Every Man a Tiger (1999) Read online

  In November 1990, Chan’s husband Coung was released from Vietnam. I was in Riyadh when I got the news and was overjoyed. Over the years after the evacuation of Saigon, he had been in reeducation centers and had endured a great deal. Ba also died about that time; but her wish to be buried in the soil of Vietnam was never realized. Hung was married in Salem, Oregon, in 1979 to a wonderful and beautiful woman named Quin (who doesn’t take any sass from him). His sons are named Viet and Nam, so he will never forget the country he once served so proudly.

  3

  The Vision of Bill Creech

  FOLLOWING Vietnam, the Air Force was in bad shape, but it was by no means only Vietnam that had caused it. The problems were systemic in nature; they were the consequences of the way the Air Force had been run for many years.

  Ever since the heating up of the Cold War, it had been the nuclear mission, and those who were in charge of it, the SAC commanders, who had been running the Air Force. In doing so, the SAC commanders gave every other Air Force mission at best only partial attention. How could dropping a bomb on a bridge compare with destroying the Soviet Union? The SIOP became supreme, and, as Chuck Horner had discovered, other methods of training were either downplayed or forbidden.

  Bomber generals like predictability, order, and control, and in World War II, the best guarantee of bombing success had involved sending one’s bombers over the target in a specific line at a specific altitude. When the bomber generals became the SAC generals in the decades that followed, they ran the Air Force the way they already knew and already thought best—with order, centralized control, and intense micromanagement from above.

  The authority of the SAC was further enhanced when Robert McNamara became the Secretary of Defense, and instituted the Planning, Programming, Budgeting System (PPBS) used by the Pentagon to build the annual budget submission for Defense. PPBS made the USAF Nuclear Forces—SAC and Air Defense Command—into what were called the Major Force Program 1, MFP-1. Since MFP-1 programs supported the most important part of America’s military strategy, they were to receive more DOD attention, and money, than other programs. Meanwhile, TAC and Conventional Forces were MFP- 2—second class.

  The SAC generals took the ball and ran with it. Their methods, their procedures, became the only ones allowable, and they refused to tolerate any deviations. They did their best to standardize everything for which they had responsibility, and manuals and directions became the order of the day.

  For instance, Walter Sweeney, a SAC general who commanded TAC in the early sixties, devised a system for rating the wings using what was called “Management Computation System” (MCS). Each wing’s activities were given a monthly score. These included not only measures of combat capability such as bomb scores and aircraft-in-commission rates, but also on-time payment of officers’ club bills, the number of lawns that needed cutting in the base housing area, the number of DUIs (driving under the influence) ticketed to a wing, and the number of contributions to the Air Force Aid Society. From all this a composite score was computed. The wing with the top score was presumably the best wing in the Air Force, while the one with the lowest was the worst. If a wing had a bad record paying its club bills, that counted as much as anything else, and the wing commander would certainly be criticized, and might even lose his job.

  It’s no surprise that a system that measured uncut grass alongside bombing skill had no credibility with the troops. No surprise, either, was the result: the troops lied.

  Take the case of a range officer at the bombing range at Poinsett, five miles south of Shaw AFB, at Sumter, South Carolina. An F-100 flight from Myrtle Beach was going to be on the range. The flight leader would give the range officer a call to tell him the kind of scores his squadron needed for their MCS points; and the range officer made sure that they got them. Consequently, if a pilot threw a bomb way off target, the score actually reported by the airmen became a no-spot (the smoke charge didn’t function when the bomb struck the ground, so the airmen scoring the bombs couldn’t tell where it hit). In short, there was no failure, and no loss of MCS points.

