NELLIS AFB—1965-1967

When Horner returned to the United States in August 1965, he and Roger Myhrum went back to Seymour Johnson, where they worked in the command post doing odd jobs and waiting for orders. The boredom of all this was enlivened one day in October, when a parade was held at Seymour Johnson, during the course of which Horner and Myhrum each received an Air Medal for attacking the fake SA-2 SAM site that fateful day in July. Horner was surprised; he hadn’t expected it. And he was proud: nobody else in his wing who’d entered the Air Force since the end of the Korean war over a decade earlier had one of those blue and yellow ribbons on his chest.14

For the next two years Horner volunteered every chance he could to return to the war, but was told by the TAC personnel assignments people that he was too valuable for that; his combat experience was needed to train the rapidly growing pipeline feeding replacement aircrews into the war. This meant a move to Nellis AFB as an instructor in the F-105 school, where they trained new and old pilots to fly the Thud in combat.

During the time Horner was an instructor at Nellis, nearly all the experienced F-105 pilots had been or were being cycled through the war. By late 1966, that pool had been used up; those in it had either completed their tours (the normal tour for an F-105 pilot being 100 sorties, about four months) or had been shot down and killed or captured (the F-105 had the dubious honor of leading the pack in this category). This meant that the turnover rate in the F-105 (which flew only over North Vietnam or Laos) was at best four months. And this meant TAC had a tremendous training load in order to qualify replacement pilots. Since the pipeline could not feed the vacancies, the Air Force impressed non-fighter pilots, trained them in quickie courses, and shipped them off to war and near-certain death or capture. The term “There ain’t no way” became common in the F-105 community about this time. It meant: “There’s no way to make it to 100 sorties in the F-105, because you are going to get shot down before you reach 100.”

Here is how the training at Nellis went:

An instructor was in a squadron with normally fifteen other instructors. Every six months he’d get a long-course class—second lieutenants just out of flying training with shiny new wings and shiny new attitudes, willing to learn. Every three months he’d get a short-course class—pilots who came from staff jobs or from flying other aircraft.

To both long and short, he’d teach classroom instruction on the systems in the F-105, as well as taking off and landing, flying in formation, and air-to-air and air-to-ground gunnery, weapons, and tactics. Even though these students were being sent off to Vietnam when they graduated, there was still considerable inertia in the Air Force, so he also taught nuclear weapons deliveries. But whenever he was teaching his students what they would actually use in war—bombing techniques, lookout procedures for MiGs and SAMs, and so on—he always made sure they got the message that this would be a test question administered in the sky over North Vietnam.