Jocko Podcast - 364: You Only Fail if You Quit, With Record Breaking Fighter Pilot, Dick Rutan

Episode Date: December 14, 2022

Retired United States Air Force officer and fighter pilot, test pilot, and record-breaking aviator who in 1986 piloted the Voyager aircraft on the first non-stop, non-refueled around-the-world flight with co-pilot Jeana Yeager. He was born in Loma Linda, California, where he gained an interest in flying at a young age. He is the older brother of famed aerospace designer Burt Rutan, whose many earlier original designs Dick piloted on class record-breaking flights, including Voyager.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 364 with Dave Burke and me Jocker Willink. Good evening, Dave. Good evening. The Mistys who volunteered were among the most talented, hardworking, courageous group of men I have ever encountered. To a man, they were remarkable pilots. They worked long hours, days on end, to get the program started. During the early missions, we were consumed with establishing procedures, deciding on tactics, constructing our maps. testing varied equipment in aircraft configurations and learning the area it was

really hunt and peck trial by fire we decided on three cycle missions using two in-flight refuelings we were looking for road traffic storage areas and SAMs which were beginning to move into the lower parts of the pack those early misty missions were really hairy as we experimented with how to survive in a dense AAA environment while marking targets and directing strikes. Though facking was not a new concept, the U.S. Air Force had employed facts since World War II. Fast facking was new, and we were truly plowing new ground. We had to learn to operate and survive in a very dense threat environment while operating

for extended periods at low altitude, dicey stuff. our loss rate during the first six months was 42% a steep expensive and tragic learning curve i cannot emphasize too strongly the courage of the first group of men who raised their hands they were going where no jet pilot had ever been before to do dangerous things no one had ever done and that right there is an excerpt from a book book called Misty, which is the book is made up of a bunch of first-person accounts of Misty pilots in Vietnam. And that particular account was from a man named Bud Day, who is the founder and the first commanding officer of the Misty Squadron, which he commanded for about two months before he was

shot down. He was captured by the communists. He actually escaped his initial captivity, but he was shot and recaptured. And then he was sent to the Honoi Hilton, where he spent five years and seven months as a POW. Upon his release, he was awarded the Medal of Honor for his personal bravery and his leadership in the face of extreme enemy pressure. But even while he was in captivity, the rest of the squadron, the Misty Pilots, They continued on. They flew the F-100 Super Sabre, which is known as the Hun.

There were 157 pilots that served as Misty Fast Fax, and FAC stands for a forward air controller. They were around from 1967 to 1970. And as forward air controllers, that meant they did that from the sky. They were marking targets and directing other aircraft to take out those targets and it was a very dangerous job Especially because the Misty pilots did a bulk of their flying in North Vietnam where they were exposed to the most intense Of the enemy air defenses and of those 157 pilots 34 were shot down two were shot down twice 23 were recovered

Four were captured by the enemy. Seven were killed in action. But they were able to accomplish their mission. They were able to get bombs on target, destroy critical enemy nodes, and deliver close air support to troops on the ground. And it's an honor to have one of those pilots with us here tonight to discuss his experiences and his lessons learned. His name is Dick Rutan. He served 20 years in the Air Force.

And in addition to his combat experience, he was a test pilot, a record-setting pilot. He piloted the first plane around the world with no stopping and no refueling. He's also an author. He wrote a book called Voyager and another book called The Next Five Minutes. And it's an honor, like I said, to have him here tonight. Dick Rutan. Dick, thank you so much for joining us. Well, it's great to be here.

I'm a great fan. It's, man, when you think about this new mission that you guys picked up and what it's like to learn when you're learning curve is you're learning in combat. That's a rough thing to get into. A rough way to try and figure things out. Well, trial by fire. That's why it's called the, initially it was called. the Voyager or the Misty experience, the Misty Experiment. There we go.

Anyway, there's a thing on PBS that's very popular now about that, that was made up. Oh, about the Misty pilots? Well, it's called Misty, the Misty Experiment. It's on PBS. Oh, well, I haven't seen that one yet, but I'll definitely check that one out, because it's anytime you're exploring new ground like that and you're doing in a combat situation that's that's a scary thing to do and you guys were definitely doing it um so let's before we get into that let's let's start at the beginning and about kind of where you came from in the beginning

and i'm going to go to your so your book you've written two books this one's called the next five minutes embracing the impossible and uh you say in this book my father dr george a rutan always said he had an inkling that my life would involve adventure even as a baby in diapers I was exploring our farm in rural Oregon I wanted to see and touch and explore it all looking back I realized that our parents gave their children the precious gift of freedom to explore the world and experience life they never held us back from doing anything even if some fought it risky or dangerous my dad lovingly called pop was a product of the Great Depression and a World War II Navy veteran he

took advantage of his VA benefits and put himself through dental school, then moved his family to Danuba. Am I saying that right? That's right. Dinuba. Dinuba. Yeah. A small agricultural heartland town, 35 miles southeast of Fresno, California.

It was the perfect place to grow up to fly Cessna's and Piper Cubs, to ride motorcycles and to throw toilet paper out of an airplane over the high school during a Friday night football game. While riding my BSA motorcycle, I was often chased out of town by, local cops, but usually found a way to ditch them by riding through neighborhood vineyards. I knew they couldn't catch me, although many tried. I enjoyed the thrill of this cat and mouse game, even when the officers would caution my parents about my unrueliness.

So there's a little glimpse into your childhood. Sounds like you were a handful. Now, it's great. Dynamo was an absolute fantastic place to grow up. had the freedom, a lot of agriculture, and that's when we learned how to fly. Little airplanes, and it would be buzzing and throwing toilet paper out, like they said. So what did your dad do in the Navy? Dad got in at the very end of the war.

In fact, he should have been exempt, and he called up, and there was a mistake someplace. And they gave him a draft notice. He says, hey, I'm married and I have a family, and I should be exempt. And they thought, well, yeah, you're right. But he says, you know something my country's at war? God damn it, I'm going to go. And he did. And so what do he do in the Navy?

He was, I think he was a corpsman there in Farragut. In fact, that's up where we live right now in Cordellane, Idaho, by Lake Ponderance. and there's a big, huge naval base up there. And that's where he spent the end of the war. He never made it into a ship or into combat or anything. And then he used his GI Bill to pay for dental school. It became a dentist. That's right.

Like many of those vets, they took advantage of that. And I think it was probably one of the best investments our country ever made. Yeah. And then, you know, you've already talked to me. We were like two paragraphs into the beginning of the book, and you're already talking about flying Cessna's. What was your first experience in a plane? Well, it was right after World War II.

It was just a little kid. I can't remember exactly what it was. But my mother, when dad was going through dental school, we didn't have any money. And for some reason, mom took me out to a place called Flae Bob there in Riverside. It's a little grass field. And she bought an airplane ride. for this little kid.

And to this day, I can remember almost every detail of that experience. We went out there and we're going to fly and that was a pretty neat thing. And at that time, that airport was just a grass field someplace. And it was in a

Piper. It's a J-5 Piper cub in the back seat was a little wider and then that means that two people could sit there. Okay, well, they put mom and I in the back and when I sat out I couldn't see out. You know, the windows were too high. And I said, there's no fine way that I'm going to sit in this hole in this experience. So I stood up and grabbed onto the pilot seat.

And it was an old airplane. And I can still remember the stuffing. And I can still remember what it smelled like. And I remember that the tires had no tread. And somebody came out and hand-proped the airplane and got it going. And we accelerated. and the big thrill of lifting off in seeing an entire new world

that I had never experienced even existed. And for that 15 minutes that we flew over Riverside, and I still remember the famous mission in, and I had no idea that later on that I was going to be honored with a set of wings in the Flyers wall. But anyway, I looked down, and it was so amazing. And what I saw that day would change my life,

forever. Mom would say her two sons had aviation fuel instead of blood and they were not issued birth certificates, they were issued flight plants. And so from that moment on, it was an extreme, I guess, abnormal fascination for aviation. And unfortunately, maybe at the expense of a more rounded character development. Now, I knew a lot about airplanes, everything. As they flew over, you could identify which one they were. And I knew what kind of motor engines they had and so forth. But the other things to make a rounded experience for growing up,

I knew absolutely jacked squad about any of that. So as you're growing up, so you definitely want to be a pilot? Oh, absolutely. Did you want to be a military pilot? Yes. To go back a little bit more, I grew up in the dawn of the victory of World War II. And this time I became fascinated with aviation. And then I was really fascinated about combat. And I found it very intriguing. And as I learned more about those guys that flew out of the 8th Air Force in East Anglia in England. and those long missions in B-17s and B-24s.

And I learned about the loss rates. You know, one group would come back and 600 beds would be empty. Who are these people that did that? When three-fourths of them were casualties. And I thought, how in the hell? You know, it's one thing to go and do that once, but if you're the only one that comes back from your whole squadron with wounded on board,

how in the love of whatever do you get back in another airplane and do that again? I was fascinated. Who the hell are these people? And then you had to ask the question again. You know, I kind of wanted to be a warrior. I always thought it was the ultimate and human competition

is where the pinnacle is where each other would compete for the ultimate prize and that's your life. And it's fascinating. How can I could I do something like that? And I had to find out one way or another. I had a learning experience, a learning problem.

It was diagnosed just a few years ago, actually, when I was trying to write this book, and I was telling people how I read and how I process things. But it was a dyslexia, whatever that is, dyslectic. And I always had a hard time in school. But the fascination for whatever the warrior's life was, I don't know, had to find out for myself. Now, every young warrior grows up, and pretty soon he's a warrior, and the time goes by, and it becomes the age to be a warrior. Okay, I'm a young guy, and I'm in the thing right now.

This is a warrior. And then you walk outside and look around and think, well, what war am I going to fight? It's a small window of opportunity, actually. And I looked around, frick. It was Vietnam. But I still had to find out. And that was something that was kind of gnawn in my back all that time. I couldn't wait to do that.

I had to find out if little Dickie Rutan can do that. And, you know, our parents gave us some really important things. One of it was freedom. There's the world out there. I give you life. You can make of it what you want. And I remember, well, my mom would take it to air shows. And this was in Merced, California, and I was a little kid.

And I never forget that. I was walking up there, and there was an RF84, a reconnaissance, F84, jet. Smell like a jet curasing. And I remember looking in the windows, the camera windows, and they had scantily clad females in there. And I thought, wow, this is really cool. And then I saw that pilot standing there, and he looked really cool. Man, he had his G-suit on, his flight suit on, this at his wings, and he was a pilot, man, and he was a flyer.

He could go and fly that airplane. And I stood there and looked up at him, and my mother, what she said right then was really important, kind of a turning place in my life. And my mom looked at me, and she says, Dick, would you like to do that? I says, oh, God, would I ever? But then I said something to the fact that I don't think that I could ever achieve that. And she grabbed me by the neck or the nap. And she said in no uncertain terms, looked at me and she says,

if you want to do that, you can. And don't you ever say that you can't do something like that? And that was the motivation. Like she says, you can do, if you can dream it, you can do it. And the only way to fail is if you quit. and to achieve all those things that you dream about, all you have to do is manage the motivation. And so on that day, in that Castle Air Force Base in front of that F-84,

she instilled the fact that I could really do that. Now, was she able to take that focus and get it towards your grades in school? No. According to your book, it didn't go get there. No, I always had problems in school. And that was driven somewhat by your dyslexia. It was by dyslexia. could identify it or nobody could evaluate what the hell was Burtt was Dickie having a problem

in school. In fact, my dad, right after grade school, right after high school, he sent me down to a university, I think, in Southern California for an aptitude test. Hey, is this, you know, who is this kid? Is he, what his aptitude is? Is he a college type and whatever? And I went down and took the test, and Pop came back and says it scored very, very low and, well, like in English, as an example, communication skills. But I was very extremely high mechanical,

very high mechanical aptitude. And so then I wasn't going to be a college guy, obviously. And not to jump ahead too much, but I went in the Air Force right at a high school. and as I was going through advancement and so forth, to be a lieutenant colonel, I had to have a college degree. So in that time, they had a bootstrap program. We're talking about motivation again, the bootstrap program.

So here I am. I'm going to be a lieutenant colonel. I got about 18 years in the service. And they sent me off to Killing, Killeen, Texas, the American Technological University. and for about a semester or whatever it was, three or four or five months. And I went out there by myself and in a little apartment. Now, here are this older guy.

You know, he's been to Vietnam, and we've been through the Cold War and setting nuclear alert and stuff. And I'm looking around all these kids out here, drinking and raising hill and chasing girls. And I wasn't doing any of that. And it dawned to me, and he says, hey, You know, you did have problems with this. And I thought, this is college. You know, geez, I feel always scared of college. I wonder how I'll do.

And then I thought what the motivation was. I got a family and two kids. I need to get promoted. And if I don't, I'm going to give up retirement and all those other benefits and stuff. And the humility of coming back and failing this thing. And so I figured out a way, I got a briefcase, and I put a tape recorder in it.

And I sat down in that seat right in front of that professor. And I didn't have anything else. I wasn't drinking and I wasn't chasing girls or anything. So every word that he had, I wrote notes, you know, detailed notes of this thing. And here are this dyslectic kid that had a problem in any kind of academic situation. He graduated with a BS degree on the dean's list. and a 40 average. Holy Manhattanist.

And it's just the motivation. You can accomplish anything. If you can, all you have to do is manage the motivation. If you keep yourself motivated or motivate those around you, it's the example of the World Flight Project. I kept thinking, and we had some horrible times, you know, challenges. The five and a half years with no money, having to build this big, huge airplane ourselves by hand.

The flight test, dangerous as hell, I don't know how I ever survived that thing, and this frail little airplane that was going to go 29,000 miles. Wow. And when things were falling apart, and I wanted to give up, about motivation again, I would go out in a special place in this little, crummy little airport, Mojave, semi-abandoned military field in Mojave, California, in the high desert, next to Edwards Air Force Base. and I have a special place that I would sit down in the hangar by the hangar looking the ramp and looking out over the desert

and some insurmountable problem difficulties and I'd close my eyes and I would try to imagine what it would feel like to land at Edwards Air Force Base having accomplished aviation's last milestone and I close my eyes and let that feeling permeate permeate through my psychic. And I'd realize this is the last, you know, the last milestone in aviation, it's unrefueled world flight. And I think, and I'd loud, after thinking about that, and I'd let it settle into my psychic, I'd thought, you know, I'd feel pretty good. I'd feel pretty good. And for five and a half years, when I was really down and dejected, I'd do it out there and close my eyes and try to visualize that. Then that was managed, managed the motivation.

And I found that that's really a key thing. And I try to tell people about that. If you can dream it, you can do it. But just manage the motivation, and you can accomplish anything. Now, as you're growing up, you've got your brother, Bert, right? Right, brother Bert. And it sounds like you two are thick as thieves and everything that you're doing, right? Well, not really.

We were five years apart. So, therefore, we were never in the same school. at the same time. I was gone, went to a high school and being five years apart, I was gone a year and before he even started. So we weren't really all that close, I guess, in some ways. I guess it seems like you became close later. Well, yeah, we were brothers. He was, you know, I was a guy that was riding motorcycles and getting chased by the cops and stuff and buzzing around Friday night high school games and being the long-haired Elvis Presley haircut with dirty Levi's hanging on the last the last hair of my ass and so forth. And, you know, he was the one

that was more studious. I think that the education thing, the two brothers, he got a lot of, he got a lot of what I needed to go to school. Of course, I took away from him some of the mechanical part of it and so forth. And that's what, so you're growing up in the 50s, because you're born in what, 30, 38? 38, right. So you're growing up in the 50s, this is an in California, in the 50s, Elvis, motorcycles, Levi's jeans, like you had the whole thing going on, right a lot of a movie. American graffiti.

That's it. If you remember that movie, I mean, I thought that they had done American graffiti in my little town because all those characters, I knew every one of them. I went to school with him. Now, you also mentioned the book that you were scared of heights. Yes. What was that all about? Well, phobia.

Well, it's Ed's phobia, I think. It was really, really, and my brother and I both have Ed's phobia. If you get, I couldn't write in glass elevators, or I couldn't look off a tall building or look over a cliff. And I didn't realize, you know, this later on, in the Voyager project is that I always thought that phobias were just sissy things you know so what you're what are you scared of height not heights but you're scared of what spiders or scared of being in a tight place and I just thought that was that was a sissy thing

but it was but the fear of heights it became a debilitating phobia that I'd go over next to a cliff or something and become cold and clammy, uncontrolled shaking, extreme heart rates, inability to, and the ragged edge of being panicked. And so I've had that all in my life, I guess. I just, how do you cure to that? Stay the hell away from high places, don't look off big cliffs and stuff. And I thought everybody had that. You know, you're supposed to be afraid of being high for crying out much.

So I just thought that was normal until that particular thing happened during the stress of our Voyager project. And there was a lot of stress, mental stress and stuff for that. You know, no money, trying to do it with volunteers. People, volunteers would not show up. They'd only do half of it. And it was very stressful, especially with no money. and the thing is to hell with it, we're going to do it anyway. It's just a neat thing.

So I took off in my Long AZ that I built, one of the first models that my brother designed called Long Easy. And I took off one day, and I did the first turn under traffic, and it hit me. That debilitating phobia happened to me in flight. I never had any problem in flight just looking over the edge of a cliff and it hit me. It hit me so bad. Cold and clammy, heart brace,

inability to do almost anything. And it skidded the airplane around and finally damn near crashed on the runway trying to get back and taxied in and then sitting there by myself. And the heart rate would slow down. You could kind of relax a little bit. And then I thought,

Holy crap, Dick. You're right in the middle of the Voyager project. This is your project. You're going to be the commander. You're going to be the guy. You're going to be the guy that lands at Edwards Air Force Base and taxied up for the whole world, having accomplished this great milestone achievement.

And I can't fly. I'm screwed. What the hell am I going to do? I knew right away that I could never tell anybody about that. You know, who in the hell would ever fly with me again? And rightfully so, I wouldn't blame him. I said, this guy, for some unknown reason, could have a debilitating phobia. I mean, that's a grounding thing.

And it so happened, and it was in Las Vegas. It was in the Hilton Hotel. And it was sitting at the bar that some real strange things happened, fortuitous. What happened? At the bars in Vegas? Well, it was in a bar, but that wasn't the point I remember. Remember, for some reason, I sat down next to some guy, and we struck up a conversation. And I found out that he runs a clinic for fear of flight.

You know, people have that passengers, and people come in and they go through a program about trying to overcome fear of flight. I said, what? Boy, I needed to know about this. And so as it turned out, he was very forthcoming. And I would ask questions, you know, the details of the program and how you do that. What is, I mean, how do you cure people of this thing for crying out loud? And he was very forthcoming. And boy, old Dick, he was taking detailed memory notes of everything that happened.

Then I realized, Dick, you can never tell anybody about that. In fact, I don't think anybody ever knew until they read my book. and I did it it was a self-help self-cure thing and it was really incredible and at the end of myself my self-taught clinic

I have no fear of flights no fear of heights any place I thought wait a minute you're supposed to have a little bit of fear because if you fall you could get hurt really bad what was the crux of getting through that well

because just so for context for everybody that doesn't know the whole story. I mean, when you're working on the Voyager flight, when you had this, so you've been scared of heights your whole life, but you'd also been a pilot your whole life at this point. You'd flown in Vietnam, you'd perish you. You've done a bunch of things that had to do with Heights,

but then for some reason, in the middle of this effort to go and fly around the world in the Voyager aircraft, you're getting another little aircraft, which, by the way, I look at your brother's little aircrafts that he built, and they're like little one-seaters. They look like you could, they look like a little model airplane.

that I used to build, right? So maybe that's what you were scared of. But you get up on this flight and all of a sudden you get this height panic. See, when this thing, the panic happened, I've already been through my civilian thing. And I was a flight instructor and I went in the Air Force and went through pilot training, went to combat, set nuclear alert, all those things I've already been done before I finally did my 20 years and one microsecond, by the way. And we could talk about what was going on then. So anyway, I got out 20 years in a micro-second,

and then joined my brother, and then we did the Round of the World thing. So I had flown a lot. And none of that phobia or scariness or anything ever manifests itself in flight. You know, I could, you know, I'm a fighter pilot for crying out loud. We do air shows.

