In San Francisco, a bus picked them up, along with some other pilots from McConnell AFB, Kansas, and took them to Travis AFB near Oakland. After the bus left them off, their destination began to grow clearer: Somebody handed them an empty bag and sent them down a line. They filled the bag with soldiers’ gear—rifle, pistol, mosquito netting, sleeping bag, poncho, helmet, mess kit, and web belt with canteen. In the military, they handed out that kind of gear when a man was about to go off to war, just in case he needed it. On the one hand, it was better to be safe than unprepared, but on the other hand, when a pilot gets handed a rifle and a poncho, he gets a bit edgy. It suggests that he’s about to go and live with the Army in the field, directing air strikes. Horner wanted to fly jets, not stomp around on the ground. Fortunately, they also gave him a .38 pistol, which was a weapon you carried when you flew jets in combat, so that was reassuring. Well, time would tell.

Horner and Myhrum were then loaded onto a commercial jet contracted to the military and headed west. They landed in Bangkok, where they were told they would be going upcountry in a couple of days on the Klong Courier—that was the call sign of the C-130 that took people and supplies clockwise from Bangkok around to all the Thai bases in the morning, and counterclockwise in the afternoon. They were going to a base called Korat, in central Thailand, about a hundred miles northeast of Bangkok, where two squadrons of F-105s were located.

Korat was one of four bases—the others were Ta Khli, Ubon, and Udorn—the Air Force was then operating in Thailand, though the bases remained under the control of the Thai Air Force. The Air Force had been at these bases on and off for several years, training Thais. Early in 1965, F-105s from Korat raided North Vietnamese munitions storage areas supplying the Vietcong in the South. Even though more raids soon followed, the U.S. presence at the air bases in Thailand was kept very quiet, partly to keep it a secret from the enemy and partly to avoid embarrassing the Thai government.

Two days later, while Horner and Myhrum were waiting at the Bangkok airfield for the Klong Courier, Horner ran into a pilot from Korat whom he knew named Dick Pearson. Along with another pilot from Korat, Pearson was passing through on his way to Washington, D.C., where they were being sent to answer hard questions about an embarrassing incident over North Vietnam.

Horner was eager to pick Pearson’s brain, for this was his first in-person conversation with anyone who had flown combat missions over North Vietnam. And it was here that he received the first of many lessons pointing out the gulf between reality and fantasy in the Vietnam War.