Last Flight in the Eagle

"It is appearances, characteristics and performance that make a man love an airplane, and they, are what put emotion into one. You love a lot of things if you live around them, but there isn't any woman and there isn't any horse, nor any before nor any after, that is as lovely as a great airplane, and men who love them are faithful to them even though they leave them for others. A man has only one virginity to lose in fighters, and if it is a lovely plane he loses it to, there his heart will ever be."

-Ernest Hemingway

Most fighter pilots with whom I served over the years had that quote in their office or on their Hooray for Me wall at home, myself included. Now I wince a little that it sounds a little misogynistic (I can hear Peg in the back of my mind saying, "Ya THINK?!"), but I was a different person back then.

Thirty years ago yesterday I flew the F-15 for the very last time. I marked the occasion with a fairly anodyne entry on Facebook, thanking the folks who made those last few days in uniform so very good. This morning I find myself wandering through the days from my first flight in the Eagle in May of 1988 to my last ride in August of 1994. A brief interlude, no longer than the average lawyer's trip from undergraduate freshman to freshly minted law grad, but so very formative. Maybe because no one's shooting at you in 1L Contracts.

I learned I was heading for F-15 RTU at Luke AFB during our assignment night debauch a few weeks before I graduated from pilot training. I was protected, in the top ten percent of my class, and in theory if they had the plane available I'd requested as my first choice (of about twenty on the "dream sheet", if memory serves), that's where I was going. I selected the Eagle for the most nonsubstantive of reasons: they were based in better places than the Viper, with no remote TDYs to Korea. Unbeknownst to me, MPC swapped my first operational assignment at the last minute, from the 49th Tactical Fighter Wing at Holloman AFB, New Mexico, to Langley AFB, Virginia. Had that not happened, I would have spent three years in a desert hell hole and missed my chance to go fight a war in another desert hell hole. Fortuna's wheel.

I reported for F-15 RTU ("replacement training unit") at Luke AFB, just west of Phoenix, in early May of 1988. I had a contract on a house in Virginia that included a clause allowing me to get back my earnest money deposit if I washed out. I was that brimming with confidence.

My squadron at Luke was the 550th Tactical Fighter Training Squadron, the Silver Eagles.

I lived in the VOQ, drove a Jeep with a bikini top, ate hot wings at the base bowling alley, drank beer and learned the ribald songs of my new tribe in the squadron bar. Oh, and flew the most magnificent jet in the inventory, the mighty F-15A, the old school variant of the Eagle built in the mid-1970s. They'd taken out a lot of the fancy electronics in the student jets, making the nose lighter and the jet incredibly maneuverable as a result. As we'd say, it could turn up its own a**hole.

And what a backdrop to learn the art of aerial warfare, the southern Arizona desert.

That jet belonged to the famous 555th TFTS, the "Triple Nickel". We had four F-15 squadrons on the ramp: us, the Nickel, the Deadly Jesters, and the Killer Claws.

There was also an entire wing of F-16s at Luke back then, one of two RTU wings for the Viper in the 1980s. Tyndall AFB hosted an entire wing of Eagles for RTU, as well. All those squadrons at Luke are demobilized or reassigned. Things change.

I graduated from RTU in September of 1988, and drove cross-country in a Wrangler with no air conditioning to my first operational assignment at Langley. The 550th converted to Mud Eagles (the F-15E) soon thereafter, then just went out of business.

We always looked down our noses a little at the Strike Eagle. The whole culture back then puffed us up as Knights of the Air, flying a single-seat steed into battle against another Knight who occupied the apex of armed service, each of us alone in a swirling gyre in which only one would live. Those Strike Eagle guys had a backseater for Pete's sake, and most of their training was devoted to precision bombing. That was a long way from the white scarf romance in which we Gray Eagle guys lived in our heads, but it was a hell of a lot closer to real war, as I'd find out later.

Not long before I arrived at Langley, another fateful change in assignments altered the arc of my flying career. My original orders sent me to the 48th Fighter Interceptor Squadron, part of the old Air Defense Command.

It wouldn't have been a bad gig--all of those guys had under their belts a no-kidding intercept of a Tu-95 Bear bomber droning down the coast on its way to Cuba. But they flew old A models, sat alert, and were limited to a continental air defense mission that was receding in importance with the waning and eventual end of the Cold War.