And I just felt right at home, and there was never any situation until that one particular thing under a lot of stress that it finally crawled out of my psyche and hit me really bad, and I had to cure myself of it. So what did you do to cure yourself, though? Well, first of all, you have to get all the symptoms gone. I mean, real quick. And so I was in, you know, there's some of these hotels that have a matriam inside,

and you come out of your room and you're looking inside the hotel, and, you know, you look over the edge, and it's really a long ways down there. And you go up to the edge and you get all the symptoms going, all of them. And it took all the willpower I could, almost drag myself, grab the edge, and pull myself up and look at it. And the more that I'd look down, the more this phobia would just explode into my psychic, heart rate, breath, skin, cold and clammy, and uncontrolled shaking. And the first thing you do with this, you get all the symptoms going.

and then you identify one part of your body and you concentrate on it totally on that particular thing. And I chose my right elbow because it was shaking. And I concentrate as much as I can and I finally, after maybe, no kidding, after 20 minutes,

I could get that one elbow to stop, to stop shaking. And I says, oh, that's really cool. I says, well, I'm going to try the other elbow. So as soon as I would go to work on the other elbow, first one would start again. They didn't have to go back and do that. But that was a procedure that you would get one, you would slow down one arm and then you were able to control it while you went to the other arm or the right leg or the right calf or one part of it. And so you go through

this procedure, you drag yourself up there and this phobia would just explode on you. Everything was going. Then you go down right elbow, left elbow, right knee, left, left, until you got them all calm. And if you concentrate on it, you can keep them quiet. But as soon as you would try to do something else, boom, they'd explode again. But what I'm getting that is, is you go through this procedure,

and you can finally start to control everything. And then your skin isn't cold and clammy anymore, and you feel relaxed. But the problem was, I can control my breathing. I can decide when to take a breath and not. But what do you do about this damn thing in my chest that's going like mad, really high heart rates? And then it was the thing called biofeedback.

And they talk about how you go with biofeedback to be able to control your heart rate. And then pretty soon, I could go up and if it tens would happen, I'd go right over the left, left, and just calm everything down. And then eventually, eventually I had no symptoms whatsoever. Not even a normal fear of heights on the edge. Got it solved.

And then... But then you think, hey, there's this thing back in the corner of Dick's psychic someplace. This gremlin could crawl out again. That's why I could never tell anybody about that. You've got to keep that one quiet, especially the insurance people. especially the insurance or the FAA in my medicalist because I knew that that was a grounding, a big time grounding item for the FAA.

So let's get back. I want to get back to sort of how you got into flying in the first place. I'm going to go back to the book here. And again, look, the book is awesome. So many details inside the book. Just go get the book. I'm going to read some highlights from it.

But there's plenty more highlights that we're not going to read, but just to kind of talk through the story a little bit, you say this. Throughout my childhood, I struggled with academics, a struggle that was almost debilitating. Regardless of how hard I might try, it seemed I was doomed for failure. I was held back a year in elementary school, but nothing improved. By the time I reached high school, Pop decided to have a battery of test run to help me clarify my strengths and weaknesses. It was determined I had exceptional high mechanical aptitude, but skills in other areas suggested I was not college material. Decades later would pass before it was discovered I

suffer from undiagnosed dyslexia. What I did know was I had a gift and a passion for flying and aspired to make my mark doing something in that field. Fresh out of high school, I could hardly wait for the opportunity to fly high in the stratosphere and make those white vapor contrails. So I signed up for the United States Air Force Aviation Cadet Program. After taking all the tests and going through the rigorous physical and written exams, I was told I was qualified.

I was not qualified to be a pilot, even though I was already a civilian commercial pilot, but they had a special program for me. I could become a navigator. I couldn't believe it. I was fully physically qualified. I had fighter pilots eyes, but did not score the best in academics. I suspect that that had everything to do with their decision to reject my application for pilot training. I complained to my Air Force recruiting sergeant. He told me all I had to do was when I got to pre-flight at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio was tell them about my civilian pilot status and they would change me right over to pilot training. That was the first, that was one of the first lies told to me in my new way of life away from home. It all seemed so simple, and I signed the dotted

line. This is the first time I'd ever been away from my mom, my family, and the safety of my sheltered life. I stepped off the bus in my low-hanging Levi's and long, greased up Elvis haircut. I soon discovered I would lose my cool hair and during the next two weeks would only be allowed to mutter, yes, sir or no, sir. This once shit-hot civilian pilot was now off to nav school it nearly broke my heart along with my spirit the cadets assigned a pilot training were issued brand new shiny helmets while I was issued three large books of celestial site reduction tables so that's your introduction you get you get a this assignment to be a navigator you go to nav class you end up as a backseater as a rio a radar intercept officer you get stationed in oregon from

Oregon, you get stationed up in Iceland. And then when you get to Iceland, you apply for pilot training again and you get accepted. And when you get accepted for that, you get assigned to an air transport squadron, which is flying in and out of Vietnam, which now the Vietnam War is kind of getting started or starting to escalate, I should say. Well, yeah, what happened? Yeah, I had no interest in navigating big cargo airplanes back and forth. So then I went into the fighters. I was flying fighters, but in the back seat as a radar intercept officer. And then I applied for pilot training. For some reason, if I fly in the back seat long enough, according to the Air Force, I got a lot smarter. So then I was smart enough that I could go to pilot train. So while I was waiting

to go to pilot training, I was assigned to C-124's cargo. old, they call it big old shaky. And while I was waiting to go to pilot training, I was actually flying as a navigator now in this big huge cargo airplane. This is right in the middle of Vietnam War, back and forth to Saigon. And as it turned out,

those hours that I spent at 8,000 feet in a C-124 waiting to go to pilot training gave me some incredible understanding of what I was going to face later on in life to fly this Voyager around the world. And as it turned down, having had that Nav experience, that may have been critical to the success of the flight around the world and the Voyager. So I don't know, maybe Faye goes around and it comes back around again on who can tell. But you do end up finally, like you said, you got a lot smarter as you flew around in the back of the airplanes. You got a lot smarter. You got accepted for pilot trading.

And you say this in the book. Before I knew it, pilot training, 67D was ready to begin. And my time as a navigator came to an end. I was off to Loughlin Air Force Base in Del Rio, Texas, right on the Rio Grande River west of San Antonio. Although I didn't appreciate it at the time, my experience as a navigator over vast stretches of open ocean. and training with radar would prove to be a vital factor in the successful completion of Voyager's flight years later. Because of my academic challenges, I knew I had to work clever, work hard, and maintain my motivation to be successful in pilot training. I would sneak a tape recorder into class by concealing into my briefcase.

I made it a point to sit front and center row so I could capture every word of each lecture. With the help of these tape lectures, I arduously wrote impeccable notes to study from and aced every test. I graduated number one in my pilot training class. Granted, I had a huge head start with more flying time log than many of the instructors, but I never told anyone I was a civilian pilot. I was a civilian instructor pilot. I let them believe I was just that good. Upon graduation, I was awarded my dream, the F100 Super Sabre,

affectionately known as the Hun. Out of 360 graduates, there were only two F100s offered with that. I was off to real life and death combat in Vietnam. So you kept it a secret that you were a civilian. Like, how many hours did you have? Well, see, I wanted to go into the Air Force pilot training. I can go back to that day that I stood there at March Air Force Base looking up at that fighter pilot.

You know, he was a guide from a different place. And here, after all the interim years, I was going to be able to do that. Now, I always made a joke that I always thought, if you want to be a real Air Force fighter pilot, you had to go to Luke Air Force Base, and you had to train in the hunt. It was a difficult airplane to fly. It had some really strange things about the airplane, but that was more of a challenge. I says, if you want to be a real fighter pilot, you've got to go through Luke Gutnery School, getting the F-100. And so I talked about that

during my pilot training days. I was bragging, and I said, I'm going to get an F-100, and I says, I'll bullshit pretend. They says they haven't given an undergraduate pilot training right out of training to go directly to fly this really weird airplane. I said, that's all right. I says, all I have to have is one because I'm going to graduate out of 360 pilots

in five different bases. That is number one. Well, you're talking about a heads up. I had to bite my tongue a lot because I was a civilian flight instructor. But I had been wanting to go to pilot training all my life. I wanted to go to that training. And I didn't want anybody giving any shortcuts

or bragging about, hey, I'm already a pilot. And the old hamids says, that's a lollipop that I've been wanting to lick for a long time. And I want to lick every darn bit of it. Now, it came to the point when you graduate, the class standings. And this is kind of more or less a metaphor. but they have all the assignments written on the blackboard, see, and there's a curtain. And they come up and they say, okay, who's number one in the class?

And they open up the curtain, and there's all the assignments. And I looked up there, and much to my shock, there was two F-100s. Now, I'd been bragging about it. Everybody says, ah, bullshit, there's no way. But it opened up. they were surprised but the most surprised person in that whole room

was me I had no idea that it would be there and I walked up just like yeah I knew it all the time BS I didn't know squat all the time and of course then we went to

the gunnery school went from there on to Vietnam so when you were coming through as a pilot a civilian pilot structure like how many hours of flying did you have Well, this is a guess. I probably had a couple thousand hours.

So Dave, Burke, how much of an advantage is that going through pilot training when you have a couple thousand hours worth of flight? Well, it was a flight instructor thing, too. See, I sold it on the day that it was my 16th birthday. My mom drove me out and I sold it in a little Cessna 140, and then I, she took me down to the DMV and I did my driver's desk and then I could drive my mom home for the first time. So I was, so I was a pilot before. And then your 17th birthday, the day that you needed to be to be a private pilot that I could carry passengers and so forth.

And then at 18 years old, it could be a commercial pilot and flight instructor. So Dave, what's the assessment? You have 2,000 hours worth of pilot time and you're going through pilot training. That's definitely going to help. But in Dick's offense, that can cut both ways. And when I was in flight school, the kids, now nobody hit it. You couldn't hide it. I think when I was going through, if you had flight time, everybody knew it.

Some of the best students had experience. But some of the worst students were the ones that had experience too. So I think you obviously had to keep that to yourself. And you have to not reveal your bad habits or your habits. or your habits that you have brought as an aviator and you've got to pretend like it's all new. So having flight experience mostly helps, but I saw kids struggle a lot

because they didn't want to learn a new way of doing it. So a few guys that had a flight time didn't get through the program, particularly because they were unwilling to adapt to a new way of doing it. Sounds like you didn't have that problem. Dave, you're exactly right, because it had to be very careful of that.

But it wasn't the fact that I was going to be, like the civilians do it better or something. But I noticed that I was just amazed about how different things were. It's all proceduralized. Like in military pilot training, to enter the pattern is exactly like. There's a bridge you'd have to overfly, and then there was a farmer's pump house on his thing, and then you turn downwind, and it was all proceduralized. You know, brace, talk, trim, turn, very regimented, see, very regimented.

And it was amazing. I thought, you know, somebody, that farmer goes out there and tears down that pump house, none of these guys could get back. But it's just a procedure. But that's the way it was. But the thing was that I sat there, I remembered as a little kid sitting there in Dinuba, picking grapes or something, and looking up and see those contrails, a single contrail, so high that I could not see what was making them.

And I looked up at that thing, and never forget. And I says, damn, I've got to, there's nothing else I got to do. I mean, the desire to be at the pointy end of that contrail was overwhelming. Here again, the motivation. And there it was, two sabers up for grabs, and you got one of them. I got one. I'm going to fast forward a little bit in the book here. You say, my assignment to Vietnam as a combat fighter pilot was typical.

After completing advanced gunnery school at Luke Air Force Base in Phoenix, Arizona, of this newly minted jet fighter pilot attended Air Force Survival School at Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane, Washington. It was February, dead of winter. I would be stationed in the jungle tropics but was being trained to survive in waste deep snow. On our ride to Vietnam, we made a short stop at Clark Air Force Base in hot and sticky Philippines, where we received specific jungle survival training. This environment was definitely more representative of what we would have to face in the jungles of Vietnam, Instead of having to build a shelter in the snow, we learned how to catch, kill, and eat boa constructors.

Arriving in Vietnam, I had to burn Bummeride from Saigon and a C-130 flying 300 miles north to Foucat, where the 35th tactical fighter wing was located. In August of 1967, I was assigned the 416th squadron as a newbie fighter pilot to get checked out in combat. In South Vietnam, most of the action was air to ground in support of the ground troops, in support of the ground troops. Being a newbie, I was always the tail end of the four ship formation. We would check in with the forward air controller, a guy in a little Cessna, and he would fire a smoke rocket into the jungle. We would hit his smoke with our four, 500 pound mark 82 bombs and then return to base. I seldom saw any ground fire coming my way. So that's kind of your introduction.

You get over there, you're doing these missions. And then this happens. say finally the day I had been anticipating my entire life arrived how would I react to being shot at directly my target this day was a bunker complex and the goal is to drop napalm into the tunnels I flew at low altitude assumed a shallow dive angle and snuggled up close to the enemy tunnels to hit the target as I rolled in just off to the right of my bunker target a 50 caliber triple A opened up firing bright tracers the tracer stream was aimed directly at me and they were close someone down there was trying to kill me specifically this is the moment that

would define me as a warrior or as a coward in 1803 president Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark on the three-year core of discovery to open up the West upon their return captain Merriweather Lewis told the president the greatest exhilaration a man can feel is being shot at and missed as that long stream of trappers tracers zipped past my canopy my first thought was not to turn away or hide between my knees or to cry for my mother it was exactly the opposite my first reaction was the audacity of that son of a bitch to shoot at me generally the next thing you do will get you killed resetting the site from the bombs to guns I

rolled hard right and headed in to destroy that bastard observing this my flight lead screamed, Rutan, get the hell out of it there. I argued, but sir, he shot at me. He repeated, Rutan, get the hell out of there and probably saved my foolish amateur ass. Captain Lewis was right. The exhilaration was overwhelming and extremely addictive. At last I had found my answer to how those World War II bomber crews could go out again and again. I too could do it. I was a combat warrior. I loved it. I welcomed it. I needed more. Much more. As my combat career progressed, I was described by some as aggressive among the aggressive.

I had not come to Vietnam to drop bombs on the top of trees. As with most hot shot fighter pilots, I came to kick some ass win and then go home. That's pretty good introduction to combat. It sure was. but then it answered a lot of questions. But it also found it generated something else. I don't know if I talked about that, about it, I call the, there's an adrenaline gland that most people have.

And I call it a combat gland. And I think it's right here on the right side of my neck someplace. And what happens, it's only active if somebody shoots at you. And then it gets active. And what it pumps into your psychic, into your system. It's the most, well, it's extremely addictive and euphoric, addictive and euphoric. And it's like an addiction, a drug addiction. Well, maybe it is a metaphor again.

But you need to have more and more. And then I found out about Misty, kind of by accident, that that was part of the, I think that's the only mistake I made in the book. It's the 35th Tech Fighter Wayne. It's actually the 37th, but whatever. But anyway, there was this little detachment of a very small, a very small group of people in a very highly classified area and doing some really shut-on stuff. And I thought, that's what I came here for.

Yeah, you write about here about the Misties. The Misties flew the two-seat jet trainer version of the F-100. Each plane carried two fighter pilots, one in the front, was the mission commander and the one of the back was the forward air controller. To keep each honest, those roles alternated. They flew low and fast over the panhandle of North Vietnam and Laos. Single fighters armed with only a few hundred rounds for the 20 millimeter canons and 14 white smoke marking rockets. To be able to see them through the camouflage, they had to get right down in amongst them. So the loss rate was high. The first Misty commander, Major Bud Day, who we heard from

already today was shot down early in the operation and spent more than six years as a POW. With air refueling support from the KC-135 tankers over the Gulf of Tonkin, Misty missions were long, four to six hours and laced with plenty of action. Owing to high risks, the Misty unit was composed of only volunteers, and each tour of duty was short, only 120 days. A high percentage of those who did more than one tour were shot down. Each Misty sortie was a shorty was a lot of, assigned flights of F-105 Thunder Chiefs or F-4 Phantom Fighter Bombers. If they had a really hot target, they could scramble gun fighters off the alert pad at Danang to come north and work with them.

Most high-value targets in the north were well defended with intense AAA. Once a target was determined, the Misties orbited just out of gun range and waited for the fighter bombers to join. It took a few minutes in the orbit to brief everyone on the target, and that gave the gunners plenty of time to pump up adrenaline and exercise their trigger fingers. The Misty had to mark the target with a white smoke rocket and was the first one down the shoot. The gunners knew the drill as well as the Misty's rolled in inverted and pulled the nose down toward the target. Every gun would open up. Within seconds as tracers flashed by their canopies, they lined up to fire the

smoke marking rocket. It was always one hell of a rush, a real e-ticket ride. Now this was more like it this was real combat this was what I came to Vietnam to do I had to become a Misty how did I do it first of all Misties are volunteer okay volunteers okay okay so I volunteer so in January of 1968 my life changed dramatically I was a Misty and on my way to the action in North Vietnam no more making toothpicks out of jungle trees or upsetting monkey colonies my new world revolved around heavy AAA flack, truck parks, burning oil fuel dumps, storage bunkers, and stopping the flow of war material along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. This was what I was here for. God, I loved it.

Yeah, so they, so you only had 120, that's the standard tour was 120 days. 120 days in Misty, right? And the, the, you're going out on these operations. What's the chances you're, you're, You're going out on a Misty operation. What's the chances you're going to receive enemy fire? Every time. 100%. 100%. The Misty day, well, we could only do three Misty missions in a row, three of them.

And then you were totally spent, beat. When you say in a row, you mean three days in a row? Three days in a row. And these are four to six hours apiece. Four to six hours. However, you'd wake up three or four hours ahead of time because you had a long intelligence briefing. What was going on up there?

What were the other mysties reporting, truck parks, barge traffic, burning trucks, whatever? We need to be really up to speed before you went up there and took over. So there was a long intelligence briefing. And then you go out to the airplane. It's still dark. And you get in the F-100, you taxi out. And usually in Vietnam, it's,

It's kind of semi-foggy, maybe a little drizzle, kind of an eerie thing. And just before dawn at Fucat, every morning a lone F-100 would light his afterburner and off into the Merck to North Vietnam. And every morning I'd hear that lone F-100 take off and wonder what his day was going to be like. And you'd go up, we had our own tanker. Because if you're low and fast in a jet, you're burning fuel. And since you have your own tanker off the coast, it's just you, then you could do multiple refuelings, and you could still fly your mission.

But it was kind of an eerie, solemn thing. I remember going through the Chowall Hall, and a Vietnam combat chow hall. You've experienced that, too, powdered eggs and greasy bacon and some stuff in the more. morning chow home and maybe you would drink in a little bit before the night before and you're really not feeling all that good and normally you wouldn't want to you wouldn't want to eat it I would look at that and I said it skip it you know but I stand there and I look at that food

and I think about how terrible it is and then somebody a little voice would come to you and said dick you better eat this because this may be the last meal you're going to have for a long time And then with that in mind, you sit down there and you whiff it down and gag it down as much as you can. But then, it's about a 20-minute flight. You go up and you rejoin with your tanker just off the coast of North Vietnam. And about 20,000 feet, and you take on your load of fuel. And then this experience between the time that combat started, is you back off of your tanker and you make that turn.

and you start descending at 20,000 feet, you're going to penetrate North Vietnamese airspace, and you're going to try to do it at a different place each time, not for the routine. But it was very solemn. The air was generally very smooth, the most serene thing you could ever see, and pretty soon the coast of Vietnam,

which is normally kind of farmland and rice patties and things, the most peaceful thing you've ever sent. And as you descended out of 20,000 feet, to hit the coast at low altitude where our mission was. You check your visor, hit your visor down, your chin strap on, make doubly sure that all the seed ejection safety pins are pulled out and in your pocket. And then all of your emitters are tied out

because you don't want to have a transponder on or a beacon on. And then you set up for the rockets and the mill setting, and then you arm the gums. And then you sit there for a handful of minutes. And you think, God, I wouldn't want to want the next. six hours of my life is going to be like. And it's kind of an awesome, quiet, solitude feeling.

