You love a lot of things if you live around them, but there isn't any woman and there isn't any horse, not any before nor any after, that is as lovely as a great airplane. And men who love them are faithful to them even though they leave them for others. A man has only one virginity to lose in fighters, and if it is a lovely plane he loses it to, there his heart will ever be.
-Ernest Hemingway
I'll write this tonight and decide in the morning whether it's something I should publish. Sometimes late night wisdom seems less so in the pale light of dawn.
No post this morning, after on my return trip from supper with an old, dear friend I ran over some construction debris in the road and blew out a tire. This, in turn, led to the spectacle of me crawling around under the truck at nine this morning, changing a tire after USAA's completely worthless customer support couldn't pair me up with a tow truck, a coverage for which we pay a lot of money. By the time ten a.m. rolled around I was soaked in sweat and caked in parking lot grime, but the spare was competently installed. Peg likes to tell of her father's insistence that the Bowen children all know how to change a tire; the memory shamed me into completing the task at the risk of heat stroke, with Mexican roofers watching and offering words of encouragement in Spanish at the old gringo panting and flat on his back trying to comprehend the spare tire storage arrangement under the truck bed.
So, what did I plan to write about this morning, before my adventure in tire changing? Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of a very big day in my life, the day an F-15 Eagle first took flight at Edwards Air Force Base in 1972. I had just turned eight on that particular July day, and couldn't imagine that not even sixteen years later I would ascend the ladder of the mighty Rodanus Maximus, the Flying Tennis Court, the Twin-Tailed Plastic F*g Jet (as the Vipers called us--they were clearly jealous) as an anxious twenty-three year old with a bad case of Imposter Syndrome for my first roller coaster ride across the Arizona desert.
Actually, I couldn't have imagined it only a year before. I've had motion sickness since I was a kid, was the one who puked down Dad's neck in the nicotine-scented 1972 Caprice on the long drive back from Mississippi to Atlanta. I'd spent my third lieutenant summer in an F-16 squadron at Nellis AFB in Las Vegas, and of course did the Big Spit in the last few minutes of my incentive ride in the sleek, lovely F-16 (we can say nice things about the Lightweight Disposable Fighter because, well, you should always be nice to the help).
So when I arrived at pilot training in 1986, and they had us write a meaningless one paragraph paper read by no one regarding our dream job at the end of that ordeal, I spoke longingly of a life hauling junk across the Pacific at the helm of a C-141, munching on a box lunch at one G as my ass grew wider and I plotted my future at Delta.
But I really didn't want that, did I? My grandfather the bomber pilot always longed for a fighter. "Give me a P-38 and send me into battle," he'd volunteer after a little too much Gewurztraminer. And Grandpa helped raise me. I always had in my gut a desire to fly something lethal, and don't like working with other people. So yeah, a single seat fighter seemed a good choice if I could just stop puking.
Which I did, and soon found myself with a sufficient class rank to be told that whatever I requested on my "dream sheet" at the end of pilot training would be my likely destination. What do you want to do, young man?
By that time I knew exactly the job I wanted, flying the mighty F-4G Wild Weasel. The plane was a smoky, greasy relic, but the mission was uber cool. The Weasels would fly into areas defended by surface-to-air missiles, lure the batteries to lock on and shoot, then sling an anti-radiation missile or two at their radar antennas as the E Models swooped in with 500 pound bombs to kill all the SAM crews. Pure murderous bliss.
But, alas, I was warned away from that dream by my assigned T-38 instructor, Dudley Dave Thorsen. Dave had been an F-16 driver at Kunsan AB, Korea, when the Air Force sentenced him to three years in Mississippi as an instructor in T-38s. "Dickey, you don't want to fly no Wild Weasel," he advised. "Those planes are going to the boneyard soon, and you'll be stuck competing all over again to fly a Viper or an Eagle. You just need to put on that dream sheet that you want to fly the F-16, the Electric Jet, the greatest fighter ever built."
So I put the F-15 at the top of my wish list. Part of it was my general disdain for Dudley Dave back then, whose sadistic habit of instructing by fear, ridicule, and sarcasm made me ponder whether I wanted to work shoulder-to-shoulder with a whole building of those guys.
But mostly it was about real estate. Viper bases dotted the Korean peninsula, sat just below the Aleutians, filled a valley in Mormon country in rural Utah. The Eagle community was based in the Netherlands, in West Germany, along the Gulf Coast, and on the Virginia Peninsula. Where would you rather be?
Plus, while the Viper was a fox, the Eagle was a hedgehog that knew one thing very, very well. Its only purpose was to hunt and kill other airplanes. "Not a pound for air-to-ground" was the tag line when the F-15 was designed in the late 1960s. Although they later betrayed that dogma in the late 80s with the advent of the F-15E Strike Eagle ("Mud Hen", as we dismissively called them), perhaps the greatest tactical bomber ever built, in my day the Eagle had one mission only, and although the onboard computer was loaded to include air-to-ground functions, we were never taught how to use them.
So in November of 1987 I learned that I would be trained to fly the F-15 in Phoenix, then assigned to the First Tactical Fighter Wing, "America's First Team", at Langley AFB, Virginia. I guess the rest is history.
Tonight I celebrate that magnificent machine's fiftieth birthday, celebrate the days and nights when she brought me home safely from some pretty scary stuff, and feel a little reverie for the power and the feeling of being at one with a partner who could take me to just about any point in space I chose, an airplane that would give me this rush of awe and--well hell, let's face it, love--whenever I'd step out of the crew van and lay eyes on those beautiful, lethal lines.
Hemingway's right--you never fall out of love with your first fighter.
Happy birthday, dear. And many happy returns, for both of us.
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