It hit me then that, daily, our wives had to contend with the unspoken horror of all that. Not only did they dread our death, but just as real was the knowledge that their lives, as members of an extremely close interdependent society, also hung in the balance. And I came to appreciate the steel in their unspoken and unacknowledged courage—as opposed to our own drunken ribaldry, which we pretended was “guts”—in the ever-present face of death. The pilots were scared children who used booze, offensive behavior, and profane language to hold the awareness of their fragile mortality at arm’s length. But our women shared a gut-wrenching horror that someday the wing commander would show up at their front door to announce that they were now going to have to provide for and raise the children alone, that they were about to be turned out into the world to fend for themselves, and that their closest confidantes in the world would soon stare through them, lest they see what might be in store for themselves.

Service wives, especially fighter pilot wives, are the most underrated warriors in the world. Daily, they confront their own fears, staying home to change a dirty diaper and getting ready for the next move, while shoring up the inflated egos of their mates before they go off to chase around the sky. God bless and watch over them.

★ Death came personally to Chuck Horner during his time with the 4th TFW.

One of the 4th’s missions was to deploy to Turkey and sit alert with a nuke on their F-105s. They flew gunnery training over the Mediterranean, air-to-ground at Koyna range in Turkey, and low level all over Turkey. While Horner was in Turkey around Christmas of 1964, his parents, his sister, Mary Lou Kendall, her husband Bill, and their three children were killed in a car accident in Iowa (Christmas was not a lucky time for the Horner clan; John Towner had been killed during the Christmas season of 1953-54).

Those deaths were terrible, and so was Horner’s grief. Despite them, however, there was a fascinating side story that made, and still makes, the horror and grief a little more bearable.

When Chuck Horner came back to the States for the funeral, he was a nobody captain with a lot of pain, yet the USAF took care of him royally—actually, they treated him like a warrior. They arranged transport that brought him from Turkey to Des Moines before his sister from San Diego could get there. Colonel John Murphy, his wing commander, even had the TAC commander’s personal T-39 transport meet Horner at McGuire AFB when he got off the military air transport system aircraft that brought him from Germany.