And then you got it pumped up to 550 knots. And then all of a sudden, now this is kind of, the light level was really low. Because it's just kind of... Early in the morning? It's just on, we just want to, we don't want to penetrate at dawn.

And we're going to be there until noon. But that first time, you have this eerie feeling. Like, you know, what does the next six hours of my life's going to be like. And then all of a sudden, all that changes, because the very first gunner on the shoreline sees you. And every bloody tracer that he fires, you can see it really easy. And then there's a lot of guns on the coastline. And they know the drill when Missy's coming, because we're up there every day. And then the whole skies is full of

the most beautiful fireworks show you've ever seen, this massive display of tracers. Then you try to find maybe a, I've heard it called the tear in the curtain to make your way inbound. But then with the very first time that that first guy opens up at you with the tracers, that little gland in my shoulder I was telling you

about, ha, it's on. It is pumping. And then it's freaking combat, baby. And we're going to be there in mortal combat with my fellow man for the next six hours. And I'll tell you what, this guy loved every damn second of it. It was a big challenge. You know, you kind of hide your trucks and stuff and your war materials that kill our soldiers in the South, and we're going to freaking find it. And I'm going to round up some F-4s and some F-105s to come down there and bomb it and take you out. And if any of you guys even have the thought of one of your classic Russian gun sites, six position in a circle, they're all classic Soviet with 37 and 57 millimeter. And then there's the other one, the 50 Cal and the, what's it, 14 zip guns?

And then there's always the, everybody has an AK-47. And when you fly by, especially in the mornings, all the little villages, They all look like sparklers, and they're all shooting, but they're shooting. You know, we're pulling a lot of Ging, jinking really hard, so they can't ever aim at us. And every once in a while we'd pick up a small arms round, very rarely. But then it's the big stuff that would, you know, blow your whole airplane apart. And then it was fights on.

So are you waiting for the fighter bombers to show up before you ingress? Usually there's an air order of battle for the day, a frag, they call it. And we were assigned, like the other Misties, there were some other targets that were identified, that we need to go up and make strikes on that area. And then, just before the day started, they were assigned your assignment at 105s, flight of F105s, or F4s, they called the gunfighters,

the F4s out of Danang. They were assigned to us. They'd show up and we'd rendezvous and I already have the target and I'd go down and find it, identify it. And then we'd brief them. You know, the altitude, the escape routes, what the winds were, altimeter setting.

And that's a brief that you're doing on station. Yeah, when we finally join up with them. So would you have to, in order to find the target, would you have to go down and look? Right. And that was the big problem. That was mainly why we had a, a forward air control in North Vietnam.

Because the guys that would come up there, they're not up there all the time, and they're high altitude. And a lot of times, I find that this is really unfortunate, that they would go and drop bombs on villages and stuff, especially at night. They'd see a little village, and they'd bomb the villages.

And they'd say, and the morning mystery, they'd come up, and the controllers would say, hey, they had a, I said, the guys were up here last night, and we killed 40 trucks on Brown Route, and we go over there, and there wouldn't be any trucks on Brown Route, but there was a village over here burning.

When we put an end to all that, so that I think that we directed the airstrikes against legitimate military targets on the Ho Chi Men Trail, and that was good. And sometimes they identified it, and they wouldn't have fighters, so they would identify it, and then they would brief us the next morning, and we'd go up there and find it. Now, if you're up there almost every day for six hours, you get to know that place like the back of your hand, especially the gun sights. The gun size's accuracy that varied dramatically.

In fact, there was a guy in Laos. He was on an edge of a real rugged carse, and he's a 50 caliber. We call him the kid on the cars. And every morning we come up and wake him up, and as we'd orbit him, he would shoot, exactly 180 degrees. And he was the worst shot in the world. And I always looked at down. How do you get all that ammo up there on this steep cliff?

And why in the world, why in the world would he lead us like 180 degrees around the circle? And when I'd have a new Misty pilot, I'd say, I want to show you what a 50 caliber looks like. And so we'd fly up there, and the kid on the cars, he would fire, and wouldn't he'd come any close and so forth. But every once in a while, some of these gun crews are really good. they would get us, normally you could see most of the gun sites,

and if you could see them, then you could avoid them, or you could not maneuver in such a way. And we'd name, we'd give them names and stuff. But basically, if the guy was really good, and his camouflage, you know, this is a major Soviet-style gun site, if they were well camouflaged, and we came by, and I had my belly up looking at something else and they would fire and the tracer would come those big 57 caliber of 37 caliber things you know

as big as a beer can would come by with that with that red tracer comes by really close and sometimes you can actually hear the shockwaves you know like a like a baseball bat around your airplane then they know that they were really close and if they were really close and very clever and well camouflaged we freaking had to go back and kill him. At least I did. The thing about combat, if somebody is trying to kill you, and like the bombers in World War II, they just have to sit up there and take it. They couldn't retaliate against it, and I thought that was really horrible. But the Misty had the ability that if you were good and you came really close to me,

fucker were going to come back and take you out. And so I'd roll back, roll back and there'd be a ring around the gunside, it'd be slowly drifting away, and then I'd pull up just out of their range, and I'd think, and they knew what the drill was going to be after that, because I'd either go out and get some tankers, but I'd come back, and we'd scramble the gunfighters out of Danang, or we have a flight of F105 so we could rob from the guys going downtown, Hanoy, or something.

I says, hey, I got a target for you. It's an extremely aggressive, accurate gun site, and I want to take them out. I want you to take them out for me. Quiet. Sometimes the Misty would try to describe where the gun site was by talking them into it, so I didn't have to mark them. I says, okay, guys, you see the Gulf of Tonkin out there? Yeah, we see that.

It's a big river called the Cranky River. Okay, follow it up until it has a dog leg beam. You see that? He says, okay, right at that place, and you try to talk them a little road, and right off there there's a field. And if I tell them, sometimes I could talk them into like a truck storage area or something, and they could get that. But if I'm trying to talk them into it verbally into a gun site, they almost never can see it. They say, okay, Missy, this is your target. You freaking mark them, man.

Now, you have to go to what altitude to get a mark on a gun site? Well, we knew what the range of them was, and we'd just climb out of the range. 57 was a little higher, 37 was a little lower. And it was really interesting because these shells, the six positions, and they'd all open up, and the long stream of tracers. And they'd float up and they'd get slower and slower and slower. And finally, the tracer would go out, and then you couldn't see them anymore, but then they would start down, I guess, and then they would all see.

self-destruct, boom, boom, boom, boom, little puffs of smoke. And we try to stay above that. And that's what? 4,500 feet or something like that? Yeah, 4,000 to 5,000 feet, if memory serves me right. And so you're doing your best to fly above that range? Right. When you go to mark a target, do you have to go into that range, or can you mark it from

outside that range? No, no. You got to get in there? They know what the drill is. And it's up to you to put that white phosphorus smoking, right, marking rocket right on top of them. And what you want to do is find out what the drift is. So you put the marking rocket just upwind.

And when the white phosphorus goes off, it blooms up. And hopefully it'll drift over the gun. So when my first fighter down the shoot, he has a better chance because they can't see him now. And then he can come in and drop his bombs. But, you know, as a kid, for the first time you climb up on a high dive at a swimming, and you walk out and all of a sudden this 15 foot looks like 15 miles and you look up what the hell am I doing here and it takes all the courage you have to walk out on the edge of the board and jump off for the first time and everybody's experienced something like that it comes up finally the misty

circling them and they shot and they missed the misty now they know what the drill is and they know that if the first thing they do if missy marks them they're dead And so all their concentration is is to knock the Misty out of the sky. And they're all waiting for you. And sometimes you'd have to wait because the fighters weren't available then, and they'd have to go out and refuel or whatever. So you're circling them, and they know what the drill is. And as soon as Misty's, as soon as his wings roll up, pass vertical.

And as soon as you're past vertical and the nose starts down, every damn gunner knows that they got to kill the misty. Because if they get marked, they're fucked. Now, there's a handful of seconds because there's a thing called lead. If you're flying along, we could always jank, and they would have a hard time tracking us and give us the right lead to hit us. But there's about four or five seconds where there's no lead required. because all I have to do is aim right at the missile because he's coming down to shoot right at you.

There's no lead, there's no lead requirements or anything and there's that handful of seconds. So that's when you've got your nose at the target and you've got to keep it there for four or five seconds to get your rocket off. Yeah, and there's an overwhelming urge to just throw the rocket down there and get away, but then he keep thinking, this is important because how I market, how I have. If I can use the smoke to blind them, I owe that to the fighters that are coming up there too. And so it takes a lot of willpower. When the nose finally comes down and then they're all shooting, then it's all coming up your way. And to roll out, pull it down, put the pepper just below the target, and then let it ease up and make sure there's no yaw involved in the airplane, and you're not a lot of G.

because if you're having, if you're flying G, the angle of attack will change, you're marking, and it's all that. But it's that handful of seconds, and it takes, you think, you know, just don't throw this thing out there. It's like an eternity, and you pull it up, and then you stabilize it, and then pickle. And once smoke rocket comes out. Now, the bad thing is the escape route. And once you fired fairly low at maybe a 30 or 40 degree dive angle. And what altitude are you at when you fire? 1,500 feet.

Okay. So maybe 2,500, 2,000 feet. You're well within range. Okay. Now, the worst thing you want to do is you fire the, then you pull off straight ahead over the target. You don't want to do that. So once you fire, you roll the airplane about 130 degrees. degrees to the right and then you pull down into the ground and and what you want to get is a

tracking solution that they have to use some type of skill to be able to hit you tracking. Now they've only had this one chance where they don't have to do any, all they got to do is aim, they don't have to lead you. So you pull to the right and down and roll wings level. Now you're coming out pretty low, but there's no way they can track you because because now there's a big angular velocity and stuff, and you're pulling up. And when you come back around, you want to look at your smoke, and it's either hit my smoke,

or generally the fighters, three or four fighters that are orbiting, there is absolutely no freaking idea, no confusion, because that whole thing, the muzzle flashes just, you almost light up the world. And then it's payback time. And the misty pulls back up, and you say, you know, hit my smoke. And then you pull up around and then lead rolls in.

And now they all concentrate on lead coming, because he's got to do the same thing coming down the shoot. Of course, he can drop his bombs a lot higher. I was going to say, can't he drop from a bigger altitude? Yeah, maybe six or eight thousand or something like that. So is he out of their range of their weapons? No. By the time they pull out, they're probably down within their lethal range for sure.

And now, if you're flying around and you see the guy roll in, there's no way you can tell because of the angular velocities and stuff. The angles off when he rolls in and drops his bombs. Now, his stick of bombs come off and he pulls off. And then you see him the bombs fall. And then you see the gun side, the muzzle flashes going up at him. And they see them. and you see them down there shooting like mad, and then you watch the bombs come

and see the gun sides, the bombs come. And then the gratification you get when it hits them dead center, and all of a sudden the most conflagration of dirt and nails the gun sites. And then the guns are laying over and all the bunkers are gone and stuff. Sometimes.

Sometimes they miss. So what we would do When they would roll in Then I would pull up in the opposite direction and make a fake pass at him And that was to draw fire away from number two And he's coming down the shoot And then we just do a crossing maneuver And they may be able to do the same thing for three coming down

To try to draw some other fire And there's a handful of minutes that it's pretty exciting And in a four to six hour mission How many targets would you go after? It varied a lot, depending on the weather sometimes. It's usually a pretty high workload. If you're not, if you're, you've had your assigned targets. Sometimes all they want to do is drop bombs on a road to do a road cut to on the side of a cliff

and try to close the, try to close the roads. They did a lot of that, thinking they were going to close down the road. the Hoachian Trail. We go down there in the afternoons we put in a bunch of strikes and actually have a road slide on a cliff and I thought boy that shut down the Hoachim Inn Trail for a while. We come back at dawn the next morning and the road is fixed. It didn't slow them down at all. The other thing that was really fun is that the Navy went out and they mined at some of the rivers like the Quanky River up there and they were magnetic mines.

And when they were like when a boat comes by it would trigger magnetism of it and it would blow up Well these these mines would sit up there and they get more and more and more sensitive And this this this was just fun I guess and so the first guy down the river First guy in that morning become real low right down the river going real fast and Almost there invariably we could trigger off some of those mines behind us you know just to go up and screw with it them sometimes. Good, good overview of what you guys were doing up here. I got, again, you profile some of these missions in here.

Here's one of them where there's a downpilot. You say, down in the jungle is one of our own, a fellow fighter pilot, a warrior. He was still free and talking on his survival radio. So this guy got shot down and you hear him talking. Our creed was that if you are free and talking, we will never give up on your rescue. The rescue force that morning suffered numerous delays in mismanagement. Before helicopters could be deployed into North Vietnam, permission had to be required from some kid in LBJ's White House. It seemed that permission giver was asleep and no one wanted to wake him, which caused extensive delays at a time when every second was critical.

Frustrations abounded for those on the rescue team. I had flown seven and a half hours the day before and would invest another seven and a half hours before this day was over, with nerves ready to see. snap this disjointed rescue effort continued and it was already close to noon my relief Wells Jackson a Misty 2-1 had just arrived as he was being briefed a call came from search and rescue headquarters in Saigon canceling our rescue and instructing us to pull out all forces I was incensed with this turn of events but the orders had originated from those much higher on the chain of command than I a lowly captain then it hit me Since I was the only one who could talk directly to Jack the downpilot, it was going to be my job to tell him we were giving up and abandoning him to the North Vietnamese for certain torture, imprisonment, and possible death.

I was infuriated. What were they thinking? We were American fighting men and we never give up. Enraged, I demanded to know who gave the order to pull out. Turns out it was a general in Saigon who thought it was. was too risky and it issued the order to withdraw. I thought since that general made the decision to quit, that general should be the one to tell Scotch Zero-3 that he was to be abandoned.

Sleep deprived and furious, I ignored any sense of military rank protocol and demanded the general tell me the exact words to use when informing Jack that further rescue attempts were being aborted. While we waited for the exact words, I finished briefing my relief, Misty 2-1, and with a heavy heart left the area knowing we were about to fail one of our own. Back at home base in Foucaat, it was now close to sunset. I sat slouched in the O club, disillusioned that my commanders could violate our most sacred Cree.

If you are free and talking, we never give up. and heartbroken, my only company, a couple of empty beer bottles. I contemplated my commitment to these high-risk missions. It was then that Wells Jackson, Misty 2-1, burst through the door with a big smile on his face. I had to wonder what the hell he was so happy about. Hey, Rutan, they got Scotch out. I could not believe my ears. And blurted, what? Jackson continued. Yep, Scotch was rescued. Seems the general could not come up with the, exact words to tell a fellow warrior he was about to be abandoned. Perhaps the general began to realize how such a decision could compromise the long-term morale of all of us who fought and died on the Ho Chi Men Trail.

That particular mission, when they got him out, see, before that morning, well, actually the day before, we were up there and there was a flight of F105 not under our control but I could hear him talking that Scotts 03 the number three guy in that four ship

Fon 05s they were calling calling and there was no answer so I flew over to the area that they were working and just by a fluke by glints maybe just a second

I spotted the orange and white canopy in the top of the jungle and as I flew up, pulled up, to come back around, it disappeared. However, I memorized that spot before I took my eyes off of it again. So I pulled up and I called and called, there was no answer. And so then I pulled up and I did a dive bomb pass where I could talk to him overhead, diving right straight at him at that point. And I called Scotch, and he came back, and he could hear me, and he could talk.

Now, there's just a handful of seconds that we could exchange information. Where are you? I mean, are you okay? He says, no, I have my call. He says, I have a broken back and I can't move. Come and get me. Now, the sun was just going down, and it wasn't enough time to generate a rescue force. And so Steve Amdor, another fellow, Misty and I, we'd already done a six-and-a-half-hour mission.

And we put Scotch asleep that night and told him, we'll be back at dawn to get you. And we went back to Danang and landed and tried to organize a rescue force that morning. And then we took off, about three hours of sleep, we took off. And just right at dawn the next morning, I came across that thing with my afterburner going

and called him and there was no answer. So I pulled up back around and I dove at that spot. And then I could ask the question, he can give me the answer, and then we'd pull off and we'd go away. So that's how we were going to communicate with him. Okay, this was dawn, this faithful day. It was long and disjointed rescue.

In fact, they'd shot up two helicopters. The helicopter would come in and hover, and they found him that night. They located him, and they set up a flak trap because they knew we were coming back. And every time one of the helicopters would come into a hover, Jolly Green and H.H.3 Air Force helicopter, they would shoot and shoot them up pretty bad. And they did that to two of them, and they got away. There was an A-1 Skyrater that was also working the rescue that morning, and he got shot down, and for some reason he tried to dead-stick it into the Ben-Huy River, and he was killed.

So we lost two helicopters, and we had one A-1 shot down, and the pilot was killed. The whole morning was disjointed because they had B-52 strikes coming in, and they pulled off our rescue forces numerous times to let these big bombers. You know, here these guys are 30,000 feet. They dropped their bombs before they even go feet dry, and to try to, you know, hit some targets that were near where we were working. So we got pulled off back and forth. So finally, the jollies, the jolly grains were trying to,

to come across the border into North Vietnam and they couldn't get approval. And I said something that was probably not very... I said something that wasn't very complimentary about these guys that wouldn't come in and get my guy. Which turned out, then I learned about the fact they couldn't because of some snot-nosed kid in LBJ's White House that had to approve it and nobody wanted to wake him up.

and boy then the frustration level was just really high. You know, there's targets that we'd have, but when you're out there and you're trying to find and rescue one of your own, then that's totally different. Your motivation different. I kept thinking, God, it could be me down there. And so there was a guy named Don Engin, and at H.H.3, Now this is after the time that I says, you know, I briefed them, and then I says, tell me the exact words.

You know, if he's going to, if he made a decision to leave this guy to die, well then damn it, let him tell me the words. I mean, you made the decision. You come up with the words to tell him, then I dawn on me, hey, I'm the only guy that can talk to him. I'm going to have to tell him that I thought, screw him. I'm not going to come up with my words. Let the general's words. And then I left with the heavy heart, like he said. And as it turned out, Wells came up and they, the general changed his mind.

And only this time when Engin came in and hovered, they put the guy's name was the PJ. He had been in country three days, I think. He was a two-starryper, a PJ that he was going to be down on the ground. And he was there just long enough to hear all the horror stories about being on the ground in North Vietnam. And then he came into a hover and he dropped the PJ down through the jungle to try to find Scott Zero 3. And I guess he roamed around, and it's all in tape, it's an incredible tape. And Wells Jackson is talking about a gunside over there that's trying to lob 37 millimeter

into the rescue area. And in Wells' back seat, he has a photographer that went along with him that day. And the guy was six hours, and he was throwing up continuously. And over the interphone, you could hear the kid throwing up. But he came into a hover. Anyway, Cali, Sergeant Irwin Cali, yeah. That's the PJ? It's on the ground.

And he finally found, he roamed around and found him. And then now he had the vector of the Jolly Green Orr. Now it's all very quiet. There's no ground fire or anything. He says, he says, forward, forward, forward. It says, okay, that's good. Drop the, brought to the penetrator. It's a long cable with a special peep.

