For Scott, 1981 started with just a little excitement when he experienced an engine failure in a MiG-21. Incredibly, he managed to deadstick the powerless jet to a successful landing. “I was out over Range 71 on a sortie against a 422nd Test & Evaluation Squadron F-16 from Nellis being flown by Don ‘Doc’ Kremple. We were on a 1 v 1 scenario and I was on the offensive. I attacked him and as he turned hard into me, and as I slid through his turn circle I got two or three loud bangs – compressor stalls. I pulled the throttle back to clear the stalls, but as I did so I realized that the engine had quit.”
It was time for Scott to put to good use the simulated flameout (SFO) landings that all the pilots on the MiG-17 and MiG-21 practiced each time they returned to Tonopah. “I just said, ‘OK, I have lost the motor,’ and pointed towards Tonopah. This particular MiG-21 was one of the early vintage ones where we didn’t really trust the ejection seats, and I was thinking to myself that I didn’t have much of an intention of ejecting unless it became clear I wasn’t going to make the field. I was going through the restart procedures, but it was becoming clear that it was not going to happen.”
In an incredible act of composure, Scott realized that he needed to get as much information out about what had happened in case he died in the ensuing moments: “I told Doc over the radio everything that I had seen and heard, so it would be recorded on his cockpit video recorder. The MiG-21 was not made to do flameout landings. The Soviet philosophy was that you punched out if you lost your engine. We did it because we had experience in single-engine fighters, and we trained for it by putting out our speed brakes to simulate the drag of the stalled engine, and flying certain parameters. I was now flying these parameters for real, one of which was to maintain at least 250 knots so that the engine would windmill and keep the hydraulics working.” This was crucial: the hydraulics drove the MiG’s flight control surfaces. Without the hydraulics the surfaces would freeze and cause Scott to lose control.
”The problem was that you couldn’t touch down at 250 knots in that airplane. The drag ’chute was made for a maximum of 190 knots and the brakes weren’t strong enough to stop you. As advertised, I popped the ’chute and it disintegrated or ripped itself out of the housing. That left the rabbit catcher, the netting that would catch the airplane and stop it.” Scott duly became the first pilot to test the MiG-21 with the barrier at the end of the runway, thankfully with positive results – “The airplane flew again, I flew again, and we bought a new barrier!”
In March 1981, and with only two weeks’ notice, Press dispatched Scott and Sheffield on TDY to Somalia to fly the MiG-21MF FISHBED J with the Somalia Air Corps in a program named HAVE TRACK – a Military Assistance Program that is officially listed as an AFSC project. The two men took with them a single maintainer, Chico Noriega.20 As Red Eagles ops officer, Press was now responsible for organizing such clandestine missions, and had himself flown MiGs with a third-world country between his return from Iran in 1979 and his arrival to the Aggressors later that year.
Somalia was at the end of protracted conflict with Ethiopia, a conflict that had started in 1974 and ended with the destruction of the Somali insurgency just prior to the Red Eagles’ TDY. Like many underdeveloped nations in Africa and across other continents, Somalia had embraced the Soviet Union briefly in the 1970s, but had then decided it no longer wanted Moscow’s help. It ejected all of the Soviet advisors, but only once they had rebuilt the Somalia Air Corps’ military infrastructure. This formation had around two squadrons of MiG-21MF Fishbed Js (and MiG-21UM Mongol trainers), as well as some MiG-17s and F-6s (Chinese-built MiG-19s). Only about half of the Fishbeds were airworthy by the early 1980s.
The three Red Eagles were there, Scott said, “to help generate favor with the country’s government, but we were also able to determine the standard of their pilots and their training,” which meant that they were there to assist rather than exploit. Presumably, the defeat of the Somali insurgency was enough to prompt the CIA to engage the country’s increasingly erratic dictator, Mohammed Siad Barre, in discussions about his future. It was better, they no doubt argued, for Somalia to become a US client state than to continue down his current path. Military training for his pilots was presumably just one of the carrots dangled in front of his face. Soon, the United Nations and Western aid agencies would join the chorus, but ultimately, none would be successful.
