A Buffalo in the House

“Here’s how it is.” Callan spoke very slowly, making Veryl and Roger even more anxious. “Charlie must have hit that fence going full-out, because he’s clearly suffered a serious neck injury and trauma to his spinal cord and it’s affected his nerves. We grade neurologic injuries from one to five. Five’s the worst. The animal’s down and can’t get up. That’s Charlie. He’s a five.”

“I can see that. I can see that he’s a member of the family. I don’t underestimate the role that love can play. Also, I know from Dr. Sandberg how cooperative Charlie is. He tolerates a lot of handling. To see that in a bison is exceptional. He seems to understand that we’re trying to help him. That’s a big, big plus.”

“We have to anesthetize Charlie to do the procedure, and there’s a risk with ruminants. From our limited experience, we know in general they seem to have problems with anesthesia. A small percentage regurgitate when given anesthesia and they aspirate the contents of their stomach. And they suffocate. One in a hundred,” Callan said. “At worst, one in ten.”

“But according to Dr. Callan,” Veryl said, “he’s not much of a candidate for getting better on his own. He’s a five, Roger. Dr. Callan was pretty clear—fives rarely get up on their feet again. You know if this were any other animal, if we were more practical people, we’d have to put him down. If we don’t let Dr. Callan put Charlie under and find out exactly what’s going on, and he doesn’t get well on his own, we’ll hate ourselves for not giving the doctors a chance to save him.”

An hour later, he and Veryl watched as the doctors put a line in a vein in Charlie’s leg and put him quickly under. Then the surgical team put a ventilator down Charlie’s throat to help him breathe, and Dr. Callan asked Roger and Veryl to leave the operating room. On her way out, Veryl stopped and whispered in Callan’s ear, “Please save Charlie, Doc. Next to me, he’s Roger’s best friend.”

They had two hours. Veryl suggested they go out and shop. Walk around. Something. Anything. Roger said no. He just wanted to sit there, staring silently into space. Waiting. Thinking. Until seven months ago, he had never seen a bison or even given them much thought. Now he was taking extraordinary measures to save one buffalo’s life. He sensed that, if Charlie survived, their lives would forever be linked.

ROGER HAD NEVER DONE things lightly. His first passion was flying. At twenty-one, he indulged a childhood dream by taking lessons, even though it was a tremendous financial drain. He worked construction jobs to pay for it. Impressed by Roger’s natural gift for aviation, his first instructor suggested a career as a pilot, but Roger had already entered a corporate training program as an Arizona State undergraduate. By the time he was out of college, he was already disenchanted with corporate America and spent most of his waking hours at airports, chasing airplanes, begging for a chance to be somebody’s copilot. He skimped and saved to get his private and commercial licenses, his instrument and multi-engine ratings.

He had everything but a job, and then a friend mentioned a small ad she had seen in a Phoenix newspaper for contract flying in Southeast Asia. It was the spring of 1968, only a few months after the Tet Offensive, so Roger knew what “contract flying in Southeast Asia” probably meant, but he was antsy about getting his career off the ground. He applied for the job, flying to Washington, D.C., for the interview. The job entailed flying relief missions to refugees in a DC-3. He suspected otherwise, but said nothing. He was examined and tested.

His Phoenix flying instructor had been right about his skills; of five thousand applicants, sixteen were hired and Roger Brooks was the youngest member of the crop. He became a pilot for Air America, the clandestine arm of the CIA whose roots were as a private guerrilla airline hauling cargo in post–World War II China. By the late 1960s, Air America was in the business of serving “national security interests” in Asia. At one point during the Vietnam War, Air America would have the third-largest airline fleet in the world, logging as many as thirty thousand flights a month. Roger Brooks’s dream had come true, and then some; he had one of the riskiest jobs in all of aviation.

While the war in Vietnam was tearing both that country and America apart, the CIA was waging a secret war in Laos to help General Vang Pao’s army fight a Communist takeover there by destroying its supply line, the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Along with hundreds of other civilian pilots, Roger had been recruited for a military operation whose existence the U.S. government flatly denied. The work included hauling mercenaries and ammunition deep into Laos, rescuing downed pilots, running resupply missions, doing photo reconnaissance, evacuating endangered locals, and making humanitarian food drops.

Roger flew night orbits over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, communicating with road watch teams whose job was to spot enemy truck and troop traffic coming down the Trail. He flew an unpressurized plane at twenty thousand feet, just clearing the effective range of most antiaircraft guns, but he still felt like a mallard on the opening day of duck-hunting season. To make matters more harrowing, the pilots were civilians and therefore prohibited from carrying firearms, a disadvantage for which a few pilots paid the ultimate price when shot down over enemy territory. After the night orbit program was canceled on Christmas Day, 1968, Roger started flying copilot, delivering supplies to Hmong hill tribes in the mountains, on U.S. Air Force C-123 assault transports from which the military markings had been removed.

Aside from the usual rest and relaxation in Bangkok, the pilots lived lives of dangerous anonymity with few amenities. Whenever the CIA learned that American journalists had gotten wind of an Air America base’s whereabouts, the pilots and crew would have an hour or two’s notice to dismantle and evacuate. By the time the press showed up, all they’d find were a few huts and some chickens. As “civilians,” many pilots did multi-year tours of duty. Two hundred and forty-three pilots lost their lives flying for Air America during the Vietnam War (one hundred during the last three years of it)—and for many years only their families and friends knew how they really died.

