Maverick … 1: an unbranded animal; esp. a strayed calf 2 [Colloq.]: a person who takes an independent stand, as in politics, refusing to conform to that of a party or group
Webster’s New World Dictionary, Third College Edition
John Richard Boyd grew up with flight and came of age as aviation did. He was born on 23 January 1927. The year was significant. Later that same year—in May—Charles Lindbergh would make his famous solo flight across the Atlantic. As a young boy growing up in Erie, Pennsylvania, Boyd was entranced by flight and the exploits of the pilots of the era. He followed the adventures and derring-do of Wiley Post, Douglas Corrigan, Howard Hughes, and the Air Trophy races with enthusiasm and awe. As a youngster, he was fascinated not only by aviation and advances in technology (highlighted by the New York World’s Fair) but also by what Winston Churchill called “the gathering storm” of the approach of World War II.
His young life was marked with the milestones of aviation’s horrors and disasters, the breakdown of peace, and the onslaught of war. He was only nine when German bombers raided Guernica in the Spanish Civil War. When he was ten, the USS Panay was strafed and bombed by Japanese aircraft in the Yangtze River, Amelia Earhart was lost in the Pacific, and the huge airship Hindenburg burned at Lakehurst, New Jersey. The Munich Crisis occurred in his eleventh year, and despite Neville Chamberlain’s declaration of “peace in our time,” toward the end of the summer of his twelfth year, World War II began. The blitzkrieg attack against Poland consumed the beginning of seventh grade for him. Almost exactly a year later, the Battle of Britain was fought over the skies of southern England. The fate of Britain hung in the balance. Boyd remembered the Edward R. Murrow reports from London on the radio. When he was fourteen, Japanese torpedo planes and bombers attacked Pearl Harbor. Franklin Roosevelt’s “Day of Infamy” speech was broadcast over the radio at his high school. During the summer of his fifteenth year, the Battle of Midway was won. The radio, newspapers, and the Movietone News, as well as many movies themselves, were full of the images of aerial battles and the war.
After Pearl Harbor and the German declaration of war on the United States, the entire country was soon mobilized for war. Auto factories made tanks and planes, not automobiles. Gasoline, nylon, rubber, and countless other goods were rationed. There were Victory gardens, recruitment posters, war bonds, men going off to war, and women off to work, all as constant reminders at home of the war that was being fought across both the Atlantic and the Pacific. The Doolittle Raid on Tokyo, accomplished by flying B-25 bombers off the deck of the carrier Hornet in April 1942, rallied the nation with a militarily insignificant but psychologically important strike against the Japanese. Boyd’s favorite movie as a kid was Dawn Patrol, about naval aviators in the Pacific. Even the sports he enjoyed and the heroes who played them—baseball and football—were interrupted by war. It is not surprising that with this sort of socialization, his life would be dedicated to both flight and war.
John Boyd grew up with several strikes against him. He never really knew his father, he was raised by a single mother, and they were poor. He was able, however, to use the hardships as a crucible in which to form character. The day Boyd turned three, his family buried his father, Hubert Boyd, a Hammermill Paper Company official, who had died of pneumonia. That event would color birthdays for the rest of his life. His birth day was his father’s death day, at least symbolically. His mother, Elsie, had five mouths to feed, no husband, and not much to fall back on in the winter of 1930. The year his father died, more than 1,300 banks would fail. Unemployed fathers sold apples on the street to buy food for their families. Boyd’s mother got a job in telephone advertising, sold baked goods, and did whatever odd jobs she could to earn a living.
Until his father’s death, the Boyds led a fairly genteel, upper middle class existence. After it, they had to scrape to get by. They went from being socially well connected and economically comfortable to wearing hand-me-down clothes and scrimping to make ends meet. His mother had to spread herself pretty thin among the children and the ever-present need for income. Boyd said that as the youngest boy in the family, he “was able to be a little more curious, to explore and do things at a younger age than most. I had a lot of freedom to do things as long as I tended to produce.”1 A tough taskmaster that Boyd remembered fondly despite her stern Germanic discipline, Elsie always had a basic optimism about the future. From her, Boyd learned to be independent and the value of being strong-willed and working hard. He was to practice all of them with a dogged tenacity.
As a youngster, Boyd was fascinated with flight and airplanes. He used to doodle and draw rather modernistic monoplane aircraft in an era still populated essentially by biplanes. Jack Eckerd, of the family who started the drugstore chain, befriended Boyd as a youngster. Through Elsie’s friend Hazel, Jack’s sister, Boyd got to know the Eckerd family. Jack had a Stimson biplane and was a licensed pilot. Boyd longed to go for a ride and finally did so in 1941. It was Jack Eckerd who gave Boyd his first two flights. Boyd was hooked. Flying was fantastic. When he went into the service, it would be into the Army Air Forces.
