One of the Few.

Now, this is an interesting story. It occurred in 1979 during my second year as Director of Operations at Osan Air Force Base in South Korea.

In the Air Force, when you have a major aircraft accident, you convene an accident investigation board to determine the cause and any remedy that might be required to prevent or at least reduce future accidents. The president of the accident board is a full colonel and a pilot who is experienced flying the same type of plane as the one in the accident. The accident board comprises the colonel who leads it, one or two other pilots, airplane factory technicians sent in from the United States, doctors who do the forensic stuff, and all in about eight or more highly capable people—a very strong team. The goal is to complete the investigation and determine exactly what happened within 30 days. As the president, your task is to assemble this group of specialists, investigate the accident thoroughly, and come up with a very long and complete written report on exactly what happened, why it happened, who’s to blame, what went right, and what went wrong.

Anyway, it turns out, that in the Philippine Islands, outside of our primary air base there, Clark Airfield, an F-4 fighter jet piloted by one of their best pilots, a Weapons School Graduate (the Air Force’s “Top Gun” school), with the weapons systems officer (WSO) in the backseat crashed on a high speed low level entry into the gunnery range over the jungle in northern Luzon. The pilot and WSO were killed. The aircraft was spread all over the jungle in a million pieces. And I was appointed to be the president of the accident board.

I’d been involved in accident boards before, not the least of which was my own accident, but then I was the guy being investigated instead of the other way around. So anyway, here I am, the head of this thing. And we pack up the family for a little month-plus vacation, at least for them, and head down south to the Philippine islands to set up the investigation board. It was an interesting experience. It’s a little bit like being a crime scene investigator, where you assemble all the clues from all the collected technical data, forensic information, and pieces you can gather, and you usually can determine the cause of the accident and who or what is to blame. In a lot of cases, quite frankly, it is pilot error. Pilots are human beings, at least most of us are, and we make mistakes. We don’t make mistakes often, but every once in a while, we do. And when you do, it can kill you. So, the idea is to decide what caused it. Was it the pilot who caused the crash and the fatalities? Was it a mechanical failure of some catastrophic level? Was it, I don’t know, weather, control tower? I mean, who knows?

Anyway, I’m down in the Philippines and I’m investigating it, and we’re putting together all the bits and pieces that we could find in a hanger. A little bit gory. When you take an airplane at 500 miles an hour and roll one into the jungle, you end up with a million pieces. I don’t know about a million, but hundreds of thousands of pieces, literally. And part of those pieces, unfortunately, are from the crew members. That gets a little bit gory. But you must have the pieces for the doctors doing the autopsies and stuff like that.

So, we’re working, assembling all this information on the accident, and for whatever reason, after about week two or maybe going into week three, it’s just not coming together. I don’t know; something about it just doesn’t make sense. About that time, I got a phone call from the Flying Safety Officer at the headquarters of the Pacific Air Force. He told me, “The four-star Commander of the Pacific Air Force is really antsy to find out the answer. And by the way, he said, ‘It’s clear that it’s pilot error.’ So, as the accident board president, he wants you to find out why it was pilot error, declare pilot error, close down the investigation, and let’s get on with life.” And I said, “Well, I can’t do that yet. I can’t. I don’t have the answers. I don’t know what caused the accident.” And he says, “Yeah, but you don’t understand. The four-star said it’s pilot error. You’re in charge. Go figure out why it’s pilot error, close down the accident investigation, and let’s get on with it.” Oh, great. So, I said, “Listen, I can’t do that. We just don’t know yet what happened but so far it doesn’t look like pilot error.”

I had another, whatever it was, 10 days to go. Let’s see where it leads. So, after about two weeks of work, I’m still not getting anywhere. Something is just not right. So, I grab one of the fighter wing’s best pilots, an F4 pilot from the squadron, and he and I go into the flight simulator and try to recreate the mission. And we did. The simulator guys worked all the magic and cranked it up so we could come close to simulating the mission.

