Then Skinny decided that wasn’t enough. His squadron also needed to be different from the other two squadrons at work, so he bought them glengarries, the traditional Scottish hats, to wear with their flight suits. When Bruce Hinton tried to stop this change in uniform (correctly judging it against the uniform rules), they had another fight, and Skinny won. Thus, for the three years Horner was at Lakenheath, everyone in Skinny’s squadron wore a glengarry, with his rank on it, with his flying suit.

There was a serious point behind the apparent silliness. Skinny’s goal was to create an elite unit, the 492d Tactical Fighter Squadron, within an elite unit, the 48th Tactical Fighter Wing. His methods probably went too far by today’s practices; but back then, in the shadow of World War II and Korea, commanders had a great deal of latitude. During Vietnam, Horner and the other pilots at the bases at Korat and Ta Khli in Thailand wore nonregulation Aussie hats for the same reason.

Horner’s initiation into the Skinny Innis leadership style came on the day of his first mission at Lakenheath.

That morning, he looked out the window at fog thick enough to cut with a knife. Believing that prudence was a wise course for junior officers, he reported to Major Innis in a military manner and calmly informed him that since he had never flown in actual weather, let alone the kind of fog they had outside, the major might consider finding someone else to take the mission. Major Innis looked up from the paper he was reading, glared at Horner, and snapped, “Get your ass in the air. You don’t think I’m going to fly in shit like this, do you?”

It was a case of learn or die, and he learned.

As it turned out, after Horner had been in the squadron a couple of months and proved he could hack it, Skinny let him know that he had gone to high school in Iowa with his cousin Bill Miles and had been one of his closest friends. They had both joined the Air Corps together, and gone on to get their wings.

Years later, in 1964, Innis—now a colonel—was in Saigon flying old, broken-down B-26s over South Vietnam. In those days, the U.S. government was pretending that Innis and the other Air Force people in the country were “advising” the VNAF, though, in fact, they were doing much of the fighting. Some of Skinny’s friends loved being there, because that was where the action was, and when Chuck Horner heard about that, he did what he could to get himself into the war.

When he wrote Innis to ask for his help, however, Skinny advised him to stay as far away from Vietnam as he could. Even then, Innis realized the war was destined to collapse into disaster.