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  I certainly do not want to take anything away from George Gobel, but while he was busy defending the skies of Oklahoma, somebody had to protect Florida. As a United States Marine Corps fighter pilot, that was my job.

  Like George, I did not fly in combat in World War II. Instead, I taught aircraft-carrier landings on land. But the government wanted a return on its investment in my training, so just as my career in television was starting to blossom, I was recalled for duty in the Korean conflict. I flew eighty-five missions over enemy lines in Korea. People who had never even seen any of my TV shows were shooting at me.

  I don't know why I so desperately wanted to be a marine fighter pilot. Maybe because my distant relative Joe Kennedy was a naval aviator. Maybe because my father made flying seem so exciting. Whatever the reason, while I was a student at Lowell High School I joined the Civilian Military Training Corps, which was the military version of President Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps. For several weeks during two summers I went to a military training camp on Diamond Island in Maine, where I was taught how to march and shoot and follow orders. It was in the CMTC that instructors first recognized my natural leadership qualities and promoted me to sergeant. Those qualities consisted primarily of the fact that I was the tallest person in my squad and had the loudest voice. If I had chosen to enlist in the real man's army, I qualified for a commission as a second lieutenant. But I didn't want to be a soldier, I wanted to be a marine—and not simply a marine but a marine aviator.

  In preparation for the war that seemed inevitable, the navy had created the V-5 program. By completing two years of college, a participant could qualify to be an aviation cadet, the first step toward becoming a marine aviator. I wanted to go to the University of Notre Dame, but I couldn't afford the tuition. So one afternoon I drove the large bingo rig with MULCAHEY & DEAN painted brightly on its sides right up toney Chestnut Hill to Boston College and enrolled. It was a colorful and auspicious debut.

  My freshman year I did well in all of my courses— physics, calculus, chemistry, biology, and poetry—all except German. As an electrical engineering major I was required to take German because so many of the great mathematicians had written in German. But German was Greek to me. I flunked it my first semester—the only course I've ever failed—and just barely passed it second semester.

  Besides keeping up with my studies and holding down several jobs, I ran for freshman class president. My campaign strategy consisted of handing out ink blotters proclaiming, "Everybody's Sayin' We Want McMahon." Truthfully, no one was really saying it—especially not the coeds—but everyone wanted the free blotter. I won the election.

  In the middle of my sophomore year the navy reduced the entrance requirements for its cadet program; I immediately dropped out of Boston College and enlisted. It was then that I heard the four words that since the founding of this republic have become synonymous with our great military heritage: hurry up and wait. I had to wait several months to be inducted. Doing has always been easy for me; I get up, I go, I do. I like the phone to start ringing early and continue ringing till late at night, I like every minute of my day to be filled; waiting is tough for me. The most difficult thing for me to do is nothing.

  While waiting to be called I got my first real job in broadcasting. I was hired to be the night announcer on WLLH, the Synchronized Voice of the Merrimack Valley. WLLH was a three-hundred-fifty-watt station that, if the winds were blowing just right, could be heard all the way from Lowell to Lawrence. During the day I worked on a surveyor's crew, starting as a rod boy and eventually becoming assistant crew chief. I had no idea what a rod boy was when I accepted the job, but whatever it was, I knew I could learn how to do it. I've always been a positive person. When I was offered the job as Carson's announcer on The Tonight Show, for example, no one had any idea exactly what form the job would take. But I knew from experience that I would figure out how to do it, whatever it turned out to be.

  Christmas 1942 was a sad time for my family. America was at war, my father was too sick to work, and I was about to leave for military training. My mother was very upset that I was leaving. Like all mothers, she knew the dangers of sending her son off to fight a war. One night I overheard her on the telephone telling one of her bridge partners, "We're not going to have a Christmas this year. Edward is going off to the navy right after the New Year and I just . . . Ijust can't handle it."

