Military Pilots Really Have "The Right Stuff"

Tammie Jo Shults, F-18 Fighter Pilot

Today I listened to the audio of pilot Tammie Jo Shults calmly speaking with Air Traffic Control in Philadelphia after the Number 1 engine exploded on her Southwest Boeing 737 aircraft.  Her voice had the kind of calm I have heard on headsets when I have been on military aircraft in serious trouble.  You would never know the danger from the voices of the pilots.

The Exploded Engine on Southwest Flight 1380

Shortly after I enlisted in 1972, I discovered that active duty soldiers could fly anywhere for $10. After I settled in to my first permanent duty station at Hill Air Force Base in Utah late that year, I decided to take a week’s leave and fly military from Utah to Boston and try out Space Available Flying.

I showed up flight operations at Hill the morning my leave began.  The first flight out was to Lowry Air Force Base in Denver.  It was an executive jet flying empty to pickup a general. I was a 19-year-old Airman First Class at the time.  They signed me up for the flight. I was the only passenger for the 500-mile trip over the Rocky Mountains.  It was glorious.  I had a drink and snacks served by the sergeant who was the steward on the plane.  I arrived in Denver thinking that flying “Space A” was about the coolest thing that ever happened to me. 

C-130 Hercules Transport Aircraft

I strolled to flight operations in Denver.  The next thing going anywhere east was a C-130 Hercules on its way to Atlanta, Georgia.  I think the plan was actually to go to Warner Robbins Air Force Base, but in the end, Atlanta was where we landed. Atlanta sounded good to me. I had never been to Georgia and I would be on the Atlantic Coast. 

The C-130E Hercules of that era cruised at 300 mph, less when fully loaded as we were today. After the one-hour trip across the Rockies, it would be more five hours inside the engine roar and wind noise of the four-engine Hercules.  The plane was fully loaded with palletized cargo under straps including what looked like Army mobile radar.  I walked up the tail ramp and past the cargo to the front of the plane.

Behind me, more than 50 high school ROTC cadets filed in for a trip to Georgia for a convention of some kind.  For some of these kids, it was their first flight.  In a C-130, everyone sits in fold-out seats made from nylon strapping material facing the middle of the plane.  The few windows were behind the heads of the cadets. Most of the cadets had their official USAF bag lunch as did I: two bologna and cheese sandwiches on Wonder Bread, chips, a cookie, and a carton of milk.  Those lunches would keep me busy for much of our ill-fated flight. 

Before we took off, the loadmaster handed me a set of headphones and asked me to help with the cadets.  I said sure and started checking seat belts.  The loadmaster told the cadets not to look at the cargo while we were in flight and to keep their seatbelts on unless they had to get up.  If you have never been in a C-130 or other cargo plane with seats down the sides of the fuselage, it is great advice not to look at the cargo, but it’s pretty much impossible.  The shaking cargo in flight will shift even a good digestive system into reverse. 

The flight was smooth for the first hour.  Many of the cadets laughed and joked and ate their bologna and cheese sandwiches.  An hour later we hit turbulence.  I watched some those happy teenage faces go pale, then green.  I grabbed a stack of airsickness bags and passed them out, open and ready for use.  Then I collected them. 

The kids kept me busy for the next few hours. While I was helping one of the kids out of the toilet, I left my headphones hanging on the bulkhead.  As we sidestepped toward his seat, the plane shuddered. When the kid was safely buckled in, I went back and grabbed my headset.  I heard the pilot say, “No fuel to the right wing. Engines three and four inop. Feathering props.”

The plane was crabbing in the sky. With power only on the left wing, the plane would try to spin clockwise, then flip back when the counterforces built up.  So we oscillated as if there were an axle sticking up and down between the wings and we rotated on it.

The pilot had been talking to air traffic control. He came back on the intercom. “We’re 70 miles out. Runway at Hartsfield will be clear for us. Ten years ago in the ‘Nam I landed a model B with one engine and some big chunks of wing missing. We’ll be fine. Big bump, when we first touch down, then we’ll be fine.”

We slowly descended. Our slower airspeed made crabbing less violent. The loadmaster and I double-checked seatbelts and told all the kids everything was fine and we would land soon. We were lying with a smile.

Ten miles out I went up to the flight deck and looked ahead though the cockpit.  Red lights were everywhere on the airstrip. The pilots and the rest of the crew were perfectly calm, but it seemed like the rest of the world thought a plane with two dead engines was a problem. 

We descended. As we neared the ground the pilot pulled the nose up hard.  When we touched, the plane took one big bounce, skidded right for a couple of seconds, then settled down and stopped quickly. 

