Boyd said he called in the young officer and gave him the big picture of how many base activities depended on the good will
of Thai officials. He ordered the young officer, guilty or not, to continue the relationship. “I’m giving you a direct order
to screw her every night until you are transferred out of here,” Boyd said he told the officer.
“Sir, I don’t believe that is a lawful order,” the officer said.
“Goddammit, I issued it and you better obey it. We’re at war and bigger things are at stake here than your guilt. Your dick
can cause you problems but it is not going to cause problems for America. You do as I say or I will make your life a living
hell for as long as you are in the Air Force.”
Then Boyd called in the village official and told him the young officer had seen the error of his ways and that the relationship
with the official’s daughter would continue.
Rabid dogs and obscenity on latrine walls and wandering young officers may seem inconsequential. But these small stitches
not only make up the tapestry of a wartime Air Force base, they go to the heart of Boyd’s creative style of problem solving.
They were all effective, and they all contributed to turning around an important American air base with a severe morale problem.
Boyd also thought the Base Exchange (B-X) at NKP was an unnecessary indulgence. He said a store selling everything from hair
dryers to television sets to stereos had no place on a combat base—that such things made Americans “soft.” Persky recalls
that once, he and Boyd were talking when Boyd pointed at the B-X and said everything in the store should be loaded aboard
C-130s and parachuted into North Vietnam. “Let them get used to the good life and then we can just walk in and take over,”
he said.
Boyd also dealt with situations of great consequence. He said the McNamara Line was an expensive failure and shut it down.
He claimed that a four-star general later told him he was sent to NKP solely because Pentagon generals knew he was the only
man in the Air Force with the guts to close down the boondoggle.
Boyd, as a senior officer, lived in a trailer. By all accounts he worked eighteen- and twenty-hour days. He bought a reel-to-reel
tape deck, and every night as he did paperwork his trailer was filled
with the ominous “Ride of the Valkyries” or the majestic “Entry of the Gods into Valhalla.” It was at night that Boyd made
his phone calls to America, to Sprad or Christie or Sprey and once to Mary. These calls were made on the ham-radio network
called MARS, a system that necessitated saying “over” after speaking and then waiting to accommodate the interminably long
pause; Mary found it terribly confusing. And it was at night that he worked long hours on his “learning theory.” It would
be almost five years before this search culminated in one of the few things Boyd ever wrote, an eleven-page paper he called
“Destruction and Creation,” an unpublished work that some think is his most significant intellectual achievement.
In December, as the Christmas bombings began and Air Force bases were on high alert, Boyd received an emergency message from
his brother Gerry. His baby sister, Ann, had breast cancer and was very ill. She might not live. Boyd must come to the hospital
in New York.
The news hit Boyd hard. His mother was fighting a failing memory and Gerry had been talking about bringing her to Florida.
And now this. He got an emergency leave and headed back to the States.
Ann lived with Marion in New York City. She still was influenced by her mother’s admonition to keep all personal information
close and did not want anyone in the family to know she had cancer. But Marion could not deal with a dying sister by herself.
She said to Ann, “Gerry is coming up here on business. He will want to see you. I’ll have to bring him by the hospital.”
“Okay,” Ann said.
Marion pressed ahead. “And John is coming back from Thailand for an important meeting here in New York. I can’t keep him away.”
“Okay.”
So the four living siblings, the remaining sons and daughters of Hubert and Elsie Boyd, gathered in Columbia Presbyterian
Hospital. After a few days, Ann seemed to rally. Boyd wearily crawled aboard an airplane for the long flight across twelve
time zones, back to the war, back to a remote base in Thailand. But Ann’s rally was brief. Boyd was at NKP little more than
a week when he received another message: Ann is dying.
Ann was heavily medicated when Boyd arrived, in and out of consciousness. Gerry and Marion sat by her bed. Gerry suggested
that he
and John go out and buy Ann some ice cream, which she loved. Ann was sleeping so Marion nodded her assent. Gerry and Boyd
slogged through the winter streets for almost an hour. While they were gone Marion noticed that Ann seemed unusually still.
