Boyd (20 page)

For weeks the two talked after class, and Cooper’s tutoring kept Boyd abreast of classroom work. One afternoon the two men
walked across Hemphill Street to the Yellow Jacket, a small restaurant named for the Tech mascot and a convenient place for
Tech students to buy hamburgers and hot dogs. They nursed a couple of sodas and talked. Finally Cooper raised the subject
that had been on his mind since he first met Boyd. “You’re older than most students. Why did you wait so long to go to college?”

Boyd said he already had a degree from Iowa and that he was an Air Force officer seeking an engineering degree.

“What do you do in the Air Force?”

Boyd beamed down at Cooper and said, “I’m a goddamn fighter pilot.”

From his tone of voice it was clear there was nothing better in the world to be, nothing higher to which one might aspire.
It so happened that Cooper agreed. Forty years later he still remembered the gist of the conversation.

“What do you fly?”

“Fly ’em all. Been flying an F-100 for the past few years. Flew a fucking F-86 in Korea. I was in goddamn MiG Alley. We’d
fly up to
the Yalu and the Communist sons of bitches would be up forty-five or fifty thousand feet where we couldn’t climb, but when
they came down we kicked their asses.”

Cooper was a nineteen-year-old college student talking to a thirty-four-year-old Air Force fighter pilot who had romped triumphantly
down MiG Alley. He had no idea that Georgia Tech would expose him to such things. He put down his soda and stared. This was
more exciting than designing space vehicles. He was talking to a
war hero
.

Boyd must have sensed Cooper’s awe because suddenly he was off and running. He loved to talk and now he had an appreciative,
even worshipful, audience. And it was okay, too, that everyone else in the restaurant could hear.

“I landed in Korea at a place called K-13. Came in there in a goddamn C-54 with a load of lieutenants, all F-86 pilots about
to go into combat. We land and we hear sirens and we see the air police racing alongside the airplane and we wonder what the
hell is going on. Then the door opens and this full colonel comes up the ramp. He’s got APs [Air policemen] in front of him
and APs behind. They’re guarding him, making sure he gets on the damn airplane. They’re sending him home. Turns out he crossed
the Yalu and shot up half of Manchuria. He told his flight, ‘Turn off your goddamn radios.’ And they went across the river
and shot them up. It happened a few days later to another colonel. Then another one. In three days I had three full colonels
gone. They went across the Yalu and hosed them down good.”

Cooper shook his head in amazement. And other students in the restaurant listened and nodded, apparently delighted to know
the truth of what had taken place in Korea, and glad to know our boys had done what had to be done in fighting the Communist
menace.

It is true that pilots sneaked across the Yalu and shot up Communist air fields in their Manchurian sanctuary. And it is true
they were transferred if they were detected. But colonels did not do this, certainly not three colonels in three days at one
base. This was a war story, an instance of Boyd laying it on thick when talking to civilians—but this does not mean it was
a
lie,
as most people define the word. Cooper as a southerner understood this. Southerners and fighter pilots know the story is
more important than the facts. If a story is not true it can become true in the telling. So even if Cooper
had known Boyd was telling a war story, it wouldn’t have mattered. Cooper went on to work in the defense industry and would
repeat the three-colonels story hundreds of times in later years when Boyd became famous.

Boyd and Cooper ordered hamburgers. Boyd wolfed his down in several bites and kept talking, telling stories of his Nellis
days, his loud raucous laughter ringing out triumphantly across the restaurant. He told Cooper of this thing he was working
on, this idea he first had back at Nellis when he wrote the “Aerial Attack Study.” It concerned the performance of fighter
jets and it was something like driving along the expressway and deciding whether or not to pass the car ahead. At some speeds
the driver knew he had the power to pull out and pass the car in front. At other speeds passing the car was far more difficult.
The same idea could be applied to an aircraft in combat. The pilot with the most airspeed or the most power could put himself
on the six of an enemy and be in position to win the dogfight. If he did not have the airspeed or power, he better not try
to outmaneuver the enemy.

Finally it was time to get back to studying, and the two men returned to the John Saylor Coon Building. They found an empty
classroom on the second floor and there, on one of the long desks that ran almost the width of the room, they opened the thermo
textbook
Engineering Thermodynamics
by Jones and Hawkins. It was a relatively small book, but its equations had bested some very bright young men. Cooper began
talking about the second law, explaining how more usable energy always goes into a system than comes out, because there is
unavailable energy called
entropy
. Boyd nodded. After a while he stood up and began pacing. Cooper went on for several hours, but Boyd could not concentrate.
Something was swirling through his mind, pushing at the edges of his consciousness—but what? Boyd continued pacing. He grimaced
as if he were in pain.

All entropy means, Cooper said, is that no system is one hundred percent effective; if it were, you would have a perpetual-motion
machine. The professors make it too complicated with all the talk of unavailable energy and states of energy and systems.

It was almost midnight when Boyd threw wide his hands in exasperation and said, “Goddammit, I understand about airplanes.
Why can’t I get this?”

“Then think of it in terms of an airplane,” Cooper said. “It’s the same thing.
Entropy
is unavailable energy. Energy can increase and decrease. If you put ten units of energy into a system and only eight units
are available to do work, the result is an increase in entropy.”

Cooper continued. He loved to talk about thermo. But Boyd wasn’t listening. He was hearing something else. In his Oral History
interview he said that suddenly he found what he had searched for so long, that his hair stood on end and his skin tingled.
All that he had been wrestling with for years suddenly made sense. The clean and simple and elegant majesty of the idea almost
overwhelmed him. Thermo laws about the conservation and dissipation of energy are like the tactical give-and-take of air-to-air
combat. In a dogfight it is not power or airspeed that enables a pilot to outmaneuver an enemy. It is
energy
.