I waited until all the kids had filed out before I grabbed my duffel bag and walked down the ramp.  Fire trucks and ambulances ringed the area. I couldn’t count all of the emergency vehicles that were waiting for that big bounce to turn into something worse.  I sat on my duffel bag and waited for the crew to come out of the plane.  When the pilots and the flight engineer came down the ramp, they were talking like nothing had happened.  The loadmaster came over and shook my hand. He thanked me for helping out with the kids. 

A couple of decades later I would read Tom Wolfe’s book “The Right Stuff” and know that the “Cool” those astronauts brought to the Mercury space program came from learning to fly in the military.  Alan Shepard, John Glenn and the other astronauts, the heroes of my Cold War youth, are now pilots like Tammie Jo Shults and Chesley Sullenberger, military pilots, masters of the complex skill of flying and who remain calm and competent when engines fail.

   

Field Guide to Flying Death: Cruise Missiles

A British Tornado fighter plane carrying four 

Storm Shadow Cruise Missiles  

Cruise missiles are actually a pilotless jet plane that flies to its target and explodes instead of landing.  Cruise missiles, like the Tomahawk and Storm Shadow missiles the U.S., U.K. and France fired at Syria recently, have jet engines and are in powered flight from launch to target.  

Rocket-Powered Missiles

Most modern missiles are rocket powered. They launch, burn their solid or liquid fuel in the first few seconds or minutes of the flight, and then follow a ballistic path to target—they fly where gravity and air resistance says metal darts coasting at thousands of miles per hour through air will go. They are thrust to a speed of one thousand to several thousand miles per hour then coast to their target using a guidance that steers the missile while it coasts through the air at very high speed. 

Cruise Missiles 

A Cruise missile doesn’t coast through the air, it flies.  Really it is a jet plane with a warhead as its only passenger.  So instead of blasting to thousands of miles an hour then coasting to target with little nudges of guidance, the Cruise missile flies. Because it flies, it can travel hundreds of miles a hundred feet or less above the ground over varied terrain. If the enemy tries to intercept a cruise missile, it can evade. The best fighter planes can only turn, dive or climb within the limits of the pilot’s brain and body. Somewhere above 5gs, even the most fit pilot will black out. The only limit on evasion by a Cruise missile is physics.  

The Storm Shadow and Tomahawk cruise missiles recently fired at Syria are subsonic, traveling 500 mph, or about the same speed as a commercial airliner. But a cruise missile is much harder to hit.  Flying close to the ground, following the terrain, makes it a tough target to hit. Most radar systems don't work that close to the ground.  

A Tomahawk Cruise Missile fired from a U.S. Navy Destroyer

Cruise missiles are so accurate they can hit a garage door after a 500-mile flight. The latest upgrades to the navigation systems make the targeting so good the 3,500-pound, 20-foot-long missile could probably hit the handle on a garage door. 

The Attack on Syria
In the most recent raid, all of the 103 missiles flew to target.  The Syrians claimed to have shot down 71 of the missiles.  NATO said Syria fired 40 missiles to no effect.  The Syrian claim is quite amazing, shooting down 71 missiles with only 40 interceptor missiles. The firing of the missiles was a demonstration of how adaptable these missiles are to different launch sites.  The Storm Shadow missiles were fired from French and British fighter planes. The U.S. Navy launched 57 Tomahawk cruise missiles from destroyers, cruisers and a submarine. The Air Force launched another 19 Tomahawks from B1-B Lancer bombers. 

Plans are underway for a rocket-assist package for the Tomahawk that would increase its speed to Mach 3, more than 2000 mph. Another innovation would be to use unburnt jet fuel as an explosive on impact.  Both innovations would make an already effective weapon even more deadly.

The occasional series "Field Guide to Flying Death" includes:

Artillery

Mutually Assured Destruction

Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles

A-10 Thunderbolt II

Apache Longbow Attack Helicopter

Going Ballistic

President Grant Wipes Out the Ku Klux Klan in 1872

I am on page 767 of an 1,100-page biography of President Ulysses S. Grant by Ron Chernow.  The first 600 pages follow Grant from childhood through the end of the Civil War and the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.

Grant remained in charge of the U.S. Army from victory in 1865 until his election as President in 1868.  In those years, Andrew Johnson was President. Johnson began his abbreviated term in office carrying out Lincoln’s plans to give full rights of citizenship to Black Americans, but then became sympathetic with southerners who wanted to disenfranchise Blacks and prevent them from voting. 

Grant took over and re-energized Reconstruction.  Within a year of taking office, Grant became convinced that the marauding bands of southerners called the Ku Klux Klan would take over all of politics in the South and prevent Blacks from being full citizens.  Between 1870 and 1872, Grant authorized the Army to eradicate the Klan in cooperation with the Justice Department.  By 1872, the Klan was effectively wiped out across the South as an organization. 

