The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales From a Strange Time

  The midnight roads around Antelope Valley are quiet these days, except for an occasional teen-age drag race. Today's test pilots go to bed early, and they regard big motorcycles with the same analytical disdain they have for hippies, winos, and other failure symbols. They take their risks, on assignment, between dawn and 4:30 p.m. But when their time is their own, they prefer to hunker down in the wall-to-wall anonymity of their one-story, flat-roofed, Levittown-style homes between the base golf course and the officers' club, there to relax in front of the tube with a succulent TV dinner. Their music is Mantovani, and their idea of an "artist" is Norman Rockwell. On Friday afternoons, from four-thirty to seven, they crowd into the officers' club bar for the weekly "happy hour," where most of the talk is about planes and current test projects. Then, just before seven, they go home to pick up their wives and dress for dinner, again at "the club." After dinner there will be a bit of dancing to the jukebox or maybe a small combo. Heavy drinking is out of the question; a drunken test pilot is viewed with genuine alarm by the others, who see any form of social excess -- drink, wenching, late hours, any "unusual" behavior -- as an indication of some deeper problem, an emotional cancer of some kind. Tonight's juicer is tomorrow's -- or Monday's -- hangover risk, a pair of slow-focusing eyes or an uncertain hand at the controls of a $100 million aircraft. The Air Force has trained three generations of elite-level pilots to abhor any hint of foreseeable human risk in the flight-test program. The planes, after all, are risky enough, they are the necessary unknown factor in the equation that every test project ideally boils down to. (Test pilots are very hip to equations; they can describe a plane and all its characteristics, using nothing but numbers.) And a cool waterhead knows that an equation with only one unknown factor is a hell of a lot simpler to cope with than an equation with two. The idea, then, is to minimize the chance of a second unknown factor -- such as an unpredictable pilot -- that might turn a simple flight-test equation into a scorched crater on the desert and another wave of donations to the "window fund."

  Civilian test pilots, working on contract for companies like Boeing or Lockheed, are just as carefully screened as their soul brothers in the Air Force. The men who run the "military-industrial complex" are not about to entrust the fruits of their billion-dollar projects to the kind of pilot who might be tempted to zoom a new plane under the Golden Gate Bridge at rush hour. The whole philosophy of research testing is to minimize the risk. Test pilots are sent up with specific instructions. Their job is to perform a set of finely plotted maneuvers with the plane, to assess its performance in specific circumstances -- stability at high speeds, rate of acceleration at certain climb angles, etc. -- and then to bring it down safely and write a detailed report for the engineers. There are plenty of fine pilots around, but only a handful can communicate in the language of superadvanced aerodynamics. The best pilot in the world -- even if he could land a B-52 on the Number Eight green at Pebble Beach without taking a divot -- would be useless on a test-flight project unless he could explain, in a written report, just how and why the landing could be made.

  The Air Force is very keen on people who "go by the book," and there is, in fact, a book -- called a technical order -- on every piece of equipment in use, including planes. Test pilots can't go by "the book," however, because for all practical purposes, they are the people who write it. "We push a plane to its absolute limits," said a young major at Edwards. "We want to know exactly how it performs under every conceivable circumstance. And then we explain it, on paper, so other pilots will know what to expect of it."

  He was standing on the flight line in a bright-orange flying suit, a baggy one-piece thing full of special pockets and zippers and flaps. These pilots are sporty-looking people, vaguely resembling a bunch of pro-football quarterbacks. The age bracket is early thirties to late forties, with a median around 37 or 38. The average age in the U.S.A.F. Aerospace Research Pilot School at Edwards is 30. Nobody over 32 is accepted; few pilots younger than 29 have logged enough air time to qualify. From a list of 600 to 1000 applicants each year, the school picks two classes of 16 men each. Washouts are rare; the screening process is so thorough that no candidate who appears to be even faintly questionable survives the final cut. Forty-one of the nation's 63 astronauts are graduates of the test pilots' school -- a military version of Cal Tech and M.I.T. -- the ultimate in aviation academics.

