Wry Martinis (22 page)

I had dinner the night before the flight with my intermediary, Lt. Gen. Robert Beckel (Ret.), at a restaurant that looks down on a lagoon in which two full-size pirate ships attack each other every hour. In a distinguished career, General Beckel flew 313 combat missions in Vietnam, including close air support during the siege of Khe Sanh. He also flew the U-2 and SR-71 “Blackbird” reconnaissance planes, the latter so fast (Mach 3, 1,800 mph) that, as he put it in terms even a math imbecile like myself could understand, “If you fired a .30-06 rifle from Los Angeles
and took off simultaneously in the SR-71, the SR-71 would get to New York five minutes before the bullet.” Later, as head of the 15th Air Force, he commanded the B-52 bombers that gave permanent nervous tics to the Iraqi Republican Guard during Desert Storm.

For two years in the mid-1960s, General Beckel flew the solo position with the Thunderbirds. He has the gentle manner that I’ve found in all but one of the numerous war heroes I’ve met. “If it’s possible for one man to love another man,” he tells me of the Thunderbirds, “this would be it.” I don’t think he’s spent much time in New York or San Francisco, but I got his drift. The Thunderbirds, eights pilots and 130-odd enlisted men and women, are a tightly knit group.

He told a story about the time actress Yvette Mimieux—remember her? the girl Rod Taylor rescues from the Eloi in
The Time Machine
—went up for an “orientation ride” with the Thunderbirds in the mid-sixties. Normally, the Thunderbird’s narrator is the one who takes visitors up for rides, but in this case the leader asserted droit du seigneur and took her up himself. A few days later the Air Force chief of staff opened the newspaper to an article featuring the very lovely Miss Mimieux in the cockpit of one of his planes, alongside the headline,
OPERATION BEDSIDE
. The story was full of breathless quotes about how she’d gone three times the speed of sound upside down, five feet above the ground. “Which of course she hadn’t,” said General Beckel. “And
OPERATION BEDSIDE
was the name of the program she’d taken part in, and for which this was the reward—visiting servicemen in the hospital. So
that
ended orientation trips for a while.”

He talked about G forces, the phenomenon that was going to be a big part of my day tomorrow. G forces are multiples of the force of gravity. Standing, walking or sitting normally, we are under one G. We experience two to three Gs in the seat of a 747 during takeoff. Tomorrow, in the F-16, I would be “pulling” up to nine Gs. My 185 pounds would, if put on a scale during the maneuver, weigh 1,665 pounds. Nine Gs is the normal operating limit of an F-16.

Nine Gs is also the point where your average civilian—such as myself—starts to black out. Astronauts on take-off go through up to twenty-five Gs, but they are lying on their backs. An F-16 pilot is reclining slightly and, if he is pulling nine Gs, is usually in the middle of a dogfight, or trying to shake a heat-seeking missile.

Flying the plane itself, said the general, isn’t really all that hard. In the old days, getting the aircraft to do what you wanted it to do was a big part of the whole job. These days, computers do most of that work, leaving the pilot to concentrate on up to 125 possible configurations of guns, missiles and bombs. The stick, which used to be between the legs, is now off to the right, leaving the left hand to operate the weaponry. The stick itself barely moves—a mere eighth of an inch in any direction. Pressure sensors register the slightest touch. In fact, the first modern sticks didn’t move at all, until the pilots demanded that a little play be built into them, for feel.

“Now we have what’s called ‘instantaneous Gs,’ ” said the general. The slightest pressure on that stick and the pilot can find himself pulling the maximum nine Gs and fighting not only the enemy but also from draining the blood in his brain. Pilots wear a G suit, outer leggings resembling chaps that contain air bladders that inflate automatically under G pressure, squeezing the legs and midsection and forcing blood to stay in the upper body. But G suits can’t do all the work, and if you are not prepared for high Gs, you can black out in only three seconds. It takes anywhere from seventeen to forty-five seconds to fully regain consciousness; that’s a long time if your nose is pointing to the ground at six hundred miles per hour. It happened recently to an American pilot in the Adriatic.

I remember two other things from that night: General Beckel pointing out that the Thunderbirds were formed in 1953 to convince Americans that jet fighters were really safe, despite the fact that so many of them were crashing in the Korean War; and riding up to my room in the elevator in Caesars Palace with a Roman centurion.