  Another Sweeney game was to call from his office directly down to a squadron. Whoever picked up the phone was put to a test. Procedures that pilots were supposed to commit to memory were printed in the pilots’ handbook in boldface letters, and the hapless man on the phone was asked to parrot the boldface for a given emergency in his type of aircraft. Sweeney, naturally, had the book open before him; and if the pilot on the other end of the phone missed a word, he got a vicious chewing-out. And Sweeney wanted it all exactly as written; it had to be “Throttle—Off,” not “Throttle—Shut Down,” even though they meant the same. The result, first, was that the boldface procedures were soon pasted to the wall over every telephone in every squadron in TAC. Second, when Sweeny asked for the pilot’s name, he got an alias. Some of the names were very creative—Captain John Black, for instance, would become Captain George Suckfinger—yet the SAC general never caught on.

  To the pilots, standardization and authority were important, but not this kind of mentality, and so the best of them fought back. They saw a vast gulf between the jobs they were being told to do and the jobs they felt needed to be done, and it seemed to them they had three options: they could crack under the strain, do a half-baked job, or fight by deceiving—lie and do the real job as much as they could swing it. Thus, integrity meant lying—not a good place to be, and the strains showed.

  They showed in many ways—problems with drugs, alcohol, race, and sex. Too many crashed, too many were lost. They showed in smaller but equally telling ways, too: too many aircraft inoperable because there weren’t enough parts, too many hangar floors filthy, too many NCOs in their offices instead of with their troops, too many troops without clean toilets or clean washrooms.

  It wasn’t until 1978 that a general named Bill Creech took command of the TAC, saw what needed doing, and did it, but that was several years in the future. In the meantime, men like Chuck Horner started laying the groundwork for reform.

  When Chuck Horner returned from Vietnam in August 1967, he was primarily an operations man: he flew fighter planes, that’s what he did. Now, while continuing his strong operational inclination, he found himself on a steep learning path. He needed to understand how to work the bureaucracy, needed the right kind of mentoring, needed to be shown how to get things done off the field as well as on. It was very lucky for him that his first major job offer after Vietnam put him in the heart of tactics development at Nellis AFB in Nevada.

  NELLIS AFB

  Nellis has long been, as it calls itself, the “Home of the Fighter Pilot.” Because of the large-scale ranges and the free and open airspace, much of the USAF’s fighter equipment and tactics development has been carried out there, and after Vietnam began to make its presence felt, and money was freed up to develop the new conventional systems needed to fight that war, it was a very busy place.

  In the 1960s, two major functions were based at Nellis: a fighter wing that performed F-105 (and later F-111) qualification training; and the Fighter Weapons School (FWS), where top fighter pilots received (and still receive) advanced training in fighter pilot instruction—at first in the F-100 and F-105, and later in the F-4.

  Fighter pilots with a great deal of experience (usually 1,000-plus hours) and credibility were selected both for their flying skills and their ability to instruct, and sent to the FWS for a six-month intensive training course—in effect, a doctoral degree in Fighter Operations. The academics were fiercely difficult, and there was nearly endless flying in which every move was graded in a laboratory environment on the ranges. Beyond that, FWS students learned how to be superb platform instructors, as well as how to work with maintenance to ensure that the bombing systems were working correctly and the munitions being maintained properly.

  After leaving the FWS, graduates were called patch wearers: instead of their flying squadron patch, they wore on their right shoulder the FWS patch—gray with yellow circles and
a bomb impacting this bull’s-eye. After finishing the course, receiving their patch, and returning to their home base, patch wearers became the promoters of fighter excellence in their squadron or wings.

  Graduates additionally received an “S” prefix on their Air Force Specialty code. Thus, AFSC A1115E signified the following: “S” meant FWS grad; “1115” meant pilot; and “E” meant F-105. When personnel people noticed the S on an AFSC, they knew this pilot needed to be handled specially, not only because of his special training, but also because of the Air Force’s huge investment in him. For that reason, patch wearers were more likely to be assigned the good flying jobs.