None of this mattered to Scott or Sheffield, of course. They were there to fly with the Somali pilots. They flew the MiGs at Baledogle Air Base, noting that the pilots “weren’t very good. We saw the product of the Soviet training system. It was bureaucratic, regimented, and not very effective,” Sheffield observed. In contrast to a 1979 visit by representatives of the Red Hats to the Sudanese Air Force, the two Red Eagles pilots wore sanitized flight suits for their 1981 visit; they removed the patches that would indicate the squadron to which they belonged. While Scott was privy to project HAVE COAT, the now-declassified 1980 exploitation of a single flyable MiG-21MF FISHBED J by the Red Hats, one source indicated that he had been unable to fly the jet because of the last-minute nature of TRACK and maintenance issues with the COAT article. He had, however, familiarized himself with the aircraft by sitting in it, reading the manuals for it, and summarizing the differences between it and the MiG-21s flown by the Red Eagles. Of course, none of this was known to the Somalis, who were tacitly led to believe that neither pilot had flown the Fishbed before now. Invariably, though, they were going to wonder how it was that the enigmatic Americans could master the MiG-21 so quickly. Scott was candid about this:
A part of the Aggressor job was to be an expert in the various Soviet Air Force subjects – tactics, training, “the Man,” the aircraft, etc. During my years as an Aggressor, I had been certified on all of the academic briefs at one time or another so I was able to converse on many aspects of Soviet Air Force training, including the operation of various MiG aircraft. At that time, I was also maintaining currency as an F-5 Aggressor.
My cover story to the host as to why flying the MiGs came so “easily” simply combined those two aspects of the Aggressors – the knowledge of systems and operating procedures was a result of my academic “expertise” and the ease of flying was due to the similarity of F-5 and MiG-21 flying characteristics. Explaining my ability to taxi competently from the get go required a different story. With the exception of the T-33, most USAF aircraft of my era had relatively easy-to-use steering technology; however, steering the MiG-17 and MiG-21’s air release method was somewhat like the T-33, I was told. Since the MiG and T-33 taxiing required a different sort of hand-foot coordination which, in turn, necessitated a bit of practice before one could satisfactorily master the task of taxiing the aircraft without embarrassment, I simply fabricated an explanation that I had flown the T-33, thus my familiarity with the taxiing issues.
The Somalis checked out both pilots in the two-seat version of the MiG-21MF, known as the Mongol B, to satisfy themselves that the two could be trusted to fly what was a very limited and important national asset. Later the roles reversed, and the Red Eagles showed the Somali pilots how the MiGs should be flown properly. For Sheffield, that process turned out to be a little more exciting than he might have hoped for. On one particular day, he was instructing in a Mongol B from the back seat with the Somali squadron commander in the front:
He became fixated on the guy we were fighting, which was Mike Scott and another pilot in the back of a similar aircraft. We were just spiraling towards the ground. Our agreed call to end maneuvering was “knock it off,” which I say, but he continued spiraling into the ground.
I managed to get his attention somehow, and then for the first time he stopped looking over his shoulder at the other aircraft and realized that we were not only low, but also slow, with probably only 250 knots. He literally buried the stick in my lap and we departed controlled flight. We did a snap roll to the right and were about to spin and crash into the ground. I forced the stick forward and stomped on the left rudder. He was pulling back to start with, but the nose dumping towards the ground scares him even more, so he starts fighting me for control.
Sheffield overpowered the other man and the jet began a gradual recovery. But it had been very, very close: “We came so close to the ground that our jet exhaust blew the straw roof off of a hut on the ground. When we got back I literally kissed the ground, I was so fortunate to still be alive.”
While Sheffield and Scott were busy in Africa, back at Tonopah an unexpected visitor had dropped by. It was Kobe Mayo. Now a lieutenant colonel, he was very pleased with how far the operation had come: “Wow! It was the fantasy come true. I met some of the guys, signed my name in the log and was really impressed by what I saw.” Mayo’s visit coincided with the arrival of the first ever Marine Corps pilot assigned to the Red Eagles. His name was Maj Lenny Bucko, and he became “Bandit 22.”
Bucko had flown F-4Js with the US Marine Corps in Hawaii and Japan, and had also punched out of an F-4 in the Philippines when one of the “spoilers” – the device on the wing that makes it roll – popped up on take-off and became stuck, causing a rapid uncontrolled roll to the right. As he pushed on the left rudder with all his might, the 42,000lb “Rhino” had stopped rolling. He plugged in the afterburners to gain some height, but the F-4 became uncontrollable with the associated increase in speed, as Bucko recounts: “It did a snap roll at about 600ft above the sea. My radar intercept officer, Rob Stockus, initiated ejection and got out at about 600ft and 120 degrees angle of bank. I got out when the airplane was even lower and completely upside down.”
The ejection broke several of the vertebrae in Stockus’ back, ending his flying career. For Bucko, who walked away unscathed, death had been nano seconds away. His parachute had not fully inflated when he hit the sea next to, and almost at the same time as, the malfunctioning Phantom. To the pilot of the F-4 taking off behind, it looked like he had ridden the Phantom into the ocean – he had transmitted “Bucko didn’t make it out.” But he had, and after a few nights in hospital for observation he went out and had “a week’s worth of big boy drinks.” On his very next flight in the F-4 he had experienced an engine fire on take-off, followed by an interesting single-engine landing.