Strangely enough, we couldn’t duplicate it. I mean, the two of us must have run through the SIM, or simulator, I don’t know, more than a dozen times, and never could duplicate it, which led us to believe something was wrong that we weren’t aware of. It wasn’t pilot error. There was something else going on. But we couldn’t figure out what it was. So now I’m just about out of time. My thirty days were up, and I got a very harsh phone call from the four-star Commander of Pacific Air Force headquarters that said, “Close that thing down right now and declare pilot error.”

Well, as it turns out, as the president of the accident board, theoretically, I do not have to shut down the investigation. I can keep it going until I’m satisfied that we found the right answer. So, I go back through the staff guy, and said, “I am not shutting the investigation down because I don’t think that it’s pilot error. Something else happened to cause the accident. So, I’m going to continue the investigation until we find out the correct cause.” Another seriously bad career move.

Well, now I’m desperate. I needed to get more data. I needed to get more clues. I needed to find out what we were missing that might still be in the jungle along the flight path prior to impact. Day after day we rooted around in the jungle, searching for pieces of the wreckage but there was still stuff missing. So, I decided we needed to bring in more help.

I remembered that years ago, a close friend of mine in the CIA had to hide out in a headhunter village in northern Luzon, in a heavily jungled area. So, I went to the USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development) group from our State Department and convinced them to let me have a bunch of 50-pound sacks of rice so that I could barter with the villagers to help us out. Thanks, old friend. I didn’t know much about “headhunter” villagers, but my buddy lived with them for six months or so and survived, and I had lived with the Montagnards in Vietnam for a while, so I figured I could work something out with the chief of the village. Lots of free rice usually builds quick friendships in the jungle. So, next I got a helicopter assigned to support me and carry me and my interpreter and my rice and I flew up to the headhunter village. I landed in the center of the village. I thought it would be a good idea to make a grand entrance, and I went to the chief and started my sales pitch. Before we started the negotiations, I thought it would be smart to set out the parameters of our discussion. It had occurred to me that if you’re in the headhunter business, you probably have to kill the person under the head first. So, I had the interpreter point out to the chief that if anything happened to me or my men, there would be no more rice because I would only have one day’s supply. Then, even worse, my Filipino military friends would come and destroy the village and kill the chief and his entire family, but him very slowly. To which he nodded his understanding. I said that I was looking for aircraft parts and any remains of the crew from the plane that had crashed in the nearby jungle. I described in detail the type of thing we were looking for. And I said, “And, if you’ll send your men out to collect all the bits and pieces, then I will show up every morning, starting tomorrow, with rice, and I will pay you and them in bags of rice for everything that they find and turn into me.” And the Chief says in his language and dialogue something to the effect, “Well, that’s cool. We’ll see you tomorrow morning.” By the way, his cut of the rice deal was about 50%. Typical politician.

So, I jump back into the chopper and get a couple of 50-pound sacks of rice, big burlap bags full of rice. And I loaded up the helicopter every morning for the next week or so. And every morning, I flew into the headhunter village with my bags of rice. And sitting next to the chief and his main guys, his people would bring in bits and pieces of everything they found in the jungle, and because they were getting paid for it, they found a ton of stuff in the jungle. By the time they were finished, they may have ended up with the cleanest jungle in Asia. They brought me bits and pieces, parts, relics from World War II aircraft, I mean, all kinds of things. It was amazing. And I bought everything, and I paid for everything in rice. And this went on for days. And every day I’d collect everything, put it in the chopper, bring it back to the hangar, and we’d sort out what was relevant. And we’d test that and run it through all the labs and stuff like that.