You know what it is? A penetrator device, kind of like a bullet that can go down through the jungle. And it goes down, and it's our air mentality, puts Scott Zero-3 on the penetrator. And then everything's quiet. You know, the guy sitting there on a nice hover. Ingen. Ingen is a Coast Guard exchange pilot.

It's not an Air Force pilot, Coast Guard pilot. And they said, okay. And then Talley on the ground, there's a little radio, and he says, okay, I got him, you know, pull me up. And then there's a handful of seconds. And you can just imagine he's sitting there in a hover and the cable's coming up, oh, so slowly. And I don't know how high it was.

It may have been 30, 40, maybe 50 feet in the sky. and then they activated the trap. Now they knew this time that the Jali wasn't going any place. He was hooked. The other guys weren't hooked. They just get away. But they knew that Jalee, they had the choice of either cutting the cable and leaving.

And Angon said later, he says, guy, how could you sit there under that withering fire? And he says there was no way I would ever leave one my PJ on the ground. God, I mean, that was just his mindset. What an incredible person. And this cable come up and Talley would squeeze the mic button on his little radio, and he's been screaming, ground fire, ground fire, take it out, take it out,

and in the background you can hear intense automatic weapons fire. And Talley told it later, he looked up at the jolly, and it was being from all different directions, being shot to crap. I mean, the windshield was being blown out. there was hydraulic fluid leaking, one of the landing gear just plopped out, and there was punctures of fuel pouring down and pieces falling down off the airplane. And later on I asked Talley, I says, what a great thing, you know, to save the helicopter, you know, you'd sacrifice yourself to do that.

And he looked at me, you know, typical boy, this kid. He looked at me, he says, oh, no, no, sir, it wasn't that at all. He says, I looked up, and I didn't want the damn thing falling on me. Anyway, Engen, he was awarded the Air Force Cross, but it should have been a Medal of Honor. And even today, I'm still trying to work that out, especially since I found out an entire Vietnam War, that all the contributions that the Marines, I'm sorry, not the Marine, but the Coast Guard, this guy was a Coast Guard exchange by it. In that whole war, and all the participation by the Coast Guard in that war,

there was not one Medal of Honor winner. And I thought that's really a shame. And even today, I'm signed to write letters and trying to get that thing upgraded because I think it would be important that the contribution of the Coast Guard should be recognized by one of their heroes and anger to do that.

Anyway, they got him above the jungle, canopy, and then he translated away, and it was just a few miles. And he just crossed the Benhai River, there was a medevac there called the rock pile and they landed and that i don't think that jolly ever flew again it was shot up so bad man we got another situation uh in the book and in this one you're flying and there's another plane another saber that's on fire and there's a there's a general you don't know this at the time but there's actually a general in the in the front seat yeah this is a it's

another RF4C. You know, same thing that Lee was flying except that was a reconnaissance word. It was a wrecky version of the phantom. And so this guy, their call signed is Strobe 1-0.

And so you're flying next to them, you see that they're on fire. And you tell them, hey, you're on fire and go into the book here. It says Strobe 1-0 acknowledged our call that he was on fire, and stated we're bailing out. This should have been a standard ejection.

They were flying at 10,000 feet straight and level. At an ideal speed of about 230 knots, everything was set for routine ejection and water rescue, which is interesting that you're talking about a routine ejection and water rescue. That shows your mentality. I had never seen an ejection up close. The notoriously complicated F4 Martin Baker seat known as the backbreaker would be something to witness. I eased the old hun to route formation about 30 feet out on his left wing and waited for what seemed in eternity

Nothing happened almost two minutes dragged by before the rear seat finally ejected Later on I asked the backseat of what had taken so long they knew they were on fire He said that they had taken out the checklist and reviewed the ejection procedures The general did not want to eject They argued about the position of the command ejection handle in the rear cockpit The major upholding his duties wanted it in the command eject position where the guy in the back ejects the front seat pilot. However, the general insisted that it be left in the off position, thereby making each seat a single initiated ejection. The major reluctantly sat up straight, grabbed the yellow handle between his legs, and pulled, giving the general, leaving the general to his fate.

from my vantage point, the rear cockpit ejection was textbook, and I remember it vividly. The aft canopy opened and separated cleanly, clearing the tail by at least 20 feet. The seat started up the rails. As the bottom of the seat cleared the cockpit, the rocket motor ignited, burned for 1.2 seconds, and the seat went straight up, very stable. When the rocket stopped, the small drogue parachute released, and the seat rotated backward 90 degrees as it cleared the tail. Looking over my right shoulder, I could see the main C9 parachute canopy. had also deployed as it started to open the seat separated from the backseat pilot and kept right on going with the canopy fully open the pilot swung back underneath

I thought the whole thing was neat as hell until I looked back at the stricken aircraft what I was about to witness was chilling it would leave an indelible imprint which remained surreal and unforgettable to this day I was horrified to see the front cockpit totally engulfed in fire I saw an occasional flash from a white helmet that was barely visible through the smoke and flames The general is sitting straight up as before, but motionless. He seemed oblivious to his circumstances. Huge flames that resembled giant blow torches streamed from the rubber pedal area at his feet through the cockpit around him and out through the now open rear cockpit. The fire had filled the phantom's interior and produced a dense black smoke trail that obscured the tail. Strangely, the aircraft flew on, terrified.

I thought the general must not be aware of the fire. So I began to holler over the radio. Strobe 1-0. Bail out. Bail out. I continued to scream desperately, but the general just sat there doing nothing. The wings remained level, and the aircraft now began a shallow descent. My God, I screamed.

Why doesn't he eject? How can he just sit there? What the hell is wrong? Then I figured it out. Maybe he couldn't hear me. I was too far away. 30 feet, so I drove the hunt right up next to the burning cockpit and screamed again. Strobe one zero bail out bail out then Harland yelled oh my god look at it burn

Frustrated in half in shock and what it had just transpired not 10 feet from us we moved in closer So close the air pressure between the two aircraft caused the fiery phantom to roll up into a right bank as I pulled back the F4 turn 90 degrees rolled back wings level and pointed itself directly at the beach in a slightly steeper descent by then we we could no longer see the general's white helmet only a blackened charred canopy the paint on the entire nose was burned and blistered there were a couple of small explosions in the nose area that blew some of the panels loose and sent other pieces flying off the plane the entire front end was a charcoal-colored mass the orange and yellow flames subsided their dense smoke streaming backward over the fuselage for some unfathomable reason i continue to call strobe one zero begging him to get out Even though it was obviously futile We stayed close on his wing and at 500 feet the old phantom gave one last gas Pitched up a little then dove straight into the beach and exploded I just couldn't let go Harlan screamed god damn it dick pull up

I know Harlan's stern direction was the wake-up call that saved us I might very well have crashed right beside strobe I pulled up hard barely missing some small trees behind the beach pulling off to the left and in a choking voice I told water boy I told water boy I'm Strobe 1-0 just impacted on the beach Moments later water boy asked whether there was any chance of survival My plaintiff reply was Negative survival Negative survival Now there's a

You have to kind of go and debrief this situation And there was a tape There's a tape of this whole thing There is And there's something that you talk about in here There's something that you edited out of the tape Was it some words between you? you and the general? What was it? Let me back up a second. I always remember the Nixon,

he had an 18-minute gap. I had an 18-second gap. First of all, these were extremely high-risk missions that these guys flew, the RECI missions. They were 500 feet, and they were straight and level. And they would come up and we would check in, and they had their certain coordinates for departure and their routes and stuff. And the Misty, they would check in with us, and then we would help them identify it. Sometimes they needed some help identifying stuff. And so I would stay up above these guys and watch them,

watch them with their photo run, straight and level. It's getting shot up like that. Flying straight and level up there, it's almost a kiss of death. That 500 feet. Yeah, you just never want to do that up there to fly straight and level. I would never fly straight and level. missiles had four or five Gs on us all the time, jinking like men, so nobody could really predict where we were going to be. That's the only thing that we could survive at all.

But the one thing that I did know is that these were extremely high-risk missions into North Vietnam by the reconnaissance guys, and they were flown by lieutenants and captains, just like me. The field grade and would never be a general officer. So I had just come off to tanker heading into North Vietnam, and I heard the call that we had taken a hit just north of Kayson, I think, and we're coming out feet wet to get feet wet. And so I says, wow, okay, well, I'm just coming out, and they're coming out, and we're coming back in, so I joined up with them. Now, my perception was that I was talking to the front cedar, and the front seater. and the front seater was a captain just like me, right? I had no idea, it was a dental officer.

I had no idea that I was talking to a CNI major. The major is supposed to take care of this general in the backseat. So my conversation, my perception was that I was talking to a fellow captain that was sitting in the front cockpit, and that wasn't the case. So we joined up with him and looked him over. He looked pretty good, and we had to get real close up. underneath them, we could see there was a little bit of fire going on up in the camera bay. Nothing bad.

They were complaining about losing, I think they lost a utility hydraulic system, and it was getting really hot. But that was all. And I think the general was up in the North Vietnam where he bloody well shouldn't have been. But it was his last mission. It was his champagne flight. He was going to go home.

And he wanted, they told me that he could get an extra. air metal if he flew into North Vietnam, which he wasn't supposed to. So this general, Bob Worley, fighter pilot, really a good guy, he wanted to go up there on his last mission and bring back some good information, good photography and stuff. And so all of a sudden, well, we joined up with him. He was about, I don't know, 10 miles, feet went heading south towards Denae. and we saw the little fire. And I was having a conversation with a fellow captain,

not knowing that it was a general. And so we told them that they were on fire, or had a fire up in the nose. And we pulled off, like you said, like you read in the book, into route formation around on his wing. And they took a lot longer than I thought to go ahead, and I found that later,

that they were arguing about. Now, the general assistant, I don't think the general really knew that there was anything really, bad enough that they should eject. That's why the argument was. And I'm sure that he says,

okay, I'm going to get rid of this guy in the back, and I'm going to fly this airplane back and save it because, you know, if I lose the airplane and they find out I was screwing around in North Vietnam, they're going to really frown at me. And I think that was his motivation to get rid of the guy in the back

and then he could be the hero and fly the airplane back, which wasn't the case. The problem on the F.I. Phantom was you can't get rid of the canopy. It has a pneumatic plunger that has to push the leading edge up or else the the wind, the normal wind speed clamps it down. You just can't unlock it because it won't go anyplace. You have to have these plungers. And I think when they got hit in the nose, that plunger was damaged. And so he didn't know it at the time, but the only way he could live was to get the airplane back because this injection system without the

the canopy gone, you can't eject through it. It's one of the Martin Baker things. So that was in his, that was in his mind. So when they finally decided to go ahead and eject, the fire hit him, and I'm sure he wasn't ready for that. Now, my conversation the whole time was with that guy in the white helmet and that fire. That was the conversation we had. Had no idea that the guy was talking to was hanging in a parachute a couple miles behind us. So that was my mindset. But I often thought about what I was saying, what I was seeing, and what my reaction to that was. It says, why did I say, well, maybe he can't hear me. You know, how absurd this is, hey, hey, Dick, I didn't notice this fire that the whole cockpit was on fire. I'm sure glad you told me about that. Now,

I'm just going to go ahead and eject, hey, appreciate you telling me that I'm freaking on fire in a cockpit's full. So you're sitting there and you've got to do something. And so I called him, you know, strove in a one-o-one, bail-out, bail-out, screaming out to bail-out. And then I says, well, maybe you can't hear me. I mean, how stupid is that? What do I mean? Did it in between 30 feet that he can hear me on a UHF radio that will transmit for hundreds of miles? I mean, it's just absurd, you know, the psychology of that and what hit you all of a sudden.

And then I drove in so hard that the air pressure turned him. Other words, he would have crashed in the, you know, the golf of the Tongue. And this one, he crashed right on the beach and not wanting to let go. And almost crashing right beside him. You know, we pulled up, and the water boy was the, the, the, the controlling agency, the one that controls us in and out of the pack and BDA and organizes fighter strikes and stuff. That was our controller. And then all of a sudden, since he blew up, now I'd seen a lot of airplanes crash. And it wasn't unusual to see another airplane,

you know, a combat loss. I'd seen those before. And it was always like, okay, well, okay, another one, another combat loss, and we'd ride it off, and the war goes on. But it's we were pulling up off to the left, they wanted to know survival, and I said negative survival, and then all of a sudden there was a whole bunch of interest in this crash site. They wanted security up there, and they wanted get medevacs, and they're going to deploy a whole bunch of stuff, and I thought, what the hell is going on? That's not strange. Airplane crashes, combat loss, war goes on. So we went back, we went back and found the backseater hanging into parachute, only this time the wind was really strong on the Gulf of Tonka, and then it was

really rough. Now, we're down in South Vietnam, south of the border. So the sandpan that was coming out was coming out from the south, and it was a motorized sandpan, and it was really rough, and he was bouncing. So this is now a race between? Well, the guys hanging in the parachute, and see normally you can get killed on somebody out there screwing around if they don't know what to do now everybody's trained the jolly comes in and they know what to do and how to take care of the parachute you know all those issues you need to get to get you out of the water into a rescue craft and then there's certain training Dave you moving through all that many times soon so all of a sudden we see this this motorized junk and we look to

we look at it and it's what's a sandpan on a junk motorized and he's booking it he's going and he can see the guy hanging in the parachute and he's going out there so he go by and it has the south Vietnamese flag on it and mean in that war that doesn't mean square root of foxrod rata what the flag is and so Harlan that I talk about he was in the front seat he was my student that day and I was the instructor in the back during this whole thing and so I looked at the at him and I says well we can't let that guy get back to the pilot and I said okay well go ahead and go ahead and kill him and so Harlan armed a gun and he came back as we're turning on final I'm thinking you know maybe he is a South Vietnamese and why don't we just

scare him so he did a little pass-by and he just kept going and so it says okay well he's got the message and now we'll just go ahead and him. And as we turned final the second time, I had second thoughts and I said, well, Harlan, why don't we put some 20 millimeter right across his bowel? Okay, so Harlan did. He rolled in and he put a stick of, you know, run a strafe across his bowel. Now it was really neat. He was going out to it. I said, oh, no, no. This strape went right in front of it and then he goes, whoop, boom, boom, boom, boom. And then he beat back, beat feet back to the store. and then the Jolly Green finally came and rescued him after that.

Now, we flew back to Foucat. No, I went about another three-hour mission that day, and I didn't get back until noon. And so we pulled into Fucat, and I noticed that there was every colonel in the whole base was there at Amitas. And I told Harlan, I said, hey, I says, I don't know what we did,

but it must have been a major fuck-up. And I couldn't remember that I'd been anything really bad. But what were these damn colonels here for? And so we opened the canopy, and the first colonel up that's there, it says, what are you doing here? You're supposed to be in Saigon. You're supposed to be in Saigon. What are you land? We're not supposed to land here. It's just all mad at me. And then I told Harlan over the inner phone. I said, Harlan, I don't know what it is, but it's worse than what I thought. And then the guy finally found out that realized, he says, oh, you don't know who was in that airplane, do you?

Recky guy, fellow captain. You know, I said it's really a shame. It should have seen a lot of stuff. And he says, oh my God, you didn't know that it was General Worley in that airplane. Now everything all made sense. And he says, oh, yeah, by the way, I got it all on tape. Because when he hollered Mayday, I started the little tape recorder that we jerry-rigged. We bought it at the hardware store,

and I jerry-rigged a plug that whatever I went into my headset that I could record it on little cassettes. That was just kind of my idea. And so I handed it to him, and the colonel took it, and said, you got it on tape, wow, and he was holding it. And they didn't know what to do with it, so he gave it back to me, and Gunniss. And he says, go get a Class Bay uniform on.

There's going to be a T-39 scat back to bring you down. There's some generals that want to talk to you down. in Saigon. Holy frick. The last thing in the world that this little upcountry POG pilot wanted to do was hanging around with four-star generals. How many generals that you talked to at this point in your deployment to Vietnam? I'm in general. Shoot, I'm a little POG captain. See? So anyway, the T-39 come up and picked us up and on our way down to Saigon and thought, you know, I'd have listened to this tape and so I played it.

And there was something in there that was extremely, extremely inappropriate. Just language-wise? Harlan is dead, and I'll take that what I said to the grave. Fair enough. And so I recorded it over it, and it was exactly 18 seconds long, just like Nixon's 18-minute tape.

And it's a damn good thing, too, that I took that out of there, because every one of those damn generals wanted his own personal private briefing. And so I had to play it over over and over again, and I'm thinking, God, I'm sure glad to erase that. But it was a shame, too. Along with that, there was his, he had two daughters, General Worley, good guy, fighter-power.

And they called me some years later, and they wanted to go down, and they wanted to go to Vietnam where their father had died. And nobody could tell him where it was, the exact location. But I thought, these two ladies, they need to go to an exact spot out there to build a memorial and have closure right where their dad died. Now, I tried to drag it out of my memory and describe exactly, you know, turn left here, and there's a little town called Fuknoy, and you go to the beach, and you turn left, and you go 100 yards, and that's where he crashed.

Well, as it turned out, it was 100 yards the other direction, but it didn't matter because they went there, and they sent me a place, picture of a memorial and they were hugging each other and it was it was kind of a closure it was a nice thing for him now you got another another thing that you write about in the book you write about your friend howie Howard k williams what happened with him and what was this this mystery phone call that you got can you talk us through that yeah uh the misties we were we were kind of a unique group We were doing some highly classified stuff. And we were separated from most of the in-country fighter pilots

that flew those, um, toothpick, monkey deaf, making monkeys deaf missions in South Vietnam. And sometimes we'd fly those missions and there was troops in contact and there was a lot going on. And we'd go in there, Roland brought my bombs and leave. And I'd think, hey, there's a combat down there. I wanted to be part of it. What happened? I mean, who's in common? I want to know the details of that. And I just didn't want to climb, you know, fly back my airplane, not knowing about it. That's why I wanted to go to Misty.

And I found out about Misty, and I says, hey, I want to go there, and it's a volunteer thing. And the guy says, no, one of the requirements says, you have to be a flight lead. And I says, okay, well, I want to go to Misty. I kept bugging my commander, the squadron commander. And he said, no, damn it, retain your, a newbie pilot here and you'll be six or eight months four to six months before

you can even think about checking out as a flight lead. So I kept bugging him and bugging him and bugging him and bugging him and he finally just got pissed off and he says, okay, god damn it. I'll give you a flight lead check which I was no more qualified or experience or anything.

And so I went out and I didn't do a very good job as a flight lead. In fact, I think I got hit on that. An in-country, yeah, an in-country hit, which is very rare getting hit from in-country. The biggest thing they have would maybe be a 50 caliber, and it hit it in the gun bay. And as an example, I screw it up. I mean, here's a target, right? We're going to go in and I've got a flight of four. And the wind is blowing. So what does I do? Little Dick trying to be a flight lead. He chooses, you know, there's three targets down there.

as an example. And so what I do, I try, I go and attack the target that's upwind. So if it's upwind, there's a bunch of smoke, and the smoke drifts over all the other ones that they have to hit. You know, like classy newbie screw up. And so the commander says, God damn it, Dick, if you want to go to Mississippi, then you can go get the hell out of here. I want to see you again. And so then I enjoyed these classified guys that had were We had our own air-conditioned little trailers out in our own little contolment area. And that's the tip of the end of the spear, and that's where the action was. And that's where Dickie wanted to be.

Boy, that was so happy and enthralled with that. That's why I stayed to do a second tour, to do actually 100 missions in Misty. So then I went up and what I saw into North Vietnam in the areas that we were, it was a different world. there was a lot of ground fire and a lot of targets that had been hit. And we went back 35 years later. I went back with five guys that I flew combat with. And I wanted to go back to that area. We call it the Root Packs.

And North Vietnam is often in about six different areas. You know, two of them the Navy has, and then there's the ones up around Hanoy, and we were one of the ones down in the southern Panhandle, just above the DMC, it's called Route Pack 1. So that was our primary area that we flew in all the time. And I don't know where was I going with that. Well, I was trying to get to the, what happened with Howie. Oh, with Howie.