After Grant left office, white supremacy returned in the form of Jim Crow laws and the Klan itself returned in a different form in the 20^th Century. The name Ku Klux is an Anglicized form of the Greek word for circle, Kuklos (κυκλοϲ). These circles of hate are among the most shameful parts of American history.  Grant shows that even in a time when the Klan could draw upon tens of thousands of veterans to fill its ranks, it could be crushed by a functioning central government.  

By any measure, the Klan remains the most deadly domestic terror organization in American history. 

I will write more when I finish the book. 

  

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Empathy: The Tyrant’s Key to Manipulating Fools

In a perfect world, empathy would always be good. It would describe our capacity to identify with the suffering of others. We would use empathy to experience the humanity we all share and that experience would lead us to love. 

But the world is not perfect, and in a tyrant’s world, empathy can be easily used to stir fear and hatred. The same empathy that led Mother Teresa of Calcutta to lift lepers out of gutters in Calcutta can reinforce the anti-immigrant hatred in Fox News viewers.  I recently tuned to the Fox News Channel several times in a week to look for weaponized empathy.  It showed up immediately and forcefully.

Laura Ingraham (before she went on “vacation”) showed a report of an illegal immigrant escaping custody while being deported and another report of an illegal immigrant robbing a store.  The intent of these reports on the anti-immigrant network is to fan fear and hatred among their viewers.  Ingraham is manipulating empathy to stoke fear. 

On Fox News, criminals have brown skin.  Fox News never referred to the Parkland mass murderer as a terrorist, despite killing seventeen people. Fox never showed a picture of the shooter in a #MAGA hat. The shooter in Las Vegas who killed 58 and wounded 500 was not labeled a terrorist. These killers are white, so they are labeled as mentally ill. Even with 500 people dead and dying, the white shooter is not labeled a terrorist.  Every Muslim killer is a terrorist on Fox News as in White House tweets.  The President never labels white mass murderers terrorists. 

Every tyrant perverts empathy in this way to fan hatred in his people against “others.” The Russian Tsars labeled Jews as “others” and caused more than a million Jews to be killed in the late 19^th and early 20^th Century in Russia.  Hitler screeched about German victims of Jewish crimes on his way to setting up the Holocaust.  Putin of Russia, Al-Sisi of Egypt, Kim Jong Un of North Korea, Rouhani of Iran, Asad of Syria and the other tyrants in charge of a fourth of the world’s governments all use empathy to define enemies of the people and unify hate to reinforce their tyranny. 

In his book “Against Empathy,” Paul Bloom warns of that most of us see our capacity to experience the suffering of others as the ultimate source of goodness.  

“Many of our wisest policy-makers, activists, scientists, and philosophers agree that the only problem with empathy is that we don’t have enough of it,” he says.

Bloom, in sharp contrast, says empathy is one of the leading motivators of inequality and immorality in society. Far from helping us to improve the lives of others, empathy is a capricious and irrational emotion that appeals to our narrow prejudices. It muddles our judgment and, ironically, often leads to cruelty. We are at our best when we are smart enough not to rely on it, but to draw instead upon a more distanced compassion.

In a talk at Franklin and Marshall College recently, Bloom told the audience that in psychological evaluations, that scoring low score on tests of empathy predicts nothing about behavior. Psychopaths score low on empathy, but so do those who have Asperger’s Syndrome. There is no correlation between low empathy and aggression. 

The best predictor of aggression:

--History of violence

--Lack of impulse control

--Need for stimulation

He joked with the audience that he would feel no danger if those in the front row scored low on empathy tests. But if those in the front row had a history of violence, lacked impulse control and looked bored, he would exit the stage.

After the talk, I thought about another word that seems to define a virtue, but can lead to tragedy in the wrong circumstances:  Loyalty.  I am currently reading a biography of Ulysses S. Grant by Ron Chernow.  Among the many reasons 700,000 Americans died in that most murderous of all of America’s wars is misplaced loyalty. Every one of the senior commanders in the Southern Army had sworn an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America. Lee, Longstreet, Stuart, Early and all the rest of those generals decided their loyalty lay elsewhere in defending their state or defending their right to keep other men in bondage. 

Misplaced loyalty led to unparalleled slaughter and misery. 

Honorable men of the German Wehrmacht followed their perverse and murderous leader into war that left a stain on their nation that can never be fully erased. 

Like loyalty, empathy needs rational thought as a guide. Empathy can lead a surgeon who could make a million dollars a year to go to a refugee camp with “Doctors without Borders,” and serve the most wretched among us.  It can also thousands of fearful fools at Trump Rally to chant “Build a Wall – Kill them all.” (NY Times August 3, 2016)

Empathy, like loyalty, can make our lives richer, but neither loyalty nor empathy can be an end in itself. Both must be kept in check by clear, rational thought. 

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Maundy Thursday: My Day to Volunteer

On this day 11 years ago, Maundy Thursday, the Thursday before Easter, I decided to call an Army recruiter and re-enlist.  It was mid-April. I would turn 54 two weeks later.  I called three local reserve recruiters, but none answered the phone. The fourth one I called was Kevin Askew of the 28th Combat Aviation Brigade at Fort Indiantown Gap, Pa. He answered the phone. 