After four or five days, these guys started bringing in bits and pieces of the engine. And when we examined the pieces, not we, I shouldn’t say, I didn’t examine them, but the technical representatives from McDonnell Douglas and Pratt and Whitney. They examined all the various recovered parts, then ran them through a lab back in the States, and they found that some of the blades on one of the engines were cracked, and at high speed and high RPM, they disintegrated, destroyed the adjoining engine, and all sorts of other components like the flight control system. The aircraft imploded and went into the jungle. Remember that the guys were running a couple of hundred feet above the ground at about 500 miles an hour. So, it only takes a hiccup to drive the plane into the jungle. So, finally, now we know the truth. It was a massive explosion, the bird imploded, and two good guys were killed. By this time, I’m about five to six weeks into the investigation. And when you talk about heat from the four-star general at the Pacific headquarters, I was indirectly getting very fiery comments from the four-star. To make a long story short. By the time we got everything in, we could conclude that it wasn’t pilot error at all. It was a failure of the engines and aircraft, and there was no way in the world that the pilot could have recovered that aircraft. Then we went out worldwide to all of the fighter bases with the same aircraft and engines, and we found eight or 10 other engines in the field just like the one from our accident. They had come from the same depot with the same flaws and fatal characteristics for failure. We were able to pull them out of service, send them back, repair and replace the damaged portions, and thereby presumably save the lives of a dozen or so guys. I was proud of that. I was proud that I took the heat and came up with the right solution to the problem, and that it wasn’t pilot error at all. It was a mechanical failure.

The end of that was a very cool reception from the staff at Pacific Air Force headquarters and a verbal reprimand from the Commander of the Pacific to the effect that I had disobeyed him. He was right. I did. But I thought it was essential to do so. From that point on, I was on his blacklist. However, I felt that I had redeemed the pilot and the weapons systems officer, and that their families would know that their deaths had absolutely nothing to do with their skills or abilities. So, the four-star commander was not very happy with me, but I was pretty happy with myself. I knew you must do what is right, even if it is painful. A good leader must always be ready to take one for the team and do the right thing.

Last week, I had the privilege of joining the No Bell Podcast, where we dove deep into some thought-provoking topics. We talked about the reasons behind going back to the fight for four tours, the mental challenges of returning home, and the lessons (or lack thereof) we’ve learned since Vietnam.

It was a raw, unfiltered conversation about resilience, mistakes, and finding purpose—even in the hardest moments.

🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts ↗

A couple of the flight instructors from Luke Air Force Base got all fired up on the idea of investing in commodities. The fact that we knew nothing about trading commodities would not stand in our way. We were going to get rich in the commodity market. So, one day, I want to say it was spring of 1968, one of my fellow instructors got a tip on a lead zinc mine in Colorado. The mine owners were looking for a couple of “investors” who wanted to buy the lead zinc mine and then get somebody to mine it for them so they could sit back and get rich. Just what we were looking for. The perfect deal. Hard to pass up. So, we decided to rent an airplane and go take a look. Now, the mine is up in a tiny town at the height of the Colorado Mountains, and it’s an old cowboy town with a population of probably 100 or maybe less. We were going to overnight in an old hotel, saloon, boarding house, or whatever. Very old and rundown, and probably the place where Wild Bill Hickock got shot.

Anyway, there were four of us. It began so predictably, as all ill-conceived adventures often do. Three F-100 Instructor pilots and a stockbroker—each brimming with their own veneer of expertise. One of the IPs (instructor pilots) was the guy that was going to rent the plane and he had all the connections with the owners of the lead zinc mine. The other guy was an instructor pilot that had spent some time as a part-time bush pilot up in Alaska. So, he had a lot of small prop plane time. And then me. We took our stockbroker with us because stockbrokers know all about commodities and investing and stuff like that. Besides, he was a really good guy. So, a very solid team for our trip, sort of. Anyway, we’re going to take a weekend and the four of us will fly up to Colorado, check out the mine, decide whether we want to invest in it and then turn around and fly back.

We rented the plane. Nice plane, a four-seat something prop type, and we flight planned the trip. With our collective years of aviation experience, we decided that if you land at the top of high mountains in the thin air, you can land a little heavy, but you can’t take off heavy. The runways are usually not long enough. Certainly not dirt strips. So, we decided that we would not refuel on the way up. Instead, we would fly up, we’d land at this little dirt airstrip on the top of the mountain and then the next morning when we’re ready to leave, we’d be light because we won’t have full gas tanks. We’d take off light and we’d fly out of the mountains to another airport just outside the mountains, refuel there and then fly back into Phoenix from there. We’d be light going in and light coming back out. Very clever.

