Soon, Dr. Melscheimer was trusting me to act as joeger, or "hunting guide," for an important guest. I followed all the customs and learned their hunting traditions. I wore lodencloth, the green hunting uniform of a guide, a green shirt and tie, and a green felt hat with a boar's hair shaving brush in the back. When we killed an animal, I gave it the traditional letzter bissen, a "last bite," by placing a twig in its mouth, a symbol of respect to the animal. I also took a twig off an evergreen shaped like a cross, dipped it in the animal's blood, and wore it in my hat as a trophy of that day's hunt. The cross-shaped twig honored St. Hubertus, patron of hunting.
Carl Armin and I competed as guides, each of us trying to lead a guest to the day's biggest head. But I had an advantage: The day before the hunt I flew over the revier and carefully mapped it out, much the same as I had done at Edwards, picking out fishing holes and good hunting areas. So my party usually beat Carl Armin's by bringing in the day's biggest head, and the guests raved about me to Dr. Melscheimer, who smiled and nodded, saying, "Yes, I've trained that American well." He made me a master hunter on his revier, a real honor that meant, among other things, that I could go out and hunt alone, and he invited me to join the guild of German hunting guides, the only foreigner in that outfit.
Glennis didn't sit around waiting for me to get back if I was off flying somewhere. She and Siegrid took off in our four-wheel drive jeep station wagon and hunted on their own. They once joined a party of German boar hunters and bagged the day's only kills. While those German men grimly watched, they had their pictures taken by the local newspapers, and then they had to buy drinks for all the other hunters- the price for having beaten them.
The kids had a ball, too. They enjoyed the snow in winter, not having seen much of it out on the Mojave. Hahn, high up in the mountains, brought us drifts right up the lower windows and a white Christmas was guaranteed every year. About the only thing that slowed them down were a couple of bad accidents. Susie, who was then four, stuck her finger in a light socket and electrocuted herself. The housekeeper saw it happen, grabbed her, almost getting zapped herself. Glennis got the power turned off and saw that Susie; had stopped breathing. She gave her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and got her heart started, then raced her to the base hospital, where they slapped oxygen on her. She was okay in an hour or so, but it took Glennis a couple of days to stop shaking. Then Mike, who was six, almost lost an eye going up concrete stairs on a pogo stick, while Susie tumbled off a bike and broke an arm. Her arm was still in plaster when she fell and broke her leg, and I began to think it was more dangerous being Susie than flying the X-1.
About ten months after I arrived at Hahn, life became more complicated and dangerous for all of us. The wing received new airplanes-a bigger and more powerful version of the Sabre, called the H model, which gave us much faster acceleration. The MiGs discovered that fact when a couple of them wandered over our small gunnery range at Furstenfeldbruck, outside of Munich. I scrambled, leading a flight of four model Hs, and shocked the hell out of those MiGs by catching up with them before they reached their border. We just sat on their wings, eyeball to eyeball with those Czech pilots, who were taken completely by surprise. We escorted them back where they belonged and gave them plenty to report in their mission briefings. The new Sabres had greater range and could carry heavier loads, and our mission was suddenly changed from air defense to "special weapons." We became fighter-bombers carrying nuclear- weapons.
Base security was increased to guard the bombs that were stored in special underground bunkers, and we began to train in techniques for dropping them. Each Sabre carried one Mark XII tactical nuclear bomb, which in those days was still heavy and cumbersome, about the size and shape of one of our wing tanks. The bombs were low-yield, but we didn't know whether or not we could really survive the blast after dropping one on a target. We practiced various techniques using dummies. We came in low on the deck until we were about ten miles from target, then we raised our nose about forty degrees and fired off the dummy bomb in a shellike trajectory. Or, we'd come in on the deck, then climb straight up over the target, release the bomb, then flip over backwards in an Immelmann and race to get the hell out of there. The bomb, meanwhile, continued to climb to about 10,000 feet before nosing over and dropping to earth. We also practiced high-altitude dive bombing, releasing the bomb at about 18,000 feet. All we had to do was drop it within twelve hundred yards of our target. And that was a low-yield weapon. None of us was happy about coming in on the deck, exposed to enemy ground fire, with an atomic bomb strapped to our belly. We just hoped to God we would never have to really prove the effectiveness of those techniques.
The wing now had a big intelligence section that supplied each pilot in all three squadrons with his own personal target in Russia and East Germany. Each pilot kept his flight plan folder stashed in his cockpit until he had it memorized and practiced flying his profile so often that he could do it in his sleep. Our Sabres could not be refueled from airborne tankers, and we could keep flying only for a couple of hours before our tanks ran dry. All of our targets were deep inside the Soviet sector and included radar and other communications sites. Our attack was meant to pave the way for the main strike force of long-range Strategic Air Command bombers, but unlike those guys, we had no way of making it a round trip mission. To get to the target and back would take longer than our fuel supply. So, a big part of our training was E and E classes-escape and evade-because all of us would be forced to parachute down in enemy territory. Man, missions didn't get more serious than that, but the guys just accepted it as their job.
During the 1956 Hungarian uprising, when Russian tank divisions began moving all over Eastern Europe, our wing went on the highest priority alert. At two in the morning, our pilots were roused and assembled in the briefing room and given their targets, while real atomic weapons were attached to their airplanes. The guys climbed into their cockpits around three A.M. and sat all night on the flight line waiting for the word to take off. By the first light of dawn, the alert was called off. Not many guys dozed off that night; it was as close to the real thing as any of us ever wanted to be.
Because we were now a nuke squadron, the powers that be decided to move us out of Germany in order to disperse targets of potential Soviet attack. They ordered our wing into France, and, God, none of us wanted to go from our comfortable brand new base into a make-ready strip just across the German border in Toul, that was little more than a sea of mud with some trailers and Quonsets trucked in overnight. Glennis and the kids got there a week after I did and just rolled their eyes. It was the pits. Just miserable. Everyone hated every minute being there, and to make it worse, the strategic move became a joke when General de Gaulle decided that no American nuclear weapons could be stationed on French soil.
At that point we should have packed and gone back to Hahn. Instead, we just sent our bombs back there; now, if there were nuclear alerts, we would fly to Hahn to load our bombs, then take off and fly to the target. Whoever approved that plan deserved to be stationed at Toul for life. To make it worse, tensions were really high with the French. We were limited to flying in a narrow corridor around our base, and Mirages flew real aggressive against some of our flights. On one occasion, the French actually dropped their wing tanks and our guys did, too, usually a sign of aerial combat. In the mood I was in, if I had been in the sky that day, I might have started a war.
The only thing good about the place was that it was close enough to Germany so that if Glennis and I drove most of Friday night, we could at least spend all day Saturday and most of Sunday at Dr. Melscheimer's hunting lodge. I had expected to spend a three-year tour at Hahn; instead, we suffered more than a year in the mud at Toul.