Boyd (15 page)

“Good morning, Sir,” they echoed.

They took the measure of the man they had heard about for so long. He was tall for a fighter pilot and had dark hair, an angular
face, and the nose of a raptor. He was rangy and his carriage was loose, more like that of an athlete than a military officer.
His uniform was neat and the creases down each side of his shirt lined up with the sharp creases in his trousers. He thrummed
with nervous energy as he stood there with the F-100 models in his hand.

Boyd studied the class. The students came from Air Force bases around the world, from Itazuke, Japan, and Clovis, New Mexico;
from Kadena on Okinawa and Bitburg in Germany; from Wethersfield, England, and George, California. They were from different
backgrounds. Many were on the short side. Most were bachelors in their mid- or late 20s. Each was the best fighter pilot in
his home squadron and each believed he was the best fighter pilot in the class. And each ached to meet Forty-Second Boyd over
the Green Spot.

Boyd knew each was thinking the same thing:
This guy is getting a bit of age on him. His eyes are not as good as they once were. He can’t pull
heavy Gs the way I can. When I get him over the Green Spot, I’ll pull enough Gs to roll his eyes back in his head and then
I’ll hose him. Maybe ten seconds. Easy.

Boyd smiled. They would have their chance. But before they flew against him, they had to listen to him. The platform from
which he spoke was a foot high and stretched from wall to wall across the front of the classroom. He roamed this stage like
a caged animal and began teaching a subject he knew better than any man in the Air Force: how to fly a fighter plane in combat.
In the beginning his voice was soft and compelling, almost as if he were sharing a secret. He stepped forward and prowled
the classroom and returned to the platform. He stopped at the edge, leaning toward the students, the tips of his shoes bending
as his toes curled downward like a diver on the edge of a swimming pool. Then he backed up, spun around, and began writing
equations on the blackboard—long, complicated equations about lift and drag and vectors, math far over the head of most fighter
pilots. They didn’t care about math. Who the hell could remember this stuff when they were at 25,000 feet in a high-G turn
and trying to roll out on a point? All they wanted was to get on Boyd’s six and hose him.

Boyd wrote with one hand and erased with the other, occasionally glancing over his shoulder to demand, “Do you get what I’m
telling you?”

“Yes, Sir,” they said as one.

The old building had no air-conditioning and within minutes he was soaked to the waist. He paused, fired up a Dutch Master,
and looked around the classroom. “Are you receiving?” he boomed.

“Yes, Sir.”

He puffed on his cigar and remembered what Spradling told him: “Lower the intensity, John. You are just too overpowering to
the students. Slow down. Relax.”

Boyd took a deep breath and tried to do as Spradling said, but seconds later the admonition was forgotten as he wrote another
equation or demonstrated another aerial maneuver. This material was too important; the students had to understand. Boyd taught
them aerial maneuvers they had never heard of, maneuvers that even the boldest pilot among them had never considered. He demonstrated
with the F-100 models, twisting his body and contorting his arms as he
showed maneuver and countermaneuver. There was one maneuver so foreign to fighter pilots, so astonishing in concept, that
when Boyd demonstrated it the students frowned in disbelief. He placed the two F-100 models in a tail chase, one tucked in
tightly behind the other. In combat, the defensive pilot would be pulling heavy Gs to keep the offensive pilot from getting
a firing solution. The usual tactic for the offensive aircraft was to pull tighter and tighter, seeking a better angle in
order to loose a burst of gunfire. But Boyd showed how the offensive pilot could roll his wings level, pull up into a climb,
and then roll
in the opposite direction
. This happens so quickly and is such an unexpected maneuver that the defensive pilot has no time to react. As the offensive
pilot comes out of the roll, he is perfectly positioned on the tail of the enemy.

Boyd bared his teeth. “Then you hose the bastard.”

The move was so counterintuitive that it took several moments to sink in. As the students pondered, Boyd placed the F-100
models on his desk, turned back to the class, and said, “The world is divided into hosers and hosees. Your job as fighter
pilots is to be a hoser.” A feral grin split his face. He leaned toward the class and added, “I, of course, am the ultimate
hoser.”

