7
                         Day Two

    It’s 1 p.m. at a stage field outside Mineral Wells Texas, and hotter than jackrabbit sex. Wayne straps on the helicopter. I board, snap into my seat belt, helmet up. This time Wayne walks me through the start-up procedure. I prime the engine with just enough fuel, check battery power, move switches into position.
    “Always yell clear before you hit the starter,” Wayne says. “You never know when some ya-hoo will walk into your fuckin’ tail rotor.”
    I nod, look outside the cockpit for stray ya-hoos and yell, “clear!” Then I turn the key. Soon the engine purrs, the blades whip overhead and the aircraft is ready to fly. I watch Wayne’s big hands again. The size of skillets, they stay millimeters away from the controls, just in case. My confidence is such that I almost tell Wayne to relax, sit back, enjoy the ride. I don’t do this. It’s good that I don’t.
    About to try my first liftoff to a hover in a helicopter, ever, I squeeze the cyclic and collective for all I’m worth in the world. In more ways than one it will be the first high point of my aviation career, which is then two days old.
    Wayne cackles at me. “If you can hover the bastard you can fly it! Ha-Ha-haaaa!”
    Hovering is indeed the most difficult part of flying a helicopter. Move one control, and you must move all others correspondingly. I’d heard this fundamental truth in the classroom, then from Wayne. I’d discussed it among my fellow students. I even read it in the Army’s book on how to fly good. Still, I’d watched Wayne the day before, his subtle control pressure, his utter lack of jerkiness or force, and it really didn’t look that hard. “Treat it like a woman,” he’d said. (Bear in mind that in June 1969 I was still a virgin.)
    I take the controls. Wayne hovers near them, his hands ready to override any overcontrol or misplaced input his virginal student might make. I suck in a breath of Texas humidity, lift the collective and feel a wave of ticklish emotion in my gut as the machine ‘gets light.’ Rotor rpm dips, so I inch the throttle up a tad to compensate for it. So far so good. I pull a teensy touch more collective. The skid gear skitters on the concrete, and the aircraft fishtails in a fancy dance. I push pedal to correct the yaw, and Lordy Magordy, it stops. Great! See; what’s so hard?
    Already I’m sweating. Globs of salty water sting my eyes. Rivulets course from my pits, and tickle my sides. I decide to be a bit more aggressive, show her who’s boss as Wayne said with his signature cackle. I pull a bit more power to see what happens, jerk the collective up and... She rears up like a swatted wasp, nose high, nose low, yaw right, yaw left, a Texas cowpuncher’s got nothin’ on me!
    I hear the crudest cackle ever from Wayne. “Holy screwin’ Jesus here I come, ‘cause I’m gonna die today! Ha-Ha-Haaaa!”
    The helicopter leaps off the ground, to a ten, or six, or twelve-foot unstable hover. “Yee-Hahh!” The nose swings right, then left, then right, through about 80 degrees. “Yoooowwweee!” The damnable little machine pitches ten degrees up, then twenty down. “Ride ‘em cowboy!” Engine rpm staggers between 2,500 the low point, and 3,200, screaming above the red line. “Ha-Haaaa! I’ve got it!”
    Wayne’s hands touch the controls and the machine stops like a roped calf. Frozen at a hover, rpm steady as a rock. “Okay, try again, and remember, just think about moving the controls, don’t actually move them.”
    Exhaling with conviction, my heart doing whifferdills, I take back the controls. With the same result. Like a scalded alligator the aircraft bucks and bolts, up, down, sideways, backward. It seems to resent my attempts to master it. “Yee-Haaaa!” Like a bronc refusing to be ridden it bucks and kicks, tail up, nose down, rpm all over the gauge, screaming, then sagging. Wayne’s cackle fills my helmet. “Yowwww—eee! I got it!” Once again the machine freezes in place. The word bastard floats through my head. Not Wayne...necessarily. I think I hear the aviation god chuckle, but that may have been Wayne, too. I hunker down, shrug off my humiliation, wipe away a half gallon of sweat and try again.

