On Wings Of Eagles (1990)

She pocketed the money, hugged him, kissed his cheek, jumped off his lap, and bounced out of the room without a care in the world.

This time there were tears in Perot's eyes.

It was like a reunion, Jay Coburn thought: the old Tehran hands in the boardroom waiting for Simons, chatting about Iran and the evacuation. There was Ralph Boulware talking at ninety miles an hour; Joe Poche sitting and thinking, looking about as animated as a robot in a sulk; Glenn Jackson saying something about rifles; Jim Schwebach smiling his lopsided smile, the smile that made you think he knew something you didn't; and Pat Sculley talking about the Son Tay Raid. They all knew, now, that they were about to meet the legendary Bull Simons. Sculley, when he had been a Ranger instructor, had taught Simons's famous raid, and he knew all about the meticulous planning, the endless rehearsals, and the fact that Simons had brought back all his fifty-nine men alive.

The door opened and a voice said: "All stand."

They pushed back their chairs and stood up.

Coburn looked around.

Ron Davis walked in grinning all over his black face.

"Goddam you, Davis!" said Coburn, and they all laughed as they realized they had been fooled. Davis walked around the room slapping hands and saying hello.

That was Davis: always the clown.

Coburn looked at all of them and wondered how they would change when faced with physical danger. Combat was a funny thing, you could never predict how people would cope with it. The man you thought the bravest would crumble, and the one you expected to run scared would be solid as a rock.

Coburn would never forget what combat had done to him.

The crisis had come a couple of months after he arrived in Vietnam. He was flying support aircraft, called "slicks" because they had no weapons systems. Six times that day he had come out of the battle zone with a full load of troops. It had been a good day: not a shot had been fired at his helicopter.

The seventh time was different.

A burst of 12.75 fire hit the aircraft and severed the tail-rotor driveshaft.

When the main rotor of a helicopter turns, the body of the aircraft has a natural tendency to turn in the same direction. The function of the tail rotor is to counteract this tendency. If the tail rotor stops, the helicopter starts spinning.

Immediately after takeoff, when the aircraft is only a few feet off the ground, the pilot can deal with tail-rotor loss by landing again before the spinning becomes too fast. Later, when the aircraft is at cruising height and normal flying speed, the flow of wind across the fuselage is strong enough to prevent the helicopter turning. But Coburn was at a height of 150 feet, the worst possible position, too high to land quickly but not yet traveling fast enough for the wind flow to stabilize the fuselage.

The standard procedure was a simulated engine stall. Coburn had learned and rehearsed the routine at flying school, and he went into it instinctively, but it did not work: the aircraft was already spinning too fast.

Within seconds he was so dizzy he had no idea where he was. He was unable to do anything to cushion the crash landing. The helicopter came down on its right skid (he learned afterward) and one of the rotor blades flexed down under the impact, slicing through the fuselage and into the head of his copilot, who died instantly.

Coburn smelled fuel and unstrapped himself. That was when he realized he was upside down, for he fell on his head. But he got out of the aircraft, his only injury a few compressed neck vertebrae. His crew chief also survived.

The crew had been belted in, but the seven troops in the back had not. The helicopter had no doors, and the centrifugal force of the spin had thrown them out at a height of more than a hundred feet. They were all dead.

Coburn was twenty years old at the time.

A few weeks later he took a bullet in the calf, the most vulnerable part of a helicopter pilot, who sits in an armored seat but leaves his lower legs exposed.

He had been angry before, but now he just had the ass. Pissed off with being shot at, he went in to his commanding officer and demanded to be assigned to gunships so that he could kill some of those bastards down there who were trying to kill him.

His request was granted.

That was the point at which smiling Jay Coburn had turned into a coolheaded, coldhearted professional soldier. He made no close friends in the army. If someone in the unit was wounded, Coburn would shrug and say: "Well, that's what he gets combat pay for." He suspected his comrades thought he was a little sick. He did not care. He was happy flying gunships. Every time he strapped himself in, he knew he was going out there to kill or be killed. Clearing out areas in advance of ground troops, knowing that women and children and innocent civilians were getting hurt, Coburn just closed his mind and opened fire.

Eleven years later, looking back, he could think: I was an animal.