The path from there to the picture below was beyond bumpy, but by August 15, I re-enlisted. 

Two years later, on my 56th birthday, I stepped out of a C-17 cargo plane and onto the airstrip at Camp Adder, Iraq, my home of the rest of 2009.  

Two years later, near Easter of 2011, I volunteered to go to Afghanistan with Alpha Company of 2-104th Aviation.  It did not work out.  They left late that year, I did not.  Then two years after that I volunteered to go with a Stryker Brigade from the 28th Infantry Division, again to Afghanistan.  President Obama himself cancelled that deployment in early 2014 as part of his plan to cut troop strength in that longest of America's wars.  In May 2016, I was a civilian again.

Last Fall I went to a meeting in Philadelphia for people who want to move to Israel. It was just a couple of months after Charlottesville and I was exploring my options.  The woman I talked to could see I was not ready to move to Israel right away, so she suggested a program called Sar-El.  It's a program for people who are "past military age, but would like to help the Israeli Defense Forces."  That sounded wonderful.  To qualify, I have to fill out all the forms that show I am eligible to be an Israeli citizen, but I don't have to apply for citizenship. So today I got out the long form and started filling it out with a the goal of spending a month in 2019 as a volunteer on an Israeli military base helping out with repairs or in any way I can. 

While those of us who volunteer live and work on an Israeli base, we wear IDF uniforms.  My family just laughed when they found out I would be wearing an IDF uniform.  One of my daughters suggested adding memory to my phone for selfies.  Yes, after wearing the uniform of the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Army in three eras, I would love to wear an IDF uniform. 

Clearly, Easter/Passover week is my time to start something new. 

Tankers vs. Non-Tankers: the never-ending discussion among armor crewmen

  

So much of the Army is competition, especially the combat arms parts of the Army where men are confined together in small armored spaces and have endless hours to “talk shit.”

When my small armored space was the turret of an M60A1Patton tank, one of the subjects that came up among us young sergeants was the question: Who is a Tanker, and who is a Non-Tanker?

Before gunnery, I was a Non-Tanker. Not only had I never qualified on Tank Table VIII (Tanker’s final exam), but I had transferred from the Air Force. A Wing Nut is not a Tanker.  So I was in the Limbo of those who simply never had been to annual gunnery.   Worse still, I enlisted in the Army in June 1975 after leaving the Air Force. Because I carried over my rank as Specialist4, I started as a gunner in 1-70^th Armor. I made sergeant in February and, partly from a shortage of sergeants, got my own tank crew right away.  Not only was I a Non-Tanker, I was the Non-Tanker in Charge of his own crew.

That first year, I fired “Distinguished” at tank gunnery at Fort Carson, Colorado, in April 1976.  Because I qualified near the top of the battalion, I was allowed to be part of the discussion of who was a Tanker and who wasn’t from that time forward, at least until 1978.

Every competitive job or sport has a group of insiders who discuss for hours, especially when drinks are involved, their equivalent of who is Tanker, and who is a Non-Tanker.  Whatever the field, the insider is competent, the outsider is in some critical way incompetent.

I have not been a Tanker since 1984, but the intense discussion came back to my mind in 2014 when I read the book, “The Remains of the Day” by Kazuo Ishiguro. The central character is a butler in one of the “Great Houses” in the time between the World Wars when the butler had a household staff ranging between a platoon and a small company.  At one point in the novel, a dozen butlers gather for drinks and have an intense discussion of what a butler is, what are the critical skills, who were and who currently are the greatest butlers, and, of course, who among those not currently in the room are mere pretenders. 

As with any clique, one’s place is never permanent. In January 1978, I took a job at Brigade headquarters and stayed there for rest of my tour.  I became a “Non-Tankin’ MotherF*#ker” immediately.  I got out at the end of 1979 and went to college. In 1982, I joined Alpha 6-68^th Armor for two years.  I made staff sergeant, became a section leader and as an active duty soldier in a reserve unit, I was back to being to being a Tanker! But in 1984, I got a job offer that would make it impossible to be a reservist, so I left the Army. Although I re-enlisted in 2007, I was in aviation and so was a Non-Tanker ever after.

In many ways, being a tanker really was, “The Best Job I Ever Had” and discussions about who was or was not a Tanker was one of the ways I knew how deep into my that job I was. 

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Blackhawk Helicopter at Sunset, Ali Air Base, Iraq, December 2009

Today I was looking at photos from my tour in Iraq in 2009-10.  Near the end of the tour, the days were shorter and winter sun shone on the aircraft.  I took these photos at sunset on the airstrip on Camp Adder, Talil Ali Air Base, Iraq.