As he flew back to Korat that day—no longer a virgin—Horner realized that war is not the glamorous heady adventure described in song and story. He wondered what those gunners on the ground thought of him. He was pleased that they’d missed him, and glad that he’d frustrated them, but he took little joy that he and his companions had wrecked so much of their homeland and probably killed some of their countrymen.

As Horner accumulated missions—killing more people and destroying more property—he began to accumulate an abhorrence of war. For him, this abhorrence was a complex emotion:

He always felt the pain of the people he was attacking . . . but not enough for him to stop what he was doing. He hated the stupidity and immorality of war . . . but he loved being shot at and missed. He loved taking part in the struggle, the excitement, the high. He was afraid of being killed . . . yet unafraid (like most good fighter pilots, keeping his fears in a box). When he would sit in the arming area waiting for his flight to go, a little voice would whisper in his ear, “You are not coming back from this mission.” Yet he would shrug it off and fly. Once he was on the mission, he was so busy that he didn’t have time to be afraid. Afterward, sometimes, his hands would shake—probably, he claims, from fatigue as much as anything else.

“I love combat,” he says. “I hate war. I don’t understand it, but that’s the way it is.”

During the next two months, Horner flew forty-one combat missions.

Most often the F-105s would fly in pairs into North Vietnam, conducting road reconnaissance—looking for trucks—with a fixed alternative target such as a bridge. They dropped a variety of munitions, most often 750-pound bombs; but they also carried antitank rockets and were sometimes Fragged to hit a bridge with them. These would punch small holes in the bridge floor, and repairs could be made in hours. The best missions were against stored petroleum, freight cars in rail yards, and big bridges. The worst were what they called “Whiplash Bango Alert,” during which they’d sit on the ground in their Thuds and wait for orders to scramble in order to provide CAS for clandestine operations in Laos. When they finally scrambled, it was usually at the end of their vulnerability period—during the two hours from 1000 to 1200, they were “vulnerable” to a scramble; the jet was cocked, they had to wear G suits, and they sat around close to the jets so they could get airborne quickly—and the target was usually suspected troops in the jungle. Meaning: they bombed the jungle.

★ All the pilots soon came to realize that they were not fighting the war in the most efficient manner.