We loop in the purple twilight
We spin in the silvery dawn.
With a trail of smoke behind us
To show where our comrades have gone.
* * *
In 1958 Boyd made it official that the Air Force would be his career, changing his status from reserve officer to the regular
Air Force. Mary knew her dream of becoming the wife of a small-town coach and living a simple uncomplicated life was over.
On November 2, after another difficult pregnancy, Mary gave birth to her third child, a boy named John Scott, whom she and
Boyd decided to call “Scott.” He was born prematurely. Mary believed the premature birth came because she had been ill for
weeks during the pregnancy with toxemia, a blood disorder caused by ingesting toxins.
After Scott was born, the doctor told her another pregnancy would endanger her health; she might even die. But Mary became
pregnant immediately. In fact the shortest time between any of her pregnancies was after the doctors forbade her to have more
children.
Jeffrey was born about ten months after Scott on September 4, 1959. Again Mary had a very difficult time with the pregnancy
and the delivery, and she prayed Jeffrey would be her last child.
But Boyd had his own agenda.
B
Y
1959 Nellis was the largest Air Force base in the world. The airspace over one-tenth of Nevada, more than 3 million acres
of gunnery and bombing and air-to-air ranges, was devoted to Air Force use.
Boyd had been at Nellis five-and-a-half years, an unusually long time when a normal tour of duty is two or three years. He
believed Nellis was the highlight of his career and often told Spradling that he would always remember the freedom he had
and the discoveries he made. But most of all he would remember the flying. When he retired sixteen years later, he had about
three thousand hours of flying time, and the greatest portion was from his Nellis tour.
But he was ready to move on. Boyd decided to leave at a time when his career was riding a wave of approval from his superiors.
His ERs tell the story. One began with “Capt Boyd is one of the most effective and dedicated young officers I’ve had the pleasure
of associating with.” It said he had acquired a “worldwide reputation as an authority on fighter tactics.” A brigadier general
indorsed the ER by saying Boyd “is definitely in the top ten percent of all Captains known to me and is one of the finest
officers I know.” The ER said the Air Force had awarded Boyd a commendation ribbon for his ACM research, a prestigious honor
for a captain. Another ER said, “Captain Boyd has
initiated practically all of the current materials on fighter tactics in use by the United States Air Force and many Navy
units.” Boyd had made his presence felt throughout the fighter community, something rarely done by young captains.
Boyd’s transfer was, as usual for him, attended by conflict and high drama. Boyd wanted to fly F-104s at Tyndall AFB, near
Panama City, Florida. “The assignment was set up and then the whole thing fell apart,” he said in his Oral History interview.
“I do not know what hanky-panky was done, but it was obvious I was not going anywhere.” So Boyd decided to return to college,
but not to the University of Iowa, which he still despised. His research into fighter tactics was taking him deeper and deeper
into mathematics. He knew the research would have more credibility and be far better received if he had an engineering degree
to back it up. This time he would go to an engineering school.
In the late 1950s, an Air Force officer wanting to return to college had two choices. He could apply to the Air Force Institute
of Technology (AFIT)—the Air Force’s scholarship program—or he could go to night school at a university. If he went the AFIT
route, the government matched him up with a university and paid his tuition. But AFIT rules were tough. When an officer finished
school, his next tour of duty was a “directed assignment” that almost always was on the logistical rather than the operational
side of the Air Force. This meant that a fighter pilot would be out of the cockpit during both college and his next assignment.
The chances of getting back into the cockpit after such a hiatus were slim. For that reason alone, most fighter pilots returning
to college chose night school and paid their own tuition.
Fighter pilots at Nellis were surprised when Boyd chose AFIT. But then they thought about his circumstances; he was supporting
a wife and four children—one child with a serious illness—on a captain’s pay and had no money for tuition. But there could
have been another reason. Considering his chess-master–like ability to plan ahead and considering how the AFIT program and
his follow-on assignment turned out, Boyd quite possibly outsmarted everyone, including the Air Force.