Energy!

If he was at 200 knots at 30,000 feet, he was carrying little kinetic energy but a tremendous amount of potential energy.
If he saw an enemy fighter at 20,000 feet and dived to engage, his airspeed rose, because he was trading potential energy
for kinetic energy. He built up speed, like Richard Bong in a P-38, to slash through an enemy formation and be out of gun
range before the enemy knew what was happening. Then he could use the kinetic energy (or speed) of the dive to climb back
to altitude. But as he climbed he lost airspeed and converted kinetic energy back to potential. The only way to regain airspeed
was performing a maneuver that might make him vulnerable, such as straight and level flight or diving again.

He had energy but it could be temporarily unavailable.

Boyd searched frantically through his books and found a yellow legal pad and began scribbling notes and ideas and equations
and theories and questions. If he could look at air-to-air combat in terms of energy, he could devise equations for the performance
of an aircraft.

The test was forgotten. Boyd wrote and mumbled and nodded and went into long periods of silence. Cooper tried a few times
to talk to Boyd, but it was clear the older guy was in a different place. Cooper went home. Boyd went to the library—it was
open until 1:00
A.M
.—and continued working on equations. He made a list of what had to be done next, which equations had to be written and solved,
what theories must be followed up and developed. He filled sheet after sheet of his yellow legal pad.

When the library closed he drove up Buford Highway, turned onto McClave Drive, entered his home and continued working. Then
he called Spradling. It was about 4:00
A.M
. in Atlanta, three hours earlier in Las Vegas.

When the phone rang, Spradling knew it was either Boyd or a family emergency.

“Spradling residence.”

“Sprad. John.”

“Hey, John. What time is it?”

“Sprad, I had the breakthrough.”

“What breakthrough?”

“The one I’ve been after ever since I got here. It happened tonight, Sprad.”

Boyd talked for more than an hour. He slept several hours, then drove back to Tech and took the thermo test. (He must have
done well, as he made a “B” in the course.) After class he rushed home and pulled out his legal pad “to see if all I had done
was a bunch of shit or whether it made sense.”

It still made sense.

He added more notes, more thoughts, more equations. And then he put it away and went into what he called his “draw-down period,”
thinking, “Oh, hell. Somebody has already done this.” If what he had discovered was work done by someone else, he did not
want to waste more time. What he had come up with was so simple, so obvious, that someone had to have discovered it before.
He was casual when he mentioned his ideas about energy to Cooper and other students at Tech. He wondered if they had heard
of similar work. They had not. His thermo professor knew of no work in this area. Boyd could find nothing in the library along
the lines of what he was working on. Then it registered: if someone had reached the same conclusions he had reached and applied
it to tactics, he would have known about it when he was at Nellis. Anything to do with fighter tactics wound up at Nellis.
And since he had been the head of the Academic Section at the Fighter Weapons School, he would have seen the material. But
he had never seen any papers, any research, any reports.

It had not been done before.

He became excited all over again. The enormity of what he was in the process of discovering would change aviation forever.
He knew it.

But he had one more quarter at Tech before he graduated. And he had to do well. His attention had to be on his studies. Nevertheless,
he always carried his legal pad for jotting down new ideas. He already had orders for his next assignment. He was going to
Eglin AFB down in the Florida panhandle. At Eglin he could devote full time to these ideas about excess energy. But how could
it be applied? What could he do with it? Would the Air Force be interested?

Boyd graduated from Georgia Tech after the summer quarter of 1962. Soon afterward he was promoted to major. All his promotions
had been in or below the zone; that is, he had been promoted on schedule or faster. He was ahead of many of his contemporaries.

It was an exciting time to be in the Air Force. The country was enamored of its new president, who had declared that America
was going to put a man on the moon. The Space Race was going strong and the Air Force had big plans for its engineers. A new
general was in charge of the Tactical Air Command, a General Walter Campbell Sweeney who had been on Curtis LeMay’s staff—a
real bomber general who probably would dismantle the FWS.

Boyd put the house on McClave Drive up for sale, but it was February 1963 before a buyer came along. The buyer made no down
payment; he simply assumed the mortgage. This means that Boyd made payments on the house for twenty-two months and then unloaded
with no return on his investment.

Mary looked at her husband, a man who had a degree in economics from the University of Iowa and a degree in industrial engineering
from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and demanded an explanation. “You said the house would be a good investment,” she
charged.

Boyd shrugged and said, “We lived in that house rent free.”

It was the only house Boyd would ever own.

I
F
Nellis was the most remote and isolated Air Force base in America, Eglin ran a close second. But Eglin did not have the throbbing
and pulsating city of Las Vegas; Eglin had the lethargic hamlet of Valparaiso, called Val-P, and nearby wide spots in the
road such as Fort Walton Beach, Shalimar, and, yes, Niceville. Eglin was so bucolic that white-tail deer grazed along the
base’s main road. Eglin’s primary connection to the outside world was Southern Airways and the two DC-3s it flew each day
into the Okaloosa County Airport. The civilian airport and Eglin shared the same runways.

Eglin has hundreds of thousands of sandy acres covered in pine trees to the north and west of the base. To the south is the
Gulf of Mexico. The remoteness of the base made it the perfect place to test guns, bombs, and rockets. Some of the most secret
missions of the American military have been practiced at Eglin and the little ancillary bases squirreled away in the pine
forests. In World War II, Jimmy Doolittle came here and trained his B-25 crews for the raid against Tokyo. Tactics used to
destroy German rocket installations were developed here. A few years later, a mission to rescue POWs in Vietnam was practiced
here.