Like many boys, Boyd was not a bad student, but his real interests lay elsewhere. He enjoyed what he enjoyed—sports—and paid little heed to books and grades, relatively speaking. Regardless of the game or sport, the point was to win. Boyd was tall, slender, athletically inclined, quick, and very competitive. “I only went to school because I had to, but I was, even back then, tremendously fascinated by athletics. I have always carried a fantastic fascination for sports.… The experience made me, I would say, very competitive. I know that I liked to win and I liked the attitude. The feeling brought something out of me.” As a youngster he played baseball, football, basketball, and hockey. He is the only person I have ever encountered who gave as an example of his competitiveness early reminiscences of dodge ball during recess in elementary school. His competitive streak may well have been caused by an incident in which he was sent home from school for being too shabbily dressed in hand-me-down clothes. It was humiliating for him, but he transformed his embarrassment into a desire to become somebody. Later in life he visited Erie regularly in part to prove that he had indeed become something more than the kid who had been sent home from the third grade for being poorly dressed.2
He didn’t really start to apply himself as a student until the sixth grade. He started out slowly, sometimes poorly, and then did very good work at the end of a course. Boyd said he always had the feeling that he learned differently from others, although he didn’t know why or how until much later. Boyd liked putting things together (synthesis) better than analysis (taking things apart), but he learned to do both well. He used a learning style that would trip over an insight and then try and find the question for which it was an answer. He was equally comfortable with induction and deduction. Far from the traditional elementary school approach of proceeding from near to far—building bridges from what you do know to what you don’t know—often as not Boyd would make leaps into what he didn’t know and proceed backward to what he did. He was adept at making connections, be they forward or backward. Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann has accurately described Boyd’s cast of mind: “Nietzsche introduced the distinction between Apollonians, who favor logic, the analytical approach, and a dispassionate weighting of evidence, and Dionysians, who lean more toward intuition, synthesis and passion. These traits are sometimes described as correlating very roughly with emphasis on the use of the left and right brain respectively. But, some of us seem to belong to another category: The Odysseans, who combine the two predilections in their quest for connections among ideas.”3 Boyd was interested in how things fit together in a general sense.
Academically, Boyd was competent but inconsistent, undisciplined, and occasionally just not interested. He was good in some subjects he liked (math and science in particular) and average in others that he didn’t really care for much, such as history. He wasn’t overly concerned about studying and grades. The first time he discovered that he could really concentrate, compete against the best, and succeed academically was in an eleventh-grade chemistry class where he and the school valedictorian competed for the highest grade in the class. Boyd won. That, he said, was the first time he derived real satisfaction from intellectual, as opposed to physical, competition. The experience was illuminating but not transforming. He slowly began to like the learning. He was still inconsistent as a student, but he had gotten a taste of intellectual challenge.
He did like to read. Fiction was an escape from less than exciting immediate personal surroundings. He was a hopeless romantic at the time. As a child of the Depression, he would escape with Natti Bumpo in James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans. As an adult, he loved the movie and saw it several times. He resonated with Jack London’s Call of the Wild. Despite his reputation as a coldly calculating adversary, he was rather emotional. Asked to recall his teenage years, Boyd remembered early outbursts of anger or emotion. He would let his feelings get the better of him. He was more transparent in his youth, too quick to show others how he felt, and hence vulnerable. He learned over time that he had to suppress those basic characteristics to accomplish his goals. He slowly realized that when he became emotional, he lost control and things didn’t work out well. He began to try to exercise some self-discipline.
For a man who dedicated his life to the Air Force, it is strange that Boyd owes so much to water. Though he wanted to play football, his mother was afraid of the medical costs of injury for their Depression-era household; the family budget was already on a knife-edge of subsistence. Boyd was not happy about this, but he respected his mother’s wishes and went looking for other challenges. He settled on swimming and swam and played water polo for Erie Strong Vincent High School. He swam the 220-yard freestyle and 220-yard backstroke on the swimming team and played center forward—the playmaker—in water polo. The 220-yard events were the longest in high school swimming at the time. Water polo was a rough and tumble contest, a team sport that required great individual effort. It was much like a hockey game played in a pool, without sticks but with plenty of contact. Both his swimming events and water polo required strength, stamina, and endurance.