Nellis Air Force Base is a fifteen-minute drive north of Las Vegas. There are no centurions in its elevators, but it is headquarters to the Air Warfare Center, which runs the Red Flag exercises that simulate aerial combat between aggressors and defenders. They keep MiGs and other Soviet planes acquired (one way or another) here. This is where many of the top combat pilots in the Air Force come to train. It’s also home to the U.S. Air Force Air Demonstration Squadron, known more generally as the Thunderbirds. It’s a crisp desert day punctuated by the sound of screaming turbofan engines.

You do not just show up and immediately go whooshing up into the wild blue yonder in your F-16, white scarf whipping from your neck. First you report to a flight surgeon, in my case, Capt. Jack “Harpo” Shelton, who checks your vitals and looks in your ears to make sure that you can do the Valsalva maneuver (holding your nose and blowing to vent inner-ear pressure). The flight surgeon tells you, from personal experience, that riding in the backseat of an F-16 can be a “nauseogenic experience,” but that there are ways to compensate. (1) Don’t look down into the cockpit, (2) find the horizon and keep looking at it, (3) increase oxygen flow through the mask to 100 percent. Most people, he said, tend to get sick after the acrobatics because it’s then that the adrenaline stops pumping, so—“try to keep excited.” He reassures me that “less than half the people who go up for rides throw up. I ask him if I can take the herbal antimotion-sickness tablet that I’ve brought with me. (I’d been told not to use patches or traditional drugs as these would only “diminish the experience.”) Fine, he says, can’t hurt.

Next comes the lecture about compensating for G forces. “It’s an interesting sensation the first time you feel it.” I’ll know, he says, if the blood is draining from my head when I start to lose peripheral vision. “It will eventually narrow down to where it looks like you’re staring out through the opening in a straw.” I sense that this could be a real disadvantage in a dogfight.

The solution, according to the Air Force handout he hands me, is “straining like you’re having a hard bowel movement.” Ah, the romance of the wild blue yonder.… It occurs to me that a hard bowel movement would probably come very easily to me in the event I saw a surface-to-air missile in my rearview mirror. Anyway, the idea is to tighten every muscle below the waist so as to give blood draining from the upper body nowhere to go. Also, Captain Shelton advises, fill your lungs to three-quarters, hold your breath for three to four seconds, then very quickly inhale and exhale in a sort of bizarre parody of Lamaze birth classes. What this does is to constrict the muscles and heart, thereby forcing the blood to stay in the brain. Keep that brain full of blood, was the message I took away from flight surgery.

I practice all this in the car on the way back to the Thunderbird hangar with my escort, SSgt. Chuck Ramey. Constricting my buns and breathing like a porpoise, in combination with an impending sense of dread, gave me some insight into what it might be like to drive to the delivery
room in labor. Leave it to a nineties male to discern similarities between childbirth and flying in a fighter jet.

I was now turned over to a Life Support Specialist. I rejoiced in his title, and soon in SSgt. Jeff Kessler himself, to whom it falls to dress visiting backseaters in flight suit, G suit, explain how to use the parachute and survival harness, helmet, oxygen mask, and generally to condense three days of safety briefings into one hour.

This can have unintentionally comic effect, as it did when, during the “Post Ejection Procedures” portion of Sergeant Kessler’s briefing, he described how I must angle myself when falling between high-voltage power lines (feet together, head to one side; and may you never have to use this information) and how I should then “be relaxed” for the landing. “Be relaxed” was item number 42 or thereabouts on my post-ejection agenda, starting with being blasted out of the cockpit while going hundreds of miles an hour, possibly upside down. All the makings of a bad air day. In my youth I once jumped from a plane, and so I know from experience how wretched a prospect it is, even when done for obscure recreational reasons.

I paid more attention to Sergeant Kessler than I did to any college professor, for no college professor ever said to me, “The pilot will say ‘Eject, eject, eject,’ three times. By the third ‘eject,’ he’s going, so you might want to, too.” I felt a warm rush of relief when Sergeant Kessler said that the pilot has the option of ejecting both of us. Confident that my brain—assuming it had any blood left in it—would react hysterically to any syllables remotely sounding like “eject,” I rejoiced in this datum. Consolation, however, turned to consternation when he began displaying the one-man life raft that would be dangling from my waist on the descent. “A raft,” I asked. “In the desert?” Oh well, don’t ask, don’t tell.