Okay, this is, now Howie was our, I'm sorry, getting old and gray beard. Howie was the top gun at our gun school. He was really good. He was a fighter pilot's fighter pilot, man. He had a cute little blonde wife, a couple of little kids. He was a cool guy. Anyway, during gunnery school, he had an engine failure. He ejected in gunnery school.

And when he got back, he says, well, how did it go? Everybody said, oh, wow, he ejected. What happened? Everybody wants to know. And he says, well, the only thing had happened, and he says it jarred my, he came back and he says his glasses were a jar, his sunglasses were a jar, that's his only issue. And so now I'm up in Misty.

It sounds like as cool as it gets, huh? Yeah, it's probably as cool as he goes. So it says, how are you got to come up to Misty? And this is where the action is. Now, he didn't want to go. And that I was so excited about what we were doing, and he's our top gun guy. and I don't think he was as had the adrenaline or that little combat gland as bad as I did and he finally acquiesced and he joined Misty and on his first checkout ride he got

basically he got killed him and him and Brian Williams two Williams Howard Williams and Brian Williams they were in an area called Chapone the very hot area up in Laos and sure enough they got hit on fire and Brian says the fire was burning from the engine compartment all the way almost all the way into the back cockpit and they said he says okay we're going to have to get out so they headed a remote area in the jungle to eject and he says so and Brian says okay I'm going to go and Howard says okay I'm right behind you that's Last words he ever said. And Brian, and I was up there flying, another missile story, and I heard this, and went tearing over there.

And the Jolly Grain was real close, and they picked him up, picked up Brian, but nobody heard. And I was really upset. It says, well, where's Howard? Did you see a parachute? And he didn't see anything. And I was kind of beefed about that, but it was Howard. He was my best friend. And now he's down.

Never heard from again, but I did locate the wreck site. Dense jungle. They didn't think there was any human beings anywhere near the place. But he went down and he was, there was a little ridge, and you can see with the airplane, clipped the jungle that was burning, and then went down into the canyon, and you could see the wreckage. And so every day I would go up there real slow, almost kill myself, trying to go real slow and look down in there,

to see if I could see anything, but it was just, you know, a wreck site. Didn't hear a thing, so I thought, God, I had to go up there and on the ground and see my best buddy. So I made an arrangement out of Nekonphenom in KP. They have a radar site up there, and they fly helicopters that they put the road watch teams. You know, you guys, you're vintage. They go up there, the snake eaters like tacos, the classic snake eater, and they put these guys in to watch the roads and stuff

and report back and forth, and they insert them, and then they try to take them out and stuff. So I contacted them, and I says, hey, can I get a ride in? Just on your way in, drop me off at the rec side, and then when you're going to leave, an hour or two, when they come back and pick me up

and bring me back. And then I will know what happened to Howard, because if I see an ejection seat or something there, then I don't know whether he's dead or not. And so I had set that all up ready to go. And I'm walking around bumping into myself, too, because I'm the summary courts officer, so you have to, you know,

familiar with summary courts because if somebody gets killed, somebody is designated as the guy that has to take care of his personal thing and pay all his bills and pack all of his stuff up and write the letter to his wife and stuff. So that was my duty for that that I didn't like. And I'm all set, ready to go.

Go over to NKP and they're going to take me into the rec site. You get this phone call, and it says, he says, I'm a, I think he said it was a major. He said, I'm a major, but I can't tell you my name. He says, I know what you're going to do tomorrow, exact words. He says, don't do it. It's been taken care of. And he said, do you understand that? I said, yeah, he's been, don't do it, he's been taken care of.

I understand that. And then before I could ask any more questions, he was gone. So I didn't go. Now, there was 15 to 18 years later that I found out that they knew that Howard was dead, where they actually killed him. In Laos, they killed everybody. If you went down in Laos, the policy was that they killed you. every single one of them.

There was no capture. In North Vietnam, you're a valuable asset. Now, if you bail out of North Vietnam, the civilians would kill you, if they got to you first. But, in fact, I got another story about another F105 pilot

that I saw being decapitated with machetes right in front of my eyes. But the thing about Howard, It was 35 years later they found out what really happened, that he was found on the ground and two stories. One of them went up there and they took his dog tags. One guy said he was dead, he had a broken leg,

and he was at the foot of a tree. But I don't know what happened. He was, Howard broke his leg, and he was there, and they went up and killed him, and took his dog tags away from him. And then he told the farmer to bury him, and that they didn't bear him. bury him deep enough. And he was exhumed by a large jungle animal. And that's all they found of him

18 years later when we finally buried him in Arlington. What his remains were. What was the F-105 pilot that you saw get beheaded? There was, it was in the coastal plain. Now, the coastal plain was flat right up to the edge of the ocean. and it was all farmers, you know, rice patties and farmlands and very sparsely populated and stuff. And we were on a misty mission one day, and I looked and coming right underneath me was this thing that was on fire. I didn't know that the 105 guy was even there.

And it was a big shock. The guy was burning like mad. And so I pulled up, and I could see he was trying to make a turn towards the water and fairly low altitude, maybe three or four thousand feet or lower. And I wasn't talking to him or anything, but I'd more or less joined up with him kind of high to watch him. Now, I knew, realized the thing was on fire, burning like mad, this F-105 Thunder Chief, and he was trying to turn to get to the water. And it was kind of like a rooting section.

That's two misties in the airplane, you know, come on, hang in there. You're going to make it. You're almost there. You're almost there. And then there was a big explosion in the airplane, and it rolled upside down, and the pilot ejected. and he was high enough that he got a good shoot, and then the airplane, the 105, went over, and when he finally hit the ground,

it looked like, I don't know, 10 cans of napalm, I mean, the biggest fireball I've ever seen. And so then now he's fairly low altitude, he's hanging in a parachute. So I came around to circle him, and you could kind of see the shadow that the parachute did make, and you could tell kind of how high he was.

And so I timed it, so I came around and based the final, and I came by, you know, within, I don't know, dragging the wing in a wingtip in the, you know, I mean really low, 20 feet maybe, right by him. Now, this is he landed in the rice paddy, he took his helmet off, he was taking his helmet off, and he waved at me as I went by. And it was so close that I could recognize his face. and then I noticed that there's a whole bunch of other gunners that were just shooting like mad and so we pulled up higher back around and then it was the strangest thing I could see him in the rice paddy

and there was a perfect circle a black circle around him and it was all kind of collapsing on his point that's this black circle and that was the black pajamas everybody to have this black silk pajamas everybody that they wore up there and then he started running

and this thing collapsed into a kind of a heart. And in my next pass, I came around really low again. And the farmers were on him, and they all had machetes, and they were chopping him up. And I pulled up, and then you have really mixed emotions because I had the ability to kill every one of those people. You know, my 20 millimeter, I could kill every one of those farmers. But then you don't know if the person,

if the fighter pilot was alive or not. Probably wasn't. But there's no way you can take any risk. And then you pull up, you have really a heavy heart. Holy crap. You know, a pretty emotional thing. There was also another rescue. There was another shoot-down that was, I don't know, maybe a number of weeks different. Here again, it was another F-105 pilot, made a wingman. And he had his wingman. And he had his wingman. And he got shot down. And I went tearing up there and found his parachute canopy on the top of a ridge. It was right off the quank, there was a Quank, south fourth of the Quanky River, and there was a little village down there.

And it was a very steep slope that went up to the top of this ridge. And as I came over, I looked at it, and I can see his parachute. And so he came around now. His wingman is with him, and we're talking. And I made a really bad decision. I really screwed up, and I still feel really bad about it today that I made a mistake that I shouldn't have. And that is I should have sent him to get fuel from our tanker right then.

But the thing is that I could see the people in the village, and they were starting up the hill. And so we took turns trying to put some strife. It wouldn't strife in the people, but I was putting strafe between the people and the pilot. And I couldn't see his parachute anymore. And he never came up on voice either. And so we were both doing that. And instead of sending him out to get fuel or leaving him there to keep the,

while we got the rescue going, and I could have went out and got fuel. But all of a sudden, we were really involved in keeping, you know, the people away from him so we could set up a rescue, I realized, I should have done this to start with, just a major amateur screw-up on my part. I still feel bad about it today, is that I didn't check and see how much fuel we had. You know, what's your fuel state?

And we both ran out of fuel at the same time. So both of us had to leave and go out to the tanker. And when we came back, there was no voice anything. And the 105 pilot, later on I've tried to find who these pilots were. And the guy that was on the top of the ridge, I found that he had died. He never made it back as a prisoner of war, but the guy that was in the rice paddy did. And I don't have their names right now, and it's not important. But anyway, I was wrong about that.

And I found out later that the guy got killed. and he did get chopped up by the farmers and the guy on the top of the ridge he got captured and he made it through prisoner war and I found out about it when they finally got released in 1973 I think it was

so as you're doing this and again there's incredible detailed stories in the book and about these missions that you're doing I'm going to fast forward a little bit to well I guess it's a pretty

notable mission for you. You were basically doing a test of a theory of bringing guys up that you work directly with. Is that right? One of our biggest problems

is target accuracy. And, you know, I'd hang it out and find a really great target. I'd find a barge. I'd find a storage area. And we'd have a flight of I don't know, maybe it was a coincidence,

but my perception was that the F-4s could barely hit the ground, much less my target. And it was not unusual that we'd put a flight of F-4s in on the target. And my BDA was that there was no ordinance hit within 10,000 meters of my target, no visible damage. It was very frustrating. You'd have a beautiful target, they'd come in and they couldn't hit anywhere near it. Sometimes they get so frustrated, I'd go down and the Misties would do this, they weren't supposed to.

We had our hard deck that we're supposed to, and I get so frustrated that I'd go down, and the trucks that they couldn't hit, I'd go down and take out a couple of them with my two 20-millimeter cannons. And after giving them that BDA, I says, and just before they'd leave frequency, I'd pull up and say, hey I got an addition to your BDA. Now we couldn't claim it for ourselves, so we'd all get fired. But it's war, and damn it, the trucks are carrying bullets

are going to carry our kids in the South. You know, it's worth taking a risk, I thought. And so, by the way, I want to revise your BDA, you got two trucks killed. Didn't make any sense. But the, so this, new idea was to bring up guys that you, different aircraft that were, you thought,

would have a better chance of hitting targets? Okay. Now, we were frustrated about the ability to hit the targets, and that was a big ongoing frustration. We'd find it, mark it accurately, but nobody could hit it. Pretty fat. A side note happened once, and I don't know why there was a flight of Navy, A-4s, off to Kitty Hawk. the nomads. And I never worked the Navy because, you know, I don't know what the Navy was doing in an Air Force area, but there they were.

And I had a, what I looked like was a storage area, had bunkers and stuff, looked like there's fuel or ammo storage area, pretty good target. And so, wow, the Air Force would come up and the nomad would check in. And, you know, they'd all sound differently. The Navy would sound different than the Air Force guys. So I said, okay, I got a bunker storage area, and I described the target to him. And I says, okay, you know, green them up, arm them up, guys, you get ready to go, because I'm in the mark. So I pulled up, went around, put a nice mark in the target. And I said, okay, hit my smoke.

And I waited and waited and waited. And finally, the smoke, excuse me, started to dissipate and go away. and ask him, I said, hey, a nomad, is there any problem? Do you see my smoke? He says, oh yeah, I saw your smoke, Misty, but I was waiting for it to get the hell out of the way so I could see what the target was. I said, I'd never heard of that before.

I mean, this is really strange. The Air Force guys don't do that. They just want to come up there and piss off their bombs and get their counters and go home early, some of them. And he says, oh, Misty. I see what you're looking at. Wow, now he took over. You know, normally the Ford Air Control

and we control the strikes and stuff. He says, oh, I know what it is. He says, oh, okay. And he described it to the other, his flight. And he says, okay, two, you put your target, your bombs there, and three, and so forth. And he controlled the whole thing. And I'm sitting back at things, is, wow, it's just really cool.

And they did hit an ammo thing, and it burned for a couple of days. and I took some pictures of it and wrote a nice letter to the Navy, for God's sake. And they invited us to the Kitty Hawk, and we went out there and spent three days combat operations off Yankee Station just because we wrote him a nice letter. It was really interesting these nomads. Another thing I found, the Navy has a camaraderie between attack pilots and fighter pilots. It's a big camaraderie.

And they were, you know, hanging out with them for a while. And one of them was having an argument about something. And he says, he says, ah, Jake, god damn it. He says, you're talking like a fighter pilot. The guy says, take that back, you know, and they're really arguing. Wait a minute, I'm a fighter pilot. You know what's wrong with that? But it was really a cool experience that we had with them.

So anyway, what we wanted to do this day is that now there's guys in that draw bombs in South Vietnam. They're working troops in contact. And you just don't piss bombs off around like we do up in North Vietnam. It has to be very accurate because there's troops in contact, and there's other friendlies on the ground. And the Ford Air controllers in the South make great, you know, they go to great lakes that we don't go and bomb our own people. And so now these guys could really hit targets. And so it's my buddy Chuck Shaheen. In fact, we were kind of high school buddies in some way.

We come from the same area around Dinuba, and we should chase the same girls and so forth. So anyway, Chuck had finishing up his first tour. He might have had, I don't know, maybe 60-sorties. And I was working on 118, or 105, I guess, misty missions. And I had about five more to go. before I was my normal rotation. I says, hey Chuck, this is your champagne flight.

Hey, how about two, you know, I'll go with you in your back seat. You know, and I'll be your champagne flight and it'll be a little article in the Orange Cove Register that says two hometown boys complete combat tour and, you know, whatever, little blub and some little po-down newspaper. I thought that's all it was going to be.

So I had this, this is going to be a test. And so Chuck and I were going to go up there and find a target. Now, these are end country guys. They hadn't been up to North Vietnam. And so I said, now we've got to find a real safe target for these guys. You know, there's some areas that you don't take newbies into, really it's some intense area. And so we're looking around for kind of a benign area.

And the best we can come up with is some goddamn truck parked beside a harsh wall up there by a little river and a little road. And this truck wasn't camouflaged or anything. That should have been a clue right away. So finally, we looked around and he says, well, this is about the best we can do. But now this is a test. These guy, the in-country guys,

and they sent up some fighter weapons guys. The guy's been through the top, Air Force's Top Gun School. Fighter weapons, Nellis, we call them Patchwheres, guys with their patch that they've been through the wider, the top gun school. The guy's really good. So there were three of them.

Then they'd come up and we briefed them. and I guess they could see the truck and the guy says, okay, leads in, and he rolls in, he missed as bad as the Fours did. He pulled off, missed the damn truck. He said, oh, I'm sorry, I forgot to reset my altimeter. Well, bullshit.

This is okay, too. And he had some other excuse that his mill, his sight didn't work right, and he missed. So the long and the short of the, it is the three expert patchwheres for bombing accuracy. You know, the first guys should have taken that truck out. You know, they could drop it right in the guy in the truck's glove box if they wanted to. What the hell is going on? So all of them, all of them missed. Now, right then,

our test was over. And it should have stopped it, right? However, but however, that damn truck was still sitting down there. And that's when I'm going to take this to the book. You say we couldn't bear to fail. Three passes, same results, and no 20 millimeter hits on the truck. Chuck decided the misty fact should give it a shot. Someone should have reminded us that when the 20 millimeter guns are beyond 3,500 foot slant range, the bullets just tumble and are rendered worthless.

Until now, we had all flown above 4,500 foot hard deck, unwilling to deny ourselves this stupid truck that seemed to be just sitting there taunting us. Chuck went in. If the patchwheres couldn't do it, we would. However, we were the forward air controller, not the fighter bomber, and what we were about to do was in direct violation of standard protocol. I checked the altitude indicator. The three-degree dive angle put us flat and right next, right on top of the road.

The karst cliff was now a blur, close and right next to me. We were low enough that I could even see the pebbles on the road. This was a no-kitting. low angle Luke gun school strafe pass. Chuck had the throttle in full burner, burner, real steady, as only Chuck can fly. In the weeds now, he opened fire and put a long concentrated burst of 20 millimeter cannon right on target. I could not see the truck from the backseat, but was certain he plastered it. Great. We got some BDA. The test was successful. The champagne suite, even though the details were going to be fudged a bit. Fudged hell, in reality, this mission

was a total failure what happened in the next two seconds would nullify everything we had done chuck came off the trigger and started a hard climb as the high G came on there was a loud bang under my right seat it sounded as if Pete Rose it hit the bottom of the fuselage with a baseball bat and a home run swing there was a whoosh as my rearview mirror was filled with fire when we pulled up I could see the fires glow on the cliff wall looking around I determined there were no good options for an ejection. I'm afraid it's Hanoi Hilton. Here we come.

The drop tanks had gone dry and Chuck called for a heads up as we were going to clean the wing and jettison the external fuel tanks, pylons and rocket pods. As we pulled up, the other F-100s joined us and reported we were torching and confirmed it wasn't an internal fire. Chuck pulled it out of burner and the angry red fire in the mirror changed to a white vapor. The after burner flame had ignited the fuel. fuel stream and without it the fire choked itself out the fire was out but we were

hemorrhaging fuel at a prodigious rate there was talk about turning off generators transfer pumps looking for a tanker etc but no practical solution presented itself as we looked ahead at the coast coming up in the distance and watched the fuel gauge rapidly unwind it was painful obvious the gauge would read empty before we reached long before we reached the water all we could do now was reflight the afterburner and use the remaining fuel for speed before it completely gushed out, hoping we could still make it to the safety of the Gulf of Tonkin. The guys on our wing looked closely to see if the fuel was running inside the fuselage

where it might blow us out of the sky upon relighting the afterburner. They let us know it didn't look like it, but there was no way to know for sure. Fighter pilots like to fly close. For some reason, it seems the closer you get. The more help you can lend to stricken comrade. As we look down at the small farms of the coastal plain, knowing farmers were waiting with machetes in hand, this decision became a no-brainer.

Chuck calmly called, okay, we're going to relight the burner. We had never seen two wingmen go from close fingertip to high forward spread root formation so quickly. Those guys got away from you. Chuck mumbled something about candy asses, and if those patch wears it hit the damn truck, we wouldn't be in this fix. He pushed the throttle outboard and relit the burner.

The white vapor stream in my mirror again turned red with fire. The wingman said, no sweat, it's only torching. Wow, some torch. It was over 700 feet long. We were accelerating in a slight calm, climb, low on fuel, with wings clean and going like stink. I think we may have gone supersonic. Chuck's decision to relight the burner was a good one, and it looked like we might make it to the water.

Pilots seemed to prioritize things. Only after returning to Foucat did I remember hearing a loud rattlesnake sound in the headset and noticed something on the glare shield. Our threat warning system was showing a Sam missile. It was going wild. Surface to air missile, launch flight panel was lit up like a Christmas tree. We were four F4s flying straight and level to the coast, a perfect target, but no one in our formation gave this warning more than a passing glance.

Normally we would have called Sam, Sam, and broken for the deck. Afterward, the patchware lead told me, yes, I do remember that. I just reached up and turned it off. For some reason, the enemy did not launch the Sam's. They probably thought we were going to die in the fire, so why waste a missile? I believe most warriors during times, during the intense heat of combat, resigned themselves to the likelihood that survival is improbable. as I sat there watching the torrent of fire behind us, the unwinding fuel gauge and that distant coast growing nearer, deep in my psyche, a small glimmer of hope emerged.

Maybe we can make it. We might actually get out of this alive, not dead, and not as POWs. Halfway to the safety, the water, I made a promise to myself that if we could make it to the coast and eject and get rescued, I would not be coming up here anymore. This was my 105th Misty sortie, almost twice that of a normal Misty tour. No one could ever say I was a coward or a quitter. My next action had to be done perfectly. I had often visualized what it would be like to eject on that violent rocket seat, riding it up and out. I had studied and trained for each of the procedures.