Instead, MPC at the last minute switched me to the First Tactical Fighter Wing, "America's First Team", and the 27th Tactical Fighter Squadron.

I remember when this particular batch of patches arrived from the printer. We were mortified, seeing as how the eagle looked more like a hydrocephalic parakeet. Our squadron commander, Bubba Parker, threatened to send them back. Now they fetch $200 a pop on ebay as a collector's item. Go figure.

The 27th was the oldest squadron in the Air Force, with roots going back to 1917 and alums including Frank Luke, the "Arizona Balloon Buster", and Curtis LeMay. We had spiffy new MSIP F-15Cs, with every gadget available to hang on the jet.

And we were part of what began as the Rapid Deployment Force formed under Jimmy Carter, meaning if the balloon went up we'd be the first to go.

After wobbling through mission qualification training and barely making it across the finish line (the same self-doubt that sometimes ruins my golf swing clouded those weeks with a vengeance), I hung around the ops desk and flew every chance I got, amassing enough hours to upgrade to two-ship flight lead within a year, making me the youngest in the squadron at the time. I turned 26 a few weeks later.

A few weeks after that, Iraq invaded Kuwait. Sure enough, within a week we were on the ground at Dhahran AB---if you were alive back then, you knew the place on the news as "an undisclosed location in Saudi Arabia".

The next five-and-a-half months were spent flying patrols along the Iraqi border in anticipation of an aerial assault that never came, followed by two months and thirty-one combat missions while trying to stay ahead of my additional duty as squadron scheduler, an exercise that involved stuffing ten pounds of excrement into a five pound bag at two in the morning. How in the hell did those guys at Central Command in Riyadh think we could fly all those lines?

But we did, we won, and by the first week of March it was time to go home.

That was the day before we flew from Dhahran to Torrejon AB, Spain. I'm in there somewhere.

Back at Langley I found myself coming up on three years and ready for my next assignment. The new squadron commander had been my boss when I was writing those schedules, and he took care of me with what we used to call the Constant Carrot, an opportunity to go from Eagle assignment to follow-on Eagle assignment. That was a rare thing back then--most guys went back to fly Tweets at undergraduate pilot training or some other unpleasantness.

When Fred asked me where I wanted to go, I answered without hesitation, "Bitburg!" It had been my grandfather's favorite assignment when he was with the USAFE inspector general team, and I'd visited a buddy there once and fallen in love with those hills right outside of Trier, Germany.

But Bitburg was closing because by then the Cold War was definitely over. I asked what he had available, and he literally peered at a piece of paper that emerged from the top drawer of his desk. "I have two Tyndalls and an Eglin."

I pondered on that. Tyndall was a training assignment, a step down from the ops world. Eglin had the same mission as Langley, and they were continuing to rotate into 120 day assignments to the sand box. Been there, done that. I'll take Tyndall, thank you.

So in September of 1991 I arrived in Panama City for my new assignment with the 95th TFTS Boneheads.

I was also back to flying some of the oldest F-15s in the inventory, although we eventually upgraded to the C model while I was there.

That was one of ours, the very first F-15C ever built, in 1978. I didn't say they were new.

By the end of 1993, I was sort of lost and trying to find a next chapter. The Air Force made the mistake of forcing a choice between signing up for seven more years or getting out. They promised an $80,000 bonus, a princely sum for a young captain with a baby at home. They promised another operational Eagle assignment, this time to Okinawa where I'd likely be in the first wave in the next Korean War. Did I mention that new baby? No way, Jose. It was time for law school.

After law school I was offered a chance to come back to Tyndall and fly Eagles with the Florida Air National Guard, a part-time gig while I practiced law in Panama City. One of my great regrets in life, and I certainly have a few, was turning that down. The unit kept flying Eagles until it closed in 2010.

I'm told a number of folks thought I'd quit blogging because they stopped getting emails announcing a new post. Something has found its way onto my hard drive, it seems, blocking access to cloud files and otherwise engaging in gratuitous computer mayhem at my expense. Chuck the computer nerd promises to get all that sorted out today. We'll see.