  ★ In August 1967, Chuck Horner returned to Nellis to an assignment in the Combat Crew Training wing. This was not an appealing career move, since the wing was then converting from F-105s to F-111s, which was much more of a bomber than a fighter. After some finagling of dubious legality that kept him technically AWOL for six months but let him avoid his official assignment, he found himself flying as an instructor at the Fighter Weapons School, where a friend, Gary Willard, was the commander. There Horner went to work teaching Wild Weaseling and Electronic Combat for pilots and electronic warfare officers. He also took on special projects, such as testing a new radar bombing system for the F-105 and new Wild Weasel black boxes. Meanwhile, after six months of less than official status, a friend in personnel took care of the paperwork that made Horner legal again.

  In March 1968, Major Paul Kunichica asked Horner to join the team at the new Fighter Weapons Center at Nellis. Though the FWS had been set up to teach graduate-level fighter aviation, it soon found itself managing test projects, writing doctrine, and conducting advanced studies, all of which detracted from the quality of its principal mission, and so the center was created to take care of all those noneducation functions, all the projects and functions that needed the expertise resident at Nellis. Instructors from the FWS populated the center, and though they still flew with the FWS, they now spent most of their time working on new bombs or writing requirement documents to guide the development of new aircraft.

  Horner and Kunichica, a Japanese-American from Hawaii, had flown with each other a number of times and were friends. Kunichica worked for Colonel Dick Bond, who in turn worked for Brigadier General (soon to be Major General) Zack Taylor. Bond was very smart, below the zone (promoted to rank early), and liked cocky young men who enjoyed staying late at the office, while Taylor, a soft-spoken but tough-as-nails Virginia gentleman who’d been an ace in World War II, was the father of the Fighter Weapons Center, and a man of conspicuous integrity.

  After he moved up to the Center, Horner still flew with the squadron and taught, but he spent most of his time on projects such as a study of F-111 bombing accuracy, and on concepts that defined the capabilities needed in the fighter aircraft destined to replace the F-105 and F-4. Out of these concepts came the FX and AX, which eventually turned into the F-15 and the tank-killing A-10.

  More important personally, Horner began to understand what mentoring meant in the military, as the newly promoted Major General Taylor took him under his wing. “Bond and Taylor challenged me,” Horner says now. Bond threw Horner into some of the General’s pet projects, which meant that Horner and the General often found themselves on their hands and knees on the floor of the General’s office, building charts that the General could use to brief his four-star boss, General Spike Momyer, at the time the TAC commander.

  In young Captain Horner (promoted to major in 1969), Taylor saw a man who would see the problems through to a solution. Horner fought problems the way a dog worries a rag. He plunged into them and let fly. He loved making order out of chaos. When the smoke cleared, the floor would be covered with debris, but there’d also be the glimmers of a solution here and there, which Horner would gather up and present to his boss. During this process, he and Taylor would argue the concepts, push them and pull them, and in so doing Taylor often elevated Horner’s sight picture, got him to aim better at the real target, propelled him toward working the right problem . . . often to stop thinking small. Taylor showed him how to think big.

  This was Horner’s first time really working the bureaucracy—an experience not too very different from combat, he quickly realized: a lot of men were gunning for him—not because he was arrogant, but because he wasn’t afraid to stick his neck out and do the work at a pace they could not generate.

  The largest question facing the Fighter Weapons Center had to do with its continued existence. After the Vietnam surge in weapons development ended, the various Tactical Centers had to be reorganized, and those that were no longer really useful or viable, eliminated. Besides Nellis, Shaw AFB had the Reconnaissance Center, Pope AFB the Airlift Center, Eglin AFB the Air Warfare Center, and Hurlburt AFB the Special Operations Center. Taylor involved Horner in a study to look at what they needed to do at Nellis. When it was done, Taylor took the briefing to Langley and his new boss, General Momyer, and even suggested that the F-100 test aircraft at Nellis could be retired, which would save much-needed funds. Momyer then ordered that all the Centers be studied, to determine if there could be additional assets cut or even if the Center was still needed. Taylor picked Horner to be the representative from Nellis on that study, as he had worked up the formulas that allowed Taylor to make the cuts there. Before Horner left, Taylor gave him some very simple but important advice. “Don’t defend Nellis,” he told him. “Do what is best for the nation and the Air Force.” It was a magnificently empowering directive, for there was no hidden agenda. At the end of the day, Nellis’s Fighter Center and Eglin’s Air Warfare Center remained, but all the other Centers were shut down.