I even joined a skydiving club and completed 50 sport parachute jumps. I couldn't have been better prepared. I'd always been paranoid about my personal parachute and made it clear that no one else was to touch it ever I would meticulously adjust the straps to my frame since I had practical experience in skydiving I was well acquainted with the agony to the groin area and the twins that resulted from an ill-fitting harness a perfect fit was critical and was always on my mind prior to my ejection I considered a few things but not in any sequence I remembered running out a few Chuck had the hunt in full after burner and we both watched the fuel gauge unwind to zero. I always wondered how accurate those gauges were and was about to find out. As the needle passed empty, the engine quit. This was not a sudden flame out, but reminded me of a pilot slowly pulling the throttle back to idle. However, the RPM did not stop at idle but continued to unwind. I recalled that there were a lot of towering cumulus clouds off the coast. Chuck and I searched for an area to eject and

And as soon as we spotted a break in the clouds, we knew it was time. The HC-130 Hercules search and rescue plane, Crown 6, had just popped into view, which was comforting. During the course of this entire catastrophic mission, my cassette recorder had been running, but I neglected to remove the tape and put it in my pocket prior to ejection.

Bummer. As soon as we made it to the Gulf, I experienced an odd sense of calm. I realized this would be my final combat mission. This was the first time I truly believed I would make it out of the war alive. I was going home to see my family. All I had to do now was simply eject and get rescued.

I had complete faith in my equipment. The weather was good, and the gulf, glass smooth and inviting, was welcoming me. Yes, this was going to be a piece of cake. We had the ideal speed and altitude necessary for a successful ejection. I said, well, Chuck, it's time to go. I reminded Chuck about the half-second delay on his seat. He responded, no, if he. you go first there's no delay I began to argue but thought better of it okay now visor down

straps tight elbows in head back hard on the headrest I closed my eyes lifted the seat handles and while squeezing both triggers wondered what the next five minutes of my life would be like I wanted to avoid being anywhere near the Huns point of impact my rocket seat fired and the e-ticket ride up the rails was slow smooth and wonderful it worked once clear I kicked the seat away from me and my shoot opened with a jerk looking around I saw three F-100s crown six and a couple of F-4s that had joined the orbit I looked around for Chuck but didn't spot him or our crippled hun I could only assume Chuck had waited a while and ejected inside a cloud I retrieved the survival radio

turned it on and expected to hear my shoot locator beeper but heard nothing I had made two emergency ejections in my lifetime and the shoot beepers failed on both I tried to call but couldn't work the damn thing with my helmet on, so I put the radio away. The next item was the four-line parachute cut. Sure enough, the conical C-9 chute canopy would oscillate side to side as air spilled out one side than the other. I loved skydiving and was eager to test the four-line cut. Cutting four of the 28 lines would allow air to escape in a controlled manner and stabilize the canopy. I grabbed my government-issued hook blade knife and reached for the two-shunders.

shroud lines on my right and cut them. Next, I grabbed the two left, hook the knife around the shroud lines, cutting those two clean. But to my horror, there was another cut. I had accidentally cut into one of the four suspension risers. I slowly turned to survey the damage and saw the nylon web riser was cut 90% of the way through.

Had I cut it completely, the shoot would have collapsed and I would have streamered into the gulf. My heart was in my throat. My God, fly 155 Misty missions and die by my own hand. I think Jonesy, the first Misty to fly 100 missions, did the same thing on his final mission bailout. Do not give fighter pilots knives. Much later, someone in the parachute shop got smart

and took away the knives from the flailing fighter pilots and replaced them with a four-line release system that required no cutting. Hanging in the shoot, I took one last look at North Vietnam, remembering all that had happened to me during the past eight months. as the realization that I would not be returning to a cold, I was flooded with an unanticipated sense of relief. I remembered to deploy my raft in my survival kit, but was so shaken from the knife and parachute episode that I had forgotten to activate my underarm life preservers until just

before hitting the water. Without them, the weight of the survival gear would have pulled me straight to the bottom of the Gulf, sinking me like a brick. I barely had time to inflate one As my feet hit the warm clear water with no wind my shoot settled right on top of me what a mess I struggled to untangle myself pulled the raft over and boarded I attempted to relax and enjoy the quiet solitude as a new member of the exclusive Gulf of Tonkin Yacht Club It was amazing how clear the water was and how good survival smelled as I as I read as I read these these ejection stories. I'm always surprised that you guys like have time to think about it

and set it up kind of. I always, in my mind, I always pictured ejections. You know, you get hit and you have a second and you just pull it and you go. And you guys are sitting there thinking like, okay, well, looks like we're far enough. We got at a good altitude. You have time to think about it.

On this particular engine, there was a lot of time. You know, we talk about the warrior ethic, a real warrior if he worries about making it home because he's not where there's shit as a warrior they might as well just stay home and if you're going to go up and do

warrior type things you have to accept the realization that you're probably not going to make it and once you do that then you can become an effective warrior you can focus on the job that's right and on fire burning out there and I thought maybe I was going to make it for the first time

I thought, because I had this premonition about being captured. In fact, I used to go down into our intelligence session where they could get a lot of classified information, and I was surprised about how much they knew about the prisoner of war status, even the interrogators and their name and the New Guy Village and what was going to happen to you, and those rope tortures and stuff. That was very, very familiar with that. and it was like a premonition.

And when we got hit and pulled off, I thought, this is it, man. What are they calling the rat or something? I said, well, I think I'm going to be able to meet the rat now. And then all of a sudden, that full transition, I think we may make it to the water. And then for the first time, I thought, I'm going to make it. And since I'd done two tours, almost two tours,

nobody would give me any problem. I said, man, I found everything that I needed, everything I wanted to know about, you know, maybe it's a selfish thing. Could I be one of those warriors? Could I be one of those guys that flew those missions over Nazi Germany when three out of four of them died? Did I have the courage?

Could I really do that? And I found out. And having that information to me, subconsciously from my own personal psyche was really important. And I've learned a lot of other things too. I made a survey of some fellow fighter pilots

and it says the thing is what happened when you first started to be shot at? The very first reaction, the very first time. And we talked about it in the book a little bit. The first reaction was the audacity. Not that I'm

scared, not I'm going to drink away and duck down between my knees or whatever. It was the audacity of that son of a bitch that shoot at me. That's the first reaction. And maybe that's, I don't know, maybe a write of passage into being a warrior. So what was the survey? Oh, it was the survey that I, they were just mainly fellow fellow fighter pilots. And I tried to ask some of the the people that were, that had ground compact, like you didn't, Jocco. What was their reaction? But I wasn't able to really, that was an informal thing. I just wanted to know.

Was I unique, or was this very, very typical of what happened when you first get shot? And I found that it's probably fairly typical, that there wasn't any of the guys that I knew about that I flew with when they first got shot. did the duck down and scream from my mother or whatever. It was just the audacity. And then if you survive that, you're a warrior. And I would like to think that maybe that was a pretty common thing too, on all aspects of mortal combat with your fellow men.

So that was your last combat operation in Vietnam. So what happened after that? I mean, after that, do they give you an option and say, all right, you know, you can head home now? Well, I still had my one-year tour, and I only had about, I don't know, a week or 10 days. Now, the Misties, if you're involved in something like that, nobody give us any crap about our illegal hats or our illegal moustaches. I saw a picture of your mustache. Yeah, or any goddamn thing. Any goddamn thing we wanted to do.

You know, there was always some spit and polished colonel that would come up and give us a bunch of crap about things that are not really germane to a combat operation in the jungles of freaking Vietnam. I'll like signing my shoes or something like that. And it says, okay, Colonel, well, why don't you, I'm scheduled for a Misty 1-1 in the morning. Why don't you take my mission for me? And I'll stay home and clean my shoes. Wow, that's okay. Cool it. So basically, if you are in an environment where you're probably not going to make it anyway, that was your mindset.

We did a bunch of other stuff. We acquired our own DC3, a whole DC3, and we'd go back and forth to Hong Kong any time we wanted to. We're supposed to have one R&R where you meet your wife in Hawaii, and the guys that were married would go to Hawaii. Well, we'd go in and forge papers. or one of them was we'd go down to the personnel or I don't know, the admin office and they had these forms

and one of the forms was a for emergency leave and so we got a real one and we looked at it and somebody had a typewriter and so we could copy that form nobody ever checked on it I mean it was an authorized form and so in my example

you know we made up authorization some colonel's name and it would always have fun like he could sign his name with the left hand or the right hand you know I mean it looked official but it was phony as hell because we just made him up and I used one of those and I went down to the cargo area there at Fucat

and I handed this and within 24 hours I was back in the sack with my wife in Sacramento This was after you got shot down? No, no, no. Oh, that was just normal? It was during the eight months that I was there. You just took this emergency leave. Yeah, we'd go to Hong Kong if we wanted to.

You know, nobody messed with us at all. The only thing that we couldn't forge was pay. You're probably lucky you couldn't. Yeah, but anything else. Otherwise, you would have probably been, they probably would have caught that one. No, they would have caught that one. And that wouldn't have been right any, but as far as anything else, we'd go and do whatever the hell we wanted to. And not only that, the missies were known for, oh, I've got to give you something to.

It's our calling card. We could do whatever we want to. So I went down and I spent seven days at home, which is totally illegal. You're not supposed to go home at all. But my emergency leave papers worked just fine. And so in Travis Air Force Base where my wife and my one daughter was there, I went back and I gave him my emergency leave orders and the dispatcher there at the military transport or a mat terminal

he says okay you and your wife go back and have a nice steak dinner at the club and a bottle of wine and come back here at 10 o'clock and you'll be on your way we got a flight going out for you and so I did and like I said less than 24 hour I think in 20 hours I was back in Foucat I thought You know, I could almost commute to this thing. So it was really a devil-make error. You know, we're misties. We do all this stuff. Nobody's going to fuck with this.

On the ground or in the air. Now, I'll show you my calling card. You'll get a kick out of this. It's two sides. I think you could look at that, maybe read it. So side one says. get fact by a super fact because they were the super savers, they called them superfacts.

Get fact by a super fact. Call Misty for appointment, contact Hillsboro or Cricket. What are those? Those are airborne command, airborne air traffic control for the one of another word. Easy terms. Flack free areas optional at extra cost, specializing in Sam's, trucks, supply, areas and rest caps.

Then on the other side it says, do not make rapid movements. This man is a trained professional killer hired by your government to seek out and destroy enemies of the state. He has nerves of twisted blue steel and must be handled very carefully. When done so, he becomes very docile. You are advised to give him the love and care he needs so badly. Signed, U.S. Department of Defense. You can keep that. Outstanding.

So what happened? So now the war's over for you? The war's over for me. And then I got sent directly to another war, an important war. A war that if we'd lost, we'd lose our flight. And that was the Cold War. And then right out of the jungles of Vietnam, I found myself sitting in the same F-100 with a one-mega-tong. thermonuclear hydrogen bomb on the centerline pylon sitting in a bunker with a target someplace on the other side of the iron curtain for four years and were you stationed in England at this time station in England so how long what's your schedule like well a schedule it was a three it was a three month rotation you

spent a month at home you know family and training and and then we spent a month at Wheelis in North Africa doing gunnery training you know dropping bombs and whatever and then you spend another then the third month you're in a bunker someplace just wait to make the flight right out right on right next of the iron curtain with a target on the other side someplace like in turkey or in itling so that was the three the 90 day or this 30-day rotation did you ever get spun up what was the closest you came to launching did you ever get the call like, oh, it's go time? Well, if you can imagine, there's 12 of us, 12, we call them Victor Alert,

12 airplanes hot-cocked with a crypto code release from the president to be able to arm that weapon and deliver it. As you can imagine, nuclear weapons are very closely controlled, and rightfully so, I would say. And I would sit on alert, and I look up at that. horn, that claxon. And I thought, if that son of a bit goes off, the thing is that they didn't mess around with that. It was either all-out go or not go. There wasn't any in-between. There was no drill or anything like this. No, there was no, well, we'll drop a bomb and scare you or something like that. There wasn't any of that commitment. And the whole thing was coordinated from NATO to nuclear

artillery right next to the Fever right next to the Iron Curtain. And then us were rolling stuff back and then the B-52s, you know, they would come in for deeper penetration. And it was all go. And if they, like I looked up there, if that horn went off, I thought, fuck. You know, there's no way to get back either. You know, it's all bullshit that you can come back. But what am I going to come back to? Yeah, and you know that, right?

I mean, you know if you launch on that thing, that's the end of the world. Like when we were in England, sit in the word, we were a nuclear delivery thing. We had 12 active lines, 12. there in England when we were home for that 30 days. And you know that if this thing started, that that's a primary target. And there's probably only 12 guys. If this thing ever kicked off, there's going to be 12 individuals at Lake and Heath Air Base that are going to be alive.

Everybody else is going to be dying. So you take off with an armed thermal nuclear weapon. And in your review of mirror, everything that you know and love, your family, your friends, everything disappears in a nuclear cloud. And you often wonder, I got that son of a bitch. It's in my centerline pylon and I'm really pissed off. So we thought, well, we'd go upwind and bail out over some Norwegian fjord

and climb in a cave and wait until all the radiation went away or whatever you can visualize or something like that. However, I lost more comrades in the Cold War than I did than the Vietnam War. from accidents, training accidents? Or from what? Well, a lot of it was highly classified. The Gary Powers thing, the reconnaissance that the RB-47s did. And there was a lot of other clandestine things that even today they know nothing about.

Now, there's a lot of memorials. This is one thing, it's my pet peeve right now, is that there's Korea, all the wars, everybody has a monument there on the mall and there's no monument about the Cold War and of course there wasn't any battle line and there wasn't any casualty report and stuff that's all classified and stuff and we won that damn thing

we really did we won it and I can always say that I got shot down twice once in the Cold War the one that mattered and then the Vietnam War yeah because you had another ejection what happened on that ejection Well, the saying was, you know, a lot of it happens if you have a nuclear weapon on your aircraft and you eject or you wouldn't, would you never fly with a nuke, a live nuke?

No, they would never, I don't, the tactical air command, the strategic air command, B-52 chrome domes, I think they did fly with, with fully armed nukes ready to go. And I think they quit that after they dropped a couple of them inadvertently. Anyway, that was an embarrassing thing. During my time, we never flew with them. We flew with the dummies, and we'd go out and drop them on the range to see the accuracy. But if you're dropping a really powerful bomb,

the only thing we would do, we'd ride on the side of the bomb in Grease Pencil, something like, I don't know, who the Soviet, premieres were, whatever. Because there was one thing, you'd come at 500 knots right on the deck at 50 feet, and you pickle it off, and then you try to keep going and get in the way as far as you can. And he put the thing on the side, and it said, well, he says, well, Uncle Ho.

It wasn't Uncle Ho. What the hell was it? Whatever the Soviet thing was. He says, you got three choices. You can either run for 37 seconds, or you can dig for 37 seconds. And the third choice is you can do any combination of either one you want. Yeah, it's kind of sick humor, I guess. So how did you eject again? Well, I was on a test hop.

Actually, in England, I got kind of tired of going out to what we call the Marsh Gunnery Range and dropping little BDU 33 blue bombs practicing. And I wanted something of the little, because I was a maintenance guy. I had an A&P license, and I liked maintenance. And so I was going to go over and do the Chief of Quality Control of Flight Test Maintenance Officer, which is really a neat job, because we got to fly the airplanes without the pylons and without the drop tanks, and they were clean, and they were really a lot of fun to fly. And the missions were short and very demanding.

And one problem, one thing, if you're a wing commander and you want to get fired, those we call them Victor Alert lines. And whether they're in commission or not is very important. And if the wing commander wants to get fired, he all has to do is drop one of those lines because of maintenance or some other thing. Because when they check in every morning down at whatever headquarters, all of his nukes are ready to go and their pilots are briefed. And then all of a sudden there wasn't. Now the weather in England was really dog shit a lot of times. and we're supposed to have VFR 500 and 5,000 overcasts and five miles visibility.

But it came up that there was a lot of maintenance, and the airplanes were coming out of maintenance, and they were backed up because they couldn't get flight test. And so it came to the point one day that we were going to lose one of those nuclines. Bad thing. Ooh, that was really bad. And so in England, I think it was like 600-foot overcasts, and drizzle and maybe two or three miles visibility.

And the vice wing commander, Colonel Hurd, he come to me and he says, hey, Dick, I know the weather's already bad, but God damn, we need this thing to replace it, you know, or are we going to lose one of the victor lines? And, of course, hell, I'm a combat guy. I said I can do anything, see, go get them. And so I taxi out and light the burner and go down the runway, pull the nose up, Now, it's really a fun thing because you can run in full afterburner. A full afterburner climb with an airplane without all the ordinance on it.

Boy, it's really a sparky little airplane. And it's an afterburner climb to 40,000 feet. And I break out on top over the North Sea at about 42,000 feet. I can see. So we have weather from 40,000 feet all the way to 600 feet home. And one of the tests is the negative G check. And that's where some guys roll inverted. I just pull up and then push it over to negative G

and all this stuff floats up. And in the F100, the canopy was designed in such an area. Now, there's always dirt and crud and screwdrivers and nuts and bolts and crap. And it all ends up right over your head. But just behind your head, and when you come back to positive G, that it all falls. And it falls.

They gather it all at a very close. cleverly the way the physics of the airplane is, and it goes right down the back of your neck. Happens every time. So I always had a collection of screwdrivers and wrenches and stuff I found in the cockpit, and I'd put it on the board and say anybody, any mechanic up there that would like to get it, they can, you know, they can come and claim their ranch. Of course, nobody ever claimed it and stuff. So I did one, I did one of those, and when I came back to positive G, I felt a horrible clunk. I mean a major clunk, just like the engine was loose or something. And I thought, God, what the hell is that?

And so this time I got a lot more speed, pull the nose up really heavy, and really jammed a stick forward. And sure enough, there was another big shift of weight. It seems like right behind me. Only this time, when I came back to positive G, the 42 PSI normal operating position of the oil pressure went from there to zero. in a bat of an eye clunk. And so now had this big huge clunk like the engine was loose.

And I thought, well, maybe it pulled a wire loose because the engine was running fine. That it had zero oil pressure. Another thing, too, if, usually, if you have a broken oil line, you know, the oil pressure will just kind of bounce around a little bit and slowly decay, but to go to absolute zero,

and the spring, the bad of the nine, just bang, zero, and that's not normal. And, of course, you want to think it's not real serious because where you are, and you finally think, I'm out over the North Sea, there's weather all the way to 500 feet at home, and I says, okay, so I put. practice, see I have to call May Day, May Day, May Day, May Day, May Day. It's Ringdove 2-1, that's

call sign, Ring-Dub 2-1, May-Day, May Day, where I am and what my problem is. So I practice a couple of times so I can get my really cool Chuck Yeager voice. And it took a while, too, because the first time I tried it in my headset, it didn't sound very good. So I got it really cool. And one of the procedures is if you have zero oil pressure, you don't want to jockey the engine back and forth, right? You don't want to set the power, and that means it'll run longer. So I knew that I needed about 83% on final approach, and an extra 20 knots to get level, because the F100 did not have a zero-zero seat. I think it was, but you had to get level.

If you were descending, you had no chance of making it. Okay, and that extra 20 knots would get you level. Okay, half laps, 83%, and start down into the Merck. And they had to vector me around a little bit for identification back in those days. Anyway, it took an extended period of time, and I was telling the, finally got on the GCA controller, and I said, look, give me transmission brakes. You know, tell me your own glide path, turn level. whatever the dialogue is, but give me transmission breaks.

So in case something happens, you know, that I can call you. And, of course, the GCA controllers, when they started giving you instructions, they just clamp down on the transmitter. And so therefore, nobody heard anything at home when I was on final approach. Anyway, kind of got a short position. And I was really proud of myself. I finally intercept, glide path. I lowered the nose.

