They blew up because of a design problem. At times fuel got trapped between the hot section of the engine and the fuselage. After a while, a fire got going back there, which in time would melt through hydraulic lines (no flight controls then) or a fuel cell (a small fire instantly became a very big fire and the pilot was the marshmallow).

They hit the ground because of mistakes in Air Force tactics. In the erroneous belief that one would avoid enemy defenses that way, tactics in those days emphasized flying at low level; but the Thud, being slow to pull out on a dive-bomb pass, needed more air under it than those tactics wanted to give it.

Still, the pilots came to love flying the F-105, especially after the design and tactical flaws were fixed. It was an honest aircraft; a pilot loves a jet that obeys his commands, and a jet that makes it easier to put the bombs on target. And if he wanted to strafe a target, he had an M-61 Gatling gun. With that, much of the time, he could expect to put every round through the target, for a 100 percent score. Today, many of the attributes of the F-105—such as stability and accuracy—are found in the A-10. On the other hand, the A-10 turns, but it won’t go fast. All things being equal, fighter pilots will tell you, “speed is life.”

★ Horner had a good tour at Seymour Johnson. The 335th was a fine squadron, and there was a lot of excitement with firepower demonstrations and plans to attack Cuba—in those days there was well-justified fear that the Russians would install nuclear missiles on the island. On the other hand, the otherwise joyous squadron parties and deployments around the world were tempered by the F-105’s bad habits, blowing up in the air or slamming into the ground, either of which meant somebody had to erase a name off the pilot board, empty a locker, and return the pilot’s effects to his widow or parents.

That happened when Horner’s flight commander “bit it”—another one of those expressions people use when they don’t want to face the reality— when he flew into the water on the gunnery range off the coast of North Carolina. Parts of his body were recovered, and then came the ceremony of sitting with the grieving widow, taking care of the children, helping arrange for the funeral, and attending the memorial ceremony, with its missing-man flyby. . . . By now, all this was a familiar routine for Chuck Horner, except this time it all hit him on the head with a powerful new insight.

At that funeral, I guess I was beginning to grow up; for I started to notice something about our warrior culture that I hadn’t really noticed before: the pain and agony of the widow.