Now he showed me the survival radio—the same type that pilot Scott O’Grady had with him during his five days on the ground in Bosnia, instructing me that I must turn off my emergency beacon before I could use the radio. Finally there was the laminated 121-page Air Force survival pamphlet. I flipped it open at random and saw that I was to rub my body with dirt to disguise body odor, and how to make good use of animal organs. The last two pages confirmed the adage that there are no atheists in foxholes:

W
ITH OTHER SURVIVORS
:

In walked the Thunderbirds themselves, back from their morning practice. In one month, they would leave for their two-hundred-day annual tour, during which they give about seventy shows. There are eight pilots, six of whom perform in the show. The other two are the operations officer and the advance pilot/narrator who goes on ahead to make arrangements and then narrates the shows, describing to the crowds what it is exactly that the Thunderbirds are doing, other than apparently trying to commit synchronized suicide in front of tens of thousands of people.

It’s an interesting sensation being in a room with eight Thunderbird pilots. When I reported it later to my wife, she swooned, “Be still my heart.” The leader, Lt. Col. Ron “Maxi” Mumm makes Tom Cruise, star of the movie
Top Gun
, look like Pee Wee Herman. The others, some of them veterans of Desert Storm who flew F-117s and F-4G Wild Weasels, were not lacking in the stud department.

But then what were you expecting, chopped liver? These men are the cream of the cream, the top gun percentile of the U.S. Air Force, chosen not only for their ability to fly upside down on top of each other at 400 mph, but for the image they collectively present. The Thunderbirds are nothing if not Public Relations. Seventy-five percent of Air Force recruits say that they have signed up because of the Thunderbirds. With a yearly budget of $1.9 million, roughly one-tenth the cost of one F-16, that makes the Thunderbirds a very cost-effective recruitment device; they don’t even have to take out ads on late night TV promising that swabbing decks is going to be an adventure, not a job.

I was introduced to my pilot, Thunderbird No. 8, Capt. Daniel R. Torweihe, a thirty-six-year-old handsome, broad-faced, blue-eyed former bricklayer from Wisconsin, looking quite knightly in red show suit, white “fram” ascot, and blue flight cap. I could see why he’d been selected as the team’s narrator: he has a Disneyland-upbeat tenor: “O-
kay
, Chris, if you’re ready, we’ll walk out to the aircraft and
go flying.
It looks like we’re going to have a
great
day!” I liked him immediately, but then you bond quickly with someone who is going to fly you upside down at nearly the speed of sound.

Commander “Maxi” Mumm told me that the visibility was “hundred miles-plus” and, as I was leaving, asked if I wanted some of his lunch chili. I considered two possibilities behind his offer of spicy Mexican food moments before subjecting my stomach to nine times the force of gravity: this was either fighter jock sangfroid, or an evil practical trick on his colleague Capt. Torweihe. I politely declined, and instead made one last visit to the head, where I noticed that the autographed photo from the Navy’s Blue Angels flying team hangs over the urinal.

Tom Wolfe wrote in
The Right Stuff
that the astronauts, just before blasting off from Cape Canaveral, would utter the silent prayer: “Oh Lord, don’t let me f- - - up.” I made my own prayer into the bathroom mirror: “Oh Lord, don’t let me throw up.”

We walked out onto the apron, where nine Thunderbird F-16s sat gleaming in the sunlight, cockpit canopies up like broken shotgun breeches.

Two F-117 stealth fighter-bombers were in the line of planes next to ours, looking like high-tech bats. I asked, “What’s it like to fly one of those?” Dan shrugged, “It’s really just a
bomber.
” There isn’t much aesthetic grace to an F-117, only low-hung, black malevolence, whereas the F-16 Fighting Falcon has the sleek, sporty lines of a Ferrari. Paint it military gray and fit it out with AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles and Mk-82 Snakeye 500-pound bombs and you have a Tom Clancy wet dream. In sparkly red, white and blue Thunderbird colors, devoid of the instruments of war, it almost smiles at you.