There they are. Two ’84F’s at ten o’clock low, in a long circling climb into the contrail level, coming up like goldfish to food on the surface. At 30,000 feet the bogie lead element begins to pull a con. The high element is nowhere in sight.
I am Dynamite Four, and I watch them from my high perch. It is slow motion. Turns at altitude are wide and gentle, for too much bank and G will stall the airplane in the thin air and I will lose my most precious commodity: airspeed. Airspeed is golden in combat. There are books filled with rules, but one of the most important is Keep Your Mach Up. With speed I can outmaneuver the enemy. I can dive upon him from above, track him for a moment in my gunsight, fire, pull up and away, prepare another attack. Without airspeed I cannot even climb, and drift at altitude like a helpless duck in a pond.
I call the bogies to Three, my element leader, and look around for the others. After the first enemy airplanes are seen, it is the leader’s responsibility to watch them and plan an attack. I look out for other airplanes and keep my leader clear. When I am a wingman, it is not my job to shoot down enemy airplanes. It is my job to protect the man who is doing the shooting. I turn with Three, shifting back and forth across his tail, watching, watching.
And there they are. From above the con level, from five o’clock high, come a pair of swept dots. Turning in on our tail. I press the microphone button. “Dynamite Three, bogies at five high.”
Three continues his turn to cover Dynamite Lead during his attack on the bogie lead element in their climb. The decoys. “Watch ’em,” he calls.
I watch, twisted in my seat with the top of my helmet touching the canopy as I look. The two are counting on surprise, and are only this moment, with plenty of airspeed, beginning to pull cons. I wait for them, watching them close on us, begin to track us. They are F-84’s. We can outfly them. They don’t have a chance.
“Dynamite Three, break right!” For once the wingman orders the leader, and Three twists into a steep bank and pulls all the backpressure that he can without stalling the airflow over his wings. I follow, seeking to stay on the inside of his turn, and watching the attackers. They are going too fast to follow our turn, and they begin to overshoot and slide to the outside of it. They are not unwise, though, for immediately they pull back up, converting their airspeed into altitude for another pass. But they have lost the surprise that they had counted on, and with full throttle we are gaining airspeed. The fight is on.
A fight in the air proceeds like the scurrying of minnows about a falling crumb of bread. It starts at high altitudes, crossing and recrossing the sky with bands of grey contrail, and slowly moves lower and lower. Every turn means a little more altitude lost. Lower altitudes mean that airplanes can turn more tightly, gain speed more quickly, pull more G before they stall. Around and around the fight goes, through the tactics and the language of air combat: scissors, defensive splits, yo-yos and “Break right, Three!”
I do not even squeeze my trigger. I watch for other airplanes, and after Three rivets his attention on one enemy airplane, I am the only eyes in the element that watch for danger. Three is totally absorbed in his attack, depending on me to clear him of enemy planes. If I wanted to kill him in combat, I would simply stop looking around.
In air combat more than at any other time, I am the thinking brain for a living machine. There is no time to keep my head in the cockpit or to watch gages or to look for switches. I move the control stick and the throttle and the rudder pedals unconsciously. I want to be there, and I am there. The ground does not even exist until the last minutes of a fight that was allowed to get too low. I fly and fight in a block of space. The ideal game of three-dimension chess, across which moves are made with reckless abandon.
In two-ship combat there is only one factor to consider: the enemy airplane. I seek only to stay on his tail, to track him with the pipper in the gunsight and pull the trigger that takes closeups of his tailpipe. If he should be on my tail, there are no holds barred. I do everything that I can to keep him from tracking me in his gunsight, and to begin to track him. I can do maneuvers in air combat that I could never repeat if I tried.
I saw an airplane tumble once, end over end. For one shocked moment the fighter was actually moving backwards and smoke was streaming from both ends of the airplane. Later on, on the ground, we deduced that the pilot had forced his aircraft into a wild variation of a snap roll, which is simply not done in heavy fighter airplanes. But the maneuver certainly got the enemy off his tail.
As more airplanes enter the fight, it becomes complicated. I must consider that this airplane is friend and that airplane is enemy, and that I must watch my rolls to the left because there are two airplanes in a fight there and I would fly right through the middle of them. Midair collisions are rare, but they are always a possibility when one applies too much abandon in many-ship air combat flights.
John Larkin was hit in the air by a Sabre that saw him too late to turn. “I didn’t know what had happened,” he told me. “But my airplane was tumbling and it didn’t take long to figure that I had been hit. I pulled the seat handle and squeezed the trigger and the next thing I remember, I was in the middle of a little cloud of airplane pieces, just separating from the seat.
“I was at a pretty good altitude, about thirty-five thousand, so I free-fell down to where I could begin to see color on the ground. Just when I reached for my ripcord, the automatic release pulled it for me and I had a good chute. I watched the tail of my airplane spin down by me and saw it crash in the hills. A couple of minutes later I was down myself and thinking about all the paperwork I was going to have to fill out.”
There had been a great amount of paperwork, and the thought of it makes me doubly careful when I fly air combat, even today. In a war, without the paperwork, I will be a little more free in my fighting.
When it spirals down to altitudes where dodging hills enters the tactic, a fight is broken off by mutual consent, as boxers hold their fists when an opponent is in the ropes. In the real war, of course, it goes on down to the ground, and I pick up all the pointers I can on methods to scrape an enemy into a hillside. It could all be important someday.
The wide luminous needle of the TACAN swings serenely as I pass over Spangdahlem at 2218, and one more leg of the flight is complete.
As if it recognized that Spangdahlem is a checkpoint and time for things to be happening, the thick dark cloud puts an end to its toying and abruptly lifts to swallow my airplane in blackness. For a second it is uncomfortable, and I sit tall in my seat to see over the top of the cloud. But the second quickly passes and I am on instruments.
For just a moment, though, I look up through the top of my canopy. Above, the last bright star fades and the sky above is as dark and faceless as it is about me. The stars are gone, and I am indeed on instruments.
CHAPTER FOUR
“Rhein Control, Air Force Jet Two Niner Four Zero Five, Spangdahlem, over.” From my capricious radio I do not know whether or not to expect an answer. The “over,” which I rarely use, is a wistful sort of hope. I am doubtful.
“Jet Four Zero Five, Rhein Control, go ahead.”