Through swimming in high school and college, Boyd learned the discipline of mind over matter. Competitive swimming led him to the other levels of competition that became so important in his life. A swimmer first competes against an adversary (Did you beat him? By how much?). Second, he competes against the clock (Was it your best time? Could you have done it faster?). Finally, he competes against himself (Could you have done better? Was it your personal best effort? If it was not your personal best, why not?). Having to defeat an opponent in a faster time and do your best in the process was good training, as they say in the military.
Swimming led him to appreciate the discipline of mental as well as physical preparation. He learned the sheer force of human will and what it could accomplish. Concentration and focus are all important. It is the athlete’s own skills and ability, not those of the opponent, that are most important. As the young swimming phenomenon Amanda Beard learned at an early age, “The swimmer in your lane is the one that matters.”4 It’s an insight anyone who has pursued an individual competitive sport can understand readily, and one others often cannot comprehend. It helped mold Boyd’s character. He was always his sternest taskmaster. His personal best became the standard, and he looked on the whole exercise of winning and losing somewhat differently as a result.
Art Wieble, the swimming coach at Strong Vincent High School, was Boyd’s most important male mentor. “He had the biggest influence on me. He gave me a good sense of self-discipline. I learned you have to do things right. Being an athlete, you realize you have to work hard if you want to be good at whatever you are doing.” Apparently both Wieble and Boyd succeeded, for the 1945 Erie Strong Vincent High School team won the Pennsylvania State Championship his senior year. Boyd placed second in the 220 freestyle. It was a good showing but not the first-place prize he had hoped for. He decided he didn’t like finishing second.
The discipline he got from swimming was important, but what he learned from water polo was also essential in shaping his character. A little-known sport, save at the time of the Olympics every four years, water polo encapsulated tendencies that were to characterize Boyd in later life. It required stamina, bursts of raw energy and power, strategy, the ability to change from offense to defense and back again with precision, and a sense of teamwork as well as individual prowess. Played well, it demands carefully rehearsed tactics, a concern for the geometry of attack while moving and shooting, and knowledge of when to abide by the rules and when to break them. In this sense, it shares much in common with piloting a fighter. It is the essence of maneuver warfare in athletic competition, for it requires continuous movement—players are not allowed to touch the sides or bottom of the pool throughout the match.
Players learn to test the limits and the rules. There is only one referee who is out of the water, watching seven players on each team, and he can call only what he sees. The holding and underwater fighting for advantage are as much a part of water polo as the surface swimming, passing, and shooting. Much of the splashing that occurs is for cover and concealment, not mere thrashing about. What better preparation could a future fighter pilot and theorist of maneuver warfare want? Boyd learned at an early age to push the envelope, study tactics and strategy, and focus on how to win. He was good at all of them. Most important, it became almost intuitive.
Another influence on Boyd in those early years was Frank Pettinato, chief lifeguard at Presque Isle State Park near Erie for many years. Boyd worked summers as a lifeguard for Pettinato when he came home from college and even after a stint in the service. Serving as a lifeguard on the shores of one of the Great Lakes was demanding. There are currents and storms, unpredictable weather, and a lot of people over a large area. But, it was a good job for a young man. It was not stressful most of the time, he was outdoors, and he got to swim, meet girls, and have a good time. Pettinato took an instant liking to Boyd, thought he had leadership qualities, and put John in charge of some of the beaches. They stayed in touch throughout Boyd’s life. “Frank ran those beaches with discipline. There you are talking about human life. He had rules, and he expected people to abide by them.”
Their friendship was enduring, and John would return to Erie over the years to visit. On one occasion in the 1950s he wrapped up a visit in Erie, having left his plane in Buffalo, and promised Frank he would say good-bye before leaving. He did.
“When I first saw him,” Frank recalled, “his plane was a little speck way out over the lake. I was on the jetty. It had rained that day, and there was no one on the beach.” Boyd’s jet screamed in low toward Presque Isle—very low. “He roared over and wiggled his wings. He came in so fast it startled me, and I jumped off the lifeguard tower I was on.”
Boyd said simply, “I thought it was about time Frank got a thrill.” Boyd was flamboyant and a newly minted fighter pilot who wanted to show off for the folks back home. It just seemed like the thing to do.
