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  Like all high-performance fighters of its generation, the MiG-23 was a design compromise. To perform well at the high-G, supersonic end of the flight envelope, the airplane traded lift for raw power. With the wings tucked completely back, the stabilizers provided responsive pitch and roll control. However, even with the wings returned forward to the minimum sixteen-degree-sweep angle, the MiG-23 could become dangerously unstable at subsonic speed.

  To demonstrate the power of the big afterburning Tumansky R-29 turbofan, an instructor climbed into the aircraft, started the engine, and ran it up to full military power. A deep, rasping roar hit us, and the ground seemed to tremble. There was a heavy concrete block resting on the slope of the steel blast deflector behind the aircraft’s tail pipe. The block must have weighed three tons. When the pilot hit the afterburner, a pulsing tube of orange flame erupted from the tail pipe with a thunderous crack. On afterburner the engine developed over twelve tons of thrust. The concrete block was blown away, spiraling like a maple leaf in the wind, and landed twenty yards behind the blast deflector.

  “That’s your engine,” a captain instructor shouted, once the roar had abated. “You will have to learn to control this machine, or it will control you… right into the ground.”

  Our MiG-23 ground classes were piled on top of our regular aeronautical engineering studies. There was a cadet saying, “blue nose, Red Diploma,” which referred to the almost superhuman effort required to earn the coveted Red Diploma for academic excellence. All of us felt our noses turning blue that year. But we were old soldiers now and we knew how much slack to expect from the instructors, and what regulations we could bend or break. And the strict rule against unauthorized visits to town was the one regulation we most enjoyed breaking.

  It was unrealistic for the academy commander, General Major of Aviation Nikolai Kryukov, to expect healthy young men like ourselves to remain stone-sober and celibate when there were nursing students, vodka, and beer virtually a stone’s throw from the glass-studded front wall of the academy. Again the sense of losing the best years of our youth often overwhelmed us. And our restrictive life seemed so unnecessary when Dmitri informed us that cadets at American military academies actually had telephones in their rooms and were allowed to drive cars to visit girls in towns like Annapolis and West Point. By our second summer at Armavir, the members of my unofficial “crew” were all veterans of the Ho Chi Minh Trail over that wall.

  Absence without leave was a guardhouse offense that meant at least three days’ tough confinement, eating stale bread and drinking cold tea, and sleeping on a wooden plank with your shinel, greatcoat, as a blanket. But the tantalizing prospect of sleeping with those willing and experienced nurses overcame our fear. Once we had reconnoitered the town, “the Prince of Georgia,” Sergei Mashenko, and I pooled our money and rented a small furnished apartment nearby from a kindly old babushka whose daughter had married and moved away.

  Getting from the campus to that apartment and back was always an adventure. But even with the trees and foliage cut back severely, we found several good routes over the wall.

  These routes were also our smugglers’ trail whenever we brought back vodka for a party in the dormitory.

  I was on a vodka run just before New Year’s 1981. After making an uneventful sortie into town and returning late at night with my shinel pockets clanking with .75-liter “grenades” of Sibirskaya vodka, I hauled myself back over the wall and dropped down into the shadowy snowdrifts.

  “Oh, how nice,” a voice bellowed. “Those are fine trophies you’ve got there, Comrade Kursant.”

  It was too dark for us to see each other’s face, but I certainly recognized the voice of Colonel Stonov, one of the battalion commanders. I was looking at a week in the frozen guardhouse.

  “Hand it over!” the colonel shouted. “Now!”

  I thrust out two squat bottles of vodka. “Comrade Colonel,” I said, disguising my voice with a slur as if I were drunk, “I have more on the other side. Wait one moment, please.”

  Before he could answer, I was back over the wall and down on the gritty ice of the pavement on the city side. I dashed all the way around the walled compound and found the hole under the fence near the runway. Once inside the campus, I sprinted back to my dorm. My friends hid the vodka and brushed the snow from my uniform while I crawled into bed. The lights in our bunk room were out when Colonel Stonov came storming up the stairs. Given the time it had taken me to go all the way around the wall, he must have remained standing like a fool where I’d left him for at least five minutes.

