The police called the duty officer at Nellis and Catton was hauled back to base. The next morning Catton, rumpled and hung
over, was standing tall before Colonel Newman and learning the full dimensions of the expression “chewing out.” Two things
were working against him: the Air Force was cracking down on anyone charged with what then was called DWI—driving while intoxicated—and
the city of North Las Vegas was complaining that drunk fighter pilots were endangering local citizens by speeding down Las
Vegas Boulevard. The Air Force was being pressured to make examples out of a few pilots. After a lengthy lecture on how Catton
had embarrassed himself, his home squadron, the FWS, and the U.S. Air Force, Newman pulled a set of papers from a drawer and
threw them atop his desk. His eyes, blue and as cold as arctic ice, stared at Catton. “Know what these are, Lieutenant?”
“No, Sir.”
“They’re court-martial papers.”
Catton’s breath stopped. If he stood before a court-martial, it would be the end of his flying and the end of his Air Force
career.
The commandant stared at Catton for what seemed like an eternity. Then he said that Catton’s squadron commander was a close
friend who had saved his life in World War II. “I don’t want to embarrass my old friend,” he said. He was not going to press
the court-martial—not yet. He asked for the keys to Catton’s red Corvette. Catton passed them over.
“Lieutenant, henceforth you will walk every place you go,” the commandant said. “For the remainder of your tour on this base—and
that might not be long—you will not drive, you will not accept a ride from anyone. You will not even put on a pair of roller
skates. Except for an F-100, you will ride in nothing with wheels. One more screwup, Lieutenant, just one and…” He tapped
the court-martial papers.
It was a shaken young man who left the commandant’s office.
He stepped outside, looked up at the bright Nevada sky, and wondered how his career could have taken such a perilous turn
in such a short time.
By the end of that day, everyone in the FWS knew of his misad-venture and was laughing about how he threw up at the police
station. He was wounded, and a wounded man has little chance in the FWS. Competition is brutal. He knew what was ahead: students
and instructors alike would treat him like a pariah. His fellow students would offer no help and instructors would go out
of their way to see that he busted out. There was little chance that he would wear the patch, much less wear the black-and-gold
checkerboard scarf. What could he do? Who could help him? There was only one person. Catton stumbled down the street, cursing
the hot sun and cursing every beer he had drunk the night before. That took a while. He entered the academic building and
knocked on Boyd’s door.
“Enter.”
Catton stepped inside and saluted. “Sir, Lieutenant Ronald Catton requests permission to speak with the captain.”
Boyd nodded.
“Sir, I have a problem,” Catton began.
“That’s what I hear.”
Catton told Boyd his dream and asked what he could do to salvage that dream. For a long moment Boyd did not speak. He turned
in his chair and held up his pencil and stared at the tip as if he were looking through a pipper. Then he spun around and
looked at Catton. “No one has ever gone through this school with a perfect academic record. I don’t know if you have the smarts
to do that, Catton. But if you do, you will get their attention. If you don’t, you can forget your dream.” He paused and repeated.
“
Nobody
has gone through this school with a perfect record.”
Catton swallowed hard. Nobody had jumped across the Grand Canyon either. And what Boyd was asking him to do was the equivalent.
The bust-out rate at the FWS proved it was the toughest course in the Air Force. Pilots were smart guys; they had to be to
master the disciplines involved in flying the Hun. But most of them considered themselves lucky to graduate from the FWS.
This school had humbled dozens of college graduates, and Catton had received his commission as an aviation cadet; he had only
two years of college.
Boyd waggled a finger. “They will be watching you.”
Catton left, wondering how he could accomplish the task Boyd had set before him. He would not think about the full academic
curriculum; he would not think about the course on air-to-ground, bombs and fuses, gun sight, computations, or the course
on missiles and rockets. He would not think about any of them, especially the dreaded final course on nuclear weapons. He
would think about only one course at a time. And right now he was studying air combat maneuvering, Boyd’s course on aerial
tactics. It was one of the toughest, designed to weed out every man who was not a tiger. For each hour spent in Boyd’s class,
a student spent at least two hours studying. Catton settled in. He forgot his squadron mates. He forgot the Stag Bar. He got
up at 2:30
A.M
. and studied until breakfast. He studied between breakfast and class. He flew in the afternoon, had an early dinner, and
studied late, then arose again at 2:30 to start all over again. He was a man possessed.
