Brothers in Arms

"If youth knew; if age could."

-Sigmund Freud

Do you ever have a song playing through your head? Maybe a whole album?

I've been there the last few days. The album, actually the CD when I brought it home nearly forty years ago, was Brothers in Arms by Dire Straits.

I can't say there are any songs back there that hold any great affection for me. The most successful single on the album, Money for Nothing, feels a little dated, not least because of the homosexual slurs it casually tosses out. In fairness to the writer, he's quoting a guy working in a hardware store, who's complaining about the easy success of the earring wearing performer (most conjecture he's talking about Prince) hopping around on the television tuned to MTV.

Anyway, the songs bring me back to the summer of 1987, right about now but 37 years ago. I was living in a rented three bedroom rancher in Caledonia, Mississippi, shaded at the edge of where poplar woods behind us gave way to a sorghum field across the street, way out in the country. An abandoned shack stood in a fenced off pasture next to the field; some mornings I'd drive out the gravel driveway to work and a cow would stand peering out a window from inside.

By this time I had made it nearly nine months through Undergraduate Pilot Training at Columbus AFB, Mississippi, had watched nearly half my classmates wash out of the program while propelled obsessively by the worry that any day I might join them. I'd muddled through my time in T-37s, plugging along with a multi-downgrade "Good" on my first two checkrides and a one downgrade "Excellent" on my final, instrument check, the only thing keeping me from a perfect score being a hard landing after threading through late spring thunderstorms and impressing the check pilot by improvising a drop-in to an unplanned destination to make sure we finished all our required approaches.

In the midst of all that I found myself politely tossed out of base housing, no longer qualifying for a three bedroom Capehart in the family duplex section because I was now flying solo. A lot of us found ourselves in a similar predicament, with roommates drummed out of the program after a few failed training flights, now scrambling to find new living arrangements.

Among those who remained was my classmate Keith Schell, Lieutenant, Nebraska Air National Guard. The "Schell Answer Man" as we used to call him, for his precise responses to simulated emergencies presented by our StanEval (Standards and Evaluation) instructor during morning stand-up. Keith's apartment mate washed out right about the time I was searching for new digs, and we decided to team up and find a place to live through graduation in November, assuming we made it that long.

This, in turn, led to the little house out in the country, whose owner was kind enough to offer a five month lease through graduation.

The place looked like a bachelor pad after we moved in, furnished with hand-me-down things from my mom and a particle board entertainment center on which my enormous television, the most expensive item in the house, perched precariously. The fridge offered little in the way of nourishment, and not even much beer because we were just too busy.

Keith was the perfect housemate during that stressful time. A taciturn midwestern from outside Lincoln, raised on a farm, he was flat but drolly funny, and never seemed all that concerned about anything even as he worked as hard as anyone in my class. Keith had been an actuary as his day job while making his way up from an enlisted guy on the flight line through college and officer training to being offered a slot flying the RF-4C, a reconnaissance version of the F-4 Phantom.

Carrying only a camera or two, and no weapons, the RFs had the unenviable job of flying over a target before an airstrike, to scout for things to blow up, then flying back over it again after the place was bombed, to document the damage. That second pass was the risky one, sort of like running back under a beehive after someone's hit it with a stick. "Alone, unarmed, and unafraid" was their mantra. I kind of doubt that last part.

As a complete digression, the RF-4 was the only jet I could never catch in simulated combat at Red Flag. A hard wing jet (meaning no slats) with two powerful old turbojets, the old Phantom hauled ass at low altitude. The Eagle, with its huge wing surfaces, simply generated too much induced drag to keep up.

As a roommate, Keith was tidy, went to bed early, never got drunk, and maintained a rigid regimen for each week. On Sunday nights he's cook the exact same, giant pan of Rice-A-Roni (the San Francisco Treat!) with ground beef crumbled into it, then eat a little bowl of the stuff every evening during the work week. He never seemed bored with this routine, while I lived on a varied diet of Top Ramen, wings from the base bowling alley, and supermarket deli fried chicken, all washed down with a couple Bud Lights.

By this time the mass attrition we endured early in pilot training had mostly played out. Of the 57 who started the class with me, 30 remained, later augmented by a guy who washed back from an earlier class for health reasons. We were flying the T-38 Talon, a plane that might kill an inattentive pilot but was an absolute joy to fly.

Not to mention it's a beautiful jet, maybe the prettiest I ever handled.

Part of my fondness for this otherwise extremely stressful time, looking back, lies in the fact that my fortunes in the program shot up once I was evicted from base housing and took up with Keith out in the woods. Every checkride in the T-38 resulted in a score of "Excellent", including the critical Contact check that would mostly determine whether we would be classified as "FAR", meaning "fighter-attack-reconnaisance" qualified, or "TTB", for "tanker-transport-bomber". Basically, a division between those who'd graduate ready to fly an airplane alone, and those who might need an apprenticeship as a copilot for a time.

Keith had to make the cut, couldn't have returned to his guard unit and flown the RF-4 without it. For me, it meant getting into a space that held its own risks, given that within the FAR pack we were also ranked at the end of the course. The top ten percent would be "protected", meaning they'd get whatever they requested as a first assignment, usually an F-16 or F-15 with the occasional A-10 in the mix. Next were the doomed eight or nine who would become "FAIPs", or "first assignment instructor pilots", sentenced to stay at Columbus for three or four years to fly the Tweet or the Talon, then compete all over again for a fast jet. My buddy Bobo endured that exercise before we served together at Langley and Tyndall. Finally, there were the "Scum FARs" guys who barely made the cut--they generally went to F-4s, F-111s, or maybe an OV-10 Bronco. The FAIPs envied them.

Against rather long odds, given my acute lack of hand-eye coordination and bad habit of closing the Officer's Club bar on weekends, I squeaked my way into an F-15. Keith graduated and went home to Lincoln, flying the RF until his unit converted to KC-135s a few years later. He retired as a general, but he'll always be this guy in my memory, in a shot taken not long after we both graduated at Columbus.

He came to the house once in about 2016, and hadn't aged a day. I guess all that clean Midwestern living pays a dividend in the end.

Not sure where this ramble came from, except to note that whenever I hear a track from that old album, I can feel a little tightness in my chest, can smell the diesel of the flightline aux power units and the JP-4 exhaust. I can almost touch the frisson of that house in the woods and being in the first chapters of what Joseph Campbell might call the Hero's Journey, leading across all those decades to this glowing morning in the hills of western New York, with most of it behind me now but not wishing for a minute I could go back. I'm grateful for it all, even the tough times. Who gets to live a life like this one has played out to be?