That was the way it was twenty-eight years later, in August of 1990 when I was riding in an airplane going from Jeddah to Riyadh, temporarily in command of all U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia, and I said to myself, “What in the hell am I going to do? If they come south, I’m responsible. Well, shit, I don’t know how to do that. I’ve never fought an invading army. We don’t have any forces. What am I going to do? How am I going to do all this?” And then I realized it was what the Arabs call inshallah: “It is not mine to do; it’s mine to do the best I can; it’s going to happen according to God’s will.”
INTO THE SKY
The Divine purpose is rarely easy to discern, but it is safe to say the obvious in Chuck Horner’s case: he was meant to be a fighter pilot. It might have come as a surprise, though, to anyone who had known him as a boy and young man, in Davenport, Iowa. They’d have had to look extremely close to see the few glimmers that showed before he fell into the Air Force ROTC during the course of slouching without much visible purpose through the University of Iowa.
When he’d gone away to college, he’d found classes a bore. He avoided most of them, and learned whatever he needed to keep a C average by picking the brains of anyone who actually attended. Otherwise, he worked at odd jobs, drank beer, sat around arguing with other students, and did his best to have a good time. Meanwhile, when the C average killed off what hopes he had of majoring in medicine, he needed to cast around for something to occupy his time after he graduated until he could figure out what he wanted to do with his life.
In those days, all male students at Iowa had to be enrolled in an ROTC program, and making the best of it, he’d opted for Air Force ROTC . . . they had fewer parades. As it turned out, he actually liked the experience, and even showed some leadership—he could drill the troops better than most, and he made marching fun for his guys by making it challenging rather than tedious. But the real pull of ROTC came to him almost out of the blue. He discovered flying.
Born on October 19, 1936, Chuck Horner was old enough for World War II to have made a strong impact on his young mind. The war had made aviation enthusiasts out of everyone, but for him it was more personal. His heroes were all pilots, especially his cousin, Bill Miles, the Jack Kennedy of the family—an all-state football player and straight-A student, tall and good-looking, with a winning smile, who always had time for little guys like Chuck. Everyone in the family looked up to Bill. When the war broke out, he’d joined the Army Air Corps and become a B-24 pilot.
One afternoon in 1944, when Chuck was eight years old, he came home from school to find his mother crying. Bill was dead, on a mission over Italy. A single 37mm antiaircraft artillery round had punched through the airplane’s skin beneath his seat and killed him instantly, the only casualty on the mission. The news devastated the whole family; and it left an eerie association in Chuck—death, heroism, and flying.
Later on, Chuck lost a second pilot hero.
Like Bill Miles, John Towner was a man young boys idolized. Handsome and self-assured, John had also been an all-state football player in high school; and he’d gone on to play football at the university. In 1952, when Chuck was a sophomore in high school, John had graduated; married the youngest of Chuck’s three older sisters, Pud2; entered the Air Force; and started fighter pilot training. Basic gunnery training was taught at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona. Shortly after Christmas of 1953, John was killed on the air-to-ground bombing range at Luke, when his F-84 aircraft failed to pull out of a dive-bomb pass. Once again, the family was devastated; and once again came the eerie association for Chuck of death, heroes, and flying.
It didn’t turn him against flying, however. He already had the gift possessed by every successful fighter pilot—the ability to put death in a box, and keep it separate.
It wasn’t until Air Force ROTC, however, that he really got hooked. It was in ROTC that he first spent serious time in the air—first in a single-engine Ryan Navion piloted by one of his ROTC instructors (who, to Horner’s delight, liked to push the normally staid executive aircraft into loops and rolls), and then in a little Aeronca Champion, in which he learned to fly solo. Flying captured him then—he was good at it. He was enthralled for life.
★ Chuck Horner had met Mary Jo Gitchell, two years his junior, when they’d both been in high school; and they’d continued dating, with some ups and downs, in college. Though they were not at all alike, he knew from the start that she was the right woman for him. He was shy; she loved to meet people. He hated to talk; she could spin words out of the simplest event into rich detail, bubbling over with enthusiasm.
