Viper Pilot_ A Memoi..

the pilot could remain conscious. So the physiology folks, flight surgeons, and
paper-pushers all had their panties in a wad over this, and the centrifuge training
was supposed to acclimate a pilot to the sensations of high, sustained G forces.
That means they strapped you in the seat and spun you till you passed out. Guys
like me didn’t care. What’s one more risk in a profession built on them
Actually, the biggest threats at LIFT were the “Holloman widows.” These gals,
usually divorced from enlisted men, had been left there when their ex-husbands
moved on. They were determined to do it right the second time around and marry
an officer. Think of slightly older women from An Officer and a Gentleman, maybe
with a kid or two, and you’ve got it. Since I couldn’t spell matrimony and had
absolutely no desire for a wife and instant family, I avoided them like the plague.
After a year at Vance, Holloman was paradise. Well, Alamogordo, New
Mexico, is hardly a metropolis, but, unlike Enid, it did not boast of eighty Baptist
churches, nor did it have blue laws, and it did have the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
Albuquerque was only a few hours away, and there was moderately good skiing in
Ruidoso. It was positively cosmopolitan after Oklahoma.
Following LIFT, I was sent to Advanced Survival training at Fairchild Air Force
Base in Washington State. In February. Part of the course included an escape-andevasion
situation, where you are plopped down on a mountaintop with only the
survival equipment you’d have after an ejection. This is to say, not much.
After being given a suitable head start—about an hour—you were pursued by
armed soldiers whose sole excitement in life was chasing officers through the
wilderness. In those days, the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries were the big
enemies, so that’s who these guys simulated. They only spoke Russian or German.
Their uniforms, weapons, and attitudes were authentic. I think they all studied
method acting in East Berlin.
I figured that trying to escape and evade in the snow, without snowshoes, while
being chased by deranged sadists who intimately knew the terrain, just wasn’t going
to work. It was, as we say, a nonstarter.
But what else could I do but try, right So I thrashed my way down to a stream
that was moving too quickly to freeze, and then, using a trick picked up from some
bad western movie, I walked backward in my own boot prints to a tree. Swinging
around to the side, away from my prints, I managed to pull myself up into the
branches.
Okay. Maybe not the best of plans but it was all I could come up with at the
moment and was certainly better than trying to blindly sprint through four feet of
thick snow. And it actually did work.