So, the day comes, we jump in the plane, we fly up there, everything’s going good. We finally get over this little airstrip, and it really was short. It’s a dirt strip and, at the end of the strip, it drops off very sharply into a valley. Think cliff. And lo and behold, as we’re flying over the top of the airstrip, kind of checking it out to see what we have to work with, there’s a tree line, obviously with trees, across the middle of the runway. So instead of having, let’s say a … I’m guessing, let’s say a 3000-foot strip or a 2,500-foot strip, you have half of that because there’s trees across the middle of it and you have to figure out how to land at the very end of the runway, jump on the brakes and stop short before you run into the trees. Of course, then you have to figure out how you will take off and clear the trees during the takeoff. Not a problem. We’ll worry about that tomorrow. After all, three of the Air Force’s finest fighter pilots are running the operation. So anyway, as we’re flying over the top of the strip, we check it out and decide, okay, not a problem. We land right on the edge of the runway, hit the brakes, come to a stop and taxi off. Sure enough, it works just like we expected. So far, so good. Not much there.

We go to the local hotel that had four rooms or something like that, and a beat up ratty old bar restaurant kind of thing and spent the night there. Primarily at the bar. The next morning it’s “up and at ‘em” and we head over and check out the lead zinc mine accompanied by one of the current owners. A nice guy, looked and dressed just like the owner of a lead zinc mine in the mountains of Colorado. Or maybe a cowboy. Of course, the four of us wouldn’t know a lead zinc mine from a volcano. But we looked at all the rocks and thought, is this a good rock, or a bad rock or what? None of us had any idea, none. Anyway, after walking around inside the mine for quite a while, we left, and we all agreed that we’re clueless and that this might not be such a great investment for us given that all the rocks looked alike.

Time to give it up and head for home. So, we go back to the airstrip and get on the plane, and now we’re going to fly back to Phoenix. We get to the edge of the runway, we run it up, get off the brakes, full power, off we go. And, Whoa! Clearly, we won’t make it over the trees running across the runway. So, abort, jump on the brakes, turn around, and go back. So, I said to my buddy who’s in the left seat (pilot in command), “well what we can do is we can go full power and when you get just shy of the trees, bounce the airplane over the trees. I’ll pull up the gear and when we clear the trees, I’ll drop the gear and then right as we get over the trees, we land again. We run down the runway till we get to the end of the runway where the cliff is and by then, we should have enough air speed to lift off.” Sure, sounds like a good plan, except for the part where we are bouncing over the trees, landing and continuing to accelerate to take off before you get to the cliff. As you can imagine, that’s a bit sporty. Not something you would practice as a pilot.

Anyway, sure enough we give it a shot and the stockbroker in the back is listening to the conversation between the three of us. He is scared to death. He had never heard anybody, like the three of us, discuss how we would handle the takeoff. When listening to us, he was less than overwhelmed with the game plan. Not a problem. Piece of cake. Anyway, I’m in the right seat. The co-pilot seat. My buddy is in the left seat flying. We run it up and go as fast as we can. When we get to the edge of the tree line, he bounces the airplane. (The way you bounce the airplane is you slam the nose wheel down, bounce the nose wheel up, and then you hop over.) A little short hop over the tops of the trees. You land on the other side like you would land anywhere else. Now that you’re on the other side, you put your nose down again and try to build up air speed to get enough to take off. The whole thing was a bit exciting, but we made it fine. Not a problem. However, the stockbroker in the back is not handling this very well. Not to worry, the hard part’s over.

So, we’re climbing out of the mountains and going along. Five or 10 minutes go by, and I looked down at the fuel gauges and saw that we were running out of gas. We’re literally running out of fuel. I said to my buddy, “We calculated the fuel pretty carefully and we should have more than enough fuel to make it to the airstrip south of here but with our fuel state now I’m not sure we’re even going to make it out of the mountains.” He looks down and it turns out that in the excitement of the takeoff, which by the way was pretty cool, he forgot to turn the boost pumps off. Now the boost pumps are fuel pumps that inject a much higher flow of gas into the engine than the engine would normally use. It’s sort of like having your afterburner on and you forgot that it was on, and you’re burning gas at two or three times the rate that you would ordinarily be burning it.

