When control informs him that he is cleared to penetrate, the lead switches to the Lakenheath GCA frequency and contacts the controller, who talks him down. He breaks out into the fog at 300 feet above the ground a half mile off the end of the runway, touches down, deploys his drag chute, and gingerly steps on the brakes as the jet slips and slides on the always wet runway. He turns off on the end and jettisons his drag chute. The armorers then disconnect the gun plugs and put safety pins in any remaining bombs. About this time, the wingman lands. The lead waits for him to get safetied, and then he taxis back to the ramp in front of the squadron, shuts down the jet, climbs out, and stops by maintenance debriefing. Then he goes back to the squadron and stows his gear.

After that, he and his wingman spend maybe half an hour debriefing the flight: what went right, what went wrong, why the bombs were good or bad.

No small part of the discipline of a fighter pilot derives from the debriefings after a mission.

Since these can be brutal, the lead makes very sure that in the mission he follows the game plan, and if he’s made a mistake during the mission, he had better be the first to admit it. If he doesn’t, or if he wasn’t aware that he had made a mistake, or if he tried to cover up his mistakes with self-serving excuses, he was probably dead meat in the debrief.

Debriefings in operational units often involve heated debate, for the stakes are incredibly high, and the participants have strong and differing opinions about what will survive and work in combat and what is just fanciful thinking. On the other hand, the debriefings in combat crew training units tend to be much more structured and much less heated. The students do not have the experience to know what is functional and dysfunctional, and the missions themselves are usually very structured. However, since every mission includes unexpected events, there is always room for differences of opinion.

The most respected pilots are the ones who can identify their own shortfalls and learn from them. And the best instructors are the ones who can tell them the root cause of their failures in the air and give them tools to avoid them—either new physical techniques or different thought processes.

★ Another typical mission out of Lakenheath was called a night MSQ. This was a single-ship mission in Germany. Ground radars with very accurate beams had been placed near the East German border, in order to direct a fighter in wartime to a point in space for bomb release of a nuclear weapon. The bomb would then fly a predictable route to the target.