When he flew with Boyd, he was amazed by the extreme nature of how Boyd handled the Hun, especially the low-speed, high-angle-of-attack
flying—the most difficult part of the flight regime for the F-100. But Catton learned. He learned well.
Boyd was right about the lieutenant being watched. Catton saw the looks every day and he knew the other students and the instructors
considered him a screwup. Sure, he was a good pilot, but good pilots were a dime a dozen at Nellis. Every time Catton took
to the air, he had to fly better than he had ever flown before. One error in judgment and he was gone. He had already shown
his judgment was not the best. But to become an instructor, a man who taught other pilots how to deliver nuclear weapons,
he had to be the very personification of good judgment. And he knew the instructors did not believe he had what it took to
wear the patch. They were waiting, watching for one miscue. It was a lonesome time for First Lieutenant Ronald Catton.
He took the exam in air combat maneuvering. Boyd smiled as he handed Catton the test results. Catton had a perfect score—the
only one in the class.
So far so good. Now Catton saw a grudging difference in the eyes of others. “That screwup Catton got a hundred in Boyd’s class.
You believe that?”
He finished the course on air-to-ground. Another 100. The flight-line instructors softened a bit. But Catton was still a screwup—just
a smarter screwup than anyone had thought.
By the time he took the course on bombs and fuses, word was getting around in the FWS that the guy who got drunk in his Corvette
and puked at the police station and was under the threat of a court-martial had made 100 on two courses. He was still laboring
over the exam when Colonel Newman called Catton’s instructor and asked, “How did Catton do?”
Moments later the instructor called him back and said, “Sir, Catton made one hundred.”
Catton and Boyd frequently passed in the hall, and each time Boyd smiled and nodded. The two had a secret; they were the only
ones at Nellis who knew what Catton was trying to do. And while Catton did not know it, Boyd was privately defending him with
other instructors. “Catton’s not a bad guy,” he said more than once. “You got him wrong. Wait and see.”
After all, Boyd had enormous compassion for the underdog, having been one most of his life. When he saw the instructors and
students at the FWS arrayed against Catton, he had to defend the young officer. He saw promise in Catton, just as Frank Pettinato
had seen promise in him, and he liked the idea of a man fighting against impossible odds. Plus, he had an old-fashioned belief,
instilled in him by Art Weibel and Frank Pettinato, that hard work can overcome all obstacles.
Catton made 100 in the course on the lead-computing gun sight and followed it up with a 100 on missiles and rockets. The word
was all over the FWS: Catton’s going for 100 in every course. Now rather than ostracizing him the instructors and other students
were encouraging him. No one had ever come from so far behind. No one had ever made this many perfect scores in the FWS. Catton
had a shot at doing the impossible.
But there was still the last test, the toughest one, the one that consistently lowered a student’s academic average. In the
dreaded nuclear weapons course, students had to learn not just how to deliver tactical nuclear weapons, but how to arm and
disarm them. The course covered the physics and the electronics and the principles upon which nuclear weapons worked. When
a pilot finished the nuclear weapons course, he could damn near build an atomic bomb.
Catton studied harder than ever. When he wasn’t in class or flying, he was laboring over texts on physics and electronics
and explosives. Then came the test. Students finished and waited while the instructor, Captain Mark Cook, graded their papers.
Several pilots grimaced as they realized they were not as smart as they thought. After students received their grades, they
stood in the back of the classroom and in the hall, watching Catton. Instructors stuck their heads in the door, their raised
eyebrows asking the question. “He’s not finished,” they were told.