Boyd often daydreamed of becoming a fighter pilot and engaging enemy planes in the skies over Europe or the Pacific. For a young man about to graduate from high school with a world war going on, there was only one thing to do—join the Army. Boyd did. He enlisted in the Army Air Forces in the spring of 1945 and arranged to go in the service as soon as he graduated, but the war ended before he could join the fray. As World War II ground to a close, first in Europe and then in the Far East, there was a scramble to get the troops home and to rotate new recruits for occupation duty in Germany and Japan. At the age of eighteen, Boyd found himself part of the occupation forces at a former Japanese airfield halfway around the world. Though disappointed that he didn’t get to flight school before things shut down, he enjoyed himself and even swam on the Far Eastern Forces Swim Team. It was in Japan that Boyd learned a fundamental lesson that was to color his whole career.
As Boyd recalled the event, it went something like this. He and his fellow privates guarding a former Japanese air base were sleeping outside in the cold and snow of a Japanese winter without tents and with little cold-weather gear as well. Meanwhile, the officers were sleeping inside old wooden barracks with a coal-fired stove to keep them warm at night. Boyd and a few of his compatriots decided there was no reason they should freeze their ass off and took matters into their own hands. They started systematically to disassemble two old wooden hangars, one board at a time. They placed the wood in an old 55-gallon drum with some holes cut in it, posted fire guards as required by regulation, and slept around a fire that gave more warmth than they would have had otherwise. This worked reasonably well until February 1946, when the Army decided to survey the base. The noncommissioned officer assigned to do the survey asked Boyd what had happened to two hangars shown on his map. Boyd cheerfully replied that they had been disassembled and used for firewood over the last few weeks.
The NCO quickly departed to report to his superior. It did not take long for the appropriate charges to be filed—destruction of government property—and an investigation to be launched. Boyd and his compatriots were called singly into a room with three rather grim-faced officers seated behind a table. “It was not quite the single bare lightbulb hanging overhead,” Boyd recalled, “but the effect was the same. You knew you were in trouble, being interrogated and about to get hammered.”
Boyd was asked, as were the others, if he realized the seriousness of the charges against him. He did. The charges were explained in perfunctory fashion. He was asked if he had anything to add. Boyd asked if he was permitted to ask questions. They said he could.
“Were the Principles of Leadership for the U.S. Army in effect?” Boyd was assured they were.
“Well,” said Boyd, “one of those is that an officer should look out for the welfare of his men. Since the officers were sleeping inside a heated building, and the troops were literally out in the cold, it seems there might be a violation of some kind. The guys discussed it and I thought instead of writing to our congressman or something like that, we could probably take care of the problem ourselves. That’s how we came to burn the hangars for heat.”
There was a hurried conference among the officers, and Boyd was dismissed. The next day, the base commander called all enlisted personnel to a meeting to explain why appropriate tents, winter sleeping bags, and other supplies were not available and what would be done to rectify the shortages as soon as possible. Boyd and his buddies not only solved their heating problem but they had also taken on the system—and won. It was a valuable lesson for an impressionable eighteen-year-old. The system—any system—never looked quite so large, immovable, and all-powerful ever again. Rank had its privileges but also its responsibilities, and Boyd had learned he could manipulate the system. “If they had court-martialed me then and put me in jail, they would never have had to put up with me later.”5
Boyd laughed at the thought of a career that might never have been. If he could take on the system and win as a lowly private at eighteen, imagine what he might be able to do later. It was a real confidence-building experience for a young man half a world away from home, freezing his butt off in a Japanese winter, who longed to fly but couldn’t. Save for this incident, Boyd’s first brush with military service was as uneventful as it was uninspiring, but knowing he could buck the system and win—if he was right and willing to stand up for what he believed—was a powerful experience and insight.
Boyd returned home from Japan in January 1947. He hung around home, worked at Presque Isle State Park again, and enrolled at the University of Iowa the following September, largely on the recommendation of Art Wieble, his mentor and swimming coach in high school. He was not a bad student, just an uninspired one with no real focus. Boyd drifted through his college courses and enjoyed the swimming team, girls, and parties. His college roommate Bob Busch, himself a high school swimming star from Illinois, recalls that Boyd rarely studied and cracked few books while an undergraduate. Though they had a study room in the fraternity house where they lived (Phi Kappa Psi), the only thing Busch remembers that he and Boyd did in the study room was to paint it one year. Academics were not a high priority.
