Robert Mason - Chickenhawk

“You look so good in your dress blues. And I’m proud of you.”

“Okay.”

I flew to Fort Myers for the wedding. I wore the uniform, the silver wings, and a bunch of ribbons. Looking good. During the reception, I heard some laughter when I walked in the door. A man I did not know asked loudly, “Hey, where’s your flag?” I flushed with anger. The place was quiet for a minute, people looking at me. Susan looked horrified. A fight at her wedding? No, no fight. The only fight going on was the one inside my head. I should have gone over and decked him. Alas, there are no time machines. I cooled myself by thinking, If he knew me, he wouldn’t have said that.

I took the instructor-pilot job very seriously. It gave me the chance to cull out potential Stoopy Stoddards. During the two-month cycle each group of four students spent with me, I taught them stuff not covered in the school syllabus. The school was interested in getting numbers out the door. I was interested in their survival. For example, the school no longer allowed simulated forced landings to the ground. Instead the instructor had to take control of the ship and abort the landing before the ship hit the ground. I thought that actually skidding across the ground, finishing the autorotation, was a key experience, so I let each student do it.

Instructor pilots flew half days. The flights alternated weekly, so that you flew mornings one week, afternoons the next. I spent my free time learning photography. I taught myself how to print photographs and enlarged some of the pictures I took in Vietnam. (I won an army photo contest with one.) Invariably, I tore my displays off the wall. I wanted to say how I felt about the war, but my pictures weren’t doing it. I took pictures around central Texas, mostly of abandoned farmhouses, and my technical skill grew with the practice.

A few of us who flew the H-23 Hiller were picked to cross-train in the new army trainer, the Hughes TH-55A. When I became rated in both trainers, I became a substitute instructor pilot in addition to my normal load. The demand for new pilots was growing monthly.

The new trainer was falling out of the sky, killing veteran pilots and their students. The ships were always found the same way—nose down in the ground, mush inside the cockpit. One or two pilots and their students were killed each week. After two months of this, an IP called in as he crashed. He said that the ship had tucked n a simulated forced landing and the controls had no effect on the dive. Then he died. They found out that if the cyclic was moved forward when the power was cut, the ship would immediately nose over and dive. Once in this position, pulling back on the cyclic was useless.

Hughes test pilots discovered that the ship could be saved if the pilot pushed forward on the cyclic (not back, as he would instinctively do), and if he had 1000 feet of air to wait for the recovery. We flew at 500 feet in the training areas.

We were told to demonstrate the tuck and its hairy recovery to all our students. I had it shown to me a couple of times, but I felt that students were not going to be able to appreciate the subtlety of the maneuver, especially since they were still trying to get the trainers into the sky and back to the ground in one piece. I found that a vivid explanation of the tuck effect and an immovable hand in front of the cyclic were adequate.

Four students stayed with me for a two-month cycle, and then four more would take their place. They were overjoyed to be in flight school. So was I. I flew all the time. I began to know each of the hundreds of confined areas the army had rented from the local farmers. Even though we had so many places to train, the fact that there were fifteen hundred helicopters milling around the sky each training day made flying dangerous. Midair collisions, especially between two solo students, became commonplace.

One afternoon, I cut the power on a student, near a grassy clearing used to demonstrate forced landings. The student reacted quickly, bottomed the pitch, maintained airspeed, and maneuvered the ship toward the clearing. He was doing just fine. Unknown to us, however, another ship was autorotating to the same field at the same moment. I noticed a shadow above us while we sank toward the clearing. He was descending faster than we were. As his skids closed on our rotors, I knew there was no way out. If I moved the disk, the rotors would swing up into his skids. We were already descending as fast as the ship could go. At the last second, the other ship saw us and jerked violently away. By my reckoning, he missed us by an inch. But close calls in training were not what was bothering me during the night.

“Every morning the truck comes. I have to open the back door; I know what’s out there, but I still go to the door,” I said. “It’s always the same. The driver backs the truck to the door and says, ‘How many do you want?’ He points to a truck of babies. Dead babies. I always gag at the sight. They all look dead, but then I see an eyelid blink in the pile, then another.” I stopped.

“Then what happens?” Doc Ryan flicked an ash on his desk.

“Then I always answer, ‘Two hundred pounds, Jake.’ I laugh when I say it. Jake picks up a pitchfork and stabs it into the pile and drops a couple of corpses on a big scale. ‘Nearly ten pounds a head,’ he says. Inside my head, I’m yelling for him to stop, that the babies aren’t dead, but Jake just keeps loading the scale. Each time he stabs a kid, it squirms on the fork, but Jake doesn’t notice a thing.”

“Then what?”

“Then it ends.”

“What do you think it means?”

“I was hoping you’d tell me.”

“I’m more interested in what you think it means.”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, time’s up, anyway. Think about it. Same time next week?”

“Okay.”

Dr. Ryan, Captain Ryan, led me to the door.

“The tranqs helping?”

“They help me sleep, but I can’t fly with them.”

“A little more time,” he said. “You’ll be back up.”

I was grounded. Seeing Doc Ryan each week was part of my new schedule. This was the second time I had been grounded at Wolters.

The first time, I was with one of my best students, landing at the main heliport. At the end of the training sessions, the heliport was normally crowded with hundreds of returning trainers. Usually the instructor flew the ship in this congestion, especially on the flight line, where the competing rotor wash made hovering tricky. As I hovered toward the parking slot, I felt the ship rear back. I pushed the cyclic forward, then realized that the ship wasn’t falling backward. I was. I squeezed the intercom trigger. “You got it.” The student grabbed the controls instantly, thinking I was just giving him one more surprise test. He maneuvered into the slot, landed, and shut down. While he did that, I fought the dizzy feeling. Back at the debriefing, I complimented him on his landing and gave him a double-A grade for the ride. Then I went directly to the flight surgeon. He could find nothing physically wrong, but he grounded me for a month.

Being a grounded pilot in the midst of flying pilots is torture. I worked in the tower, kept records, and drove trucks out to the stage fields. I was performing a job normally held by a pfc.

During the month, the nightmares continued and my wake-ups became worse. I lived long nights alone in my own home. After Patience and Jack were asleep, I paced, read, built model airplanes, anything to become sleepy. Generally I would get to bed at four or five in the morning.

I reasoned that things would only get worse if I didn’t fly. The trauma of being grounded was inflaming the problem. When I saw the flight surgeon again, I told him everything was just fine. I felt great. Sleeping like a log. When can I fly? He said that if I went another week doing as well, he would put me back up. And he did.