The perils of tactical fast jet aviation were more than familiar to him, but so too were the perils of everyday life. He had gone to TOPGUN as a student in 1974, and had returned as an IP under less happy circumstances in 1979. He arrived in San Diego just before his eldest daughter, seven-year-old Jaime, died of cancer. She had battled the disease for two-and-a-half years. Just prior to her death, his marriage had broken up. “It was the low point in my life, and the job at Miramar was a saving grace because I could plunge myself into it.”
In the intervening years between the two TOPGUN assignments, Bucko had been selected to transition to the F-14, spending four months of training on the Tomcat before the Corps learned they were not going to operate the type after all. With the Tomcat destined only for the Navy, his skills as a fighter pilot were put to use teaching new Marine pilots how to fly the Phantom. He instructed for three years and then joined Marine Air Weapons Tactics Squadron 1 (MAWTS 1), which was the Marine equivalent of an Air Force FWS or Navy TOPGUN. He was based at El Toro; part of his job at MAWTS 1 was to qualify as an Adversary pilot so that he could teach other Marine Corps units Air Combat Tactics Training. This was a program unique to the Marine Corps and utilized the A-4 Skyhawk, but was similar to the Aggressor road show concept in its purpose.
It was while at MAWTS 1 that he had gone through TOPGUN as a student. On his return to El Toro, which was a mere 100 miles or so from Miramar, Bucko had remained in contact with his instructors at TOPGUN and established a working relationship that would see a flight of four TOPGUN students and IPs fly up to MAWTS 1 each weekend to fight the Adversary A-4s. The IPs had stayed at his house each weekend, and bonds had been formed. Before long, he was invited to join their ranks as a TOPGUN instructor.
At Miramar in 1979, Bucko had become involved in coordinating what the Navy called “overland” ACM week, which involved CONSTANT PEG exposures and usually meant five days of flying out of Nellis. By this point, Bucko had read “everything that I could ever find out about Soviet fighters. I knew how to identify every model and make and version by antennae, intakes, ECM [electronic countermeasures] blisters, etc. When I came to TOPGUN I had several projects and lectures that I was in charge of. I gave a three-hour lecture on the Middle East, Israeli pilot training, and terrorism groups of the Middle East. I also gave a two-hour lecture on Soviet aircraft and how to identify them,” he said. “As coordinator for overland ACM week, I set up the week of flying up at Tonopah by getting the class to Las Vegas, getting briefing rooms, organizing range times, setting up the briefings and debriefings, and leading flights onto the ranges and escorting them home.” He’d got to fly against the assets, too, testing his skills against the likes of Oberle, Press, and McCloud. All three impressed him immensely.
In mid 1980, Henderson, who had seen what Bucko was doing and liked him, approached the big Marine. “He told me that they were going to make it a requirement that they had a Marine pilot on the squadron. He asked me what I thought the requirements should be. I said ‘We need to make sure he has a lot of A-4 time, 1,000 hours of F-5 time, and 1,000 hours of F-4 time.’ He said ‘You know anyone like that?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, me!’ So I got a set of orders sending me to Nellis.” Bucko’s Aggressor checkout was a walk in the park. Since he was already so experienced as both a fighter pilot and tactician, it amounted to “a bit of a joke. It was really just about maintaining the cover story.” Bucko became the first pilot to hold all three Aggressor and Adversary ratings: Air Force, Marine, and Navy.
Spring and summer of 1981 saw lots of personnel changes in the Red Eagles. In May, LtCol Mike Press left the 4477th TES to take command of the 65th Aggressor Squadron. He was just a year shy of having been flying the MiGs on-and-off for a decade. His departure followed the earlier arrival in April of Navy pilot Lt Russell M. “Bud” Taylor, “Bandit 23.” In July, two more new pilots joined. Maj Monroe Watley came from the F-4 FWS, the 414th TFS, and became “Bandit 24,” and a young captain called Mark “Toast” Postai, “Bandit 25,” arrived from Nellis’ 65th Aggressor Squadron; he had previously flown F-4Ds with the 48th TFW at RAF Lakenheath, England. Like Myers, who maintained alternate currency with his old unit, the F-15 FWS, Watley continued to maintain F-4 currency with the 414th, and subsequently, the 422 Test Squadron. Neither Myers nor Watley flew the F-5E or the T-38 and, considering the extensive knowledge of the Soviet system(s) that they’d acquired in their previous jobs, were provided only some rudimentary “Aggressor” academics. Postai remained attached to the 65th and flew the F-5E/T-38 as his alternate aircraft.
