Skunk Works

Other Voices

Buddy Brown

I was just a dumb twenty-three-year-old fighter jock, which is exactly what the Air Force was looking for back in 1957. All they told me was “How would you like to fly at very high altitude in a pressure suit?” I immediately thought, Rocket ships! Buck Rogers! Count me in. I was shipped down to Laughlin Air Force Base in Del Rio, Texas, on the Mexican border, way out of sight, which is how the Air Force wanted it, because it wasn’t until the 1962 Cuban missile crisis that the world learned the Air Force was flying U-2s.

We had twenty airplanes there and Air Force instructors to check us out, but we had a lot of fatalities. The U-2 was strictly a one-seater. The first time you flew it, you soloed, ready or not. We did a lot of landing pattern and takeoff practicing, and got up to sixty thousand feet to get the feel of our pressure suits. It was a very tricky airplane and we had a lot of fatal pilot errors. One guy was killed flying over his house, while showing off for his wife and two little boys. He banked too low and slammed into a hill. Another time the squadron commander was forced to eject when his flap switch stuck and he lost his tail and we didn’t have an ejection seat. So he jumped out, making the highest bailout ever—a record fifty-five thousand feet—and was very badly hurt. Another time I watched a guy nose in on landing and kill himself. I shit because I had to fly next.

My first assignment was the most dangerous flying I had ever done—by far. I flew out of Alaska in what was officially called the High Altitude Sampling Program. That meant flying into the drifting radioactive clouds following Soviet and Chinese nuclear tests. Up there on polar flights when the sky was crystal clear and you could see the curvature of the earth, you’d be able to spot the nasty-looking iodine cloud drifting from god knows how many miles off. And we’d fly right into it. That program was entirely Air Force, and every bit as important as the agency flights over Russia. We flew for the Defense Atomic Support Agency, which collected our six bottles of gaseous samples of particulates after each flight and rushed them back to Washington for laboratory analysis.

They could tell by debris samples carried in the wind whether the Chinese exploded an air or ground burst, what part of the country it was set off in, how advanced their trigger and weapon were just by the materials that vaporized. And we always knew their tests from our own because we placed a tiny metal object in our nuclear devices that left an unmistakable signature on a spectroscope. We figured we were pretty safe from radiation hazards while insulated in a pressure suit, but we were naive about the dangers in those days. The most penetrating radiation was believed to decay so quickly that by the time we flew into a cloud of gases and suspended debris, the risks were supposedly minimal. We wore radiation badges. Still, every so often an aircraft landed very damned hot and had to be isolated and washed down and the pilot spent the night in hospital as a precaution. As far as I know, no one was the worse for it.

We flew these sampling missions every Tuesday and Thursday, in conjunction with other blue-suiters flying U-2s in Puerto Rico and Argentina, taking an opposite route from us. So we had one north and one south mission, and in that way we were able to sample half the globe per mission.

I flew some sampling missions out of Laverton, which was the Australian version of Edwards Air Force Base, flying toward Antarctica. I was more fearful then than I was later flying U-2 reconnaissance flights in combat over Vietnam. The reason was the extreme weather. You’d last two seconds if forced to bail out in those awful temperatures. And you’d last five minutes on the ground. The distances were so vast, there was no way to be rescued in time.

I flew at a time when the Chinese were exploding a lot of nukes, so I got used to ten-hour missions. I drank a pint and a half of orange juice through my feeding hole in my helmet, but even so, after a long flight my fingernails were so brittle from body dehydration that I could just crack them off. We also worried that ozone from so much high-altitude flying would rot our teeth. Maybe that was an old wives’ tale, but we all worried about it; I got the base dentist to make me a set of rotten-looking greenish false teeth to wear over my real teeth at base parties.

I also flew a lot of what we called peripheral missions, flying just outside the borders of the Soviet Union or China, collecting intelligence. All I had to do was throw a switch and recorders on board would collect the bad guy’s radar frequencies and signals, and monitor everything. I remember one particular mission, code-named Congo Maiden, where we had five U-2s up there at the same time in the northern part of the Soviet Union. We carried on board an ECM package called a System 12, so you knew when you were being picked up by Soviet radar by hearing pings in your headset. Tightened my sphincter for sure.