So now, we’re still in the mountains, we haven’t cleared the mountains and, in fact, we’re nowhere near getting out of the mountains and running out of gas. We’re not going to make it. It’s a sure thing. We’re not going to clear the mountains. This now officially qualifies as a problem. Not to worry. So, I told my buddy “Well, we’re going to have to land.” He said, “Well, we can’t land. There’s no runway around here.” I said, “We’ll have to land on a road.” It’s not like we have parachutes. You can’t eject from one of these things. Anyway, to make a long story short. We do clear this one mountain range, and we look up ahead, and there’s a farm road running perpendicular to us, kind of narrow. I want to say probably more like a wide-ish one lane road, maybe more like a one and a half lane road and it’s going steeply uphill into a ranch. So, I said to my buddy, “That’s it, babe.” I said, “It’s either there or you’re going to land in a field. We don’t have a lot of choice here.” Anyway, he takes it around and we line up and land on the road. Good landing, considering it’s the first time he ever landed on a road on the side of a mountain. But, as we land on the road, we clipped off the wingtips on the telephone poles on both sides of the road. We didn’t take them all off, but we took off maybe, I don’t know, six inches or a foot off both wings, and then we rolled uphill to a stop because we were out of gas. Perfect timing. No problem. Couldn’t have planned it better.

So, we rolled up and turned off onto a dirt road going into the ranch. We were only there briefly when a Colorado state trooper shows up to find out what’s going on and how he can help. Great guy. But you have to remember that the stockbroker is in the back during all of this and he is absolutely petrified. I have never seen it. It’s so funny to think back on it. He was absolutely beside himself. I’ve never seen a guy go through that kind of a change before. So anyway, the state trooper was there, and we explained to him what had happened, and he said, “Well, what can I do for you?” We said, “Well, can you get to a gas station and get us some gas and we’ll fill up just enough to get us to the next airfield.” And he said, sure. But before he leaves and drives off, we explain to him what we’re going to do. The three of us talked it over and it should be “a piece of cake.” Now, for takeoff, we know that the plane will fit between the telephone poles, because we’d shortened our wingtips a bit, so obviously, we know that if we stay in the center of the road we should be able to go downhill to take off, make it through the telephone poles, take off and fly to the airfield down the road. So now the stockbroker is listening, and he says to the state trooper “I’m not doing this, I’m just not flying with these guys again. Can you drive me to a train station, bus station, or something like that, and I’ll take a train or bus back to Phoenix?” So, the state trooper took our stockbroker to the local train station and then he came back. He had a couple of gas cans for us and said, “If I were you guys, I wouldn’t count on seeing that guy again for a long while. He really was excited. Doubt if you’ll ever get him back in an airplane.” Anyway, we got some gas. We didn’t fill it up, but we put some gas in the thing and took off, ran downhill down the “runway.” We managed not to hit any of the telephone poles on our way down, so we took off and flew to the closest airstrip, which wasn’t very far away. It was about five or 10 minutes, refueled, and pressed back to Phoenix. The three of us paid for the damages to the plane, and we confirmed our decision not to buy the mine. Good decision. Don’t know what we would have done with all that lead and zinc anyway.

It was all very humorous because you’ve got three seriously good jet fighter pilots flying a small prop airplane at slow speeds. Not a problem. Of course, if you were hypercritical, you might question how good we were with small, slower planes and you might even question whether we should have landed there in the first place. But, it seemed like the right thing to do at the time and as it turned out everything went great, except for the part where we had to land on the road. Details, Details. All in all, a fun-filled weekend and we got to see a lead zinc mine for the first time. Typical fighter pilot humor and great entertainment.

John “Slick” Baum chats with Col Robert Graham, USAF (Ret.) about the 500+ combat sorties he flew across four combat tours during the Vietnam War. Surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), anti-aircraft artillery (AAA), air bases under attack, high pilot attrition, tremendous tactical and technical innovation, training shortfalls, and unwavering dedication to duty were all hallmarks of the air war over Vietnam. As the Air Force reorients itself to confront a national security environment defined by peer competition, it is critical we look back in time and learn from the experiences of airmen who confronted and overcame similar threats.