Marion jostled Ann’s shoulder and got no response.
“Ann, are you asleep?” Marion said. No response.
Now Marion was frightened. She had always heard that the sense of hearing is the last thing to go when a person is dying.
She leaned down and began shouting in Ann’s ear. But Ann made no response. Nurses heard Marion shouting and rushed to the
room. “My sister is not right. She is not answering me,” Marion told them.
The nurses took one look at Ann and knew she was dead. “We’ll take care of this,” they said, and ushered Marion from the room.
When Boyd and Gerry returned with the ice cream, they found Marion standing in the hall, wishing she had been allowed to say
good-bye to her sister.
Then Gerry and Boyd had to go to Erie to tell their mother her baby daughter had died of cancer. Since Elsie had not known
Ann was sick, the news came as a considerable shock. But, with her usual stoicism, she endured it.
When Boyd returned to NKP, he had three months remaining on his tour and then it was back home, for good. How well he performed
his duties is demonstrated in his final ER. The front side is fire walled, again with the exception of the box regarding his
human relations, where he is graded “above average” rather than “outstanding.” The narrative says his “sound and effective
management practices” reversed a deteriorating racial situation, and that the improvements he had made in the living, working,
and recreational facilities resulted in higher morale across the base. The ER also said Boyd’s “high degree of rapport” with
Thai officials had made possible the successful completion of numerous projects that depended on Thai–United States cooperation.
It said Boyd’s mission-oriented nature “contributed materially to the success of this wing’s combat operations.” The indorsement
said that although Boyd came out of the R&D field, he had performed “in a superior manner” as a commander.
NKP was a pivot point in Boyd’s career. For him the Vietnam War served almost as a vacation from the Pentagon war. It was
a year in
which he had the chance to wash everything clean. He had begun a voracious reading program and an obsessive search for the
nature of creativity, both of which laid the foundation for what soon would become the major focus of his life.
Boyd’s ERs from Southeast Asia are close to perfect. It is worth noting that in the cauldron of a combat environment, a place
where men reveal what they are made of, and a place where—as his predecessor as base commander proved—some men collapse from
stress, Boyd performed flawlessly.
But now he was going back to the Pentagon, back to the labyrinth of the Blue Suiters.
W
HEN
Boyd took off from Thailand on the long flight to Washington, he had little idea of how troubled America was and how significant
were the changes taking place in the Pentagon and in the Air Force. President Richard Nixon was under siege, the vice president
was about to be forced out of office, and an air of mistrust and uncertainty permeated the country. Throughout the Pentagon
the command structure struggled to absorb the bitter lessons of Vietnam. And in the Air Force the long era of the nuclear
bomber generals was ending. These generals still ran the Air Force, but they were retiring in large numbers and being replaced
by a vanguard of fighter generals who brought a change, if not in philosophy, then at least in orientation.
Boyd had been in the Air Force almost twenty-three years and knew there was little chance he would make general. The Pentagon
would be his last assignment before he retired. This was his last great opportunity to leave his mark on the Air Force. He
thought his legacy would be the lightweight fighter, and all of his hopes and dreams centered around that project.
At the same time Boyd was reading widely and thinking ahead and searching for ways to get a grasp on his “learning theory.”
When
he talked of learning, he did not mean studying but rather the process of creativity. Boyd did not then know it, but his learning
theory would become the first bookend for an extraordinary series of intellectual accomplishments. He was about to begin a
stormy ten-year passage into the rarefied realm of the pure intellectual. He also was about to step onto a stage where he
would be joined in quick succession by three of the remaining four Acolytes. That stage was the Building, where, behind the
scenes, extraordinary events were taking place.
James Schlesinger was the new secretary of defense—the “SecDef” in Building speak—and, like most secretaries, wanted to leave
a legacy. To find out how to do that, he sought counsel with a man whose understanding of the military he deeply respected,
Richard Hallock. Colonel Hallock was a paratrooper, a highly-decorated combat hero who also was a close friend of the redoubtable
Pierre Sprey. In fact, when Sprey first came to the Building, Hallock was his mentor.
