Chuck went home and picked up Mary Jo and their year-old daughter Susan, and they boarded the transport home to the United States.

SEYMOUR JOHNSON

Horner’s next assignment (it was now 1963) was to the 335th Tactical Fighter Squadron, 4th Tactical Fighter Wing, at Seymour Johnson AFB, Goldsboro, North Carolina, where he would fly the famous, or infamous, F-105 Thunderchief. There his son, John Patrick Horner, would be born, and from there he would go off to combat for the first time.

The Thud, as it was called—at first by its detractors, and then by everyone else, after it proved to be the jet of choice if one was going to be shot at—was big and spacious: A man could stand up under its wing, and he needed a ladder to climb up into the cockpit. The cockpit was roomy, and the instruments were as modern as one could get, with tapes instead of dials, which made it a breeze to read while screaming down the chute during a dive-bomb pass. The Thud was also solid; since fuel was not stored in the wings, AAA could blow huge holes in them, and a pilot could still come home without a problem. And it was fast—nothing could touch it for top speed; it routinely exceeded twice the speed of sound, Mach 2, on test flights. What made it fast was a huge gas-sucking engine and very thin wings, so it flew faster in military power than most aircraft did in afterburner. Unfortunately, this capability was achieved at the cost of lift. The thin wings took forever to fly on takeoff. When a pilot had a full load of fuel and bombs, he used the entire runway. Even then, the Thud didn’t want to fly; but rather than set a land speed record, the pilot would pull the beast off the ground and stagger into the air, whacking off branches of small trees with his aircraft until he was able to start a climb.

This same reluctance manifested itself when he wanted to turn in air-to-air combat. The Thud would go fast, but it did not like to turn. Thus, the preferred tactic in a fight was just to enter it, pick a target, scream in for a shot, and then blow on through. A pilot didn’t have to look back, because no one was going to catch him.

Similar principles applied in bombing runs: just after a pilot released his bombs, he put both hands on the stick and pulled it back into his lap. He didn’t have to worry about over-geeing the aircraft, because the Thud was so solid, it didn’t seem to mind ten or twelve Gs. But if he didn’t immediately begin the recovery, he was sure to hit the ground.

Early F-105s had two seriously bad habits: they had a tendency to blow up in the air; and if the pilot wasn’t alert, they slammed into the ground.