The commandant called three times to ask how Catton did. He knew most men would have folded long ago under the pressures the
lieutenant faced. They would have busted out and their careers would have ended. But he also knew that a few men, only the
best, could grow up and blossom and realize their potential when they were put to the fire. Such men exemplify the highest
qualities the FWS seeks to instill in its students. They not only deserve to wear the patch, they honor the patch.
Catton finished and handed the test to Captain Cook. The other students moved forward and instructors crowded into the room.
Slowly Catton’s instructor checked off the correct answers. The students began to smile and elbow each other. The instructors
looked at one another in amazement.
Down the hall Boyd sat in his office, moving papers around, listening to the buzz of conversation. He waited.
Captain Cook reached the last question, checked the answer, and froze. The answer was wrong.
Silence gripped the room.
Cook asked Catton to explain his answer to the final question. Catton had computed the release gyro settings for a nuclear
weapons delivery based on the aircraft being an F-100F, a two-seater, while Cook wanted an answer based on the F-100D, a single-seater
with a different center of gravity and thus different gyro settings. But the test had not specified the type of aircraft;
it simply said F-100.
Cook nodded and reread the way he had phrased the question and rechecked Catton’s answer. The answer was correct for the F-100F.
Cook ignored everyone in the room as he talked himself through what had happened. No one spoke. No one moved. The classroom
waited. Cook decided it was he who had made the mistake. He made
a mark on the test and handed Catton the paper. “I’m giving you a hundred.”
Students cheered and gathered around Catton, congratulating him and slapping him on the back. The instructors smiled and nodded
in approval. They had been present at an event that no one thought they would ever see. Catton pushed through the crowd and
walked down the hall toward Boyd’s office. He knocked on the door.
“Enter.”
The two men stared at each other.
“I heard,” Boyd said. He smiled. “You cleaned them out.”
Catton bit his lip and nodded. He could not speak.
“Way to go, Tiger.”
Catton turned away. A fighter pilot doesn’t cry, especially if he has just become the first fighter pilot in history to ace
every academic course at the Fighter Weapons School.
Catton graduated and was given a trophy for having the best academic record in his class. He was awarded the patch. Then he
drove his red Corvette back across the desert to Cannon AFB in Clovis, New Mexico.
A few months later he received the call.
In early 1960 Boyd stopped dictating. Spradling carefully edited the document. But Boyd was not happy and spent weeks doing
further editing, revisions, and more editing. Every sentence had to be right. Every maneuver had to be in the proper sequence.
He agonized for hours over single words. He rewrote endlessly. After Spradling sent the document to the printer, Boyd still
revised. Dozens of one-page corrections were sent to the printer. When Boyd finally, reluctantly, finished, he had a 150-page
single-spaced manual that he called the “Aerial Attack Study” by “Capt. John Boyd.”
“Are you going to put that on the cover?” Spradling asked. “Aren’t you going to say it is the ‘United States Air Force Aerial
Attack Study’?”
“To hell with them,” Boyd said. “They wouldn’t give me time to do it. They made me do it at night, on my own.”
Despite his anger, Boyd was, as he put it, “… as proud as a goddamn new father” when he delivered the manual to Newman. The
colonel nodded, tossed the manual aside, and said, “We’re not going to use this in the school.”
“Why not?” Boyd asked.
The colonel showed him a much smaller document—Boyd estimated it was ten or fifteen pages, though it probably was considerably
longer—and said it had been prepared by the Training Research and Development (TR&D) section of the FWS and that it was the
publication the school would use to teach tactics.
The TR&D people had a mandate to prepare a manual; Boyd did not. His long hours and intensive work of the past four months
were in vain. To complicate matters, his manual was classified “secret,” which severely limited its circulation. Boyd fought
the classification, but since his manual contained both tactics the U.S. Air Force would use in the event of war and specific
details on how to avoid missiles, the classification remained in force.
Boyd then took an action that could have ended his career. He went over the colonel’s head and sent both the TR&D manual and
his manual to a friend at the Tactical Air Command headquarters, a man who could overrule Newman on what was used to teach
tactics. His friend preferred Boyd’s manual but said to avoid any impression of favoritism, both manuals would be submitted
to an independent panel for review.