  A sense of elitism is pervasive among test pilots. There are less than 100 of them on Edwards, with several hundred more spread out on testing projects from coast to coast. But Edwards is the capital of their world. "It's like the White House," says recently retired Colonel Joseph Cotton. "After Edwards, the only direction a test pilot can go is down; any other assignment is practically a demotion."

  Colonel Cotton is the man who saved one of the $350 million experimental XB-70s by short-circuiting a computer with a paper clip. The huge plane's landing gear had jammed, making it impossible to land. "You can't argue with a black box," said the colonel, "so we had to fool it." While the plane circled the base and engineers on the ground radioed careful instructions, Joe Cotton took a flashlight and a paper clip and crawled into the dark landing-gear bay to perform critical surgery in a maze of wires and relays.

  Incredibly, it worked. He managed to short the faulty circuit out of the chain of command, as it were, and trick the computer into lowering the landing gear. The plane landed with locked brakes and flaming tires, but no serious damage -- and "Joe Cotton's paper clip" was an instant legend.

  I found Colonel Cotton at his new home in Lancaster, pacing around his living room while his wife tried to place a call to a fellow pilot whose teen-age son had been killed the day before in a motorcycle accident. The funeral was set for the next afternoon, and the whole Cotton family was going. (The flight line was empty the next day. The only pilot in the test-operations building was a visiting Britisher. All the others had gone to the funeral.)

  Joe Cotton is 47, one of the last of the precomputer generation. By today's standards, he wouldn't even quality for test-pilot training. He is not a college graduate, much less a master of advanced calculus with an honors degree in math or science. But the young pilots at Edwards speak of Joe Cotton as if he were already a myth. He is not quite real, in their terms: a shade too complex, not entirely predictable. At a recent symposium for the Society of Experimental Test Pilots, Colonel Cotton showed up wearing a Mickey Mouse wristwatch. All the other pilots thought it was "great" -- but none of them rushed out to buy one for themselves.

  Joe Cotton is a very gentle, small-boned man with an obsessive interest in almost everything. We talked for nearly five hours. In an age of stereotypes, he manages to sound like a patriotic hippie and a Christian anarchist all at once.

  "The greatest quality you can build into a plane," he says, "is the quality of forgiveness." Or: "Having control of that airplane is like having control of your life; you don't want it wandering around up there, trying to get into a spin and crash. . .

  "Flight testing is a beautiful racket. . . Being a test pilot on the Mojave Desert in America is the greatest expression of freedom I can think of. . ." And suddenly: "Retiring from the Air Force is like getting out of a cage. . ."

  It is always a bit of a shock to meet an original, unfettered mind, and this was precisely the difference between Colonel Joe Cotton and the young pilots I met on the base. The Air Force computers have done their work well: They have screened out all but the near-perfect specimens. And the science of aviation will benefit, no doubt, from the ultimate perfection of the flight-test equation. Our planes will be safer and more efficient, and eventually we will breed all our pilots in test tubes.

  Perhaps it will be for the best. Or maybe not. The last question I asked Joe Cotton was how he felt about the war in Vietnam, and particularly the antiwar protests. "Well," he said, "anytime you can get people emotionally disturbed about war, that's good. I've been an Air Force pilot most of my life, but I've never thought I was put on earth to kill
people. The most important thing in life is concern for one another. When we've lost that, we've lost the right to live. If more people in Germany had been concerned about what Hitler was doing, well. . ." He paused, half-aware -- and only half-caring, it seemed -- that he was no longer talking like a colonel just retired from the U.S. Air Force.

  "You know," he said finally. "When I fly over Los Angeles at night, I look down at all those lights. . . six million people down there. . . and that's how many Hitler killed. . ." He shook his head.

  We walked outside, and when Joe Cotton said good night, he smiled and extended his left hand -- remembering, somehow, after all that rambling talk, that I couldn't use my right.