  LANGLEY

  When it was time for Horner to move on, General Taylor continued to take care of him—most importantly, by passing him on to Major General Gus Henry, the TAC planner, when Horner was assigned to Headquarters Tactical Air Command at Langley AFB, Hampton, Virginia. For the two years from 1970 to 1972, Horner was a staff officer, called the Action Officer (AO), in the office of the Deputy Chief of Plans in Plans in Studies and Analysis, under General Henry. There were five AOs, and for the most part they put together studies that aimed at answering questions such as how many fighter wings were needed, how best to use laser-guided bombs, and what the relative cost was of a sea-based attack sortie versus a land-based sortie (answer: ten times more expensive if you flew the sortie off a carrier).

  At Langley, Horner learned the elementary lessons of what it takes to be a staff officer. It was a demanding job, filled with intrigues and battles, within both the TAC staff and the Air Force, and beyond, within the Army, Navy, and Marines. Horner’s agenda was to push “tactical” as opposed to “strategic” aviation. Instead of funneling the bulk of the Air Force’s efforts and budget into the nuclear war mission, he wanted to put the best equipment, training, doctrine, and tactics at the disposal of the people who might fight the actual wars.

  The staffs themselves were war zones. At the TAC staff, the enemy was sometimes Strategic Command Headquarters, sometimes the Army, which was always trying to take control of the Air Force, sometimes another Deputy Chief of Staff who wanted his influence and power to grow at someone else’s expense. Sometimes it was the “doctrine” of the other services.

  Military doctrine is a conceptual statement, or even a philosophy, of how a service looks at its mission and intends to accomplish it. The essentials of Air Force doctrine can be stated simply: The first requirement of modern war is to gain and maintain control of the air. Airpower provides flexibility, range, and firepower. It can be adapted to a multitude of strategies, from attacking the enemy’s capacity to sustain war to attacking the enemy’s military forces directly.

  The doctrines of the other services tended to be much more codified and specific, which presented problems for Horner. The other services’ staff officers were better trained in their own doctrine than he was in the Air Force’s, which was more intuitive, so when he had an argument with the Army or Marin
es, they threw their doctrine at him from the rule book, while he had to make his points more with logic and enthusiasm. Landmen are lawyers; airmen are evangelists. Landmen think about defeating the enemy army; airmen think about defeating the enemy. Navy men fall in between: they look beyond defeating the enemy navy, but only think about defeating the enemy from the sea.

  It soon became apparent that all the services advocated doctrines that optimized their own role in battle, but downplayed the overall role of joint operations. Fortunately, there were men in each branch, Chuck Horner among them, who felt differently. They were sickened both by interstaff and interservice parochial arguing, and the compulsion to defend service prerogatives and programs. They simply wanted to get the job done.

  All through his career, Horner would run into people who had gone through the same catharsis, and when he did, they tended to get along, because of shared unspoken beliefs. They didn’t lie to one another. If they thought someone had a dumb idea, they called him on it without attacking him as an individual, but if they thought he was being less than honest, they attacked him without remorse. They came to know whom they could trust, and it had nothing to do with the color of a uniform or with rank.

  From the TAC staff at Langley, Horner moved on to the Armed Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia, where he trained in planning for joint and combined air, land, and sea combat. During this period he was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel below the zone, in 1972. He then spent four months at the College of William and Mary, where he earned an MBA. And then it was on to the Pentagon, the Five-Faced Labyrinth, for a three-year tour.

  THE FIVE-FACED LABYRINTH