The first problem Boyd ran into was the clearly stated intent of AFIT to send officers to college to obtain graduate degrees
in the
same area as their undergraduate work. Boyd wanted to go to undergraduate school and he wanted an engineering degree. AFIT
rejected his application. But a month or so later they contacted him; the AFIT program was not reaching its quota and, more
important, the 1957 launch of Sputnik had made the Soviet lead in technology a major issue in the presidential campaign—the
Air Force now was desperate for officers who wanted advanced degrees in engineering and science. AFIT would relax the rules
enough to let Boyd do undergraduate work in engineering, but, they told him, it had to be electrical engineering.
“Bullshit on that,” he said. “All I would do was worry about generators and motors. I did not care about that crap.” Instead
Boyd wanted to study industrial engineering, a broad course of study across several disciplines, and he would do it his way
or not at all. After a lengthy exchange of letters and phone calls, the Air Force gave in. Beginning in the fall of 1960,
Boyd could take an undergraduate curriculum in industrial engineering. And he could choose any engineering school in America.
He picked the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta for the same reason he had wanted to go to Tyndall AFB: it was close
to Warm Springs.
When students in the FWS heard Boyd was leaving, they thought the aerial tactics course would suffer. He realized he would
have to write a tactics manual before he left. But writing the manual would be a complex and time-consuming job, and Boyd
had less than a year left at Nellis. Boyd told Spradling he would need to be relieved of his flying and teaching duties until
the tactics manual was completed. Spradling accompanied Boyd to the office of Colonel Ralph Newman, commandant of the FWS.
Spradling was there when Boyd sat down, lit one of his cigars, and told the colonel what he wanted to do and how long it would
take. Newman said Boyd had no mandate to write a manual and that his job was teaching. “We can’t spare you,” the colonel said.
“If you want to write a manual, that’s fine. But do it on your own time.”
Boyd’s face went rigid with anger. He jumped from his chair and strode across the room. Standing nose to nose with the colonel,
he began tapping Newman on the chest and loudly reciting his contributions to the FWS during the past five-and-a-half years.
He pounded with such vigor that ashes fell from his cigar and cascaded
down the front of the colonel’s uniform. Spradling was horrified. Captains do not raise their voices to colonels. Captains
do not poke colonels in the chest. Captains do not dust a colonel’s uniform with cigar ashes.
“John,” he implored.
Boyd ignored him. Spittle dribbled down his chin as he ticked off all the things his manual would do for the FWS and fighter
aviation and the Air Force and why he should be relieved of duty until the manual was completed. He finished, and for a moment
he and the colonel stared at each other. Boyd gave the colonel’s chest a final tap and said, “Then, goddammit, I’ll do it
on my own.”
Spradling seized Boyd’s arm and pulled him from the room.
“Thank you, Colonel,” he said.
Once in the hall he said, “John, you don’t talk to colonels that way. You just don’t do that. You know better.”
“Sprad, this goddamn manual is important. It can help fighter pilots. It can change the Air Force.”
“I know that, John, but…” Spradling shook his head. “You better be glad Colonel Newman is such an understanding and fair man.
He could hang you for what you just did.”
“Ahhh, he’s an asshole.”
Boyd could not write the manual and continue flying and teaching; there simply wasn’t enough time. Plus, the idea of sitting
down at a desk and spending hundreds of hours writing a long document brought him to the edge of panic. He was a talker, not
a writer. When he talked his ideas tumbled back and forth and he fed off the class and distilled his thoughts to the essence.
But writing meant precision. And once on paper, the ideas could not be changed. This was the first of several times in his
life when the need to produce valuable work imposed such pressure and such anxiety that he was stricken with the thought that
he, like his brother Bill, would snap. Near the end of his life, he confided to a close friend that when he was faced with
the burden of sitting down and writing, he was afraid he would “spin off and lose control.”
Spradling came up with the solution. “John, don’t make this a big thing. We have some good Dictaphones. Why don’t you dictate
the damn thing?”
Boyd paused and thought.
“You dictate it and I’ll have my secretary transcribe it,” Spradling said. “Then I’ll edit it for you.”
