"Inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened."
-Terry Pratchett
"I can't believe I've turned into a typical old man. I can't believe it. I was young just minutes ago."
This morning I creaked and gimped into the gym at the YMCA, low back sore and metal plate and screws in my neck aching on a muggy morning.
Motivation was lacking--I was no longer the wasp-waisted Eagle Driver trying to top my bench press maximum, in a gym filled with other testosterone engorged fighter pilots on the same quest. No, this morning it was just me and a handful of other oldsters fighting this doomed holding action against the inevitable erosion time wreaks on our bodies.
I've always been one to use music to set my mind for whatever the moment might require. There are running tunes ("You Can Go Your Own Way" by Fleetwood Mac being perhaps my favorite because the rhythm matches my pace so nicely), writing soundtracks (Mozart and Bach mostly), and of course my friend John Prine filling the air around us with bonhomie during happy hour at the end of a long day. This morning I decided to dial back the time machine with a playlist on Spotify of all the old hair bands that pounded through the bar when I was a baby Eagle driver.
I can't hear the first chords of "High Enough" by Damn Yankees without finding myself walking out to an F-15 on a blazing Arizona afternoon, marveling at my good fortune in being in that place and time. I appreciated it even then.
Soon the stream of Great White and Def Leppard and Bon Jovi had transported this old man back to my time at Luke Air Force Base in the summer of 1988 for RTU ("replacement training unit") in the Eagle.
That's me, taken right around the time I was leaving for the F-15 schoolhouse.
Not exactly a steely-eyed killer. I was twenty-three years old, the same age my middle boy Andrew is right now. Three years later I would be leading combat missions over the Iraqi desert, but that was a long way down the road.
In some ways, RTU felt like the easiest training environment I'd encountered so far in the Air Force. Undergraduate Pilot Training was a grueling year of twelve hour days, and nearly half of my classmates washed out. One bad week and you'd be a maintenance officer at Grand Forks or Minot. They only gave out two regular Air Force F-15 assignments in my class, and I was lucky enough to land one of them.
The next stop was Lead In Fighter Training (LIFT) at Holloman AFB, New Mexico. I hated the place and its neighboring village, Alamogordo, a dirty desert town tucked between the White Sands Missile Range and the Sacramento Mountains. We flew the AT-38 there, known disparagingly as the "Smurf Jet" to its drivers.
I enjoyed flying the Smurf, even as I couldn't wait to get out of the place. The mission of LIFT was two-fold: First, our instructors taught us to fly formation like fighter pilots, and to engage in "basic fighter maneuvers" (BFM), basically one-on-one combat in a dance that required split second spatial reasoning and energy management unlike anything we'd experienced back at UPT. Toward the end they split off the guys who were heading to an assignment in A-10s, F-16s, F-111s, or F-4s, to teach them how to drop bombs, while the future Eagle Drivers learned the rudiments of fighting in two-ship formations.
The second mission of the guys at LIFT was to teach us how to be fighter pilots. We tore the "pecker pockets" off our flight suits--this was where one carried a survival knife in a long oval pocket just below the groin, and if you were going to wear a g-suit in your new job that thing would be worthless. Walking into the bar with no pecker pocket told the world you wore "speed jeans" and were therefore a Shit Hot Fighter God.
We also learned to play foosball, a fighter pilot obsession, and to sing bawdy songs and play crud (a whole post would be required to explain that one) and drink until you threw up and still pull it together enough to fly a fighting sortie at seven the next morning. We were a long way from the stiff, stressful world of pilot training, and we were like pledges in the coolest fraternity on earth.
Still, there were casualties, both washouts and the occasional mishap. My buddy Fasty had a midair during a BFM ride one afternoon, and he was the only one of the four pilots who survived. A former helicopter guy someone made the cut and showed up for LIFT, but managed to wash out because his prior world had been too slow to prepare him for this. We still weren't out of the woods.
F-15 RTU was different. Pretty much every student either graduated in the top 10% of his pilot training class or was a first assignment instructor pilot (FAIP) who'd missed the cut out of pilot training by one or two class rank slots, and had fought his way to the top of the FAIP heap to earn a coveted Eagle assignment. No one was going to wash out, and as far as the instructors were concerned they were running a finishing school for an already accomplished group of students.
