Boyd (34 page)

There was still another unspoken issue, a very big issue. Behind the issue were two assumptions: first, that Arab pilots and
North Vietnamese pilots operated at roughly the same skill level. Second, that U.S. and Israeli pilots operated at roughly
the same skill level. So how did the IAF achieve a six-to-one kill ratio against the Arabs while the Air Force was operating
at near parity against the North Vietnamese?

The foundation for this line of reasoning was flawed in that years of combat made the North Vietnamese much better pilots
than the Arabs. Nevertheless, either the Air Force was not nearly as good as it liked to believe or the Israelis were far
better than the Air Force wanted to believe. A convocation of senior Air Force officers gathered to hear Hod deliver a classified
briefing about the Six Day War.
When he had finished, a fighter pilot stood up and asked how the IAF got sixty gun kills.

Hod paused, shrugged, and said, “Why waste a missile on an Arab?”

Hod used humor and a diplomatic response to avoid saying Israeli pilots used guns because missiles didn’t work. He depended
on the United States for fighter aircraft and knew the Air Force was infatuated with missiles. His facetious response drew
laughter. But behind the laughter was an unavoidable fact: the day of the gunfighter had not passed.

M
ARY
Boyd says her husband changed after he went to the Pentagon, that he became more intense, less gregarious, and always on
the defensive. Boyd was constantly angry about what he saw as careerism and corruption, and he brought the anger home.

When Boyd moved to Washington, he was so anxious to jump into the F-X fray that he would not take time to look for a place
to live. Mary, taking care of the five children, did not have time to look either. For more than a month the Boyd family lived
in a single room at the Breezeway Motel in Fairfax, Virginia. Then one day Boyd showed up and said to Mary, “I found us a
place to live. It’s over in Alexandria.”

“Oh,” Mary said. She couldn’t generate enthusiasm for anything in Washington. She had not wanted to move from Eglin, where
the broad and virtually empty beach was nearby and where Stephen rolled in the surf and found one of the few pleasures of
his life. She had not wanted to drive up in the station wagon with five children while Boyd went on ahead in his Corvair.
She had not wanted to live in an apartment.

Boyd drove her and the children to 4930 Beauregard Street, a new apartment project then called Brighton Square. It was only
minutes
from the Pentagon. He pointed to the door of a ground-level apartment, number T-3, and said, “I think you’ll like this place.”
The apartment project was filled with young couples and children. Nearby were forests and open lots where children played
without supervision. The apartment had three bedrooms: one for Boyd and Mary, one for Kathy and Mary Ellen, and one for Scott
and Jeff. The den was converted into a bedroom for Stephen, who was now twelve. Big sliding glass doors covered one wall of
the den-cum-bedroom and Stephen could enter and leave via his own door. For a boy wanting independence but who was forever
bound to his wheelchair, this small measure of freedom was important.

The apartment project had no sidewalks and in the summer Stephen rolled his wheelchair through grass that rarely was mowed.
In the winter he sometimes had to push his way through snow. “Why doesn’t Dad get us a better place?” he asked his mother
several times.

Mary smiled down at her son and said, “I’ll talk to him about it.”

Boyd would brook no argument. “What if we buy a house and are stuck with it?” he said. “What if we can’t sell it when we leave?
That happened in Atlanta. Houses always have expenses. But just paying the rent is no hassle. Besides, we are only going to
be here a few years.” When Mary continued to ask about owning a house, Boyd settled into a stock response: he nodded and said,
“Yeah, we’ll have to do that” and changed the subject.

The apartment on Beauregard Street became a symbol of how Boyd’s family suffered because of his devotion to his work. In the
years following the move, Boyd’s family life devolved into a state of disarray from which it never recovered. Stephen began
repairing television sets and stereos and various electronics. His sadness about his handicap had left him withdrawn and fiercely
independent. Kathy’s quiet and gentle nature slowly changed into a clinical depression. Jeff, shy and gentle, was hammered
in discussions with his father. He found refuge with his collection of spiders and poisonous snakes. John Scott and Boyd had
tumultuous arguments that turned into scuffles and, in at least one instance, into a fight. Mary Ellen was more like her father
than any of the others; she was his “Snookums,” and she broke his heart when she became ensnared in the drug culture. For
years they did not speak. And all the children say today that their
anger toward their father is rooted in his insistence on living in the tiny apartment.