  He was not amused. But he was never able to prove who had tricked him.

  All of us hated the idea of the guardhouse, which was the main deterrent that kept most of the cadets on campus. In the guardhouse the soldiers shaved your head, threw buckets of ice water on your wooden bunk, and generally made your stay there as unpleasant as possible.

  Their favorite trick was screaming “Otboy,” “Go to sleep!” while the prisoners were outside in the exercise yard in the evening. At that command they loosed their vicious German shepherds. One cadet grabbed a shovel and clubbed the dogs to death. And the court of inquiry found in his favor and disciplined the sadistic guards.

  As the cadet sergeant, I had to escort prisoners in my platoon to the guardhouse. It was a duty I despised. But at least it allowed me and the Prince of Georgia to pull one of the best ruses in the history of Armavir. Gary was caught AWOL in town and given five days guardhouse confinement. I was responsible for both escorting the prisoner and handing over his paperwork. We took a true gamble instead. Gary crawled back over the wall and spent the five days in our apartment. I ripped up his charge sheet.

  No one was ever the wiser. But the experience convinced me to relinquish my stripes as a cadet sergeant.

  Luckily I was never directly involved in one of the most daring and eventually dangerous cadet escapades. My close friend Sergei Mashenko had shown a real artistic talent since our first days at Armavir. Using tools in the model shop, he made us beautifully crafted switchblade knives that we could use in an emergency to cut parachute shroud lines. And he could sketch freehand detailed engineering drawings that were far superior to anything others could achieve with compass and protractor. Sergei was also an excellent forger. Our military identity papers were a cardboard-faced booklet, with pages listing our particulars, including the all-important entry “Marital Status.”

  Using well-sharpened artist’s pencils, Sergei assigned a number of cadets a wife and perhaps a child or two. This deception was invaluable to graduating cadets who had enjoyed the comforts of young ladies from Armavir, but who had no intention of marrying. These were girls who had been urged by their ambitious families to spare no pain in order to snag a new Air Force lieutenant in marriage. Armed with their newly acquired proof of marriage, the cadets would break the sad news to their girlfriends just before graduation. There was not much the girls could do, as bigamy was against the Soviet constitution.

  But Sergei was not as lucky as the Prince of Georgia had been. One of his many girlfriends decided to go work as a prostitute in the international hotels on the Black Sea. The managers there let only married girls work as whores because they were supposedly free of disease. Sergei altered her internal passport. But the KGB picked her up and she informed on him. The Osobii Otdel at Armavir launched a full-blown investigation. Sergei was dismissed from the MiG-23 program and almost landed in prison.

  During the October leave between my second and third years at Armavir, I was able to visit Leningrad, having saved money by working an unofficial night job in the city. Soviet factory managers were always looking for men eager to perform unpleasant work for high wages. My friends and I contacted the manager of a textile factory near the academy that produced the cotton wadding for quilted winter garments. Our job was to climb inside the huge ventilation conduits and clean the matted lint from the filters. We used our Army gas masks to protect our lungs. It was nasty work, but paid fifteen rub
les a night, and the academy never knew about it.

  It was common practice for greedy faculty members to barter cadets’ labor for their own gain. Major Zheloudkov, my battalion commander, was one of the worst offenders.

  “Well, comrades,” he would say, “we need materials to refurbish our Lenin Rooms.”

  There was nothing wrong with the wall paneling or bookcases in the Lenin Rooms, but Zheloudkov had promised a local furniture company to supply cadets for weekend work in exchange for all the material he needed to refurbish his own dacha outside the city. He never roped me into that flunky work because I represented the academy on the Spartak wrestling circuit, and the major was a great sports fan.

  In June 1981 we finally completed our formal MiG-23 ground school and sweated through our theoretical exams. My flight instructor was Captain Vladimir Bogorotsky, a typical no-nonsense Air Force instructor, very businesslike and direct. I found him rather humorless, but completely honest and dedicated to his job. It was not surprising that he was the Communist Party secretary of his instructors’ kollectiv.