As for Henderson, since his departure the year before, he had remained closely associated with the 4477th TES:
After I relinquished command of the 4477th TES in June 1980, I worked as the executive officer for the 57th FWW commander, Gen Charles J. Cunningham. After about 60 days I went to work at the Range Group as the Red Czar, where I was in charge of coordinating the Aggressor air threat with the ground threats on the Nellis ranges. I hated the job and was looking for anything else that might be available. When I found out I was going to need heart bypass surgery in June 1981, I convinced my Range Group boss that I would not be coming back after surgery because of medical retirement. In the meantime, I had contacted Col Roger Sorenson [who was about to be the first commander of the 57th FWW Tactics & Test]. He promised me a job as head of special programs, which included foreign material testing, 3-1 tactics manual production [USAF tactics from the MCM 3-1 manual], and range ground threat systems testing. I also was tasked to work a few 4477th TES problems during the first few years. I would do the research and provide a report to the squadron and wing commanders.
Bucko’s influence on the Marine Corps’ ability to participate in CONSTANT PEG in 1980 had been significant. “I had made it clear to the Navy and to the Air Force that if they had sorties against the MiGs that they had to cancel for whatever reason, the IPs from MAWTS 1 could be overhead at Tonopah with only 30 minutes’ notice.” The message, loud and clear, resulted in a fair number of ad hoc sorties going to the Marines, who were unencumbered by some of the bureaucracy that the Air Force and Navy units had to deal with when deploying to Nellis, and which could result in the cancellation of sorties at the last minute.
Since the Red Eagles had grown from a flight into a squadron, the structure of the flying part of the organization had been broken up into three flights: A, B, and C. The C Flight became known as “Gold Flight” because it was where the Navy pilots, who wore wings of gold (as opposed to the Air Force’s wings of silver), were assigned and was also referred to as “Sea Flight,” for obvious reasons. Since the Marines were administratively part of the Navy, and as they also wore wings of gold, Bucko entered C Flight accordingly, joining Navy pilots Laughter and Shean. Completing the quartet of “squids” was Taylor, who arrived on the flight a month after Bucko.
Now that the mustached Marine was at Tonopah and on the inside, he became the Corps’ point of contact and would focus in particular on making sure that the guys at El Toro got as many exposures as possible. He also looked after them in other ways, bringing them life support items: flight suits, jackets, oxygen masks, and in particular anti-G suits that had failed the Air Force’s inspections:
The Marine corps was at the end of the supply chain, but when I arrived at Nellis the amount of stuff the Air Force signed out to me made me feel like it was Christmas. I had worn the same G-suit in the Marine Corps for about eight years, but up there at Nellis I would get a new one every four months or so. The Air Force test was to inflate the G suit and leave it overnight. In the morning, if it had deflated at all, it got thrown away. I would take a parachute bag and collect all this stuff that the Air Force wanted to throw away, and I would take it to the bros at El Toro. I was like their pawn broker.
Although things were well in most respects, Bucko was encountering hostility from certain quarters. One evening at the bar in Nellis, two Aggressor pilots walked up to him and asked him whether he was as tough as the Marines made themselves out to be. They challenged him to a ritualistic contest to determine if he was: all three would consume a raw egg followed by a large shot of alcohol. The mix was almost guaranteed to turn all but the hardest stomach. Simultaneously, all three pilots downed the two ingredients. The two Aggressors almost immediately vomited the egg and alcohol mix back into their glasses. Bucko did not. Instead, he took both of their glasses and drank their vomit. He was not pestered at the bar again.
While such bar talk was intentionally provocative and par for the course for inter-service rivalry and fighter pilot ego, there was genuine hostility towards Bucko, most notably from some of the enlisted men who seemed to be increasingly losing respect for rank or chain of command. One, a big man named Paul, Bucko told me, openly put it about that he didn’t know why the squadron needed a Marine pilot; and that actually, he didn’t like Marines at all. Bucko became aware of the maintainer’s views, as was no doubt intended. One evening he decided enough was enough – the big maintainer was staring at him while he played pool in the well-furnished recreation building behind the MiG hangars. Bucko took up the story:
Some of these guys had been in black programs for many years, and you didn’t really want to fuck with them because the MiGs were theirs. They had been there since they came out of the box, or since they went to some country and stole it or crated it up. You really respected them. I walked up to him and said, “Hey! Paul, let’s be friends. OK?”, to which he responded, “I dunno.” But he put his hand out as if to shake hands. I responded by grabbing his face with both hands and kissing him square on the lips. The crowd went crazy and he was really pissed.
Paul had been put in his place, and the ice had been broken. Other pressures on Bucko came from within his own mind. The pressure and stress of not wanting to fail weighed heavily on him in those early days. Failure would not only bring the rest of the Corps into disrepute, but it could also end the Marines’ involvement in CONSTANT PEG for good. That realization was like a hammer blow, but there was also the simple understanding that these MiGs were nowhere near as safe as even the two Phantoms that had almost killed him on successive sorties in Japan. With absolute candidness, Bucko explained that he was so nervous before his first MiG-21 flight he vomited and urinated nervously. The night before, he’d sat in the corner of the bar at Tonopah going over the sortie with his IP, Myers, but despite Myers’ wisdom and calming influence, the Marine was feeling the pressure. He was not alone.