  The next afternoon, in the officer's club bar, I decided to broach the same question about the war in a friendly conversation with a young test pilot from Virginia, who had spent some time in Vietnam before his assignment to Edwards. "Well, I've changed my mind about the war," he said. "I used to be all for it, but now I don't give a damn. It's no fun anymore, now that we can't go up north. You could see your targets up there, you could see what you hit. But hell, down south all you do is fly a pattern and drop a bunch of bombs through the clouds. There's no sense of accomplishment." He shrugged and sipped his drink, dismissing the war as a sort of pointless equation, an irrelevant problem no longer deserving of his talents.

  An hour or so later, driving back to Los Angeles, I picked up a newscast on the radio: Student riots at Duke, Wisconsin, and Berkeley; oil slick in the Santa Barbara Channel; Kennedy murder trials in New Orleans and Los Angeles. And suddenly Edwards Air Force Base and that young pilot from Virginia seemed a million miles away. Who would ever have thought, for instance, that the war in Vietnam could be solved by taking the fun out of bombing?

  Pageant, September 1969

  The Police Chief

  The Professional Voice of Law Enforcement

  Weapons are my business. You name it and I know it: guns, bombs, gas, fire, knives and everything else. Damn few people in the world know more about weaponry than I do. I'm an expert on demolition, ballistics, blades, motors, animals -- anything capable of causing damage to man, beast or structure. This is my profession, my bag, my trade, my thing. . . my evil specialty. And for this reason the editors of Scanlan's have asked me to comment on a periodical called The Police Chief.

  At first I refused. . . but various pressures soon caused me to change my mind. Money was not a factor in my decision. What finally spurred me to action was a sense of duty, even urgency, to make my voice heard. I am, as I said, a pro -- and in this foul and desperate hour in our history I think even pros should speak up.

  Frankly, I love this country. And also, quite frankly, I despise being put in this position -- for a lot of reasons, which I don't mind listing:

  1) For one thing, the press used to have a good rule about not talking about each other -- no matter what they thought, or even what they knew. In the good old days a newspaperman would always protect his own kind. There was no way to get those bastards to testify against each other. It was worse than trying to make doctors testify in a malpractice suit, or making a beat cop squeal on his buddy in a "police brutality" case.

  2) The reason I know about things like "malpractice" and "police brutality" is that I used to be a "cop" -- a police chief, for that matter, in a small city just east of Los Angeles. And before that I was a boss detective in Nevada -- and before that a beat cop in Oakland. So I know what I'm talking about when I say most "journalists" are lying shitheads. I never knew a reporter who could even say the word "corrupt" without pissing in his pants from pure guilt.

  3) The third reason for the bad way I feel about this "article" is that I used to have tremendous faith in this magazine called The Police Chief. I read it cover-to-cover every month, like some people read the Bible, and the city paid for my subscription. Because they knew I was valuable to them, and The Police Chief was valuable to me. I loved that goddamn magazine. It taught me things. It kept me ahead of the game.

  But no more. Things are different now -- and not just for me either. As a respected law enforcement official for 20 years in the West, and now as a weapons consultant to a political candidate in Colorado, I can say from long and tremendous experience that The Police Chief has turned to cheap jelly. As a publication it no longer excites me, and as a phony Voice of the Brotherhood it makes me sick with rage. One night in Oakland, about a dozen years ago, I actually got my rocks off from reading the advertisements. . . I hate to admit such a thing, but it's true.

  I remember one ad from Smith & Wesson when they first came out with their double-action .44 Magnum revolver: 240 grains of hot lead, exploding out of a big pipe in your hand at 1200 feet per second. . . and super-accurate, even on a running target.

  Up until that time we'd all thought the .357 Magnum was just about the bee's nuts. FBI-filed tests had proved what the .357 could do: in one case, with FBI agents giving fire-pursuit to a carload of fleeing suspects, an agent in the pursuing car brought the whole chase to an end with a single shot from his .357 revolver. His slug penetrated the trunk of the fleeing car, then the back seat, then the upper torso of a back seat passenger, then the front seat, then the neck of the driver, then the dashboard, and finally imbedded itself in the engine block. Indeed, the .357 was such a terrifying weapon that for ten years only qualified marksmen were allowed to carry them.

  So it just about drove me crazy when -- just after I'd qualified to carry a .357 -- I picked up a new issue of The Police Chief and saw an ad for the .44 Magnum, a brand-new revolver with twice the velocity and twice the striking power of the "old" .357.

