The Air Force had also created a new Manned Orbital Laboratory Command to test experimental weapons and military hardware from permanently orbiting labs in space. Most of their astronaut recruits came from our school.
I had flown the prototype of the new M-2 Lifting Body reentry vehicle, on a brief suborbital flight, taking off from the lakebed, so the new technology was at hand, and the training in our classroom prepared future space pilots for developments twenty years down the road. Our school was at the cutting edge of a new age of flight. Flying in space was a part of a logical stepby-step advance since my sound barrier flight in the X-1.
Once the feasibility was established, it was only a matter of time for the hardware to be developed to get us there. The X-1, crude as it was, led directly to the X-1A, that had carried me up to the dark, dark part of the sky and the edge of space. Those of us involved in extreme highaltitude testing at Edwards twenty years earlier were the first human beings to see the earth's curvature from an airplane. These pioneering flights led directly to the development of the X15 rocket airplane that carried test pilots right to the edge of space, 295,000 feet and higher. NASA's Gemini flights were also crude, little more than orbiting a guy around the earth inside a tin can, but those flights proved the feasibility of orbiting space stations and reusable shuttles. So, the trained astronauts we graduated each year at our school knew that future space missions and hardware were inevitable for them.
But unexpectedly we got clobbered. The Johnson administration, which previously had approved the seed money for a military space start-up, suddenly reversed itself. The increasingly costly war in Vietnam probably had a lot to do with their decision to cancel the Air Force Dyna-Soar program and scrub our manned orbiting laboratory plans, and keep space for peaceful purposes. This 1966 decision came just as I was preparing to leave the school as commandant and become a wing commander in Southeast Asia.
Man, I was shocked by Secretary McNamara's decision. There we sat with a school that had trained the first generation of military spacemen, who now had no missions to fly. My first reaction was that all our hard work had been for nothing. Yet I really didn't believe that. Our school had been too successful, our graduates spread all over, into important ongoing programs. Joe Engle, for example, one of our brightest graduates, was flying the X-15. And many of our guys were now NASA astronauts, several of them destined to fly the Space Shuttle, whose systems and uses were right on target with the training they had received years before in our classroom.
I never did get a chance to fly in space, but starting up that space school was the next best thing. We developed a space mission capability for the Air Force and provided trained manpower for future space efforts, civilian or military. Our school's legacy was the great pilots we turned over to NASA, many of whom are still making their mark. In the end, though, the space training function was wiped out and the school reverted to its original role of training military test pilots.
I wasn't around when the space school closed its doors. By then I was half a world away, overseeing the operations of five different squadrons of combat aircraft engaged in more earthly matters-waging war in Vietnam.
VIETNAM
Glennis saw much worse than my burned face at the big hospital at Clark Air Base in the Philippines, where she was working as a volunteer in the lab, as our most seriously wounded guys were being airlifted in from Vietnam. I was commander of the 405th Fighter Wing, headquartered at Clark, in charge of five squadrons scattered across Southeast Asia: a squadron of fighter-bombers on Taiwan, armed with nuclear weapons targeted into China, in case the war spread; two squadrons of B-57 Canberra bombers at Phan Rang; an air defense squadron at Da Nang, both in Vietnam, and a detachment of fighters in Udorn and Bangkok, in Thailand. The logistics involved were awesome, and it was tough having my people dispersed over tens of thousands of miles of real estate, but I managed to squeeze in 127 combat missions.
I became a wing commander in 1966, but I had been to Vietnam for the first time a couple of years earlier, when Gen. Hunter Harris, commander of the Pacific Air Forces, called me at the space school and asked me to take a trip to Vietnam and Thailand. He said, "I want you to give a talk to each of our fighter wings. We're having trouble getting those men to do any good over there. They're releasing their bombs too high and pulling out, missing a target by five miles.'
Evidently, we were losing a lot of people while trying to knock out heavily-defended bridges. I spent a month going from base to base and talking to the pilots. I told them, "Damn you guys. You drank the best booze, had the best-looking women, flew the hottest airplanes-now you're gonna have to pay for your reputation. If you have a bridge to knock out, that's your job. I know the ground fire is lethal. I know that if you really press home and go down on the deck, you'll be lucky to come through it. But that's war. That's your mission, and you've got to start doing it."
I was a forty-three-year-old colonel talking to pilots who were ten or more years younger, but I think I made an impression because they knew I wasn't some middle-aged desk jockey, but a guy who put his own ass on the line more times than they ever would. I wasn't anxious to see a lot of young guys go out and die, but, damn it, not one of them had been drafted into the Air Force. They had chosen to become military pilots, knowing it was a high-risk profession. Maybe they joined because flying was fun, but all of their training and flying time was geared to make each of them a skilled professional killer. That's what gunnery ranges and dogfighting were all about. In combat, they were expected to go balls-out and accomplish their mission, no matter what, which was why we lost many of our best, aggressive pilots.
Whether or not a guy wanted to be in Vietnam was irrelevant. Personally, I didn't have any philosophical problem about it and didn't know many pilots who did. All of us did have problems with the way the war was being stage-managed from the White House, but hobbled as we were, we obeyed the rules and did the best we could. Every G.I. knows the old expression: "Ours is not to reason why. Our is but to do or die." That says it all.
I spent two years commanding the 405th. Being a wing commander was a huge job as well as a logistics headache. I was used to being in the thick of things, but my guys were scattered over thousands of miles. I was responsible for the morale, performance, and well-being of five thousand men under my command, and if something went wrong, if there was a screw-up or a major failure in operations, yours truly would take the heat. Somehow, I had to find a way to stay on top of my men and their equipment.
I scratched my head wondering how. The obvious answer was there was no way I could involve myself in the daily nitty-gritty of squadron life; a wing commander was a manager, forced to rely on his squadron commanders to keep up morale and operational performance. I knew some wing commanders who demanded that their squadron commanders report to them almost hourly, but that didn't seem a very practical way to try to run five combat squadrons simultaneously. Being a bird colonel meant surrendering the old squadron intimacy. Instead, I was like a judge in a tennis match, perched up on a high chair, overlooking the court and the players. I was above daily activities, but the trick was not to be so high above that I missed what was really happening below.
I had to trust my five squadron commanders to get the job done. The personnel under my command flew five different airplanes from six separate bases, and the only way I could figure to get a handle on what they were doing was to work closely with the squadron commanders. So, I brought them all into Clark regularly to review their problems and needs. I told them, "I'm here as a listener. I'm not able to stay on top of everything that's going on under my command, so I have to trust you, my commanders, to set me straight. I'm not a second-guesser, and you can run things your own way for as long as you get good results. If I see you making some of the same mistakes I made when I was a squadron commander I won't hesitate to point them out. Otherwise, you won't find me breathing down your neck. Hell, this is a learning process for me as well."