     The rest of the period was more of the same. I arrived at a semblance of stable flight only by passing through it to another extreme. My hour-long session finally over, I unsnapped my seat belt, unplugged my helmet and cowered away from the helicopter like a throwed cowpoke. Thoughts of the infantry came unbidden; or truck driver—I was sure I could drive a truck; or cook school, if they’d have me. It was obvious I could flip pancakes, and scramble eggs with some authority.
     On the way back to base the crew bus was silent. Heads sagged. I wasn’t the only overwhelmed, overmatched trainee. The Mattel Messerschmitt looked harmless enough. But the little bastard had taken my earlier confidence and smashed it like a bully with a sandbox toy. Instead of looking forward to the third day’s session, I was dreading it.
    I’d love to report that day three, four, five were different, but alas they were not. I did my best to destroy every TH-55 I got my hands on. Wayne cackled his way through every session, his patience wearing thin only about day six when he hinted, in his signature subtle fashion, that perhaps I needed to ‘settle down and learn to fucking fly.’  

    The yawing, swaying, out-of-control near-mayhem that passed for flight training lasted another two weeks, give or take. Little by little I managed to find the key to controlling the aircraft, gaining the touch that Wayne talked about. Day after day I learned better to not move the controls, to just let the helicopter fly. When I screwed up, which was still often, Wayne shouted, screamed, cursed. “Stop wipin’ out the cockpit!” he yelled, his subtle way to tell me I was moving the controls a bit too much. “Quit poppin’ the collective. You’re losin’ all your lift! Do that in Vietnam and you’ll crash and burn.”
    When he referred to Vietnam my arms chilled. I knew that was my destination; I didn’t need to be reminded of it. It was perverse. When Wayne mentioned the war his unspoken message seemed to be that I was doing okay, or at least no worse than my colleagues.
    The crew bus had a few more open seats each day. One by one men decided that driving a truck, scrambling eggs or collating Army documents might not be so bad after all. (The Army did have a lot of documents.) I could have quit. I considered it many times. I knew my folks would have preferred it. But looking at all those disillusioned, disheartened men, my colleagues, the shared bewilderment told me I was okay. Like the first day, when the Tac tried to make me lash out at him over Patti’s picture, I sensed that quitting was what they wanted me to do. If all of us were doing badly, none of us were. I sucked it up and went on.
    My parents were nervous, and every phone call home reinforced that. Mom always mentioned alternatives, “...if it doesn’t work out.” Dad talked about his work, and my siblings. His only mention of the war was about my older brother’s return home from Vietnam, which was imminent. Both of them were afraid for me, afraid I’d be killed, a reasonable fear, I suppose.
     It may sound odd, but never once did I consider the danger. In the five months I was at Wolters there were two fatal accidents. One of those was a mid-air collision between two solo students with two fatalities. The other involved a student and instructor. Both men were killed in that crash, too. It’s not a bad record considering the low level of experience, and the high number of aircraft hours flown, likely 60,000 per month. The danger didn’t phase me. Compared to the danger I knew was coming a few months hence, the flying at Wolters was tame.
    So I put up with the hassles, the heat and the constant pressure to settle down, do it over, do it right. The cursing and swearing and sweating. It wasn’t hard to understand. I wanted to fly. I would, by God, learn to fly. The heart of man had always yearned for that ability, too.

    Something else pushed me. After two failures, the seminary and college, I needed success for its own sake. Two years before I’d been expelled from the seminary, my dream of the priesthood shattered. Then I’d been drafted out of Ohio State. If I couldn’t be a sky pilot, or soar in academia, I’d be a helicopter pilot and no one would deny me that. Looking back, the high school expulsion may have been the best outcome of my life. It crushed me at the time. Losing a dream will do that. But the dismissal activated an inner fire, an anger that took me years to tame. The determination pushed itself into my head and would not let go. No, I would, goddamit to hell, learn to fly.

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