By then the pure and elegant beauty of the maneuver sank into their consciousness and they understood and sighed in awe.

One of the students was a first lieutenant named Everett Raspberry. He was known as “Razz” and was considered one of the most
promising young pilots in the Air Force. When Razz graduated, he was the “Distinguished Graduate” of his class. He would return
as an instructor and become a close friend of Boyd’s. Still later he would go to Vietnam and fly F-4s with the 555th Fighter
Squadron—the famed “Triple Nickel”—where he would teach the other pilots the maneuver Boyd taught him. One day the Triple
Nickel would go up against the North Vietnamese Air Force and have a day of glory that would be remembered for as long as
fighter pilots talked of their exploits.

Razz, along with every other student in the class, quickly realized the Boyd legend was based on fact. Boyd clearly was the
best aerial tactician in the Air Force. He personified everything the FWS was about. By the end of the first day, all that
the students wanted was to learn everything Boyd had to teach.

That afternoon Boyd took his charges aloft. It was time to put into practice what he taught in the classroom. The students
put on their green flight suits, zipped up the “chaps” that allowed them to handle more Gs, put on their aviator sunglasses,
and strode across the flight line toward the silvery F-100s. Heat waves danced on the runway like dervishes. Off in the distance,
west of the Sheep Range, was where they would fight today. As they approached the open canopies of the F-100s, they checked
to see that the sleeves of their flight suits were snugged down and tucked into their gloves. Exposed metal inside the cockpit
could have a temperature of 140 degrees. Slowly and carefully they settled into the cockpits, fired up the engines, and taxied
to the end of the 11,000-foot runway. Then they closed the greenhouse-like canopies and temperatures rose still higher. Air-conditioning
in the F-100 did not kick in until the engine was producing almost full power, so they baked and felt sweat running down their
helmets, into their eyes, down the small of their backs, and into the cracks of their buttocks and pooling under their thighs
while they awaited clearance from the tower. Once cleared for takeoff, they advanced power, and as the throttle passed through
75 or 80 percent, they felt the engine
chugging
for a few seconds. As they accelerated past 100-percent power and ignited the afterburner, the “eyelids” at the rear of the
tailpipe opened and a thunderous wave of sound slammed across the base. Fire erupted from the tails as the Huns began their
takeoff roll. The students maintained position on Boyd as they climbed out of the pattern in close formation and headed northwest
for the Range. The pilots fidgeted with the air-conditioning controls and sought to find the balance between too much and
not enough. Not enough and they continued to sweat. Too much and small pieces of ice blasted from the ducts and the canopy
fogged over. By the time they reached 30,000 feet and were circling over the Green Spot, everyone was squared away.

Courage, diminished in the classroom under Boyd’s intimidating presence, returned. The man who knocked off Forty-Second Boyd
would be the most famous fighter pilot in the Air Force, and they were eager to give it a try.

They played grabass. They went rat-racing. They got into furballs. Boyd gave them their chance and one by one he hosed them,
and
then he nursed them along, teaching, demonstrating how to control the Hun.

At the end of the day, the F-100s returned to Nellis, rolled into place on the ramp, and the pilots dismounted. They were
drenched with perspiration, and salt rings stained their flight suits. Their short hair was pressed down tightly by the helmets.
They might have lost three or four pounds during the strenuous high-G maneuvers. They were thirsty and longed for a cold beer.

But first they had to catch a ride on the truck that served as the flight-line taxi. They headed back to ops for the debrief,
the most important part of the mission. How well a fighter pilot conducted the debrief was one of the most important criteria
in evaluating that student as a possible instructor. After the debrief the pilots charged for the Stag Bar.

The Stag Bar sat behind the Officers Club and was surrounded by World War II barracks that had been converted into bachelor
officer’s quarters. It was a place where pilots could drink without having to change into uniforms. The Stag Bar lacked the
formalities of the Officers Club. Lingerie shows were popular and sometimes nude ladies paraded around the club and caused
fighter pilots, as one of them said, to be “hornier than a bunch of three-peckered goats.” It was rumored that some of these
ladies augmented their modeling income with another, much older occupation and that they earned significant amounts of money
from fighter pilots.