For a month Boyd worked on an outline. Two or three days each week, he moved into the bachelor officers’ quarters and worked
far into the night. He slept two or three hours, taught in the morning, flew in the afternoon, and worked on his outline until
almost dawn. Then one morning about 3:00
A.M
., Spradling’s phone rang.
“Spradling residence.”
“Sprad. John.”
“Hey, John. What is it?”
“Sprad, it’s time to get that mechanical monster in operation.”
“What mechanical monster, John?”
“The goddamn dictating machine.”
Several hours later, one morning in September 1959, Boyd began dictating.
The Corvette was the car of choice for fighter pilots in the 1950s. It would not go severely supersonic but it could get close
enough, and from the way this one was being driven, it was obvious a fighter pilot was at the wheel. The red Corvette with
cream panels held a steady 90 mph as it ripped across the desert of New Mexico and into Arizona, top down, radio blaring.
The driver was guzzling Coors beer and was half smashed. Occasionally he reached down and pulled another beer from the six-pack
at his feet. He swaggered just sitting there. Only a fighter pilot can swagger while sitting down. When he was down to his
final beer, the driver began looking for a place to replenish his supply. He stopped briefly, wedged another six-pack between
his feet, and shifted up through the gears and continued westward.
The driver was a slender man with blond hair and a sunburned face. His name was Ronald Catton, First Lieutenant Ronald Catton,
and he was a Hun driver out of the 474th Tactical Fighter Wing at Cannon AFB. Not only was he a fighter pilot, he considered
himself the best in the Air Force. He was going from Clovis, New Mexico, to Nellis to attend the FWS, and in his heart burned
two goals: he was going to clean the clock of this guy named John Boyd, this Forty-Second Boyd he had heard about, and he
was going to perform at such a high level in both the classroom and in the air that a few months after
graduation, he would receive the call inviting him back to the FWS as an instructor. He was going to wear the patch and then
he was going to wear the black-and-gold checkerboard scarf and become one of the high priests in the temple of fighter aviation.
The red Corvette continued its course, now angling a bit to the north as it arrowed on toward Las Vegas. Lieutenant Catton
smiled in contentment. He ruled his world.
But after his first morning with Boyd, Catton realized he was in the cage with a man who knew all there was to know about
flying a jet fighter. Boyd’s overview of tactics and some of the maneuvers he demonstrated with the F-100 models rocked Catton
back in his seat. This guy was leagues ahead of every other fighter pilot the lieutenant had ever met. Even other instructors
deferred to him. Catton thought Boyd was very intense, cordial to his fellow instructors, and a bit standoffish with students.
He heard Boyd call one instructor “Tiger,” and from the way the man’s eyes lit up, Catton knew this compliment was not one
Boyd gave lightly. Just as had been the case with Everett Raspberry, in the space of one class Catton went from wanting to
defeat Boyd in the air to wanting to learn all that Boyd had to teach. Great fighter pilots have few heroes, but Ron Catton
had a case of hero worship.
Catton’s home squadron from Cannon rotated to Nellis for training about the same time Catton arrived at the FWS. He had been
on base only two or three days when he met several squadron mates in the Stag Bar and proceeded to knock back a few beers.
Then everyone decided to drive into Vegas for a night of barhopping and dancer-watching. Catton lit a cigarette and jumped
into his red Corvette and tore through the main gate. The sentry did not salute, probably because the Corvette was only a
blur when it passed by. Catton locked the brakes, skidded to a stop, then reversed at high speed, gravel flying. He chewed
out the sentry and was off again, the Corvette’s rear end skidding as he turned left onto Las Vegas Boulevard and accelerated.
As he raced into North Las Vegas, he reached to pull the cigarette from his mouth. But the cigarette stuck to his lip and
his fingers slipped toward and closed on the lighted end, burning him and scattering embers all over his beloved Corvette.
He whipped across traffic into a service station and leaned down to find the ashes. When he
looked up, a policeman was standing beside the car. The cop had the temerity to ask Catton if he had been drinking. Catton
was indignant. Nevertheless, the police officer invited Catton to the station. Once there Catton continued to protest but
lost all credibility when he puked on the floor.