In August 1981, America deployed two US Navy Carrier Battle Groups (CVBG) – the USS Forrestal (CV-59) and the USS Nimitz (CVN-68) – to the Mediterranean waters north of Libya. Libya’s dictator, Col Muammar al-Gaddafi, had decreed that a stretch of water off the north coast of Libya, the Gulf of Sidra, was sovereign territory. America refused to acknowledge this assertion, insisting that the standard 12-mile territorial limit from a nation’s shoreline meant that Gaddafi’s ‘line of death’ illegally dissected international waters. The deployment of the two carriers, each stuffed with jet fighters and supporting war planes, was a direct challenge to Gaddafi’s authority.
The two carriers began exercises near the Gulf of Sidra on August 18, in response to which the Libyan Arab Republic Air Force (LARAF) forward deployed a squadron of MiG-25 “Foxbat,” MiG-23 Flogger, and Sukhoi Su-22 “Fitter” interceptors and fighter-bombers closer to the northern shoreline, and thus the US carriers. According to aviation historian Tom Cooper, in an email exchange with the author: “Early that morning, at least three MiG-25s approached the two US CVBGs, but all were escorted away by F-4s of VF-11 and VF-31 from the USS Forrestal, and F-14As of VF-41 and VF-84 from the USS Nimitz. In an attempt to try and establish the exact position of US carriers slightly better, later that day the LARAF dispatched no fewer than 35 pairs of MiG-23s, MiG-25s, Su-22s, and Mirage F1s into the area. These were all, one after the other, successively intercepted by a total of seven pairs of Tomcats and Phantoms.”
The situation changed early the next morning, when a Grumman E-2C Hawkeye, with its far-reaching search radar, detected two Libyan fighters taking off. Two VF-41 “Black Aces” Tomcats were launched in response. The two pilots and two RIOs (Radar Intercept Officer), Lt Dave Venlet and Cdr Henry Kleeman (the commander of VF-41) in F-14 “Fast Eagle 107,” and Lt Larry “Music” Muczynski and Lt James Anderson in F-14 “Fast Eagle 102,” had all been through CONSTANT PEG.
As the two F-14s and the Libyan Su-22 Fitters passed by each other, the lead Libyan apparently fired a K-13M missile at one of the Tomcats. With Buck Fever something that both the Navy pilots and RIOs had experienced out over the Nellis ranges at the hands of the Red Eagles, all four men knew that it could kill them if they let it. The two pilots reacted instinctively, turning the Tomcats hard to position for AIM-9L Sidewinder shots from the optimum position behind the Fitters. Fast Eagle 102 downed the lead Fitter, followed seconds later by his wingman at the hands of Fast Eagle 107. CONSTANT PEG had just achieved its first kills.
Like any organization, the Red Eagles needed administrative support. For many years, that came from the unit’s secretary, Eunice Warren. Warren was hired by Henderson in the aftermath of Peck’s sudden departure. Henderson explained:
With his sudden departure, not surprisingly, Gail left me with many incomplete tasks and issues, one of which was hiring a new secretary to replace the one who had just quit. The maintenance guys (and pilots) referred to the outgoing secretary as “Broom Hilda.” Needless to say, she was not of their blood and she could not wait to get away from that weird group of individuals with the super-secret mission. And the squadron guys were equally happy to see her go.
The Nellis Red Eagle operations were conducted out of a white double-wide trailer in the parking lot south of the fighter Weapons School. There simply was no privacy. The commander’s office was a 10ft x 10ft room with an accordion door that would not even latch. As I interviewed new secretary candidates, everyone in the squadron could and did walk by to “check them out.” They would individually give me a secret ballot vote with a thumb up or thumb down. I always had to make sure the new candidate was sitting in a chair where she could not see the men walking by in the hallway. I also had to work very hard to keep my sober game face on during the interview.
After about ten candidate interviews, in walks Eunice Warren. Eunice had just recently married Sgt David Warren, a maintenance technician on the USAF Thunderbirds. They had met when the team visited Wright-Patterson AFB. Eunice was a GS-11 executive secretary for one of the directorates in Air Force Systems Command. She moved to Nellis after marrying David and was looking for work as a secretary. She quickly found out that a senior GS-11 position was out of the question, and the best she could do was a GS-4. When she showed up at our trailers she was dressed very smartly, very business-like. She was very beautiful and had a very ample bosom. The commotion outside my office during the interview was exceedingly distracting. At least 50 men passed my door and there were only 30 men in total in my squadron. There were a lot of second and third looks and a unanimous thumbs up. She was hired.
