B-52s and F4s

B-52s, and F-4s

I was up at 4:00 A.M. again. My brain was active, though my focus wasn’t. No TV or other electronic device, which is an arbitrary rule I have applied to myself during these pointless and inexplicable waking sessions.
I tend to have odd memories pop to mind during these weird events. This morning it was B-52s. Not the 80’s rock singers, which I have actually heard of and Angel loves, but the airplanes.

The first time, outside a movie theater, that I saw an active B-52 was when I was stationed at Sheppard AFB outside Wichita Falls, Tx. I was all of 18 or 19 at the time. They trained pilots there.  SAFB was and is, a training base. There are several things I learned about the ‘buff’ during my 9 years of cold-war service. I thought I’d share, for no particular reason.

I have never set foot on one. I am not anywhere close to being an expert on the subject, so if this spew includes inaccuracies, so be it, they are the product of ignorance and staunch refusal to do actual research, not intended to mislead.

The first buff rolled out shortly before I was born. They, though enhanced and updated, are still flying today. (I’m not going to do the math for you, figure it out yourself.)

They are what Alton Brown would refer to as a ‘single tasker’.  It was designed for one thing and one thing only and ill-suited for any other conceivable use. They were designed specifically built to haul a crap-load of bombs, conventional or nuclear, halfway across the globe, drop them and then, if necessary, and possible, return.

There are no first class or business class accommodations. No coffee carts or packets of reheated meals.  It carries a modest, young, professional crew and lots and lots of bombs and fuel. So much fuel that they cannot take off with a full tank. They take off light and get refueled in the air, Yeah, a hell of a single tasker and not a cheap one.

I first recall one taking off and just staring at it in scary awe. Recall that I left rural, bucolic, Kentucky the day after high school to learn electronics in the best electronics school in the world, the U.S. Air Force. Even Navy guys wanted to go to that school. My service was, as I have confessed before, nothing to do with patriotism or national pride or wanting to kill the enemy. I knew that my entry test scores were high enough that I could spend a career ‘in the rear, with the gear’.

I heard the beast fire up before I saw it. 8 massive jet engines spinning up takes a while. It started taxiing down the ramp. Jesus those things are huge and ugly. Prettiness was not exactly one of the design parameters.  The first thing I noticed was that it was pointing the wrong way. About 20 degrees off from where it was heading.  A thing about these behemoths is that the enormous wingspan has to be pointed into the wind to take off or land. Yeah, they need that much help to get airborne. When it finally took off, the nose was still pointed about 20 degrees off from the direction it was going. That, if you ever see it for yourself, will screw with your brain for a while. Even screwier, they can land like that as well. A B-52 has the glide path of a crowbar at low speeds.

I recall it hitting me then, still just a kid. This is not merely a plane, it is an expensive yet ultimately expendable weapons platform. It only exists to rearrange the topography and alter the population of some far-off land, for reasons that may not always be clear. (Case in point, these were the latter days of the Vietnam conflict (don’t call it a war, because wars are completely different))

BTW, the term ‘glide path of a crowbar’, as much as I would like to claim it, is actually a quite common term usually applied, as I first heard it, to the silvered delta wing F-100 class  fighters of the Korean and early Vietnam era. (once again, conflicts, not wars. ‘Wars’ are declared, conflicts are not. Semantics people, semantics. Embrace It.)   The term also applied to the premier fighter of my ancient military career, the F-4 Phantom. The F-4 is also the loudest f’ing jet I have ever watched launch. (Including the U-2s I watched take off in Korea several times, but officially didn’t actually exist, don't tell anyone, it's a secret) Case in point, I spent a month in South Korea, not far from the DMZ at Osan Air Base. Don’t worry, I was still in the rear with the gear, learning how to repair IBM card punch machines. (do not fold, spindle or mutilate) Yeah I’m punch card repairman old. (to be fair, I was the last PACAF (Pacific Air Force), formally trained IBM card punch repairman. They

were, even then, being replaced by those new-fangled “computers” you may have heard about)

I was walking to the main gate to once again get wasted on awful, mostly loosely regulated, varying proof, cheap local booze, which came, delightfully, in several  fruity colors and flavors (it made the inevitable puking a lot more interesting) The base sirens sounded. No, not a tornado, someone on the other side of the DMZ had crossed the line. This was at least a weekly occurrence.  I happened to be right beside the flight line. The ready fighters, the ones that sat, manned and idling 24/7/365 at the end of the runway lit up, massive engines at full throttle,side by side, roared down the tarmac mach one in no time. The noise they made scared the crap out of me, I don’t recall anything being that loud, before or since. If this experience doesn’t make you poop your pants, you should seek medical attention.
Nothing at all like a commercial plane. Knock off the sound suppression, mufflers maybe. While you are at it, set the exhaust on fire.

The F-4, like the buffs, was designed to do one job and one job only. There is no domestic equivalent of either. They are lethal weapons. Not pretty, not sleek. The F-4 is big and heavy for a fighter. Like the muscle cars of the 60s and 70s, they overcame large, cumbersome, non-aerodynamic design simply by putting in the biggest-ass engines ever designed. All muscle, no pretty.
As with the buffs a few years earlier, this spectacle shook my core, rearranged my brain, helped me realize exactly what I had actually signed up for.
So when you hear the phrase ‘military mind’, don’t laugh. For many of us, it is a real thing. It doesn’t necessarily define us; most of us go on to lead regular, normal lives. I never had a gun pointed at me, nor did I ever face an actual enemy. However, at a very young, invincible, immortal age, I realized that I was not the thing this was all about. Once the creases and color fade from the pretty uniforms and the medals lose their shine, those of us that enlist, at the end of the day, like the B-52 and F-4 are little more than expendable weapons platforms. Most of us never, ever forget that realization; we are not ever the ‘thing’ again. Instead, we serve.

Osan AB