Boyd and Busch were fortunate to become friends with a legend in American swimming, Doc Councilman. Councilman, then an assistant coach at Iowa, would later go to Cortland and eventually become the head swimming coach at Indiana University. There, in the 1960s, he established a swimming dynasty. Because Boyd and Busch did not particularly like the swimming team coach, they gravitated toward Councilman. Boyd and Councilman were close. It was from him that Boyd learned the importance of style and technique in swimming. A swimmer does not have to move his arms faster and flail at the water to gain speed. He can move more slowly than most, but if he has perfect technique, he will go faster because he is more efficient. It takes less energy to do things right. Wasted motion, however forceful, was simply of little use. How he did things was as important as what he was trying to do. It was an insight regarding form and function and an important lesson. Doc Councilman was the second important mentor in John Boyd’s life, another substitute father he looked to for advice, and the most important aspect of his college days, save for his introduction to his future wife.
Boyd had many fond memories of swimming practice, meets, and trips with Doc Councilman, including one trip to Florida in 1948. They were on a limited budget and hungry, driving all night to go to a meet in Fort Lauderdale. They stopped and climbed over some fences to liberate some oranges from the numerous groves along the highway. Boyd recalled living on oranges on that trip. He was deeply moved when he and Councilman visited and spoke by phone many years later; that Councilman would remember him after all that time, given the numerous swimming stars he had coached and mentored over the years, meant a lot to Boyd.
It was not only the friendship that was important but what he learned as well. It was because of Councilman that Boyd refined his appreciation and understanding of competition and the importance of sheer will, of mind over matter. He also came to appreciate the routine practice and repetition that was required to become really good at something and to overcome the boredom by focusing on minute improvements. These were lessons that he was to practice many times in later years and from which he always profited. If you want to truly excel, you have to work hard to do it. Hard work—and lots of it—would characterize Boyd’s Air Force career.
Even in college Boyd had a rather strong sense of propriety. Certainly no prude, Boyd took his sense of what was and was not right seriously. The swimming team used to elect a Miss Dolphin, named for the Dolphin Club of swimmers. One year a particularly fetching Miss Dolphin took a liking to Boyd and invited him home with her for Thanksgiving. On the second evening at her parents’ home, Boyd was somewhat startled to hear Miss Dolphin enter his room and then his bed. Boyd demurred and asked her to leave. When asked if he found her unattractive or he was not a red-blooded all-American guy, Boyd said it was no reflection on her or their relationship. Rather, it was just that it was inappropriate. He was a guest in her parents’ home and to sleep with her under their roof was simply not something he could do. Maybe they would later and elsewhere, but not then and there. It was an early example of Boyd’s willpower—or won’t power. Self-denial was to become a characteristic of Boyd. It was also the end of his relationship with Miss Dolphin.6 Years later, after reading Musashi, Sun Tzu, and others, he would appreciate the Eastern view that every want is a weakness.
Boyd was bored in college. He was an average student in most courses. Because he liked math and science, Boyd considered majoring in engineering. It seemed a good fit. He actually started the engineering program, but one of the curriculum requirements at the time was drafting, and he hated it. When he was told that drafting was likely to be his first job in the field, Boyd said no way and dropped that idea. There were a few classes he enjoyed, one in philosophy in particular, but he decided he needed to make some money, and one didn’t do that with a philosophy degree. He then decided to major in economics to insure that he could escape his childhood experience and steel himself against the poverty of the Depression. Though the classes were not terribly inspiring, becoming a Wall Street broker held a certain appeal, even if he knew little about it or how to accomplish it. His vague image of the career held some attraction and seemed competitive; he could keep score with money.
That never quite happened as intended. Along the way, a couple of other things intervened. First, somewhat by accident, he stopped by a booth on campus and was asked if he would like to join the Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC). There were strong incentives to do so. He loved airplanes. He had enjoyed his brief experience of flight with Jack Eckerd as a kid in Erie and had longed to become a fighter pilot during World War II. Having watched all the war movies and propaganda of the era, he had been more or less programmed into a love of both aviation and war. Besides, he hadn’t minded military service, unglamorous though it had been. So here at last was something he was interested in and could do in college. When the folks in ROTC told him they would pay him $27 a month as well, he figured he’d died and gone to heaven. He could really use the money. It launched his Air Force career.
The second big event at college that changed his life was meeting Mary Bruce, his future wife. Mary, a native of Ottumwa, Iowa, was majoring in home economics. She met John during her junior year, and they took an instant liking to each other. They began dating and eventually became rather serious about each other. They married on 23 December 1951. As she explains it, he was ruggedly handsome, an athlete on the swimming team, and a nice guy. She thought he was great, “a good-looking guy who didn’t think too much.”
“Look what I got!” she would say later.