By the time he left college, Chuck knew he wanted to make the Air Force his life, but he also knew that such a life involved hardships that could destroy even the most secure marriage. Before he left school, Horner discussed all this with her, and the two of them reached an agreement: she had to live with his airplanes; and she had to know that he cared for flying as much as he cared for her. She did not come second in his life—it was just that he wanted very badly to excel, and he didn’t want her to grow jealous of his mistress. She needed to know ahead of time the sacrifices that would be expected of both of them. (There is a joke about the wife of a fighter pilot who complains, “You love the Air Force more than you love me,” to which he replies, “Yes, but I love you more than the Army or the Navy.”)
For her part of the bargain she got control of the family money, which at $222.00 a month, plus $100.00 flight pay, was not much of a victory. On the other hand, she knew Chuck pretty well by then; and he wasn’t famous for a heavy supply of cash. When they’d started dating at the end of her freshman year in college, for instance, they’d had to tap her college money to pay for dinner at a pizza place on Sunday night. One time he’d bought her a birthday present, a small portable radio. When the check bounced, he’d had to borrow the money from her to make it good.
Their agreement about money still stands.
They were married on the twenty-second of December 1958, in the Congregational Church in Cresco, Iowa, Mary Jo’s hometown.
★ Horner was commissioned in the Air Force Reserve3 on Friday, June 13, 1958, just before his graduation from the University of Iowa. In October, he attended Preflight Training at Lackland AFB, San Antonio, Texas. And in November, he was sent to Spence Field in Moultrie, Georgia, to enter primary flying training in the T-34 and T-28 aircraft.
At that time, USAF flight training consisted of about 120 hours in T-34s (two-seat prop planes still used today, with a turboprop engine, by the Navy), and T-28s (larger than T-34s, not unlike P-47s from World War II). This took about six months, and was followed by another six months in T-33 jets, after which the student pilots got their wings. Horner loved every minute.
The training was strenuous, and there were few active duty pilot places to fill—it was not unlike an entire college senior class showing up at NFL summer camp and vying for a position on the forty-man roster. At this time, the Air Force was capable of producing far more pilots than they needed. Their pilot factory had been constructed to satisfy the huge need for pilots during the Korean War, but now the Air Force was smaller and more stable, and thus the name of the game was to wash out anyone who showed a weakness. Instead of receiving additional instruction when he made a mistake, a student pilot entered a process designed to eliminate him from the program. He was gone, no second chances. That meant he never left blood in the water, or else the sharks would come to visit.
The overall washout rate from entry into preflight at Lackland to graduation from Basic Training was near 85 percent, with the vast majority coming from the aviation cadets, men who did not have a college degree. (Student officers tended to be older and more mature than the cadets; and they had additionally made it through college—itself a screening process—and had passed through the light-plane screening program.) Every day someone would be out-processing after being eliminated.
To make sure he was never in jeopardy, Horner studied as he had never studied in college.
He actually practiced the next day’s flight maneuvers sitting at home in a chair, going over in his mind all the challenges he might run into the next day. The hard work paid off. He was soon headed to jet training at Laredo AFB and, if he made it, his wings.
The T-33 (T Bird) Horner would fly there was a two-seat training version of the F-80, one of the first jet fighters. F-80s had fought in Korea.
The T Bird was a good-looking aircraft, but old—most of them had been around for five or ten years; the T Bird’s technology was from the 1940s. It was fully acrobatic, very honest to fly, reasonably fast, and could stay airborne for two and a half hours at high altitude, but since it was straight-winged, it was subsonic. The worst thing about the T Bird was the seat. Though there was a seat cushion, you sat on a bailout oxygen bottle, which was like sitting on an iron bar. Flying a T Bird meant you had “a one-hour ass.” After you were in the jet that long, your tail hurt so bad you wanted to land.
In those days, the Air Force was still young and wild. Aircraft were underpowered and often poorly maintained, not nearly as safe as they are today. The leaders in the air were often veterans of World War II or Korea, where they had been rushed into combat with little training and a lot of attitude. Those who had survived were often indifferent to risk-taking that would make most people cringe. Low-level flying was low, often measured in a few feet above the ground, though as the old flyboy joke put it, the world’s record for low flying was tied, with fatal results. If it had been tough in Georgia, where they eliminated half the class, it was going to be hell in Texas.
