by aircraft noise. The route of the Rio Grande was obvious from above too, which made it easy to keep north of the border.

  This base smelled different, a dark, oily odor that seeped into everything. Jet fuel smells a little like kerosene, and the busy base had tanker trucks driving around filling up the hungry airplanes. I never escaped that smell, which was fine: I loved it. It meant I would be flying soon.

  Flying an airplane with a piston engine was one thing; piloting a jet was quite another. It was a little like going from driving a standard car to competing in NASCAR. The first time I strapped myself into a T-33 jet with an instructor in the back and took off, I remember thinking, “Holy crap, this thing can really move!” I also clearly remember my first solo in a T-33. I headed up to twenty thousand feet and circled for an hour, scared as shit, getting used to the feel of the airplane. It was a whole different sensation. No big propeller sticking out in front of me, and the cockpit was a lot smaller and tighter. Once airborne, I felt like I just glided through the air; the speeds were quite different, and the ride much smoother. Although I could make a much tighter turn in a small piston-driven aircraft, I felt the acceleration in turns much more in a jet as the airplane’s sheer power and speed squeezed me down into my seat. Like driving a car, the more I did it, the easier it became.

  We had great instructors—mostly. Many were only just ahead of us in their training, with perhaps a few hundred hours of flight time. Yet some got a little impatient with us. I remember one young instructor who, even though some of us probably outranked him as West Point graduates, made us stand at attention and salute every time we saw him. It was done to remind us that he considered us subordinates. He didn’t make for the best teacher. In fact, one of my classmates was having trouble passing the course, to the point where they pulled him in front of an official review board. Curious, I went along to see what the review was all about. After his instructor spoke, they asked the student if he had any comments. He said yes, then pulled out a roll of toilet paper on which he had written his remarks, rolled it across the floor, and began reading from one end. He had kept copious notes on everything that particular instructor had said or done that had caused him confusion and affected his flying performance. After a few minutes, the tribunal board members stopped him and told him that they would give him another chance to pass. I loved the shamed look on that instructor’s face.

  We had another instructor who was extremely memorable, for different reasons. A fighter pilot during World War II, he insisted that we all drink with him while he showed us gun camera footage from his low-level flying attacks on Nazi airfields. He was a maverick and he knew it. In fact, he seemed to revel in the likelihood that he would never be promoted. He’d even bent the points on his major’s insignia, stapling his rank permanently to his shirt collars. I remember one day in particular when he pulled a stunt with a T-33 that was sitting out on the ramp. Maintenance was not finished on the airplane—in fact, the ta
il section had been removed—but he jumped into the aircraft and taxied out anyway. The ground crew frantically tried to wave him down before he could take off, but his attention was distracted by a rattlesnake crossing the ramp. He twisted and turned the airplane around trying to run it over, and ignored all radio calls as he headed out to the runway, pretending to prepare for takeoff.

  As the control tower screamed at him to stop, he throttled the engine up to full power and sped down the runway, while the base crew went on alert and prepared for a crash. Then, at the last moment, he slammed on his brakes and returned to the ramp as if nothing had happened. That was his idea of a great prank, and the kind of stunt that guaranteed he’d never be promoted. Yet, for all of his craziness, he was a great instructor.

  Under the intense pressure, many students washed out. They were very capable, but they would not all make it as pilots. Many became navigators, while others returned to college, studied for advanced degrees, and became technical officers or worked on guided missiles. All had important roles to play in the air force. I was glad it didn’t happen to me, however, as I loved to fly jets. I was doing just fine and concentrated even more on instrument flying, becoming increasingly proficient. When the second phase of training ended at Laredo after about eight months, I chose the Air Defense Command for my advanced training. It meant I could train for all-weather flying, when relying on instruments would be crucial.

  For my advanced instruction I trained on a specific airplane and learned not only how to fly it but also how to operate its weaponry. I learned more about radar and guided missiles, while gaining additional technical expertise. This time I was assigned to Tyndall Air Force Base, close to Panama City at the northern end of Florida. Pam and I found a small house close by in Mexico Beach. After our recent postings right on the border, the name seemed appropriate. It was a beautiful spot, where we walked on the sand and swam in our free time. I was beginning to get used to the frequent moves that a military career entailed. And since I had to abandon Pam during the day to her own devices, living in such a pretty spot eased my sense of guilt.