It was a strong marriage, despite some rocky stretches. It was hard on Mary and later even harder for the children. There was Steven’s battle with polio and long drives to Warm Springs, Georgia, for treatment for their oldest son. Life with John Boyd was not easy. It couldn’t be. He was gone a great deal and, over the years, put in long hours on the job and became increasingly preoccupied (some would say obsessed) with his work. His commitment and focus did not include his family in the same way that he seemed always absorbed by ideas, tactics, battles, and intellectual insights.
“Nobody told me it would be easy. I complained some but got used to it. He was gone a lot,” but “we understood how important his work was to him,” Mary recalled. “It was a mission he was on. We all know he is very loyal and will be there for us.” She added, “He’s a very interesting person. It’s been a challenge, but we’re proud of him.”7
A private man with a close family, Boyd did not talk much of their children, and neither did Mary; they kept their private lives out of the political strife in which he frequently found himself. Their children have their own lives and follow disparate pursuits. Steven, the oldest, suffered a bout with polio. He was born in 1953, was always interested in electronics, and had a rough go of it. Confined to a wheelchair, he made his own way until he too succumbed to cancer a year after his father. That was particularly hard on Mary and his siblings. It just didn’t seem fair. John Scott, born in 1958, is a gifted programmer and works with computer software. Jeffrey, born in 1959, was always interested in nature and animals as well as art. Kathy, born in 1955, lives with Mary in Florida. Mary Ellen, born in 1961 and the one “most like John,” has been married and divorced but had the apple of her father’s eye, his granddaughter, Reba.
All of Boyd’s close friends agree that Mary was a saint for putting up with him and his intensity. There were the long workdays, the interminable telephone calls, the incessant strategy sessions, his voluminous reading, and a life of the mind that exacted a heavy toll on his time with his family, whether on active duty or in retirement. Still, their adoration for each other was strong. Though Boyd did not often talk about such things, the tenderness in his voice and the moist corners of his eyes belied his true feelings. John and Mary were vastly different in demeanor, attitude, and preferences. Like an intellectual tesla coil, full of electrical energy, John was constantly sparking with ideas at random intervals. Always restless and never still, at least mentally, John never really relaxed, constantly making analogies and insights, explaining connections. Mary, on the other hand, is quiet and subdued, but then, anyone would be in comparison to Boyd. She likes to go to Audubon Society meetings and watch old movies or just stand on the balcony and take in the sunset—things John would do with her only grudgingly at best. Perhaps it was their very differences that made their marriage successful.
Everest “Rich” Riccioni, a retired colonel and coconspirator in the development of the lightweight fighter, doesn’t know how Mary Boyd coped all those years. He readily admits that their careers were hard on their families and confesses that he and Boyd shared the same mistress for years—the country.8 That relationship demanded great sacrifices from their families and themselves, but he thinks the cause was well worth it. The effort was no more than they should have given, no less than they had to make. That attitude toward one’s work (viewing it as a vocation or calling, not merely a job) is increasingly rare in many professions, but it is, however, shared by most in the military. In that, the country is well served.
The day the Korean War began, 25 June 1950, Boyd was on a train on his way to ROTC summer camp between his junior and senior years in college. As a recruit with prior service, Boyd was hardly the typical college lad facing his first encounter with the real military. Since the trainees are not officers yet, NCOs have been known to get their digs in early and make sure the ROTC guys learn something about the way the military really works. On his return, Boyd was told he would probably be called to active duty, which for him meant being a fighter pilot. He was genuinely excited and afraid. He was afraid not of going to war but that once again the war might end before he could get into it. All the heady talk about having the boys home before Christmas after MacArthur’s successful Inchon amphibious landing did not bode well. Boyd ached to become a fighter pilot and see combat.
After graduation and initial testing in Omaha, he got his wish. Sent to Columbus, Mississippi, Boyd learned to fly the T-6 Texan, the venerable World War II plane that was a trainer for air forces around the world. Almost immediately, Boyd started to test his limits and those of the airplane. As usual, he soon got into trouble. Having learned to solo fairly quickly, Boyd started reading books about flying. He was impatient, a character trait later tempered with a sense of timing and a willingness to let some things take their course. It was typical of Boyd, though, to want to push the envelope. If he learned the basics, he wanted to learn more. Then he wanted to test what he had learned, make adjustments, and learn some more.
In flight school Boyd started to practice and refine some traits he had exhibited before but not really honed to perfection. He not only understood what we call the scientific method, but he also practiced it and lived it. His thought and action became an unfolding set of hypotheses, a flow of connected “if-then” statements, followed by testing to confirm or deny his hypothesis. A part of the scientific method is the specification of the conditions under which a given result will occur. Boyd, almost intuitively, started to specify conditions for maneuvers in flight. Speed, altitude, g-forces, intertwine to make certain maneuvers possible under one set of conditions and impossible under others.