Yet for Horner, life was blessed. He loved his work, flying came easily to him, and he excelled in the academic courses. He learned instruments by flying under a hood in the backseat of a T Bird; he learned transition—takeoff and landing and acrobatic maneuvers—and he learned flying formation. He knew now that he wanted to be a fighter pilot.
His flight commander, Captain Jack Becko (he looked a little like Jack Palance and was a terror in the sky), had been an F-86 pilot in Korea and was a joy to fly with. Captain Becko loved flying and acrobatics and formation. Too many pilots were timid—they got nervous in close formation or joining up after takeoff—but Horner, who loved it all as much as Becko did, was very aggressive, very wild on the controls. The flight commander adored that; he howled with glee when he flew an instruction ride with Horner, and Horner slammed the throttle around and made the jet go where it needed to be to stay in formation. And then, after they’d gone through all the required maneuvers, Captain Becko showed him how to shoot down another jet.
Some of the more conservative instructors—the ones with multi-engine time—were less enthusiastic, but since Horner always flew well and was always in position, they kept quiet.
At Laredo, a table, little larger than a card table, was the “office” where an instructor briefed his students. The flight room had about ten of them along the walls. On them were maps and diagrams under Plexiglas, so you could draw on them with a grease pencil, to show the path over the ground during an instrument approach, the procedures needed to compensate for wind drift, and the like. Each IP would have from one to three students in his table.
Horner grew so proficient that one day the instructor for his table, First Lieutenant Art Chase, asked him to fly lead for another, much less skilled, student. That way, Chase could get in the other student’s backseat and provide formation instruction.
When the other student lagged two ship lengths behind him, Horner saw a temptation it took him no time to give in to. He knew it was going to put him in deep trouble. It was not part of the training, it was not briefed, he was supposed to provide a stable platform for the other student to fly off of, and if he made a wrong move, they would collide and all three pilots would be killed. But what the hell, he thought, you’ve got to go for it sometimes.
He reefed back hard on the stick, kicked right rudder, rolled hard right, and slipped neatly in behind the other aircraft in a perfect guns tracking position. The instructor, in what had now become Horner’s target, never even saw him disappear. Worried they had overrun him and were about to collide, Chase started shouting on the radio. At about that time, Horner was calling guns tracking and feeling like the biggest, meanest tiger in South Texas.
That feeling lasted about as long as it took Art Chase to order him firmly back in the lead.
He knew then that he was in for—and deserved—one huge ass-chewing. He knew he had taken unfair advantage of his friendship with Chase. Yet none of that mattered. He had joy in his heart. By executing a difficult and dangerous dogfighting maneuver, he had proved to himself that he was a fighter pilot.
He has never regretted doing that roll over the top that flushed Art Chase and his table mate out in front for a guns tracking pass.
When they landed, there was indeed hell to pay; Chase wanted Chuck Horner’s hide, and he gave him the ultimate punishment, which was to be sent into the Flight Commander’s office, where you were made to wonder if you would escape with your life, let alone stay in the program. There, Jack Becko gave Horner one of the finest dressings-down ever delivered. Then, as Horner was leaving the room—scared but not defeated—Becko gave him a wink. “Chuck, you’re going to make one hell of a fighter pilot,” he said.
At that moment Chuck Horner walked on clouds. I’m going to be a fighter pilot!
The only problem was: nobody was getting fighter assignments.
With the draw-down after the Korean War, if you wanted to be a fighter pilot, you could get assigned to either Air Defense Command or Tactical Air Command. By Chuck Horner’s time, Air Defense Command was a dead-end job, flying obsolete planes. Since it was becoming obvious that ballistic missiles were about to replace the Soviet bomber threat, there wasn’t going to be much need for fighter interceptors to knock out the bombers. Over time, the Air Force has gone from a hundred squadrons of fighter interceptors to about six or eight today.
If you were sent to Tactical Air Command, however, you would check out in F-84s, F-86s, or perhaps F-100s, and spend six to eight months in gunnery school.4 Since the Air Force had no need for fighter pilots, however, you would probably then go to bomber school for another six to eight months and graduate as a Strategic Air Command B-47 copilot, or, if you were one of the top students, you might be asked to remain in Air Training Command and become an instructor pilot. There you would spend three years building flight time and teaching, but a lot of that flying would be in the backseat of the T Bird, a fate Chuck Horner did not relish. After that, if you wanted to fly fighters, you would probably get assigned to gunnery school, and if you wanted to fly heavies, to bomber school, or to air transport school. There was in those days—and there is still—an informal screening system: people believed to be incapable of flying fighters were urged to fly, or were otherwise sent to, heavies.