The first time Mary met Sprey was at 10:30 one evening when he and Boyd left the Pentagon early. Boyd got up from the table
and began making phone calls while Sprey and Mary were still eating. Mary confided to Sprey that people asked if she had ever
thought of getting a job so there would be more money for the family. “They told me if I worked I would have more input into
what went on around here,” she said. She shrugged. She knew that was not true. “I can’t take care of five kids and work. I’m
not that efficient.” She said a few people at the Pentagon asked Boyd why he lived in an apartment. After all, the mid-60s
were a propitious time to invest in the Washington real estate market. A lieutenant colonel could buy a home that would only
appreciate in value. But Boyd brushed off every such question with “I don’t like to cut the grass.”

Mary seemed bewildered by all that was going on around her. She told Christie and Sprey that when she and Boyd met at Iowa
State, she thought she was marrying an athlete who would become a coach and they would live in a small town in Iowa and join
the country club and buy a little house and lead a quiet uneventful life. It was as if she had stepped onto what she thought
was a sedate merry-go-round and found it was instead a cyclonic roller coaster.

She nodded toward her husband and with a rueful laugh said, “Look what I got.”

Boyd and his family would live on Beauregard Street for the next twenty-two years.

Most fighter pilots fly until they are too old to pass the physical or until they are promoted into a nonflying job. Some
even refuse promotions that would take them out of the cockpit. Once they lose their flying status, the rest of their life
is anticlimactic. They often live near airports and turn their eyes upward and stare longingly at every passing jet.

It was not that way with Boyd. Few pilots have been as deeply involved with all aspects of fighter aviation as he. Yet in
1968 he lost interest in flying. As a Pentagon staff officer he was not allowed to fly fighters, only the venerable T-33 that
fighter pilots looked on with
considerable disdain. He did not always fly enough to maintain his flight-currency requirements and twice his boss took him
up in a T-33 to regain currency, to enable him to keep his flying pay. But eventually his currency lapsed and Boyd did not
regain it. Fellow pilots who knew his background were puzzled. “Why?” they asked. He shrugged and said, “I’ve done that.”

It was as if he realized that not only had he moved beyond being a fighter pilot, but that he was about to move farther and
deeper into other, more complex, and more important areas of his life and that he had to clear his mind of all extraneous
matters.

Almost daily he brought new E-M graphs or new slides or the outline of a new briefing to Sprey. “Hey, Tiger, this is what
I put together. What do you think?”

Sprey took the graphs and slides and briefings and studied them. After a while in his soft calm voice, he might say, “John,
this slide is no good. Do you have a better way of showing this?”

Then the fight would begin. Sprey would explain why the slide was no good and Boyd would shout that it was perfect. Sprey
would answer in his irrefutable and thus maddening manner. After Boyd had all he could take, he would slouch off to his office.
About 4:00
A.M
. Sprey’s phone would ring and when he picked it up he barely had time to say “Hello” before Boyd barked, “What did you mean
when you said that slide was no good?”

Sprey would calmly list the reasons. Boyd would argue and shout and finally end the conversation with a grunt and slam down
the phone. He never said to Sprey, “You are right.” But he would change the slide and later boast to Sprey of how strong his
briefing was.

Time after time he came back from a briefing in exultation. One time he burst into Sprey’s office and relived every exchange
of his latest cape job. “Goddamn, Tiger, you should have been there. I hosed those sons of bitches. I stacked those goddamn
generals up like cord wood.”

Sprey was amused. “I think you like the body count.”

Boyd stared at Sprey, thinking, and a wide grin sliced across his face.