Hallock sat down with Schlesinger and said in effect, “You must understand that if you want to leave a legacy it is vital
for you to make a quick decision about what you want that legacy to be. If you don’t make a quick decision, you will have
no legacy. Because after several months you become so caught up in the business of the Pentagon, so enmeshed with the generals,
so overwhelmed with the scope and enormity of the job that it will be too late. Pick a few projects and put the full weight
of your office behind them. Guide the projects. Nurture them. Know from the very beginning that they will be your legacy.
Force them through the bureaucracy.”
Schlesinger agreed. But there were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of projects going on in each branch of the military. It would
take months to sort through them. What should he choose?
“I can recommend several. Two of the most important are in the Air Force and the Air Force doesn’t want either. You will have
a fight.”
“What are they?”
“The lightweight fighter and the A-10.”
After reading Hallock’s detailed analysis of the two projects, Schlesinger agreed.
Schlesinger’s decision was the third serendipitous event that kept alive the lightweight fighter. Once again, remarkably,
the project had
been rescued. First there was Packard’s decision to start a prototype program. Without Packard’s decision, the lightweight
fighter would have been stillborn. Second, when Colonel Lyle Cameron, head of the Air Force prototype selection committee
and friend of Pierre Sprey, began looking for projects to prototype, the Fighter Mafia, working under the camouflage of Riccioni’s
study, was ready and handed him detailed specifications for the lightweight fighter. And now Hallock had recommended the lightweight
fighter as a top priority of the new SecDef.
It might seem to anyone outside the Building that with such authority behind it, the lightweight fighter was a shoo-in to
go from prototyping into full production. But this was not the case. The Air Force had two major acquisition projects underway—the
F-15 and the B-1. A new fighter not only would take money from both of these, it would—as another fighter—compete with the
F-15. As for Pierre Sprey’s A-10, it was in prototyping but the Air Force was determined to kill the project. They wanted
to forget both the airplane and the CAS mission.
Secretary Schlesinger could not have picked two more contentious projects for his legacy.
Boyd’s new job in the Building was director of the Office of Development Plans. This office was one of several that conducted
long-range planning for the Air Force, but in truth it was a dumping ground: the Air Force placed so little importance on
long-range planning that the office never had developed a systematic approach. In yet another sign that Boyd would not make
general, the Air Force had stashed him on a dead-end street.
But Boyd was about to use the job as a platform from which he would rock the foundations of the Pentagon.
Naturally, the people in the office enjoyed the status quo, so there was much trepidation when they heard about the new boss
coming in from a tour at NKP—an Air Force superstar, a full bull with a reputation for creativity and for being an out-of-control
maverick, a heavy hitting hard-ass. The word spread: put on a pressed Class A uniform, mind your manners, and walk softly.
Boyd lived up to his advance billing. First, his appearance was striking. Because of his disciplined diet and exercise program,
he
weighed only 170 pounds. Even though he had bulging biceps and a powerful frame, his clothes hung from his body. His sunken
cheeks emphasized his beaklike nose. His high-wattage intensity gave his eyes an almost supernatural brightness. He was an
intimidating and rapacious presence.
Boyd liked nothing about his new office. The long-range planning was done without budget considerations and therefore was
largely irrelevant. Boyd called his new workplace the “office of no planning” and refused to sign most papers sent his way.
Dozens of memos and plans and studies and directives crossed his desk and were tossed aside. The paperwork piled up, first
in his desk, and then in a box in the corner. “If somebody asks me, I tell them the papers are here but I can’t find them,”
he said. “I don’t sign off on no-plans.” He stalked the office, staring at his underlings, then suddenly walking up to them,
sticking a bony finger into their chest, and saying things such as, “If your boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But
if he demands integrity, then give him loyalty.”