Of course there were rites of initiation, in particular the Solo Party after the last guy in the class had slipped the surly bonds of earth all by himself in an Eagle. I can't describe to you what it felt like the first time I climbed out over the brown Arizona desert on a solo flight in a $31 million airplane that could accelerate straight up in the vertical. I can however describe for you what a solo party feels like--wickedly jolly instructor pilots in the squadron bar force-feeding you shot after shot of Jeremiah Weed, the nasty bourbon liqueur favored by the fighter community, along with an introduction to a thing called a beer bong--a long tube and funnel that allowed the victim to drink an entire pitcher of beer in a few seconds, or to shoot it through his nose--punctuated by mandatory snacks of raw eggs (shells and all) and dismembered salamanders still wriggling in the bowl.
Yes, I puked. Several times. All part of the game.
But the hazing was minimal, maybe because the instructors were so damned happy to be there. Most F-15 pilots spend their second tour of duty someplace lousy, like back at pilot training or at LIFT, and these guys were all hand-picked from their operational squadrons for a job that involved flying this magnificent airplane without pulling alert or actually going to war. What's not to love?
And it was a very happy time in my life, living like a hard-drinking monk in the visiting officers' quarters, with daily maid service and no real kitchen so no temptation to cook for myself. I ate lots of bowling alley wings that summer. I removed the soft top and floor carpet from the Jeep Wrangler I'd bought in Mississippi when I realized I was going to fly fighters, installed a bikini top that only covered the front seats, and made the most of a rainless Arizona summer. A couple weekends I went tubing on the Salt River with some of the instructors and their entourage of wives and lady friends. One afternoon I learned that the pretty woman floating a couple tubes down from me in the bolus of drunken floaters was the widow of Fasty's instructor who'd died in that midair at Holloman. Small world.
I only flunked one ride, a high aspect BFM hop during which I hit the merge at 475 knots instead of 420 or so as I'd been trained to do. I just didn't notice the speed difference, being fixated on the instructor's jet coming right at me. A quirk of the Eagle is that its G-limit drops as you approach the speed of sound--a 9 G jet at 420 knots becomes a 6.5 G jet at 475. I rolled my lift vector onto the other jet, pulled, and promptly over-G'd the plane. Then I introduced a little aileron, increasing the G-loading out toward the wingtips, and over-G'd the poor Eagle some more. In fact, the over-G was so extreme that the maintainers were forced to convene a "panel party" that weekend, pulling the skin off the wings to check the struts for structural damage.
I got to fly that ride again. And, in accordance with tradition, I was out there on a Saturday afternoon with a couple cases of beer for the maintainers crawling all over the jet, a penance offering for ruining their weekend.
They taught us how to refuel off a tanker that summer, a weird and terrifying experience that entailed creeping up under a converted Boeing 707 so a boomer could stick a refueling probe in the shoulder of the jet and pump 2000 pounds a minute into our tanks.
I actually had an easy time with my day refueling ride. Nighttime was another matter, however.
It was monsoon season, and the mountains around us spawned thunderstorms that complicated our rejoin with the tanker, four F-15s picking through the lightning and soup until we saw the formation lights of the lone tanker outlined in the darkness. I had an instructor in the back seat that night, a crusty old major (probably 35 or so) who tried to keep it light, telling stories as we waited to get on the boom.
Once there, I was nervous and all over the place. I couldn't find the sight picture, and was over-controlling the jet in a jerky dance that was obviously making the boomer uncomfortable.
"Relax your ass," came the advice from the back seat. "You're sitting too tall in the seat, Dickey. Concentrate on relaxing your sphincter, and everything will be fine."
I meditated on the orifice at the end of my alimentary canal, telling it and the muscles around it to release. I sank probably two inches in the seat. And there it was! The sight picture I'd been hunting for! The rest of the flight was uneventful.
I've used that advice many times since, in courtrooms and stressful situations where I could feel the stress rising in my chest. The secret to consistent performance lies a few inches south of there, apparently.
By September it was time for graduation, and we had an informal little affair in the squadron bar. Some of the wives and a parent or two showed up. I was flying solo that afternoon. No one got drunk. No one sang an off-color ditty. I remember there being sheet cake.
And that was it. Maybe the best time in my life before P showed up passed away into memory, but it's always ready to stride back into the light with an incantation composed of a little hair metal.
"
Your glory days