Lored the nose. A half flaps had to gear down. And hey, 83% was perfect. They never jockeated the engine at all. This was really cool. And I'm coming down and there giving me the dialogue about left and right on glide path and so forth. And I just started to break out. I couldn't see the runway, but I could start to see down, you know, a little bit.

And I was thinking about, well, I'm rolling out on the runway and how am I going to write this thing up and so forth. So then there was a grinding noise. the intensity grew more and more. And then it grew louder and louder and louder. And then there was a huge explosion. That's the compressor stalls. And when a compressor stalls, then it shoots fire out both ends of the airplane.

So there's this grinding and this huge bang and fire shooting out in the front and dirt comes up in your face. And now I'm looking for that. I call it the small corner of time. there's a small corner of time from here, just a couple of seconds, that corner of time I can survive. And if I'm outside of that, the ejection won't work. I mean, I'll hit the ground before. And so to use every bit of that extra 20 knots that you have on board to level off and eject,

and maybe that the parachute will open in time. And so I did. and I leveled off. But then I looked down and there was a little town called Brandon, right on the final approach. And I could see the town right in front of me. And I knew that if I banked the airplane, that it would probably just bank and then ride itself and still go into the town. So this happened in just a couple of seconds. I'm slowing down, coming back on the stick to slow down to get in that small corner of time.

And I trim it, got the left trim going, and reached down with my left hand. and grab the handle and pull it up, whoops, and pull it up and it blew the canopy off and then immediately squeezed both triggers. And knowing where that jet is going to be in a handful of time, that is the most wonderful, smoothest experience you'll ever have is that ride up and out of that thing.

But the time compression is really interesting because as the airplane was going up the rails, I thought there's going to be an accident board. And they're going to go through all the paperwork, and I'm going to have to remember what I did for the last three days, what I drank, and I'm thinking about all that stuff, going up the ejection rails. And then I thought, my God, I had to put the colonel's name on there,

and it's Hurd, Colonel Hurd, is it H-E-R-D, and I misspelled it. And I thought, God, everybody in the whole world is going to see that thing. And on this paper that, you know, the flight plan or the clearance thing, and I misspelled the guy's name, how horrible. That's all going through your mind, see. It's still going up to the rails. And then the parachute opens, and, you know, you can feel it. As the canopy starts to open, all the shroud line,

yeah, the right, not the risers, but the shroud lines are all in there in their bundle, and you can feel them coming off your back, see. And then it opened. And then it's opened, and it happened so quick. straight between my legs expecting to look down right into the cockpit. Of course that was ridiculous and I looked around and off my left shoulder and I could see the airplane and airplanes flying along and now I'm low enough I can see the runway and for all the work the airplane was gonna fricking land on the runway. I thought boy they're gonna

for they're gonna get I'm gonna get frowned for this you know jumping out of a perfectly good airplane it lands on the runway and hey didn't it And then the next thing I know I'm in the trees. Parachute comes down through the trees. If you're going to bail out, pine trees are very nice, kind of smaller pines, because they're interlaced and you come down through them and they bend just right.

And by the time I got to the surface, I ended up stopping about an inch or two above the beautiful pine floor. And then with another shake, then the parachute canopy came down around my... Okay, now I'm right out of Vietnam, see, and I've ejected. And you're in the E&E training. For a whole year, I've been training for escaping evasion, height the parachute, you know,

get the radio, get that damn beeper, which didn't work this time either, the parachute beeper. And I've got to get the radio out, but in England we don't have the double radios and stuff. And so right over there, there was a guy, an English guy in a coat and tie. he was out trimming the Queens Forest, and his eyes were about big a saucers, and he's looking, you know, eyes open. Of course, I come down and we're a nuclear alert, and I have a gold visor on.

So here this guy comes crashing down through the trees, and he said he heard the explosion, he heard the seat come down, and the canopy come down, and then this guy spacecraft with a golden helmet would come down right in front of him, basically. And he's starting to back away. I said, no, no, I need your help. I need your help.

And, yeah, come on. Then I took the helmet off. Then I thought, God, I got to call somebody. You know, my radios are normally in my vest in Vietnam. But now they're in the damn seat kit, one radio in the seat kit. So the only way to get to it is to pull that handle on your seat kit that you sit on. It's got your raft and survival gear and stuff in there. So I pull the handle.

And a CO2 cartridge comes off, and this yellow raft, you know, emerges. and making all this goddamn noise right in front of this guy. And he turns around and starts running away. Where'd the plane hit? The airplane came, and it started a very left turn, and it just missed the town. It hit right beside Brandon, right across the road. It didn't hurt anybody, but it, you know,

the typical fireball and stuff that comes down. And as I was pulling back, I said, it just blew and I'm getting out. Now, nobody heard me. Now the colonel that was coming back from across country, he heard me. He's the only one that heard my call. And so anyway, I took the hell and off, and I ran and got him. I said, hey, I need your help, and I brought him back.

And what the hell? Oh, yeah, then I got down to the kit and opened it up and found the radio and opened it up and turned it on. And I called. I made a radio call. And for the time that it blew up, it was only about 93 seconds that whole time that happened. Okay.

Now, I got a really good drinking buddy, and he is the airfield support helicopter, and it's called Pedro. And Pedro is H.H.43, and has intermission rotors, and their whole mission is to, they have the spudnik that hangs, it's a, you know, it's a big ball, firefighting stuff. It's about as big as this table. It's a sphere. And the fire, and the whole thing is set up,

so the firefighters in their, in their aluminum suits, and there's a big fireball and burning, and the pilots inside, they've got to go rescue them. So the rotor wars pushes it away, and they take this spudnik with their firefighting thing, and they fight their way through the flames, and they get in the cockpit and they pull the pilot out. That's their whole thing. And so, now I didn't know about this, but nobody heard me say that I was getting out. And the end of the runway, the mobile controller.

His name was Jeffco. Yeah. In fact, he was a prisoner of war. Yeah, I think he was. I could be wrong about that. But anyway, he said he's the mobile controller. And so he starts screaming on the radio. He says, get out there quick.

No shoot, no shoot. There was no shoot. I didn't see a shoot. Get out there quick. And he's screaming at the Pedro. And so the guy lifts off and he's in the helicopter and he's heading for the fireball out there. It's going out. And he keeps saying, now the only thing that he saw was a landing light came out of the weather and crashed into a big fireball. So the guy, my buddy and the Pedro helicopter, he's out there. He's going. The guy's screaming at him. to get out there quick, and so he's going fast. And for some reason, he thought he could get there quicker if he pickled off that spudnik that he's hanging below it. So he pickled it off, see?

And it crashed halfway to the rec site. And so he's coming around, he's circling the rec sites. All you see is a big, you know, typical crash site with debris and fireball and stuff. And he's thinking, oh, shit, you know, that's Rutan out there. It's my best friend. It's really terrible.

And then he gets out there in a minute or 93 seconds or something. I call him on the radio. I says, hey, I'm down. Come and get me. Come and get me. And so now his first thought, he's circling this fireball.

And he thinks that I'm in there, right? Calling for help. And I call him and I says, get your ass out here and get me. And then his whole thing, his whole train and everything he's trained up for was that Spudnik thing and there's the fire in the classic situation and they're going to land and push the fire out of the way but he pickled it off and it's not there hoops and he's heart sick he says my god i've screwed up now rutan's going to burn alive down there and i could have saved him that's really bad and then he thinks and then he then he starts to realize wait a minute there's no fucking way that that that somebody can be alive in that thing down

there. And so he calls and he says, he says, I think he called my name. He says, Dick, is that you? I says, yeah, get your ass out here and get me. You know, thinking of Vietnam, I need to get rescued really quick. And then it's really interesting, this plaintiff voice that he said, he says, where are you? I bail out about a mile short. He says, you bailed out? You ejected? And then you can understand the metamorphose of emotion that he's going through. God, from the guy that's burning down there, and I just jettisoned my firefighting equipment, and now he's burning, and he's calling me, and I can't get to him. And then the adulation of feeling, oh, he bailed out, and he's okay.

And I says, yeah, get your ass out here and get me. And so then he did come out and get me. Of course, here you bail out, see. And so there's the officers club. And you've got to tell the story about everything. And my squadron commander, Jake Engel, he comes up and he says, hey, he says, tell me, I got a couple of questions. He says, what were the indications? You know, we have a panel full of a lot of faults, and a big master caution light comes on.

And he says, well, what's one of those lights came on? I thought, fuck, you kidding me? The only thing I saw was a big red master caution light that was accentuated and confirmed by the fact that there was a grinding noise and fire shot out the front. And then that's all I remember, Jake. And then I kept thinking about seeing that airplane flying off. It was a big pole sticking out of the canopy and I could see it and I could see the runway now. And that horrible feeling. And so I couldn't sleep that night.

So about 3 o'clock in the morning I called, maintenance control, it says, hey, you guys got the engine yet. And it says, yeah, they just brought it in, and it's in hangar so-and-so. It's on a dolly, you know, you can go and look at it if you want to. And in jet engines, it usually crushes part of the intake or the, you know, the compressor blades that spin. As they're spinning, they can tell what the RPM was that they crush and then they're bent back and they can have a pretty good idea of what the power of the engine was. And so it was eerie and I got in the car and I went down there to mission control there's nobody on the field it's kind of drizzly you know and there's there's the hanger so I drive up open the door

and sure enough I look over there and there's the engine it's on an engine stand and the excuse me the top of the fuselage is still there and then the tail is all burnt and whatever so I walk over there up to the engine by the side, see. And I know they can tell the power on the engine by the bent blades, and there's the face of it. So all you do is walk around, walk around and look at that. So I stopped there for a little bit, and you see if you have a horrible accident rate for some reason. A lot of accidents and stuff are, the old F-100 engine was, it had problems with it and, and, you know, and, you And so I thought, boy, they were going to hang me for this.

You know, the first thing they do on an accident rate is they blame the pilots. It was pilot error, everything. And I took a deep breath, and I thought, I'm going to walk around and look at the front of this engine on the intake. And then I'll know. And that may be the end of my flying, you know, my career. I jumped out of a perfectly good airplane. So I went around and looked at the face of the engine. and the blades it crushed the intake into a kind of a D section.

So all the blades were straight. And the ones that were, which crushed the blades that weren't rotating like that, they were crushed straight in like that. Zero power. Zero RPM. Zero RPM at impact. And I thought, God, you know, maybe there was something wrong with the engine. And with that, it went back and had a good night's sleep.

So you end up, I mean, you know, doing other jobs in the Air Force. Like you already talked about, you went and he had to go get your degree since you didn't have a college degree. Eventually, you retire from the Air Force. And then after you retired from the Air Force, and I guess even as you were, even before you retired for the Air Force, you were kind of doing some stuff with your brother. You were starting this kind of crazy test pilot. You were flying these little homemade planes. that your brother was making? I threw a couple of those before I retired.

But then the retirement thing was, had a big problem with the Air Force at this time. And it was in the 70s. And the military, at least the Air Force, was permeated with drugs, all kinds of drug problems and stuff. And so, Hosmer, the wing commander, says, hey, Dick, go down and take over the field maintenance thing. You're a maintenance guy, and I'll make your squadron commander of a maintenance squadron.

So I got 420 maintenance people, and we do engine overhauls and breakover halls and stuff, not crew chief stuff, but just kind of feel maintenance thing. And it was impermeated with drugs, a lot of drugs, with the people. And I never was a smoker. and I knew that smoking was bad for everybody, for anybody. And it was one guy, we were an anti-smoking, see, maybe that was kind of unique because everything was built around cigarettes and alcohol, the social environment. There was one guy, his name was Al Munch, and he was smoking all the time.

And we're in the club, and they were talking and arguing typical Friday night BS. And I says, Al, look at that. I says, look at the cigarettes. you know, it's got you. He said, nah, I could give it up any time. We have a big argument, you know. I said, I'll tell you what. I said, here's five, ten, here's a ten dollar bill.

I put it down on the table. He says, you can't go 20 minutes without a cigarette. Ah, yeah. Oh, God, for medicine. And so, and I knew he couldn't because he's addicted addicts. Anyway, he was a big addict for nicotine. And it wasn't more than six or eight minutes later that he came back. He had a whole lung full of smoke, and he blew it in my face,

and he took the $5 bill, and he threw it on the ground. So anyway, I had a maintenance squadron, and I said there's going to be no smoking in my orderly room or any of the buildings. Well, I didn't go over too well with a lot of people. And another thing, I had a third of my troops were female, female maintenance people, really good. But they would lock them up in the waft barracks at night. And they had some big waft sergeant would control the...

What's a wharf? Oh, women in the Air Force. Yeah, that's right. Women in the Air Force. Anyway, there was a big sergeant that would control all these women, and they'd lock them up at night. and my other squadron he had all the crew chiefs and they would stake in and play with my wife getting trouble and he'd get caught playing with him inside

sneaking in and so the jag and I had court martial authority and we were doing a lot of drug stuff people really hung out in drugs and even had a couple of general court marshals guys trying to torch the building and sabotage my car and attack me with kung fu darts. It's really a mess, and a lot of marijuana.

So, and I says, look, I want, it says, why in the world were you going to lock up a third of my troops, females, and all the guys, they can run around downtown and race hell, but they have to stay in this wife barracks. I said, that's, I says, look, I'm the commander, there are my people, and I want them all in my barracks. And they would say, Colonel Retan, do you have to be?

any idea what would happen if we put females in the barracks? I said yeah I know exactly what would happen in about 10 days it would sort itself out and we'd be back to normal and they could have all the rights and liberties that all the guys have you know put one corner downstairs it'd be the wife in it oh no man they wouldn't got to do that at all well the no smoking thing in trying to lock unlock my wife at night Then I was throwing kids out of the Air Force for doing drugs. Boy, there's some horrible stuff that was happening to these kids.

But then what would bother me is I'd go to the commander's reception sometime. You know, when commander, he'd have the other officers into his. And I'd look out in the back at these receptions, and the wives would be out there token. You know, they'd be smoking marijuana. And I thought, I'm throwing kids out of the Air Force for what the wives are doing back there. And I looked around at the whole scene.

Now I had a great combat record. I had all my military training, command and staff done, all those things. I was on my way to be chief of staff. And I thought, you know, it happened just like that. It turned around, and I went over to this orderly room or whatever the thing was, CBPO. home and I says I'm going home and I had 20 years in a microsecond just enough for the retirement and that was another area of something that I just wasn't ready for the politics of that so then it went out and got a hold of my brother and we flew around the world yeah and that that

that story is you know a crazy story of you know you know, as you're going through this thing, as you're, as you, uh, you know, get together the money. And speaking of cigarettes, you know, you, at one point you get a tobacco company that's going to sponsor the whole thing. You won't take their money. Uh, so you scrap this thing together. You know, you were talking earlier about the Voyager aircraft itself. And this is cool because I remember it.

Dave remembers it. Dave probably remembers it better than I did because he was a little, uh, uh, aircraft addict like you were. Me, I just thought it was cool. But the whole thing weighed like, you know, 500 pounds or something like this and and you guys took this thing you fly this thing around the world You got incredible details of that inside this book You know sleep deprivation it's not what nine days it took you to do this

You get done with that You do you you run for Congress out here in California You got all kinds of stuff in this book you you set a bunch of records Try to go around the world again in a balloon. That was interesting. Well, I thought, you know, here I am successful around the world and an airplane. You know, after you do something like that, you're looking for, you know, what else can I do? What else is out there? Has anybody gone around the world in a balloon nonstop? You end up saved by a parachute again. Yep. That's right, to bail out of that thing.

Only this time, it was fully funded. So I got Baron Hilton and Pepsi sponsors. They got a million and a half dollars and built this pressurized capsule that was pressurized I could stay in the stratosphere even sit on the moon closed loop life support system the radios we launched out of albuquerque about well we had about a three-hour delay on the launch which saved our lives really and they launched this baron hilton cut the thing and sirens and patriotic music and we launched off or run away around the world. Anyway, at 30,000 feet, to do a design screw up by the manufacturer,

the balloon wouldn't vent, so as it started to heat and expand, it wouldn't vent so it actually ruptured the balloon, the helium envelope, blew the whole bottom of it out. Of course, a lot of big explosion, but it's enough to bounce us off the floor when that thing let go. and now we're coming down

and we launched out to fly around the world and didn't even get out of the county that's an opportunity for character development I ended up in a choya cactus patch the guy says well what are you going to do next

I says well this is the first day of our second attempt and anyway since there's only one first nobody gives a crap about who does anything second. A guy, a Swiss watch company. Don't want to say the, I think it was Brightling. The Brightling Orbiter. They took off in an incredible flight,

that Timon Jones and Pertron Picard, neat guy. And I sat there and watched them, and I even made the comment in public that it was all, it's very nice to be in competition with those who have absolutely no change. chance of success. Whoops. So, I don't know, my co-pilot, he was not totally honest with me about parachutes.

And now real strong winds on the ground, like 40-mile-hour winds in a parachute. If you don't do everything exactly right, you're going to get hurt really bad. And unfortunately, he wasn't truthful with me about his parachute experience. And so he jumped out first and got a good shoot. But without knowing how to handle the high-wing landing, parachutes are neat. They'll save you life in flight, but it'll kill you on the ground. I'd be a drug across the desert.

And I ended up, I landed really, you know, started to step off your car at 40 miles an hour. Your feet hit and it really flips you around. Anyway, he didn't know anything about that. And he landed backwards and he got some severe injuries. And I landed properly going backwards and my helmet hit the ground so hard I thought I was going to break. And by the time I got both of those things jettisoned, I was in a choa cactus patch. You know, the jumping cactus, a little needle barbs and stuff.

And I was looking through my, you know, looking through the cactus in my face at our million-dollar balloon. Of course, it would hit and knock off some of the propane tanks and it would go back up again. It hit again and it discharged different stuff and finally hit a power line in Texas. And it burned to the ground. Well, that one burned to ground, I mean, but you had already made it as the first person around the world without stopping or refueling with the Voyager, which is an awesome story inside this book. And you know, you've talked a little bit about it on the podcast, but to get the full story, the book lays it out,

all kinds of issues you overcame. Just an incredible story. And, you know, one of the many reasons you were inducted into the Aviation Hall of Fame. Yep. And I mean, the stories in the book, they're just incredible. if you're listening

definitely just just order this book and you know we've been talking for a pretty long time now I don't want to I don't want to take up you know forever but Dave what do you got you got any questions

I got all sorts of questions but I mostly just enjoyed listening I'm you know we're three and a half hours into this almost and I'm just just captivated hearing the stories. And I routinely get to say this because I get to sit over here off to the side when

Jocko does these podcasts. And I just get to watch people have these conversations. But the aviation conversations are unique and they're special to me because I could picture a lot of the things you're talking about. I can picture the way you're describing him. But unrelated to that, I've been sitting here thinking this whole time about a saying that, and I think it's some phrases as don't meet your hearing. Something like that, which I think is like a some catchphrase that says like, well, don't meet your heroes because when you meet them, you're going to be disappointed because you've created this image you've had of them in your mind.

Well, I've gotten to meet several of my heroes and never once, never once have I been disappointed. But what's unique about this for me, sir, is that all the other people I've ever met, I can only read about them in books and hear about the things that they've done. but I know you because I got to see what you did. I was old enough and we were modern enough that what you did in that airplane in 1986 and I can vividly remember the three loops you did over Mahadi when you landed and getting, I can picture that as a teenager already captivated by airplanes. So to get to sit here with you, knowing who you are, not from books, but from actually seeing it happen live and in person, this is just an absolute remarkable.

day for me. So I can't thank you enough for letting me be part of this. This has been awesome. I am honored to have met one of my heroes today. Well, thank you very much. This, the brother come up and he says with the advent

availability of, it reminds me of an opportunity I had to meet the king, the now king of England. But anyway. Well, what happened when you met the king of England? Well, I called it.