  Christmas had always been a special occasion in my family. Even when my father was struggling, there were always neatly wrapped presents under a brightly decorated tree. As long ago as I can remember, on Christmas Eve, after all the shopping was done, after all the presents were wrapped, my father allowed everyone to choose one present to open. Then we would share a bottle of wine. Later that night we would have homemade chicken soup and chicken sandwiches with beer. It was a warm and wonderful tradition. I knew this was going to be my last Christmas at home for a long time, and as my father had done for me, I wanted to make it special.

  The day before Christmas I was working with my surveying crew just outside Bedford, Massachusetts, extending the runway on an army base. As I peered through my transit—my "gun," as surveyors call it—I saw the most beautiful blue spruce I had ever seen directly in my line of sight. It was about seven feet tall with wide, full branches. It was right in our path; it was going to have to be cut down. I must have smiled as I told an assistant, "That one's mine."

  I cut it down myself and gently put it in the back of my Hudson Terraplane. As I drove home that night I stopped at a small convenience store and bought their last set of lightbulbs and remaining decorations. It was as dark as a New England night can be by the time I got home, and very cold, and in my memory it was snowing but that might be apocryphal. I put the tree over my shoulder and rang the doorbell. I had a key but I wanted my mother to answer the door. When she opened the door, I told her, "Muth, we're having our Christmas."

  And so we did, and of all the Christmases of my life, that's the one I remember most of all.

  Six weeks later I reported as ordered to the Fargo Building in Boston to begin a military career that would end almost five decades later. I was one of 150 naval cadets who had passed a series of rigorous tests and physical examinations. Technically a cadet was barely in the navy—"cadet" wasn't a rank, and we were treated with all the respect due that rank. As we stumbled into long lines that first morning, the sergeant called out my name. "McMahon," he screamed at me, "from this minute on you are in charge of this group. You will take them by train to Texarkana, Texas. Do you understand?"

  "Yes, sir," I said in my deepest radio voice.

  "And McMahon," he added, "you will not lose any of 'em."

  I never learned why I was placed in command. Probably those same natural leadership qualities I had displayed on Diamond Island: height and voice. I'd traveled with my parents my entire childhood, I'd traveled with carnivals and circuses, but I'd never before traveled with 149 teenagers, most of whom had never been more than a day from home. For four days I herded this group to Texas. I made sure they got on the right trains and got all their meals; I taught them how to release the lock in the bathrooms and make long-distance telephone calls home. Some of these young people did not even know how to buy toothpaste. Many years later the incredible Jonathan Winters spent a weekend at my home. He climbed all over the furniture, made the most bizarre sounds, and did just about anything possible to entertain my children, but nothing he did even fazed me: I had once been in charge of 149 teenagers for four days and survived.

  There wasn't even a military base in Texarkana. We learned to fly at a civilian field, wearing civilian clothes, living in private homes. The closest thing we had to a military uniform was a long white scarf that we wore while flying, the same type of scarf we imagined the heroic pilots of World War I had worn. In Texarkana I flew an airplane by myself for the first time in my life. People who have flown alone have experienced this incredible sense of freedom, and no words can adequately describe it to
those who have not. I learned to fly in a lumbering Piper Cub, just about the most basic of all airplanes. From Texarkana, we went to naval training centers at Denton, Texas; Athens, Georgia; and finally to an "E-base"—the "E" standing for "elimination"—just outside Dallas, still as cadets attempting to qualify for the navy flight school at Pensacola, Florida.

  In Athens we went through a three-month version of basic training. We spent those months being tested mentally and physically. On The Tonight Show we often had demonstrations of unusual physical prowess—people breaking plywood boards with their forehead, jumping off platforms, or performing complicated calisthenics. After one guest had completed his amazing display of calisthenics, Johnny asked me if I ever did that kind of workout. "No," I replied, "I have a man who does that for me."