On Friday nights the bar lacked not only the conventions of the Officers Club, it lacked the conventions of civilized society.
Young men carved their names on the tables and on the walls and they bayed at the moon and boasted of being the best goddamn
fighter pilots in the whole fucking world. Cigarette smoke was so thick that visibility hovered near zero-zero. Language was
wild and rowdy. And just for the hell of it, fighter pilots occasionally attempted to burn down the place.

The pilots often broke out in song—not genteel parlor songs, but the songs of Hun drivers, of men who could go severely supersonic.
In the telling, the lyrics are obscene. But they were sung loudly in the spirit of young warriors. The first song often was
the elegantly titled “Dead Whore,” sung to the tune of “My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean”:

I fucked a dead whore by the roadside,

I knew right away she was dead. She was dead.

The skin was all gone from her belly,

And the hair was all gone from her head. Her head.

Boyd sat at the bar, the center of attention, the champion gunfighter in a room filled with gunfighters, the high priest among
high priests, accepting the adulation of his students. He rarely stayed longer than an hour. He might eat fast, but he drank
slowly. No one ever saw him drink more than one beer.

Boyd enjoyed these late-afternoon sessions with young pilots. Their adulation was the fuel that kept him going. He sat at
the bar and explained various aerial maneuvers and replayed all the air battles he had known and told the students all they
wanted to know about the Hun. He told them of MiG Alley. And he listened to the songs loved by every fighter pilot.

Oh, my name is Sammy Small. Fuck ’em all. Fuck ’em all.

Oh, my name is Sammy Small. Fuck ’em all. Fuck ’em all.

Oh, my name is Sammy Small, and I’ve only got one ball,

But it’s better than none at all.

So fuck ’em all. Fuck ’em all.

Raucous laughter. Cheers. Another round. By then Boyd had fired up a Dutch Master and was waving it like a baton as he inveighed
against the Air Force for wanting to abolish the FWS. There was talk of a new SAC general taking over the Tactical Air Command
(TAC) and it was said he wanted to do away with even the vestiges of air-toair training and have fighter pilots do nothing
but deliver nukes.

One pilot turned to another and said, “You made a pussy error on the Range the other day.”

There are two kinds of mistakes a student pilot could make when delivering bombs or rockets: “pussy errors” and “tiger errors.”
Pussy errors are the result of coming in high, shallow, and slow: the pilot is tentative. Tiger errors are the result of coming
in low, steep, and fast: the pilot is overly aggressive. Nobody wanted to be known as the pilot who committed pussy errors.

The two men screamed “pussy” and “tiger” at each other for several minutes until Boyd calmed them down. About that time an
officer came from the dining room of the Officers Club and registered a complaint. It was unseemly that he and his fellow
officers and their spouses must hear such songs and such language. Boyd nodded and said nothing.

As the officer walked toward the door, the fighter pilots made a noise that sounded like a barbershop quartet.
Hmmmmmmmmmmm. Hmmmmmmmmmmm
. As the officer approached the door, the sound reached greater volume.
HMMMMMMMMM
. And as the complaining officer walked through the door, the pilots shouted, “FUUUUCK HYMMMMMMMMMM!”

Glasses were raised on high. More laughter. More drinks.

Oh, there are no fighter pilots down in hell.

Oh, there are no fighter pilots down in hell.

The whole damn place is full of queers, navigators, and bombardiers.

Oh, there are no fighter pilots down in hell.

The Stag Bar was a room filled with mimes. Pilots waved their hands, fingers tight, one behind the other, bending their bodies
and twisting their arms, showing how they almost had Forty-Second Boyd. It was
that
close. Next time. Next time.

Boyd smiled and puffed on his cigar. Soon he slipped away. As the door closed he heard a fighter pilot shout, “Stand to your
glasses!” Boyd looked at the stars. In the deep black of the Nevada sky, they sparkled with an almost unnatural brilliance,
and he knew there was no place on Earth he would rather be than Nellis. As he reached his car, he stopped and looked over
his shoulder and listened. Lilting on the cool night air was the song that comes from the deepest place in a fighter pilot’s
heart: