The first breakthrough came one day when one of the best NCOs in the unit pulled me aside and told me to keep it up. I asked what that meant, and he told me that I must be doing good, because of what he saw when he stopped for a beer in the Tiger Inn, the bar just outside the back gate at Nellis. While any of the NCOs might stop there for a beer en route home, it was a pretty wild place. The folks who usually hung out there were the malcontents and young men looking to get thrown in jail or out of the Air Force. So this good NCO told me that I must be doing it right because the walls of the bathroom cubicles were filled with graffiti about how much of a shit Colonel Horner was. “Colonel,” my confidante said, “at least you are pissing off the right people.”

To this day I am certain that I made mistakes. However, the wings I commanded all had measurably higher output, aircraft in commission rates, more sorties flown, and better inspection results, to name a few, so I must have been right more times than I was wrong. I know in my heart that at each base I had the NCO corps solidly behind me, making up for my lack of experience and providing the leadership I was not able to provide.

What I had was a deep desire to make the unit better. I walked the flight line day and night. When I saw something that needed to be fixed, I made sure the person I gave the job to had the resources to get the job done. I used to lobby at the headquarters for construction supplies. I challenged my own maintenance people to fix their own work spaces so they were neat and clean. You’d be amazed how it makes people more productive if they have a shiny floor to work on in the hangar. The light is better under the aircraft, and people don’t get oily when they have to go down on the floor. Same for dining halls, same for clubs, dorms, offices, every aspect of the work and housing area. You start at the flight line so everyone knows what is most important in the Air Force: getting the aircraft and pilots ready to go to war. But then you also pay attention to the toilets, so the troops have a decent place to relieve themselves. Ditto for the dorms; they have to be clean too, and we had a program to fix up the dorm rooms so they were not dingy, moldy, and overcrowded, with rusty showers, broken blinds, and missing fixtures and light covers. I expected very high performance standards from the troops, but only because that is what they wanted from themselves.