To his credit, he finished his 100 missions, but he became a dip bomber and was never again effective.

A dip bomber was a pilot who went in at 15,000 feet, rolled in over the target, and at 14,000 feet dropped his bombs so they were sure to hit somewhere on the surface of the earth. He then immediately started a climb until he could rejoin the rest of the flight, who’d gone down to much lower altitudes to try to hit the target, even though it meant getting shot at. There were a number of dip bombers at Korat. Some, like this one, evoked sympathy; some were the object of scorn.

It’s not hard to understand why pilots who’d been shot down became dip bombers. For a pilot the cockpit is an air-conditioned and familiar womb, but when he is about to go down and he blows the canopy, he’s jerked out of the womb into the real world of wind blast, noise, and if he’s flying at high speed, pain. The uncertainty as he floats down in his parachute quickly follows: Will I get rescued? Will I get injured when I hit the ground? Will I get captured by civilians and beaten to death with hoes and stones? Will I be captured by the army and spend the rest of my life getting tortured in jail? When your plane gets hit, you’re scared. Chuck Horner’s plane was never hit, but he has no doubt about how he would have reacted if it had been.

Why did the Air Force fall into this particular trap?

Partly for old-style ticket-punching reasons—to give every officer a chance for quality combat time in order to justify promotions. Worse, in Horner’s view, the Air Force felt that since the war offered an opportunity to renew the combat experience of the force, they wanted to offer that experience to as many pilots as possible. Since it really didn’t matter how good any of these pilots were, they could afford to send in the second team. In other words, playing the entire bench was more important than winning the game.

As far as Horner was concerned, the generals who led the Air Force should have resigned rather than put up with any of this.16 Instead, they should have found the best pilots, put them in fighters, and sent them off to war with the warning: “Don’t come home until you’ve won.” They’d have figured out how to win. If they’d extended that policy all up and down the military line—as was done during Desert Storm—they’d have had a solid chance of victory.