Predictably, Horner was best with pilots who were aggressive and quick to learn. If they were slow learners or incompetent, then he had no patience with them, and they suffered his verbal abuse. The long-course people, the real fighter pilots, were usually a joy to check out—a clean sheet of paper for what he could give them. All he had to do was tell them the function of the various switches and the unique aspects of the Thud.

However, the pilots who’d been flying heavies—the cannon fodder schooled in other ways of operating who were being packaged and sent off to war—resisted change and were difficult to teach. Though he could coax them through, and for the most part could make them safe in the Thuds, their minds did not move at the pace flying fighters required. They lacked good situational awareness. Most of them got by using checklists and rote procedures, but some—because they were behind the jet all the time—were dangerous. These he taught survival skills, such as: “Don’t worry about hitting the target with your bombs. Worry about hitting the target with your airplane. Someday you’ll get through all this and return to your C-118, where you are happiest.”

Just as the conduct of the war in Vietnam was riddled with insanities, so also was the training for it: thus, instructors weren’t allowed to wash anyone out of the program. While many pilots did not meet standards, they were graduated and sent off to war. However, in the case of those few who would clearly die if sent off to war in a Thud, instructors did their best to figure out ways to keep them from going.

Horner had a young heavy pilot who was so far behind the aircraft it was a sure thing that even if the enemy didn’t get him, he would kill himself. One day, Horner learned that the young pilot had had a growth removed from his forearm. That was the excuse he needed. He had him sent to the squadron flight surgeon for an examination, and there it was “discovered” that this pilot’s forearm was too weak to pull back on the stick of an F-105 and that he should be returned to transports. And so it came about . . . even though anyone who knows aircraft knows that pulling on the wheel of a transport requires a lot more strength than the hydraulically boosted controls of a modern fighter. Sometimes the only way to beat insanity is by canceling it out with another insanity.

★ All of this pointed up the deep flaws in the assignment of pilots into combat.

First, all military personnel sent to fight the war had to operate under an arcane accounting system that governed how long they would be exposed to combat. To CPAs and bean counters this made sense. To warriors this was madness. But it was the bean counters who were running the personnel system, and the personnel system was establishing the policy that drove the strategy.