Thud Ridge by Jack Broughton

Author:Jack Broughton
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Vietnam War, Aviation, War, Military History
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

7. Fifteen Sams for Geeno

As we took the belated and hesitant step of pressing the attack against North Vietnam's symbolic experiment in industrialization, the Thai Nguyen steel complex, my buddy Geeno was notified that his next assignment in the States would take him back into research, back to the big puzzle palace. Although Geeno was one of our more aggressive leaders and gave it all he had every time, he had already gone the advanced education route to the big degree that led him to a strictly support position. Only the real-life facts of the Vietnamese operation—the Defense Department does not like to call it a pilot shortage in so many words—had allowed him to escape to the fighter pilot's primary job of driving a machine in combat. Now, as the war heated up, he was not too pleased with the prospect of heading back into the administrative jungle. How much that thought pressed him to ov-erextend himself while he had the chance I shall never know, but he sure pulled it all out.

The personnel mill seemed to be constantly out of rig, not sending enough qualified pilots down the pipeline, or once in a great while sending too many; and there is a never-ending flow of people like Geeno who are unhappy with the friendly personnel officer and their new assignments. Some of the reasons why it works like this make sense of a sort. Others don't.

You can't have the same younger people fighting the battle interminably or they run out of longevity. Even if they don't, you can only put a guy in the way of getting killed so many times before he loses his enthusiasm for the role. And besides, you get just plain tired. So you replace them with older men pulled in from some remote installation who once flew fighters or maybe never did but wear the set of feathers on the chest anyway. Now, even the most single-minded fighter pilot will admit that someone has to fill these vacated spots, but that is a lot less easy to accept when it applies to you as an individual. The real catch, however, is that it takes a different breed of cat to drive a fighter properly. For years we have shuffled our pilots into jobs that have little or nothing to do with combat, but they aren't standardized components and they don't convert back from a desk or a transport simply because a computer spits out a set of orders. Conversion or retraining takes time; often, it doesn't work. Aging, too, is a factor that should not be ignored where it means that the pilot has been forced to lose the razor-edge of frequent and demanding single-seat flight. If some of our best people are lots older than they were back in Korea and still going strong, it's usually because they have been close enough to the machines to keep their hand in, growing and aging with the machinery, learning to use to perfection every assist the system affords.

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