Our daily routine was to gather at the trailers early in the morning, generally before dawn, sort out the day’s schedule and figure out the transportation to Tonopah. Then we were off to Tonopah and a long day. Only one or two people were left behind – the secretary, an admin troop, and perhaps a supply guy. For the first six weeks, Eunice came to work dressed just as she had for the interview – a nice business suit. But she soon found out she was all dressed up with nowhere to go. At Wright-Patterson, she got a lot of coffee for visiting generals, flashed a pretty smile, and did a little typing. In the trailers she did a lot of typing and answering the phone, no coffee, no visiting generals, no need for a pretty smile.
There was a marked difference between working for a three-star general and dealing with a bunch of crusty old sergeants and bone-tired fighter pilots at the end of a long day. Soon Eunice was wearing blue jeans and a bulky sweater. The bulky sweater at least diverted the more obvious stares. She had a sweet personality and we almost ruined her with the coarse treatment. She somehow kept her sense of humor and figured out a way to give at least as much as she got. The result was that it endeared her to all squadron members.
Underpinning the Red Eagle’s operations was Maj John “Admiral” Nelson, a non-rated officer with a history of assignments in maintenance administration. He’d progressed into procurement – “everybody needs to buy stuff, and I love to spend money” – and then logistics, when one day he was asked if he would like a special duty assignment. “I came down to Nellis in May 1980, interviewed with Obi, and got the job. I think Obi was after my ability to do what needed to be done without giving anything away or taking no for an answer.” Nelson would spend the next five years with the Red Eagles, creating annual assessments of the squadron budget and equipment the unit needed. He would take this to the Air Staff for approval. Some of the money went to paying the 99th Range Group, which was based at Nellis and owned the ranges. Some of it went on buildings and facilities for the soon-to-arrive Stealth Fighter: “These guys would just turn up in my office and tell me what they needed,” Nelson divulged: “we built it with our money and they reimbursed us later.”
Nelson took care of all the unit’s travel, procurement, and finances: “There was a lot to do, and things to buy. But you could take [invoices for] parts a, b, and c and put them together to learn about what we were doing.” Nelson had quickly realized that having to go through the procurement office at the 57th FWW created a paper trail that led to the 4477th TES and then on to Tonopah. “That was not what you wanted. So, one day we had the TAC Logistics two-star general visit us. I explained it to him and told me he would take care of it. Within a month I had a contracting warrant that allowed me to spend $100,000 on any single purchase without any questions asked. I went over to procurement and told them I wanted one hundred of these purchase orders. “You can’t have that!” they said. But they called a colonel in the TAC HQ and he ordered them to comply.”
Nelson typed up every single purchase order (PO) himself. Nobody saw any of them. He could now place a single order for $100,000, issue a PO number to the vendor, who would contact the 57th FWW finance office for payment. The 57th FWW had no idea what it was paying for, and the vendor had no idea who he was selling his products to. Secrecy was therefore maintained. Anything costing more than $100,000 would be purchased by a special projects division of the Air Force’s Logistics Command, based in Utah.
Nelson’s system worked well until an ambitious captain on the Air Force’s Inspectorate General (IG) team discovered that the 57th FWW was missing “at least five hundred” PO numbers, said Nelson. “He said, ‘Where are they?’ They said, ‘Admiral has them.’ ‘Well, where’s Admiral and what is he doing with them?’, he replied. ‘He’s over there in a trailer, and we have no idea,’ they said. We briefed the Deputy of Procurement [at the 57th FWW], Pat Gill, in on the program, but she had played dumb with this captain. He came over to the office and told me he wanted to see the POs.”
What followed was a debate about whether the IG had a need to know. Eventually, Nelson had had enough. “You don’t have a need to know. You had better call your team leader and ask him. The captain said, ‘I can’t call him, he’s with Gen Gregory.’ I said, ‘OK. That’s even easier.’ I picked up the phone and called Gen Gregory’s office. I passed the phone to the captain. He said, ‘Sir, I am over at this office. This major will not let me see them… Yes, Sir… No, Sir… Yes, Sir!’, and that was it. He said, ‘OK. I am out of here,’ and he left just like that. We never saw him again and no one else ever came back.”
To enable a degree of oversight, Nelson would occasionally invite Gill to review his POs, but the reality was that his position relied on his absolute integrity: “I was not about to cheat the government, and I wasn’t going to let a businessman do it, either.” The POs were kept for three years and were then buried by Silver Bow Lake at Tonopah, Nelson revealed. So, why not shred them? “Because we didn’t have a shredder!”