  Not in Athens, Georgia, though. One of those tests consisted of stepping on and off a bench twenty-two inches high for five minutes while carrying a pack one-third your weight—for me that was sixty pounds—to test your endurance and ability to recover quickly. Please, ladies and gentlemen readers, do not try this at home. The publisher cannot be responsible for the results. Now, what stepping on and off a bench while wearing a sixty-pound knapsack had to do with flying a sophisticated flying machine, I had not the slightest idea. But those people who could not do it for five minutes did not get to fly.

  At the E-base we flew the Stearman biplane, one of those old-fashioned airplanes with two open cockpits and two wings that are still used in air shows, which we affectionately called the Yellow Peril. We called it that because it was painted bright yellow and the way we flew it put the pilot in great peril. It was used to teach us aerobatics—rolls, loops, spins, turns, steep climbs and dives—because its two wings gave it tremendous maneuverability. The maneuvers we learned to perform in the Yellow Peril would help us survive in combat. All we had to do was survive learning them. Some people did not.

  But probably the most important thing I learned from the Yellow Peril was confidence, confidence in myself and my airplane. As an entertainer, each time I did something new—a movie, my nightclub act, a television sitcom—people would ask me if I was nervous. The answer was that, almost without exception, I was not. Flying an airplane to the top of a loop and then reducing air speed until the engine stalls and the plane starts dropping like a leaf makes me nervous; facing an audience does not. The ground is much harder than any audience. The confidence I gained doing Immelmann loops and chandelles and lazy 8s and wingovers extended through the rest of my life.

  I had the first of several close calls in the Yellow Peril. During a training flight the plane suddenly seemed sluggish; it just didn't feel right. Pilots trust those feelings. I decided to land in a large field. As I stepped out of my airplane I looked down and there was a single die. It became my lucky charm. I put it in my pocket and carried it with me throughout World War II. It did its job.

  One of every three candidates washed out at the E-base. The navy was finally satisfied that those of us who had made it to Pensacola could fly an airplane, and there they turned us into combat pilots. We flew the AT-6, a two-seat trainer in which we learned gunnery and bombing. At Pensacola we also took a battery of psychological tests that would determine the type of aircraft to which we eventually would be assigned. I wanted to fly the Corsair, a carrier-based fighter and just about the hottest piece of machinery in the air. But as I read some of the questions, I knew that if I answered them honestly I probably would not get the Corsair. Among these questions were "Would you strafe women and children in the street?" "Would you shoot an enemy pilot as he parachuted out of a plane?"

  I answered them honestly. No, and no. As a result I was assigned to the B-25, a land-based bomber. The navy had decided that if I wouldn't strafe women and children, I'd have to bomb them. A lot of pilots loved the B-25; not me, I wanted fighters. So I requested an opportunity to plead my case before the psychological board.

  When I appeared before the board I used every sales technique I knew. "I knew what answers you wanted," I told them, "and if I'd been dishonest and answered the questions that way, I'd be a fighter pilot. But I can't believe the marines want officers like that. I don't believe they want people who are willing to shoot innocent women and children. And as for enemy pilots, why should I shoot down a man in a parachute?"

  To make sure he won't fly again, replied one of the board members, and maybe shoot me down.

  "Well maybe he might extend the same courtesy to me if I ever have to jump out of a plane," I argued. "I think we all know about the great tradition of honor among pilots."

  I got my Corsair. In 1938 the navy had decided to mount the most powerful aircraft engine being manufactured onto the smallest possible airframe. The result was the F4U Corsair, one of the finest airplanes ever made. I was six feet three inches tall and weighed about 180, big for a fighter jock, but that airplane fit me as though it had been cut by a fine tailor. When I slipped into the cockpit I felt like I was home. The Corsair was a gull-winged plane—the wings folded to save space aboard carriers—and it had a maximum speed of 425 miles per hour at twenty thousand feet and a range of fifteen hundred miles. Anyone who ever flew it can probably still tell you all its specs. I loved that airplane.