  Bogorotsky’s crew consisted of five cadets. Lapwing Siskin and I were in the first echelon. Deep Freeze had the second echelon to himself. And Misha Soutormin and Anatoli Sarichev formed the third echelon of the crew. With our strong academic background and good record on the L-29, we were probably the best-prepared crew at the academy.

  We had worked hard on MiG-23 cockpit simulators, and were completely familiar with the complexities of the afterburning engine, hydraulic wing-sweep control, pulse radar, and infrared search and track system (IRST). But the only way we would truly understand the new aircraft was to fly it.

  Our first instruction was in the MiG-23UB, the uchybno boyevoy, a two-seat combat trainer version of the aircraft. As in all Soviet trainers, the instructor sat behind the student, both a reassuring presence and a reminder to the guy in the front seat to pay attention to business.

  Our new G-suits had larger constricting inflatable air bladders on our thighs and abdomen to protect us more effectively from blackout during maneuvers than our L-29 suits had. This was good news because we’d been told our testicles could be damaged during high-G turns and banks. But cadets also believed that pulling a certain amount of Gs made you a better lover because your blood pooled in the “vital organs” of the lower body. The new KM-1 ejection seat was more powerful than the L-29’s, and had a powerful, solid-fuel rocket that could save your life at zero altitude in the event of a flameout on takeoff. The instrument panel of the MiG-23 was crowded with electronics, including a radar sight for the 23mm GSh cannon-pod, air-to-air missiles, and a weapons-release panel for bombs and ground-attack rockets. The cockpit also had a Sirena 3-M radar-threat warning system and a SRZO Information Friend or Foe radar-interrogation system. And the TP-23 IRST actually displayed data on a clear Plexi-glas head-up display (HUD) above the instrument panel.

  If these complexities were not enough, management of the afterburning R-29 turbofan was a demanding task. An afterburner, we learned, could virtually transform the aircraft into a piloted rocket. But learning to control the variable-geometry wings through all the power-setting regimes of the flight envelope proved incredibly difficult for some students, even during ground school. The wings had to be swept back at least thirty-three degrees for transonic flight, but forty-five degrees was the standard setting. If you forgot this requirement and accelerated to 0.8 or 0.95 Mach in the denser air below 9,000 feet with your wings unswept, a sudden, dangerous “overswing” could occur, which caused rapid, alternating negative and positive Gs. The plane quickly became uncontrollable. In 1980 an instructor and student from Armavir were killed in just such a sudden overswing accident.

  Naturally, for high-Mach flight, the full-rear wing sweep was necessary. This meant we had to learn to handle the throttle, the wing-sweep hydraulic lever beneath the throttle quadrant, and the control stick simultaneously — while also using the weapons system electronics and the radio. And, of course, the wing had to be in the full-forward position for landing. Clearly, even some of my group of fifty talented L-29 pilots were not yet up to this challenge.

  Captain Bogorotsky believed in long flying days while the weather was good. Within two weeks I was handling my own takeoffs and landings. The takeoffs were no problem because of the generous lift of the upswept wings and the powerful engines. But landing the MiG-23 was never easy. The landing airspeed was high, 140 knots, much faster than the L-29. So you had to judge your flare altitude and speed on the landing threshold with precision. If you landed with too much airspeed, you might experience a dangerous condition known as the “progressive goat.”

  The overly springy landing gear exacerbated this problem. In any aircraft the actual flare maneuver was a near stall. But if you flared too fast and slammed down your nose gear, the MiG-23 would bounce back into the air in a nose-high attitude, at which point the inexperienced pilot would instinctively jam the stick forward and bring the nose gear back down to the runway. This was the start of the “goat.” The nosewheel would slam down hard, and the aircraft would bounce again, this time higher, with the nose pitched even more steeply. The bounce and pitch back would progress, with the nose dropping and bouncing back more sharply on each cycle. By the fifth bounce, the tail keel would drag, killing the last of the airspeed. The plane would stall off on one wing, fall onto its belly, and explode. And, unfortunately, even our advanced ejection seat would not save a pilot at zero airspeed.