Other administrative tasks included applying the Air Force’s STAN/EVAL procedures to the squadron, a job for Scott and McCloud. Scott explained: “I did everything on a grease board – the guys’ names were on there with a list of who needed what check rides and when. The STAN/EVAL guy for the F-5 and T-38 at TAC was an ex-Aggressor called Mike Tobin, and he knew about our MiG operations. He would come out and inspect us, and while he would sometimes tell us we were a little behind the rest of the Air Force with our documented training reports, the other side of the coin was that we couldn’t send our documentation anywhere because of the classified nature of the program.”
Henderson explained further:
Like the rest of the Air Force, the pilots accomplished STAN/EVAL and instrument checks in their non-MiG aircraft; and they were administered on an annual basis by TAC-certified check pilots. The MiGs were a different story. During initial checkout, the grade slips were filled out by the instructor for each ride. Since the MiGs were only flown in day VFR [visual flight rules] weather, a STAN/EVAL program would have very limited things to “eval.” The STAN/EVAL pilot could fly chase in the traffic pattern, maybe circle the fight during a 1 v 1 engagement, or be the wingman/chase during a two-ship engagement. Although none of these had very practical meaning, records were maintained in proper format – Form 8 – and included the in-house portion of the pilot’s official USAF STAN/EVAL “847” record [the MiGs were coded as YF-110, YF-113, or YF-114, as applicable]. The pilot records and the program, which was TAC/DO approved, were inspected on an annual basis by Tobin.
Tragically, on September 8, 1981, “DL” Smith, by now a lieutenant colonel, was killed in a T-38A crash. Following the successful creation of CONSTANT PEG, Smith had left his black world assignment at TAC HQ in 1979 to become the commander and flight leader of the Air Force’s aerobatic demonstration team, the Thunderbirds, for the 1980 display season. While this post usually lasted only one year, TAC’s commander, Creech, had personally requested that Smith stay in the role for the 1981 season, too. Smith agreed, but it was following a four-day weekend of displaying in Cleveland toward the end of the season that Smith perished. Sheffield was assigned to take part as the pilot member of the ensuing mishap board.
Taking off on the Tuesday morning with his crew chief in the back seat of the Talon, Smith had rotated smoothly off the runway as the white jet reached flying speed, and immediately ingested a flock of seagulls that had congregated near Lake Erie. Power loss had been instant, and ejection was the only choice. “Smith’s backseater got a good ’chute, but ‘DL’ did not,” Sheffield relayed. A lanyard to the parachute on Smith’s back had been accidentally released during the ejection sequence, and that meant that his parachute had failed to deploy. Smith had been killed by “the oddest of chances of the ejection sequence going wrong in the oddest of ways.” Up until now, the Red Eagles had been marginally involved in the selection process for the Thunderbirds. T-38s had become hard to come by at Nellis since the move to the F-5, and since the Thunderbirds were based at Nellis, they would borrow the 4477th TES’ Talons when they needed additional aircraft to help checkout prospective pilots for the next season.
On September 20, Sheffield was involved in an altercation in a Las Vegas casino. He was struck by a blow that knocked him to the floor, and as he landed he banged his head. The resultant trauma to his brain induced a coma. He was taken to hospital where he remained comatose for a period of several weeks. Eventually he started to return to consciousness, but in his dazed and confused state he started talking about the MiGs. This was clearly not deliberate on his part, but it was an alarming breach in security. Until he finally regained full control over his senses, one of the Red Eagles remained with him around the clock in a bid to keep him from revealing the secret that was CONSTANT PEG. When he did talk about the MiGs when doctors, nurses, and anyone else was within earshot, the Red Eagle pilot with him would smile and explain that Sheffield’s delirium must have been worse than anyone had previously thought.
Sheffield’s injury left him grounded for the remainder of his time with the Red Eagles (the Air Force categorizes such groundings as DNIF – duties not including flying), but as he convalesced he knew that his time in the active duty Air Force was over. “Gail Peck is one of the finest men I have ever known, and the way the Air Force treated him was just shitty. Having seen that, and then seen how they treated Richie Graham [the Aggressor commander], one of the best commanders I ever worked for, helped me make up my mind. It was a ‘one mistake Air Force.’ You could be the man who walked on water, but if someone else under your command screwed up indirectly, the first response of the senior Air Force leaders was to fire the commander.” In the case of Graham, one of Sheffield’s friends going through the Aggressor checkout had put an F-5E into an unrecoverable spin on his first flight with the squadron, having flown in a manner that he specifically had been instructed not to by the upgrading Aggressor IP. “He ejected, and Rich Graham was summarily fired.” Sheffield handed in his papers to leave the Air Force.
While Sheffield recovered through September and the Air Force started working out a leaving date for him, his best friend, McCloud, was making preparations to leave the squadron for a three-year tour as Actions Officer and Program Element Monitor in the enigmatically titled “Special Projects Office” at the Pentagon. In fact, Sheffield called McCloud “Mr Black,” on account of the fact that he was involved in many of the 4477th TES’ most secret ancillary duties.