  Of 150 young naval cadets with whom I entered the program, I was one of only two who eventually earned the gold wings of a U.S. Marine pilot. It took me almost two years to earn my wings, and it was worth every minute of it. But I think my training was as tough on my mother as on me. She knew I was stationed in Florida, but if a plane crashed anywhere in America, she was sure I was in it. "I'm in Florida, Muth," I tried to explain. "That plane crashed in Chicago."

  "So then you're all right?"

  After graduating from Pensacola I was assigned to Lee Field, which was about thirty miles outside Jacksonville, for further training in the Corsair, but first I got to go home. I wanted to surprise my mother. My parents were living in Hartford, Connecticut, where my father had taken a job at the Pratt and Whitney plant in East Hartford. When the war began, the carnival business had pretty much closed down for the duration, so he ended up as a supervisor at Pratt and Whitney—where the Corsair engine was built! My father and I worked out a great plan: I was going to hide at a neighbor's house and he was going to send my mother over there for some reason. When she knocked on the door, I would answer it.

  Somehow, she sensed I was there. And she immediately decided that the reason I was hiding across the street was that I had been injured in an accident. "He's hurt, isn't he?" she demanded of my father. He insisted I was fine. "It's his legs; they're gone, aren't they?" She ran across the street in tears, convinced I had been wounded, crippled, or disfigured. Even after a full inspection, she persisted, "You're sure you're all right?"

  Of course she had reason to worry. Believe me, flying the Corsair was a dangerous job. The Corsair earned the nickname the Killer because a lot of fine pilots died in that airplane. As was often said, any landing from which you walked away was considered a good landing. At Lee Field we learned how to land on an aircraft carrier. There is only one way to land on a carrier: very, very carefully. There is almost no margin for error. Life and death are a matter of inches. One morning I was practicing carrier landings at a satellite field near St. Augustine. The field was perfect for this job because it was surrounded by water. As I made my approach I kept my eyes squarely on the landing officer, who used flag signals to visually direct pilots onto a carrier. As I decreased my air speed to just about the minimum needed to keep the plane in the air, my engine suddenly started sputtering and I lost altitude much too quickly. I started choking the engine, just as I would have choked the engine on my old Hudson on a cold December morning in Lowell, desperately trying to squeeze a few more feet of air out of that plane. Somehow, I'll never know how, I made it to the very edge of the runway.

  When I saw the landing officer a few minutes later, he said, "You know your wheels hit the water?"

  I shook my head. I knew how lucky I had b
een. My approach had been so low that my landing gear had touched water. If my wheels had gone even a few inches deeper, the nose of my airplane would have pitched into the water and the plane would have flipped over. That's fate, that's all it is. If my wheels had been six inches lower, just imagine all the Alpo that never would have been sold.

  I qualified as a carrier pilot by making eight landings on the USS Guadalcanal. There are two moments that every carrier pilot will remember his entire lifetime: his first takeoff from a carrier and his first landing. The takeoff is easier. You rev that engine about as high as it'll go, then release the brakes—and pray. Seconds later the deck suddenly falls out from beneath your wheels, the wings catch the wind, the plane begins to lift, and you're airborne. And very happy about it.

  Landing is much more complicated. Very few things in my life will ever be as small as the aircraft carrier on which I had to land. When I was standing on the deck of a carrier, it seemed huge, miles long, like a small city. But it was amazing how fast that deck shrank when I got into the air. I had been flying for more than two years when I attempted my first carrier landing. I had flown several different types of aircraft in various situations. I had spent hundreds of hours in cockpits and thousands of hours in classrooms. I knew every nut and bolt on my airplane, I had studied the physics of flying, I understood aerodynamics. And yet, even with all that training, as I looked down upon the Guadalcanal from about thirty-five hundred feet, I thought, are they out of their minds? This is impossible. I remember thinking, Holy God, I gotta get back on that?

  If I had spent time thinking about doing it, it probably would have made it more difficult. Instead, I just did it, exactly as I had been taught. My alternatives were limited: I either landed my airplane on that carrier or I found out how good a swimmer I really was. That is called motivation.