I called him, hey, Chuck, and I didn't go over too well. He's a fellow fighter pilot. I don't bow to bow to royalty in any case. I'm an American. Hey, Chuck. Well, anyway, the, the bird said that with the availability of carbon fiber, he thinks it's possible to build an airplane light enough that'll carry enough fuel to go around the world.

Now, the airplane took off, these are round numbers, 10,000 pounds, 3.6 tons of aviation gas. 3.6 tons. The carbon fiber structure weighed 926 pounds and a wingspan bigger than a buoy 737 and a cockpit half the size of one of the restrooms on 737. But all of that, that 926 pounds had to carry

3.6 tons of fuel, two engines, avionics, radios, two hardy little food and water and launch off. It's one of the things that you get on a train one day and you realize the train's going off a cliff and it's too late you can't get off. You know five and a half years I've told everybody, hey we're going to fly around the world. Help us out. Had no money. Volunteers begged and borrow a quarter million dollars with a carbon fiber. Half a million dollars with avionics and radars back in those old days with no GPS and so forth, a mission control system and set that whole thing up. And I described it in the book, the first part of the

next five minutes. And I named the book because how many times in my life have I sat in a cockpit and wondered what the next five minutes of my life is going to be like? And there have been a number places. And we haven't even talked about some of the flight test stuff that we did with Bert's planes. But the book starts with trying to put the thing in perspective. What did it feel like? When I first started going out and giving my talks, my wife, and I met her after the flight. She listened to a couple of my lectures, and I'm kind of a technical person. And I think it's important that my audience knows how many fuel tanks we had and how we sequenced them and how the L over D and all the other stuff. And finally, she, she,

come up to me and she says, Dick, she says, nobody gives a frick about how many fuel tanks. He said, I want you to tell them what it felt like. And so I changed the whole tenor of the book. And it wasn't, the book's not written for aviation, as you can tell. It was written for to try to talk about challenges and motivation and some of the emotional challenge that we had along the way. And try to set that up. And the book, the book starts with, with, I'm sitting in the end of the runway at Edwards Air Force Base that morning. We had roughly 25% more fuel than we'd ever had on board before, much less flight tested it. The airplane was, of course there wasn't much to it, so it's pretty flexible and it could bend.

And I'm sitting there thinking, because the two and a half years of flight tests and the 69 flights, we had some horrible emergencies many, many May days. The propeller blade came off and it ripped the engine off. It was just hanging in the bottom of the cowling and flight control problems and ran into some rain and

almost one of the airfoils on the airplane didn't like rain and we found out about it the hard way and we just barely flew out of the rain in time to save. I mean it was numerous stories about that that's in the book. But try to

to set up the situation that I'm sitting at the end of the runway. What am I thinking about? What's going to happen? Trying to remember some of the stuff that's happened ahead at the time. Another thing is, you know, people are really interesting. Interpersonal relationships. I met, I met, I separated from my first wife, and later on I met another girl.

name is Gina Yeager and we had a big and romantic thing and about the time we met Bert says hey how about doing this around the world things wow okay is it Bert you designed it and Gina and I will fly this thing around the world we're off on this five-year odyssey this romantic audits and it was really good I mean some of the most interesting times in my life but then for some reason she decided to Well, she got out of the bed and went into the other bedroom. And I didn't have enough time to replace her.

And there was a whole bunch of pressure going on. So all of a sudden we're have this romance ended. And we weren't even talking to each other. And now we've got to go and fly around the world together. And the fact is that it takes two pilots to do that. You know, you take turns. But she couldn't fly the airplane. She didn't want to learn how to operate in any of the systems.

I kept saying, damn it, I can't do this thing by myself. I need to have another pilot. You need to learn this, but you wouldn't. And I says, if you don't learn how to run and set up the nav systems and all the other complicated things about this airplane, I'm going to replace you with an actual pilot. And she looked at me and says, either take me or I'll burn the airplane.

So my choices were two, and one of them would have been in jail. And so when we, the two of us climbed into that airplane that day, that morning at Edwards Air Force Base, I had no idea how we were going to do this. What did you think your percentage chance of a success was? Well, none. It was all set up. It was to go. It didn't have enough time to fix any of these things.

The weatherman came up one day and he says, you know, we've been working really hard on this thing to get all the systems, the mission control, the weather, their communication systems, the worldwide, all this stuff had to be set up. And it says, and the weather was terrible. And we had missed the weather window. And it was in December and it was outside of the weather window. And the weather guy, Len Snellman comes up and he says, hey Dick. He says, well, we missed the weather window. We have to wait until next year. And I said, all of this stuff that were borrowed, all these big huge computers and communication system were all borrowed.

And I didn't know if I could get all that equipment back in a year and all the people back in a year. And I looked at him and I said, Lynn, I said, the airplane's not ready yet. It's close. He says, when the airplane is finally ready, I'm going to walk outside. It's a metaphor. So I'm going to walk outside, and if it's raining, I'll wait. And if it's not raining, then I'm going to go. I said, you go back in your weather thing, and you find me a wait around the world outside of the weather window.

And next day he comes back and says, hey, Dick, I think I found you away, except for one thing. Can't get you across Africa. And the map, look at the world map, big wind map, see, Africa is only this bit. I'm worried about that when we get there. profound, as you see in the blue. So anyway, I wanted to rest. When the airplane is finally ready, and all the people sign off, not metaphorically,

they say that it's ready, the engines, the systems, everything is ready to go. You know, the refueling, Bowser's are ready at Edwards Air Force Base. The press has been notified. I thought, when that's done, Gina and I, we can go up in the CERAs and just,

rest. He didn't have some rest, you know, just to be ready. And when it was finally ready, the next morning we had a weather briefing that was either a go or no go at 10 o'clock. And I walked into the weather briefing, and Lynn Snellman, the weather guy, comes in and he was smiling. And I thought, oh, shoot. And he's telling me, but during the briefing, I realized that he, that the weather is perfect for departure, except for Africa. And I thought, God, God, I would just, you know, just one day off. I could just go and get my head clear. One day is all I wanted, but there wasn't.

And it's just like General Eisenhower when it was on D-Day. They all looked at him and said he had to say go or no go. And it says, okay, let's go. And in 10 seconds, I was alone in the room. Everybody had left. You know, it's all choreographed, where the engine starts, take it over there, set it up at Edwards Air Force Base. the fuel bousers.

We had the last supper with the family. Then I thought that here I am, I should have the VIP quarters. The VIP quarters out there at Edwards, then I didn't check on it. I trusted somebody else to do that. Well, they didn't. They didn't know anything about it.

And so I ended up in a real old barracks, kind of one step up from an open bay barracks. and those things they have central heating and the ducks whistle and they make a lot of noise and this I go in this room and it's bare and it's an old military bed with you know the steel thing on it and it's just a terrible thing I thought god now I asked the driver I says well hey there's the VIP quarters over there you know here I'm going to fly around the world at least somebody, he says that he didn't even know anything about that. God, that's okay. So I'm laying in there and listen to that and first, you know, it's a wake up in a handful of hours and I'm laying there

and it's hot and I'm trying to get some sleep and all of a sudden there's a knock on the door. I thought, knock on the door. Who the hell is this? So I'm really pissed. I get up, open the door and My flight surgeon, Dr. George Juhlund is there. He's our flight guy for all over medical stuff. And I said, George, what are you doing? And he says, oh, Dick, I forgot. And he had a little box. You know, like the children's milk cartons, you know,

they open them up and stuff. He says, I want a urine sample when you wake up. And here's the box that I want you to do it. And I thought, George, you woke me up. You woke me up to give me a box that piss in. And then I was really pissed. I was so keyed up about that. I don't think I slept.

Finally the wake-up time calm, and we went out and called on board the airplane with no sleep per se and a co-pilot that wasn't talking to me and didn't know how to do run any of the systems. And we took off having no idea how in the hell I was going to do this. And we thought about all the stuff we'd gone through in the last five and a half years. And then it was time. And I thought, you know, Dick, you're probably going to be dead in the next five minutes.

What you really ought to do right now is shut the engine down and open the little canopy and get out and walk out in the desert. At least you'll be alive tomorrow. And then I thought, wait a minute. I ask all these people all these years to come and help me. and a lot of them sacrificed quite a bit. Some of them even lost their jobs to come and help. Had I done that, they would have every right to chase me down

and commit premature euthanasia for some damn coward that totally deserved it. So I said, there's no way out. There's no way. So that morning, trepidation, I pushed both the throttles wide open, released a little tiny break like a foot on a nose wheel or something, foot on a skateboard because brakes are really heavy so we didn't take any brakes and that thing lumbered down the runway

and it accelerated yeah there was a acceleration checkpoint and I asked I put more fuel on board the airplane than what the designer wanted and Eve was really mad about that but I was worried about running out of fuel I always had this nightmare that'd run out of fuel 100 miles short, hell of a record, but we still failed on first around the world. So he put up some flag markers down the runway, and he says, Dick, you need to have this specific airspeed as you cross each one of the markers. And because you don't have really have wheel brakes on the airplane, and to be able to stop before you run out in Edwards Dry Lake, you need to have these target air speeds as you cross them. Well, he didn't know it, but Dick was really tired.

He had been at this thing five and a half years, and all this emotional things with my girlfriend, plus all the other things that we had to deal with. The only thing I wanted, I just wanted this freaking thing over with. And I didn't care if I was on fire. I wasn't going to quit. So I had to give him a blood oath to my brother, okay, I'll do that.

I promise, promise. No one full will. There's no freaking way I'm going to quit. I want it over with. I've just, you get to that point. And so we started accelerating as the flag markers came by, we were starting to kin, you know, one knot low, two knots, three knots, and at midfield, the last marker, we needed 86 knots.

Yeah, 100 knot for takeoff, 86 knots. And I was four knots low. So I keyed the mic button, it says we're four knots low at midfield. And nobody said anything. I think everybody knew there was no freaking way I was going to quit. Besides that, the airspeed indicators over here, see, and here's 65. It only had to go a little bit farther to a hundred. A little bit more.

Just a little bit more. This is all I have to. And I looked down at the end of the runway. It's still a mile and a half away. I said, shoot, there's no problem. Not knowing that the faster you go, the more rapid you consume the runway. And so we hit a... our rotation speed, and I gave it three more knots from mom, and the wing tips were dragging

on the runway. And I reached up and grabbed that control stick and says, well, Dick, if you'd never been smooth in any time of your life, you better be smooth now, because this is the big one. And it reached down there and started pulling back on the stick, and the canard lifted, and the boom tank started coming up, and I could see the wings come up slowly, slowly, and I swear to God they were going to touch over my head. And with 95% of that world's longest runway, it lifted off. Actually, I have the video, if you want to look at it or see it or include it, but the wings came up real slow, and it lifted off, and it flew in ground effect,

and it finally got to 100 knots. And if it got to 100 knots, we had enough power to climb. And so we shook off the wingtips, which were damaged, lost three foot of wingspan. And they were talking about aborting. It says, there ain't no fine why I'm going to quit. They're just not going to quit under any circumstances. I don't care what's wrong with the airplane. It could be on fire.

And so we turned and put W in the compass. And metaphorically, I held W in the compass for nine bloody days and looked up without turning around. And there was Edwards Air Force Base ahead of us. I guess the world is round. It's still amazing to me that normally if you fly a long ways to get home, you've got to turn and I come back.

But if you just keep going in the same direction and to get home, it's still strange. I guess maybe the world is round, but I know one thing. It's a bloody long ways around the world. The world is 25,000 miles at the equator. Or just under that.

The Voyager actually flew 26,358 statute miles, unrefueled. We got home with one-half of one percent of our takeoff fuel. So we just barely made it back. But that morning, it was beautiful in the L.A. Basin at the high desert. Tens of thousands of people came out. And cars were lined up all the way back into Lancaster. And a lot of people.

And somebody says, hey, Dick, if you orbit for 20 minutes more, you'll have an even nine days. And I always thought, well, that would sound better. And so we orbited around and flew over the crown and said things like, hey, Dick, what time is it? I says, well, it's Miller time. You only go around once. That was the beer at the time. Another one says, Dick, what are you going to do now? I said, I'm going to Disneyland. And Eisner was the head of Disney that time.

And his wife said that that was the first time that that thing had ever been said in public. And then I said after that, knowing that I invented that or whatever, that I guess Joe Namath or some football player that won the Super Bowl. And he says, what are you going to do now, Joe, or whatever his name was? Well, I'm going to Disneyland. Well, they probably paid him $50,000 to do that. Didn't pay me anything.

But that day I went out and we put the landing gear down, and it was going to land in the dry lake. I mean, we were so light then I could have landed on my briefcase, but it was going to land at Edwards Air Force Base and the famous Murat of Dry Lake. And so we came around, and another thing I was worried about is on the dry lake, there's no death perception. And I had basically been awake for nine days.

I sat in the seat for three nights. four days, three nights. Going into the fourth night, it says even Dick, you can't do this. You've got to get some sleep, but I couldn't put her in the seat. Because when we're heavy, if the autopilot kicked off, the airplane would self-destruct in 15 seconds, and I couldn't get to the controls. So we had to wait until we burned off enough fuel that it would dampen itself out. So he came around and touched down a good buddy, Mike Melville. He counted it down to five, four, three, one touchdown on aviation's hallowed ground, you know, where Chuck Yeager and Scott Crossfield chased the demons in the sky. And what an honor to be able to land in that place.

And taxied up to the crowd and shut off those engines that had run for solid for nine days. And I looked around at everybody, and I set my head back a little bit, and I closed my eyes. and it felt every bit as good as I had imagined it for the last five and a half years. And the airplane hangs in the National Air and Space Museum in the mall. Well, I think they're doing some renovation that it hung there.

You know, it's a tribute to a couple of things, to the freedom that we have in our country. And also that if you can, like mom says, if you can dream it, you can do it, and the only way to fail is if you quit. and managed the motivation. And in the book there, when President Reagan and Nancy presented to us the Citizens Medal,

just a couple days after the flight, they're in Crystal City in Los Angeles. There was some speeches given. Bert and I said something, and Gina said something, and the president said something. But we got to meet them and get acquainted with them. about who they were. And when we first met in the ante room

before we went on stage to accept the medals, we started talking, and we were nervous. We're going to meet the presidency. And as we sit there and started to talk a little bit where we were, we reversed positions subconsciously. And I realized they're as nervous as we were. But this is the presidency.

And we got invited to Washington and had dinner a couple of times in a state dinner sitting at the same table with Ronald Reagan. What an honor that was. And he is every bit. And in the book, I found the transcripts of the words that were saying, and I read them today, I says, I said that extemporaneously?

But it turned out really well. Especially it's all done because, like we talked during that presentation with the president, about freedom. how precious that is. Well, no doubt about that. And the book definitely spells that out. And just the whole story is incredible. Your story is incredible.

I want to close out with something that you write in the book. Something you write in the book about your best friend, Howard K. Williams, as we talked about earlier, who you call Howie. Again, he was shot down in Vietnam. There was a lot of unknowns about what did it actually happen to him. You had that mystery phone call. And it wasn't until 1992 when his remains were recovered by the POW MIA Resolution Task Force. And as you mentioned earlier, you attended the service.

And he wrote about that in the book. You say, how we, how we, how we, how we? military funeral at Arlington National Cemetery was an impressive ceremony with full military honors befitting a fallen hero the POW MIA name bracelets worn by his friends and family were ceremoniously added to the grave as I turned to leave the grave site I saw Howard's son he was only four or five when I had last seen him at Luke but at this moment I couldn't believe my eyes he was the spitting image of his father my buddy would have been so proud of his boy.

Future visits to Washington, D.C. would always find me at the Vietnam War Memorial. That symbolic black granite wall contains more than 58,000 names of fellow warriors killed and missing in action. I run my fingers over the name of one of America's best and one of my very best friends, Howard K. Williams. Each time I stand before his engraved name, I swear I see his reflection smiling back at me from within the dark granite surface. I continue to miss him.

And for all these years, I have wondered what really happened. I recall the camaraderie and fellowship of the fledgling fighter pilots off to test their skills in mankind's epitome of human competition. deadly combat. And I thank them, especially Howie, for their sacrifice that allows me to live a full life. So, sir, thank you. Thanks to you and all your comrades that served in sacrifice for our freedom. Well, thank you.

Look at it as a fellow warrior. There's just one thing. There's an individual, his name is Jeremiah Denton, and he spent many years as a prisoner war of the North Vietnamese. And they picked him up, and he got off the airplane at Clark Air Force Base after enduring all of that. They asked him, there was microphone set up, and if he wanted to say a few words.

And he gets off the airplane. He looks around for his first two or three steps on free soil. He walked up to the microphone, and he said something to me so profound that it epitomizes fellow warriors. And I'm going to say it, but I'm going to choke up because I try to imagine what he had gone through in the words that he spoke that morning at Clark. and what he said was

I consider it an honor to have had the privilege of serving my country under difficult circumstances and I think God as long as there's that kind of people that look back on that whole thing as an honor to serve his country

and I think as long as there are those people our flag will still be free. Yes, sir. Yes, sir, indeed. And I don't think I can say anything else beyond that other than thank you. Thank you, Junkle. It's an honor to be here.

Thank you. And with that, Dick Rutan has left the building also. Dave Burke left the building. He's escorting Dick Rutan back to the hotel. They're probably going to sit and talk about flying for a while. So just incredible story. Obviously, read the book, get the book.

The next five minutes, it's called. It's just incredible to be able to sit here with a guy like that and hear these stories. Just rolling in to North Vietnam, tracers everywhere, locking eyes with those enemy fighters trying to kill you and doing that day after day after day after day after day after day after day. That's the American fighting spirit. So thanks for listening. If you want to support the podcast, go to joccofuel.com.

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check out jocco underground.com. We got the YouTube channel. We got psychological warfare. A bunch of books. Again, the book, the important book for today is the next five minutes by Dick Rutan. Just an awesome book, an awesome read. You know about Jocko Publishing. We got a bunch of books.

Only Cry for the Living by Holly McKay. I've written a bunch of books. You can check those out as well. Kids books, Way the Warrior Kid, One, Two, and Three, get some of that. Aeschelam front. Look, these principles that we talk about, about combat they also apply to everyday life to business and we talk about those and we teach those at echelonfront eshlamfront.com for details come to one of our live events so that these lessons

get shared to get passed on we also have the online training academy at extreme ownership.com where you can learn this stuff online don't you don't need to go somewhere to get this information and also if you want to help service members active and retired You want to help their families? You want to help Gold Star families? Check out Mark Lee's mom. Mama Lee, she's got a charity organization. And if you want to donate or do you want to get involved,

go to America's mighty warriors.org. Don't forget about heroes and horses.org. You got Micah up in the wilderness, helping people find themselves. Yep. Dave Burke's on Twitter. He's on the gram. He's on Facebook at Dave R. Burke.

I'm there too. At Jocko Willink. And thanks once again to Dick Rutan for joining us, for sharing his lessons learned, sharing these incredible experiences. And thanks to him and to all the other military aviators that rule the sky and give us dominance. And they pay a heavy price for it. And thanks to the rest of our military personnel who also pay the price every day to keep us safe and protect our way of life in this great nation.

And the same goes to the police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, all first responders. You all keep us safe here at home. And we thank you for that. And to everyone else out there today, you heard what Dick Rutan said. And he talks about it in the book.

He talks about what his mother would tell him. And at one point in the book we didn't cover today, he talks about sometimes when he was facing a seemingly insurmountable problem or challenge. He would run. He would go and run to clear his mind. He'd do it for physical fitness, but he did it to clear his mind to gain perspective. And sometimes he says in the book, he would chant that cadence that he spoke of that he learned from his mom, which is you only fail if you quit. And that is the truth. So go out there.

Don't quit and keep getting after it. And until next time, this is Jocko. Out.