There was great value in learning well what the plane could not be made to do under certain conditions, and the same held true for determining the pilot’s skills. Learning both, however, risked death. It was a necessary set of experiments. Boyd just tended to push them a little farther than most. Exploring the fit of plane and pilot, what they can do and what they cannot, was a necessary exercise in learning to fly well. He was merely perfecting his flying skills (all pilots feel that way to some degree), but Boyd was also honing his mind to a much sharper edge. He observed very carefully. Through trial and error and extension building on a base of what he had learned, he progressed rather rapidly to absorb new concepts. It was the beginning of the development of a method of inquiry on which he would rely.
Another thing happened in pilot training in Mississippi: Boyd learned to learn for himself. He was autodidactic, self-taught, in almost everything he did. Years later he would emphasize this and tell people his education had consisted of going to a “cow college” in Iowa (the University of Iowa) and a “trade school” in Georgia (Georgia Institute of Technology). He had undergraduate degrees from both and never earned a master’s degree or attended any professional military education other than Squadron Officers School in the Air Force. The great majority of what Boyd learned, he learned on his own. He began the practice in flight school by reading books about flying and going beyond what he was learning in the formal program.
At the base library he checked out books on aerobatics. Tired of gliding turns and other such basic “nonsense,” Boyd taught himself to do Immelmann loops in both directions and then point roll-outs, barrel roll-outs, and snap roll-outs, all to either the right or left, along with low-speed loops and high-speed turns. He learned how to do lazy eights and a snapdragon eight and then a snap roll at the top of a lazy eight. He had a ball, but he never practiced gliding turns. Then his instructor took him up to check him out on some of the basics, including gliding turns. “It was a disaster. I couldn’t even begin to do them correctly.”
The instructor was furious. This guy was obviously incompetent if he couldn’t do the simple basics as required. Boyd asked, “Hey, can I show you something else? Since I did so badly on the gliding turns, you probably want to know what I have been doing.”
Luck was with him, for the instructor agreed, and Boyd proceeded to do his repertoire of hotshot tricks: rolls, loops, and such. The instructor demanded to know who had taught him. “I read it out of a book. I kept trying until I got it good.” The instructor was impressed.
Boyd’s final check ride came a few days later. During the intervening time, he practiced gliding turns and the other basic routines on which he knew he would be graded. After a few preliminaries, the instructor doing the check ride said he understood Boyd knew how to do Immelmanns. Boyd said yes and showed him.
“Show me the rest of your stuff,” the instructor ordered. Boyd again went through his repertoire. Suitably impressed, the instructor said, “Okay, let’s head for home. You pass.” Boyd got his pilot’s wings, instead of washing out of flight school.
Boyd was sent to Williams Air Force Base, in Arizona (known as Willy), for fighter training. There Boyd was introduced to the F-80 Shooting Star, America’s first jet fighter procured in any numbers. Boyd was ecstatic about being a jet pilot, but he was not enamored with the regimentation and what he considered the slow pace of the flying training. He wanted to push the limits of what he did know and learn more about what he didn’t know. That agenda did not include the many boring cross-country flights to test his navigational skills; he wanted to see what he and the airplane could do. Once again, Boyd nearly got into trouble for breaking the rules. Long before Tom Wolfe’s book The Right Stuff, fighter pilots were known as a breed apart. You either had it or you didn’t. Guys who were good sticks (first-rate pilots) were respected and could get away with a lot. Boyd quickly set about becoming a good stick.
Far ahead of fellow students at Willy in his ability to fly, Boyd hated the cross-country flights that were required. Some of his friends who already had their wings were flying out of nearby Luke Air Force Base doing air-to-air practice. “I had heard that they were going down to Ajo and that they were going to do some of their air-to-air stuff, so rather than go on my cross country, I decided to fly down there and join in on their air-to-air practice.”
Air-to-air combat was another eye opener for Boyd. What looks to others like a confusing and disorderly fur ball of a fight among swarming planes in the air was really a delight to Boyd. There was more order to the process than one might think, and Boyd would spend years deriving order from the chaos of air-to-air combat. What initially excited him was that it was limitless. It could start or end at any altitude, from any direction. It was all azimuth and multidimensional. It was, he would realize, the best way to think about a problem. Years later, after refining his skills and trying to teach others how to do air-to-air combat, Boyd would realize he had simultaneously developed a new and different way to think.