Because Horner had graduated number one in his flight and was fighter-qualified, he was eligible either for instructor training or for one of the few gunnery school slots. The matter came to a head when the Group Commander, Lieutenant Colonel Jack Watkins, offered him a teaching spot at Laredo. When the offer was made, however, he gulped, refused, and somehow found himself picked for one of the few F-100 gunnery school slots. He figured you better follow your destiny, even if it might take him to B-47s. The main thing was that fighter flying was in his blood. Even if he got sent on to B-47s, he knew that somehow in the future he would find a way to fly fighters.
★ One of the proudest moments in Chuck Horner’s life came on the day Mary Jo pinned a very tiny set of pilot wings on his uniform. The ceremony took place in Laredo, in a paint-peeling, run-down, non-air-conditioned base movie theater, straight out of World War II. He had never worked so hard for anything as he had for those wings.
It was also in Laredo that Horner was introduced to the tough side of military aviation, the missing-man formation flyby, to commemorate a pilot killed in an aircraft accident.
One day, he was sitting on the end of the runway in his
T-33, awaiting takeoff clearance, when the aircraft ahead of him, as it was lifting off, rolled abruptly and flew into the ground. The ailerons—the movable surfaces on the aft part of the wing that enable a pilot either to keep his wings level or to roll the aircraft—were incorrectly rigged5 so that both of them moved in the same direction. When the pilot made an input to level the wings, the aircraft rolled; the more he tried to level the wings, the more he kept rolling.
So there was Chuck Horner, a twenty-two-year-old kid with a fire-breathing jet strapped to him, staring at what just seconds before had been a silver jet, and was now billowing black smoke and orange flame. The rescue helicopter and fire trucks roared onto the scene, and the flames were quickly extinguished. Then the pilot’s remains were placed on the helicopter (there was no way anyone could survive that crash) and were just passing overhead on the way to the base hospital, with the charred legs of the pilot’s body dangling out the door, when the tower cleared Horner for takeoff. He swallowed hard, closed the canopy, pushed the throttle forward, released the brakes, and prayed.
In the thirty-six years in the Air Force that followed, he learned to do that again and again. Too many times, he and Mary Jo went to church services that ended outside the chapel with four pilot buddies roaring overhead in formation, and then the number three man pulling abruptly up to disappear from sight heavenward.
★ If flying in training command was dangerous, gunnery training was several notches worse. Chuck Horner took to it immediately.
On January 5, 1960, he reported to Williams AFB, Arizona, for gunnery training and check-out in the supersonic F-100.
The Super Saber, which had replaced the venerable F-86 Saber, was the first USAF aircraft capable of exceeding Mach 1 in level flight. It was a swept-wing, single-seat, afterburner-equipped, single-engine fighter, and its mission was day-fighter air-to-air combat, though subsequent models were also modified to carry both conventional and nuclear bombs. For armament, it had four internal 20mm rapid-fire cannons and carried heat-seeking air-to-air missiles. The gun sight was primitive by today’s standards, but sophisticated at the time. It was gyrostabilized, and a radar in the nose provided range to target for air-to-air gunnery. The F-100 was normally flown at 500 knots/hr and had reasonable range: with external drop tanks, it had about a 500-mile radius. For its day, it was reasonably maneuverable. Though older aircraft like the F-86 were more agile, the afterburner engine gave the F-100 an edge on acceleration and maintaining energy. Maintaining energy is a plus in air-to-air combat. When a pilot loses his energy all he can do is point the nose down and keep turning while the enemy figures out how to blow him away. F-100s were used in the Vietnam War, primarily in South Vietnam, for close air support, since by then the aircraft did not have the performance, speed, range, payload, and survivability to make it over North Vietnam. Those who flew it liked it: it was honest most of the time, and with it they got to do air-to-air as well as air-to-ground gunnery training.