McCloud had been Sheffield’s best man at his wedding and the two had first met when they were assigned to fly the F-4 at Kadena Air Base, on the Japanese island of Okinawa. When Sheffield arrived at Nellis to become an IP with the Aggressors in 1979, McCloud had conducted some of his checkout rides: “There is a basic maneuver called the high Yo-Yo, and most people would say that if your opponent is really committed to beat you, it’s a pretty worthless maneuver: he’s turning hard to get inside you, and you’re pulling the nose up and then pirouetting to come back down. Well, they keep their lift vector on you [keep their nose pointed at you] throughout, and that negates the maneuver … usually. He [McCloud] was the first guy that I ever saw execute a high YoYo that actually worked. He called the shot and got the kill.”
More than just a great stick, “He was most of all a great human being. If you met him you could spend an hour talking to him, but when you walked away you would know nothing about him and he would know everything about you. If you knew anything special, he would want to know everything about it. It wasn’t manipulative; he genuinely wanted to know everything. If he met someone who had some knowledge, he was like a sponge sucking it out of them.” Many others had similar levels of respect for McCloud, including Oberle: “He was on the fast track. He was a great officer who was level headed and strong, and a great pilot who could tell you how to fly.”
On October 3, the Red Eagles returned their leased Cessna 404 aircraft and replaced them with Mitsubishi MU-2s, but only after an extensive selection process and some legal wranglings that caused Nelson and Gibbs some headaches. Some of the pilots had taken to allowing their passengers to fly the Cessnas from the right seat, and competitions between the pilots had even begun to see who could land furthest down the runway in order to reduce the amount of taxi time required to get back to the parking apron. With such practices continuing in the Mitsubishis, Myers, the assistant ops officer at the time, cautioned his fellow Red Eagles not to become too casual, and to recognize the dangers of being rated in so many different aircraft:
I would brief guys that when you were flying a MiG you had your hands on a national asset. Furthermore, you are a little bit of a test pilot, because these things are less common than an F-15 or F-16, and if anything out the ordinary happens you need to get it back on the ground. You don’t push things like a warning light just to get another engagement in. Likewise, when you flew the Mitsubishis, you were an airline pilot. You weren’t there to dogfight; you flew shallow turns and were trying to think about the comfort of the guys in the back of the airplane. Lastly, when the guys flew as Aggressors, they were there as instructors, and when I flew against the F-15 in another F-15, I was there as an F-15 instructor pilot. I wanted to ensure that the guys did not transition between these three different hats while they were flying the wrong aircraft.
Myers and Corder had also been responsible for the acquisition of two $4,000 fax machines to allow the flying schedule to be transmitted between Tonopah and Nellis each morning. It was an expense for which Nelson was happy to shell out.
Later that month, according to Henderson, “A company called Information Management Inc. (IMI) submitted an unsolicited proposal to take over all [Red Eagles] maintenance functions with contractors. It was my job to conduct an evaluation of that proposal.” He did so, forwarding the recommendation that the Air Force consider the proposal, but it would be more than six months before they would reply. Incredibly, IMI was owned by Huff, the Red Eagle who had so vehemently disassociated himself from the Air Force following Peck’s firing.
For Gibbs the year had gone well, and he was pleased with the level of support he had received from both Gen Kelley and Gen Cunningham. “Cunningham used to fly the F-5, land at Tonopah and come in and say ‘Hi!’ to everybody. In-between my other responsibilities, I was still getting to fly as much as I wanted, 15 to 20 sorties per month, or thereabouts.”
The year had had its moments for Gibbs too, Nelson revealed:
I bought a newspaper to Tonopah each morning. On one morning I arrived to find a visiting general standing alone in the squadron.21 We started talking and he then asked me where the head was. I showed him and he grabbed the newspaper and walked off. A few minutes later, Tom Gibbs came in. His usual routine was to grab the paper and walk off in to the head. He asks, “Where’s the paper?”, and I told him it was in the head. He went back to his office, did a couple of jobs and then walked to the head a few minutes later. He banged on the door, “Hey! You! Hurry up. I gotta go!” About this time, Dave Stringer, the maintenance officer walks in. Tom again bangs on the door, and this time a voice calls back, “OK!”, and the toilet flushes. The three of us are standing there at the coffee bar when the general comes out of the head. Tom immediately says, “OK, Stringer, you had to go so bad, get your butt in there!” It was one of those times that Tom was really quick on his feet.
As 1981 slipped into the past, the Red Eagles were operating three MiG-17F Fresco Cs, six MiG-21F-13 Fishbed C/Es, and one MiG-23BN Flogger F. In total, they had flown 1,340 sorties, providing 462 exposures to fellow American fighter aircrews.