Boyd sneaked off to taste the delights of air-to-air combat not once but on several occasions, and finally he got caught—by an instructor from Willy who was doing the same thing. Boyd figured out that the instructor wasn’t supposed to be there either. He immediately solved the problem by outlining the dilemma: The guy who caught him could not turn him in. To do so would mean that the instructor would expose himself. Boyd offered a deal. Neither would rat on the other, and each would continue the practice. They made a pact that they would both keep their mouths shut about their extracurricular activities.
Boyd then went to Nellis Air Force Base for further training. Little did he know that it would later be his home for six years. On his arrival, he was rather taken aback by the condition of his quarters. According to Boyd, the room could be described at best as rather Spartan. It had an old metal bed with a wire rack and thin mattress, the sort of Army issue that had served millions in World War II. There was a single light and a broom-handle dowel in a niche in the wall for a closet. A hole in the wall was roughly the size and shape of a window, though slightly larger, but there was no window frame or window, just a hole where the window should be. Boyd thought this a bit odd and inquired about it at billeting. He was told he was lucky to have a room, window or not. Things could be worse, you know.
“Are you flying airplanes, Lieutenant Boyd?” the billeting sergeant asked. Boyd said he was and he sure enjoyed it, but the hole in the wall in his room where the window should be was a bit of an annoyance. If he turned the light on at night after he got in, his room immediately filled with every flying insect known in the desert. If he left it off, he was reduced to doing everything by Braille. The clerk at billeting finally consented to give Boyd an Army blanket and some nails so he could cover the hole in the wall. Throughout his initial stay at Nellis, he never did get the window and window frame installed. But he was flying, and he was deliriously happy to be in the Air Force and to be a fighter pilot. Any sacrifice to achieve that was well worth it.
Boyd used to tell that story and contrast it with his first visit to the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. He was brought out there to lecture by a fellow who used to work for him, Ray Leopold, who was then teaching at the academy. When Boyd saw the facilities the young cadets had—the beautiful setting amid 10,000 acres of Colorado countryside just below the mountains, the imposing cathedral, the classrooms and athletic facilities, their dorm rooms, all with windows—he was amazed and saddened. He understood, he said, the difference between his generation in the Air Force and those who came after.
“I was so happy to be flying,” he would tell people. “The living conditions were just not that important. But now, we take the cream of the crop, the best and brightest the U.S. Air Force can attract, and start them out with such a high level of creature comforts and such plush surroundings that they come to expect it as their due for their entire career.” He was right, and it reflects the difference in service cultures in the U.S. armed forces. Visiting officers, indeed colonels, in the Army get a cot and share a bath down the hall in bachelor officer quarters at certain installations. In contrast, the average Air Force officer on temporary duty at another Air Force installation expects his minibar in the room, air conditioning, and cable TV. Boyd thought it a most unhealthy and unnecessary state of affairs. Worse, it coddled America’s air warriors.
Boyd spent the first half of his accelerated training, from September to December 1952, in the F-80 Shooting Star and the last half in the F-86 Sabre Jet. In the 80 hours of flying time in the program, Boyd continued to sharpen his skills and learned how to do high-g rolling maneuvers, high-speed breaks, when to do reversals in hard turns, and other refinements to his repertoire. He found that he could beat his instructors at air-to-air combat rather handily most of the time. He was good, he knew it, and wanted others to as well. This was competition with a purpose, and he loved it.
Sidney Woods at Williams Air Force Base and Clay Tice at Nellis were Boyd’s role models and pilot mentors. They were wildmen who flew hard, partied harder, and introduced young Mr. Boyd into that elite circle known as fighter pilots. Boyd soaked up the ethic and entered into that fraternity of devil-may-care risk takers who are hotshot pilots. He was on a team again. He was competing. He was flying. He was learning and having fun at the same time. The fellowship among fighter pilots was even better than a jock fraternity in college.
He was gloriously happy. Others, however, were not. John was about to go off to war in Korea, leaving behind his young wife and a mother who didn’t understand why he had to do this. He had already served a hitch in the military, and his mother was grateful it had been after World War II ended. Elsie Boyd could see no reason for him to do it again. Until her dying day in June 1976, despite his successful career and all he had accomplished, she was unhappy that John had gone into the Air Force. She chewed out Mary Boyd for letting him go to Korea, as if she had any say in the matter.9 Boyd simply could not and would not give up on the opportunity to fly and go to war. That the women in his life couldn’t understand that was their problem, not his. He had missed out the last time around in World War II, and he almost missed out again in Korea. Timing—it really was everything.