I flew Vietnam missions out of Okinawa as early as 1960. I flew over the Plain of Jars and watched the French get their butts kicked by Uncle Ho. Then, in ’62, the Russians took a few shots at me with SA-2s during the Cuban missile crisis. Didn’t come close thanks to my black box in the tail that jammed effectively. So I’m a believer.

But that was inconsequential compared to another blue-suiter U-2 pilot, Major Chuck Maultsby, who was flying out of Alaska on a routine sampling mission right at the height of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. His mission took him over the North Pole in the middle of the night, and when he turned to return to Alaska, he took the wrong south heading and wound up flying deep into Soviet territory. The Russians picked him up right away and thought SAC was coming in the back way to nuke them and start World War III. We monitored them scrambling jets against Chuck. He could see the contrails of dozens of fighters trying to reach his altitude and shoot him down. Finally, President Kennedy got on the hot line with Khrushchev and told him we have a lost U-2 pilot over your country on a weather mission, and he is not—repeat, not—a hostile aircraft. Maultsby had no direct radio communications, only a passive HF receiver that allowed him to listen. Someone on the tanker that had refueled him got on the horn and informed Chuck that it was sunrise over Alaska and suggested he turn his airplane 90 degrees until he saw light, then fly in that direction. Chuck obeyed and headed for the western tip of Alaska, where he was met by a couple of our F-106s that escorted him to base. He had made the longest U-2 flight ever—about fifteen straight hours and ran his fuel down to zero, flamed out, had to deadstick in with his face mask all frosted over.

The CIA had been covering Cuba with U-2 flights for years. And then, in August 1962, they hit pay dirt and came up with the pictures that showed the Russians were planting ballistic missiles right next door, SS-4s and SS-5s. When Kennedy was shown the site constructions, he asked, “How do we know these sites are being manned?” They showed Kennedy a picture taken from 72,000 feet, showing a worker taking a dump in an outdoor latrine. The picture was so clear you could see that guy reading a newspaper.

The first thing Kennedy did was to step up the flights. The second thing he did was to take the agency off the case and put in us blue-suiters in their place. If a guy was shot down, he wanted it to be a military driver, not a CIA employee. So I was one of eight Air Force guys who took over the Cuban overflights during the crisis. We flew out of McCoy Air Force Base in Florida, three or four missions a day. Since our missions were relatively short, we carried less fuel and so we could climb higher than usual, which was good because some of these missions got hairy.

On October 27, one of our guys, Major Rudy Anderson, got nailed when an SA-2 missile, fired from a Cuban naval base at the eastern end of the island, exploded above and to the rear. Shrapnel blasted into Rudy’s canopy and blew holes into him. It was standard procedure to brief a primary and backup mission pilot for each day’s mission. The morning Rudy was hit by a SAM, I was flying the primary mission area, while Rudy was scheduled to fly the backup mission if my area was weathered in. As it turned out, my area was completely socked in with clouds, so Rudy flew the backup mission and got hit. One of the more awful aspects to this tragedy happened during a training accident earlier in the year. A pilot named Campbell was killed during a refueling exercise back in California. A garbled message got back to Edwards base control tower that Anderson was the pilot killed and everyone rushed over to Rudy’s house to comfort his wife, Jane. Well, you can imagine the impact on Jane until the phone rang and she heard Rudy’s voice and then damned near fainted away. Then she was forced to go through the same shit the second time only eight months later—but this time for real.

After Rudy was shot down, we got the word that Kennedy had warned Castro and Khrushchev that if another reconnaissance airplane was shot down, we would stage an all-out bombing attack against these installations. The rumor was he was prepared to nuke the island. If we heard that rumor, figure the Cubans did too.

I was selected to fly to Homestead Air Force Base, in Florida, and brief President Kennedy on the Cuban missions. When I was introduced to the president, he smiled and remarked, “Major Brown, you take damned good pictures.”