Col Graham’s experiences are harrowing, captivating, and incredibly instructive. Having flown the O-1 Bird Dog, F-100 Super Sabre, and F-4 Phantom in combat, he provided close air support in danger-close proximity to friendly units; operated amidst robust enemy air defenses; and got shot down off the end of his own runway by guerilla forces—yet he continued to fly sorties day-after-day as pilot attrition exceeded 20 percent. All the while, Col Graham seasoned a new generation of airmen entering the fight. These are all challenges tomorrow’s airmen will experience.

🎧 Open episode on Podbean ↗

To begin, I think it’s important to understand what it was that structured my life and drove me to try to excel in many different undertakings. As I’ll talk more about later, when my father died, I had just turned 19 years old, dropped out of college, enlisted in the Air Force, just finished Basic Training, and was sent to Biloxi, Mississippi, to start Tech School. After endless hours of thinking about how I would turn my life around and build direction and structure in my life, I decided that I needed to become a “Renaissance Man.” I had read much about that concept earlier, and the more I thought about it, the more I felt that would be the correct path for the rest of my life. Simplistically, a Renaissance man could be described as one who works diligently to excel at everything he undertakes. He excels intellectually and athletically, as a warrior, in commerce, as a leader, and as a true gentleman. That’s a pretty big order for a young man of 19 but I decided that if I were going to build a roadmap for the rest of my life, I would set the highest goals. I knew that I may not always achieve them, but I felt that it would always be better to fall just short of the highest goal than to set a lower goal and accept mediocrity. As you read through this, you will see this theme continually repeat. Many of my old friends told me that I am very different than others. This may help explain my marching to a different drummer, if that’s true.

I believed that I was one of the good guys, and I felt very strongly that I was both privileged and very lucky to be placed in a position where I could serve my country. I could do what I could to preserve our society and, more importantly, make the world a little bit better place for me having been in it. I guess I was, in the true sense of the word, a Kennedy liberal. My idea of going through life was to get up every morning and try to save the world. To go around trying to help less fortunate people, to make their lives a little bit better. I’d like to think I did. I wasn’t always successful, but I certainly tried.

Interestingly, the Air Force did a study many years ago. They decided to build a psychological profile of those most successful at combat. And if they could identify specific character traits, they’d go out and test for those character traits, and those are the people they’d turn into fighter pilots.

They took the most successful fighter pilots from World War II and the Korean War and ran them through a lengthy, intense physical and psychological testing process. When they finished, sure enough, they found common characteristics. Interestingly, none turned out to be physical. All turned out to be mental. Unfortunately, a lot of them had antisocial characteristics. In general terms, though, they found that to be the most successful in combat, the ideal candidate was a loner. Often an only child. Someone who was most comfortable working alone. In many cases, those individuals were uncomfortable operating in groups or teams. They had a variety of antisocial behavioral characteristics and were prone to violence. Anyway, they ended up with a better understanding of the type of person that would fit best in that role. For obvious reasons, they didn’t want to broadcast their findings because the chance of the information being misunderstood was very high.

The one thing that separates those people more than anything else is their mental toughness. They will do incredible things simply because they know they can and will succeed. Other people fail because they lack the mental hardness to get through difficult times and situations. These individuals are hard. They are unflinching, and they fully understand the concept of kill or be killed.

Of the people that are actively engaged in combat, most are ineffective. The Army, as an example, found that in battlefield studies, amid a firefight, only 1 in 10 soldiers aim their weapon. They’re just shooting in the general direction, but they’re not aiming at an enemy soldier and trying to kill him. Isn’t that interesting? Only 1 in 10 is. Maybe that’s why there aren’t more casualties in wars. But in any case, the Army went through the same kind of process, and they said, “What if we could figure out instead of 1 in 10, how we could get 2 in 10 or 4 in 10 or 5 in 10. If we could, we could send most of the soldiers home.”

Anyway, the partial solution, of course, is to develop an elite force, and when things get bad, you send in the elite force to accomplish specific missions. That’s pretty much the approach we use, and it’s pretty much the approach that most of the services throughout the world use.