  We read accident reports of both Soviet and foreign students, Cubans, Angolans, and North Koreans, who all experienced a progressive goat landing. Several of them had been killed. I was determined to avoid this potential trap.

  I soloed in the MiG-23 on September 15, 1981. This was quite an accomplishment, considering I had been grounded for one month that summer as punishment for being caught in town, AWOL in civilian clothes. If I hadn’t been in the advanced MiG-23 program, I probably would have done time in the guardhouse. But my deputy squadron commander, Major Nurokmiyetov, knew that, for me, being grounded was worse punishment than being chased by the guardhouse dogs. When I turned in the rags I had substituted for my real clandestine set of civvies, the major shook his head, realizing he had been taken. He had seen me in town before, but ignored the infraction because I was dating the daughter of his former flight instructor. Now he had to follow regulations and confiscate my civvies. “I’ll never believe that you actually wore this shit,” he said, fingering the old tennis shoes and warm-up suit I surrendered. My first American “Levi’s” jeans and nice shirt were safely hidden at the apartment.

  After I soloed on the MiG-23, my attitude toward life in the Air Force changed. I was twenty years old and had been given the responsibility of flying this powerful combat aircraft. We flew now several times a week and spent long hours in the classroom studying basic individual and formation air-combat tactics, designed to prepare us to counter known NATO combat maneuvers such as “yo-yo” ambushes from high or low altitude and high-G barrel-roll attacks.

  At this time, several of my friends became candidate members of the Communist Party, a mandatory apprenticeship of at least one year before they could be considered for full membership. If you were a candidate, you had to watch your behavior; reprimands or a stretch in the guardhouse could kill your chances for Party membership, which, in turn, could stifle your career as an officer. I preferred to wait until after graduation to become a candidate member. That way I could still take chances sneaking off to town to see girls, and all I risked was the guardhouse.

  Over the next year I mastered the Crocodile. While some cadets were still dreading every landing approach, I and a few others were practicing instrument-landing-system approaches. As I had anticipated, the members of my crew were near the top of our class. We had all conquered the terrible goat by learning to judge our flare attitude accurately before chopping the throttle.

  During our combat training in 1982, we learned to fly with a wingman in a para two-plane format
ion. We all knew where this training was leading us. The war in Afghanistan had become a protracted test of wills between the Soviet Union and the imperialists — treacherously supported by the Chinese. When we graduated in October, we would probably be sent to an advanced combat-training regiment and then on to Afghanistan. So we concentrated on the deadly serious and complex business of flying a high-performance aircraft. My earlier romantic illusions about the life of a fighter pilot were tempered by reality. You simply did not hop into the cockpit of a jet fighter and roar off into the sky to do battle like a Hussar on his horse. Modern combat aviation was more a science than adventure.

  Now my working days revolved around the mundane but essential problems of mission planning: fuel consumption, optimum climb angles, tactical navigation, multichannel radio communications, radar sights, and formation maneuvers. We also were given the additional complication of learning to evade surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) and antiaircraft artillery (AAA), just to make life more interesting. It was engrossing work, but it was not the mindless excitement I had once envisioned.

  Then one morning I woke up in my comfortable two-man room in the upperclassmen’s dormitory and realized I was about to graduate and be commissioned as a pilot lieutenant in the Soviet Air Force. I had passed all my final written and flight exams. The only unfinished business was our graduation party, the actual graduation ceremony, and, of course, the matter of my assignment.

  Our experimental program had proved successful, and I was rated near the top of the group. But I still dreaded the possibility of being kept back here as a MiG-23 instructor. In early October the academy was visited by unofficial “agents,” officers from advanced schools and combat regiments, recruiting promising graduates. I had already stated my preference for a Frontal Aviation regiment, and tried to make a favorable impression on the officers from combat units who came to observe our final flight exams.