  One of the first real-life stories I heard about the .44 Magnum was from a Tennessee sheriff whom I met one spring at a law enforcement conference in St. Louis. "Most men can't handle the goddamn thing," he said. "It kicks worse than a goddamn bazooka, and it hits like a goddamn A-bomb. Last week I had to chase a nigger downtown, and when he got so far away that he couldn't even hear my warning yell, I just pulled down on the bastard with this .44 Magnum and blew the head clean off his body with one shot. All we found were some teeth and one eyeball. The rest was all mush and bone splinters."

  Well. . . let's face it; that man was a bigot. We've learned a lot about racial problems since then. . . but even a nigger could read The Police Chief in 1970 and see that we haven't learned much about weapons. Today's beat cop in any large city is a sitting duck for snipers, rapers, dope addicts, bomb-throwers and communist fruits. These scum are well-armed -- with U.S. Army weapons -- and that's why I finally quit official police work.

  As a weapons specialist I saw clearly -- in the years between 1960 and 1969 -- that the Army's weapons-testing program on the Indo-Chinese peninsula was making huge strides. In that active decade the basic military cartridge developed from the ancient 30.06 to the neuter .308 to a rapid-fire .223. That lame old chestnut about "sharpshooters" was finally muscled aside by the proven value of sustained-firescreens. The hand-thrown grenade was replaced, at long last, by the portable grenade launcher, the Claymore mine and the fiery missile-cluster. In the simplest of technical terms, the kill-potential of the individual soldier was increased from 1.6 per second to 26.4-per second -- or nearly five KP points higher than Pentagon figures indicate we would need to prevail in a land war with China.

  So the reason for this nation's dismal failure on the Indo-Chinese peninsula lies not in our weapons technology, but in a failure of will. Yes. Our G.I.'s are doomed in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Burma, etc. for the same insane reason that our law enforcement agents are doomed in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago. They have been shackled, for years, by cowardly faggots and spies. Not all were conscious traitors; some were morally weak, others were victims of drugs, and many were simply crazy. . .

  Let's face it. The majority of people in this country are mentally ill. . . and this illness unfortunately extends into all walks of life, including law enforcement. The illness is manifest in our Natio
nal Stance from Bangkok to Bangor, to coin a phrase, but to those of us still dying on our feet in the dry rot of middle America there is no worse pain -- and no more hideous proof of the plague that afflicts us all -- than the knowledge of what has happened to The Police Chief, a magazine we once loved because it was great.

  But let's take a look at it now. The editor-in-chief is an FBI dropout by the name of Quinn Tamm, a middle-aged career cop who ruined his whole life one day by accidentally walking on the fighting side of J. Edgar Hoover's wiretap fetish. Tamm is legally sane -- by "liberal" standards -- but in grass-roots police circles he is primarily known as the model for Mitch Greenhill's famous song "Pig in the Stash." The real editor of the magazine is a woman named Pitcher. I knew her in the old days, but Tamm's son does most of the work, anyway. . .

  One of the most frightening things about The Police Chief is that it calls itself "The Professional Voice of Law Enforcement." But all it really is, is a house-organ for a gang of high-salaried pansies who call themselves the "International Association of Chiefs of Police, Inc."

  How about that? Here's a crowd of suck-asses putting out this magazine that says it's the voice of cops. Which is bullshit. All you have to do is look at the goddamn thing to see what it is. Look at the advertising; Fag tools! Breathalysers, "paralyzers," gas masks, sirens, funny little car radios with voice scramblers so the scum can't listen in. . . but no ATTACK WEAPONS!!! Not one! The last really functional weapon that got mentioned in The Police Chief was the "Nutcracker Flail," a combination club and pincers about three feet long that can cripple almost anybody. It works like a huge pair of pliers: the officer first flails the living shit out of anybody he can reach. . . and then, when a suspect falls, he swiftly applies the "nutcracker" action, gripping the victim's neck, extremities or genitals with the powerful pincers at the "reaching" end of the tool, then squeezing until all resistance ceases.