But before I got started in the radio operators’ school, my father died. That was probably the most crushing blow of my life. He was my hero. I thought he could “hang the moon,” and I didn’t think anyone could ever be as good as him. When he went away, I was pretty much at wit’s end. But I was alone, and I had to decide what type of man I wanted to be and where I wanted to go in life. No choice. It’s time to pull inside and refocus on where you are and where you are going.

In the radio operator school—security service school, I went to class from 6:00 AM ’til 12:00 noon, so it left me with some free time, other than the normal duties like guard duty or kitchen duty. One of the jobs that my father got for me in high school was in Newark, New Jersey where his business was. My job was in a business run by members of the New York mafia family. I was a hard worker, and they took a liking to me and we stayed in touch. Later, when I went off to the Air Force, they lined me up with one of their friends and a part-time job in his gambling joint in Biloxi, Mississippi. There, they taught me how to play and deal poker, and I learned how to play poker pretty well. Not surprisingly, I also learned to deal pretty well. Essential skill sets for the ambitious young man. Turns out, those skills were a big help later in augmenting my Air Force salary.

While in Biloxi, I came to understand that the Air Force appreciates athletes. I was assigned to a large student squadron. I don’t know how many thousands of guys there were, but in any case, my First Sergeant was the Air Force middleweight boxing champion. I tried out for and ended up on the base boxing team, boxing light heavyweight. Keesler AFB in Biloxi, Mississippi, at the time, was a good-sized base, probably 15 to 20,000 guys, and they only had a dozen or so on the boxing team. But being on the team really helped me. Because of the First Sergeant, I got out of many other duties, so between boxing training and then dealing in the bookie joint, I pretty much occupied all my free time. All of that was great training, and it served me in good stead later, but it was clear to me that I wasn’t going to get anywhere as an enlisted guy in the Air Force.

At the time, with the equivalent of two years of college, you could apply to flight school, and if you made it through flight school, you earned your wings and were commissioned as a Second Lieutenant. That was a big opportunity. I volunteered to take the test for aviation cadets and went to Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. You talk about a test—Wow! The test took a week, and they examined every aspect of me physically and mentally including what I knew and what I didn’t know and what I cared about and what I wanted to do.

It was the most intense testing process I think I’ve ever gone through. They do everything from a wide variety of very imaginative hand-eye coordination exercises to mental tests to aptitude tests and physical tests. And by the time you finish that process, you feel like you’ve been searched and researched. In any case, I qualified for both pilot training and navigator training. For pilot training, the wait for a class date was about 15 months to begin. For navigator training, the wait was about six to nine months. Rocket scientist that I was, I figured out that I needed to get out of where I was as fast as possible and get on with my life. So, I volunteered to go to navigator training. Six or nine months later, after running me through all different kinds of schools at Biloxi, they finally sent me off to what they called preflight training in San Antonio to prepare me for aviation cadet training.

As an aside, to give you an example of the kind of military problems I mentioned. The trip from Houston to Waco was only a couple of hours’ drive, and so I was all dressed up in my brand-new officer uniform. It was a Sunday; I was going to drive up and report to my new station. As I said, my car was a bit spotty in terms of the mechanics. As I drove through the base’s front gate and got saluted and waved through by the guard, I was really proud. And I was heading towards the Officers Club because the BOQs (Bachelor Officer Quarters) were attached to the Officers Club. Now, the Officers Club was an old and impressive antebellum building. It was about 4 or 5 o’clock in the afternoon. It turned out that the senior officers from the base and my soon-to-be immediate commander were having a formal reception. They and their wives were all lined up in full dress formal uniform out on the steps of the Officers Club in a receiving line to greet people as they were coming through. The parking was on the road in front of the Club and as I pulled up to stop in front of the Club the brakes failed, and my car and I went up over the curb and across the lawn and I ran into the side of the Club and broke the window in the side of the Club. I could tell my soon-to-be new commander was not terribly impressed as he was standing looking down at me as I shut off the engine. I then got to meet him under less than pleasant circumstances at about 7 o’clock the next morning and that was my entrée into Waco, Texas. Fortunately, it did not go downhill from there.