Boyd won battles not only in the open and more or less public arenas, such as briefings, but also in the corridors and offices
of the Pentagon, where politics is both byzantine and deadly. Here, one of his
greatest weapons was his secret back-channel communication to the Air Force chief of staff. The chief often followed the Franklin
Roosevelt theory of management, bypassing sycophantic generals and seeking out from among relatively junior officers a few
men who would tell him the truth. The chief knew the culture of the Building and knew that, in many ways, he was the most
ignorant man in the Air Force. Dozens of high-ranking officers put their fingers in the wind before they talked to him. Then
they told him what they thought he wanted to hear. Boyd, and presumably a very few others, told him what he needed to know.
Occasionally a colonel from the chief’s office dropped into Boyd’s office and said, “Can I buy you a cup of coffee?” And the
two men sat in a corner of the cafeteria and the colonel said, “The chief wants to know…” And because Boyd gave him straight
answers, the chief came to him again and again.

Boyd used these clandestine meetings to put forth his agenda for the F-X. The chief had enough confidence in Boyd’s integrity
that he agreed with Boyd about keeping down the weight of the aircraft. He sent down the order that Boyd asked for: the F-X
will have a maximum weight of 40,000 pounds.

Since the F-X had sprung forth at 62,500 pounds and since many generals believed bigger was better, those generals now thought
of the F-X as a lightweight fighter, almost a toy. Yet Boyd
still
was not happy. He wanted the F-X to weigh under 35,000 pounds.

Sprey never understood the way a real fighter pilot feels about a small aircraft until the day he and Boyd went out to Dulles
Airport to fly a pylon racer, a small but very fast aircraft. Many pylon-racer pilots are the size of jockeys. It took Boyd
several minutes to shoehorn himself into the cockpit. His shoulders were scrunched together and his knees were up around his
neck. He had to bend forward so the canopy could be closed. Sprey thought Boyd must be miserable. But when Boyd looked up
there was an expression of absolute glee on his face. “I love it! I love it!” he shouted through the canopy. And Sprey realized
that for a true fighter pilot, a fighter aircraft cannot be too small.

By 1968, people in the Building did not know if Boyd was a genius or a wild man. The most favorable light that can be put
on much of his behavior is that it was not that of the typical lieutenant colonel seeking advancement. Boyd’s manner went
beyond the coarseness,
the close-in spittle-flying conversations, the arm waving and loud voice, the long hair and disheveled appearance, and the
nocturnal work habits. If a superior gave Boyd an order and Boyd believed that order had implications deleterious to the F-X,
he smiled and said, “Sir, I’ll be happy to follow that order. But I want you to put it in writing.” Generals like to issue
verbal orders. That way if the results are not what the general expected, he can always deny he issued the order. While Boyd
was within his rights to ask for written orders, his doing so infuriated generals. It clearly indicated he thought the general
was wrong.

Once, he accosted a general in the corridor and began an intense conversation about lowering the weight of the F-X. Boyd was
smoking a cigar and waving his arms and jabbing his finger. The general grew bored and turned and began edging away just as
Boyd reached out to emphasize a point. The cigar burned a hole in the general’s tie. For a moment those passing by froze as
they stared at the tableau of an astonished general looking down at the hole in his tie. The hole smoldered on the edges and
grew larger and larger and smoke rose around the general’s face. He slapped out the burning tie, then spun and walked away.
Boyd did not know the reason for the general’s abrupt departure until someone said, “Damn, John, you just set the general’s
tie on fire.”

Boyd looked down the hall after the general. “Yeah?” He chortled. “Bet that’s the first time that ever happened to him.”

Then there was the trance thing. Boyd would be in the middle of an intense conversation when suddenly his eyes would glaze
over and he would stop talking and stare at the ceiling or the wall or out the window. It was as if he had been dealt a stunning
blow to the head. He did not respond to questions. It might be two or three minutes before he awakened and picked up the conversation.

“What the hell happened?” someone occasionally asked. “What are you doing?”

“I just thought of a new E-M iteration” or “Something just occurred to me” or “I just got the answer to something I’ve been
working on for several weeks.”

Finally there was the pipper. For a while no one knew what he was doing. Then one day a secretary could no longer take the
suspense and asked, “Colonel, are you all right?”