Roger quickly learned that it was not like the movies. There was no swelling music, no convenient cuts. He was holed up in the cockpit—hot and hungry and nursing a bursting bladder. The whole thing had the claustrophobic feel of going through an endless tunnel, away from yourself and everything you knew. After each successful mission, he felt like the one loaded chamber in a game of Russian roulette had moved one click closer. Roger developed a nervous little gagging cough when he flew into combat situations. It was as if the tunnel of his throat was closing.

One day in 1969, while Roger was walking through a Laotian village to pursue another of his passions, photography, he saw an old Laotian man moving through his rice paddy on the back of his water buffalo. The man appeared ancient, with a wizened face beneath a conical straw hat, yet he might not have been older than forty. Studying him from the embankment through his zoom lens, Roger was struck by how trapped they were in their respective worlds. He wondered what the rice farmer’s life was like, and who had it better: Roger, son of affluence and citizen of the strongest nation on earth, who couldn’t say exactly why he was flying secret supply missions to Hmong tribesmen in Laos, or the man who knew, day after day after day, that his place was with his water buffalo?

As a boy, he had watched his father, a product of the Great Depression, worship at the altar of financial security along with so many men of that generation. To support his lifestyle—the two country clubs, the racehorses, the gambling habit—John Brooks eventually had to borrow freely from his car dealerships, never claiming the loans as salary. When the IRS caught up with him, he had to sell his house and businesses to raise money for back taxes. The family was forced to exchange the large Orinda, California, house for a Phoenix rental. He tried to win his former life back at the track, and when Roger’s mother discovered—she had never really peeked at her husband’s finances before—that they were down to their last $100, she took a secretarial job to help the family slowly fight its way back to solvency. But the taint of money, and the stain of its lack, colored Roger’s adolescence. The IRS hounded John Brooks for so many years that he was eventually on a first-name basis with almost everyone in the Phoenix office. Observing this, Roger never acquired much of a taste for materialism.

THERE WERE ANY NUMBER of pursuits for which the trick of intelligent detachment was an advantage, but being a green pilot on secret missions in Laos was not one of them. Yet there he was, getting to know the locals, standing outside his own country, his mind filling with questions. Was he really better off? Was America? Who and what were the forces that had moved him across the world to dodge antiaircraft artillery fire in a shadowy war? Alone among his colleagues, all of them older and military-trained, Roger felt that, in terms of who was helping the Laotian people more, he was on the wrong side. A large slice of his generation was experiencing feelings of betrayal on college campuses; Roger was experiencing them in the belly of the military-industrial complex. Like everyone who feels the first chill of looking through the shell of the observable world at the dark machinery inside, Roger was disturbed. He waited for the feeling to go away. And it did, but only to return, again and again, in ever more intricate forms.

On leave back in the United States, he watched President Johnson talk about the war on TV. The lies leapt out at him. The president assured the nation that the U.S. military was merely flying armed reconnaissance over Laos, with instructions to fire only if fired upon, when Roger knew firsthand that they were bombing the hell out of the place. A hundred years before, America had overpowered the civilizations that had preceded it in the West, and now it was trying to overwhelm another part of the world. Roger was already well schooled in the strange-bedfellows aspect of geopolitics. It didn’t take a genius to realize that our government was not simply supporting monsters, but sometimes creating them as well.

By July 1969, he had had enough. He left Air America, flirted with expatriation in Germany and Sweden, then returned to the States to become an airline pilot. For much of his career as a commercial pilot, Roger was an airline-safety activist, obsessively defending and protecting the safety of passengers against any action by industry or government that compromised it. In the 1980s, for example, as chairman of Frontier Airlines’ Air Safety Committee and chairman of the Air Line Pilot Association’s Accident Survival Committee, Roger confronted the Federal Aviation Administration over a regulation that it had secretly approved to eliminate two emergency exits on several airplanes, including the 747. The new regulation, of course, would make it harder than before to evacuate the plane in an emergency. To read the transcript of Roger’s comments at a 1986 international air-safety symposium in Seattle is to get the sense that Roger was something of a buffalo himself—gentle until his interests were threatened and much smarter than he looked.

“It is well known in the aviation industry,” he said, addressing the heads of Aircraft Certification for the FAA and for Boeing, “that [the Air Line Pilot Association], in the strongest terms, protested the unwise, callous, and self-serving decision by some Boeing 747 series 100, 200, and 300 operators [airlines] to remove existing emergency exits from their aircraft and to order new aircraft without these exits.... It is interesting, even curious, that only one public defender of this action exists: the Federal Aviation Administration. We have yet to receive an explanation from the manufacturer as to why exit pair number three should be removed. We have yet to hear from an operator detailing the financial benefits of such a change. Surely, we don’t have a modification that has no benefits but only exists because it’s labeled ‘legal.’ ”

Boeing’s head of aircraft certification rose in response. “Those pairs of exits were removed because of the interest of our customers to have airplane configured in that arrangement, to operate in the 440-or-below seating density. . . .”

Roger had never suffered doubletalk gladly. “I would be very curious to know what your customer requests were,” he said, “and who wanted this, and for what reasons, and whether there’s a cost benefit on it, or what kind of payback period, or how much money could be saved by incurring the expense of removing exits.... I really think that for us to understand this particular removal—I think that the public really deserves to know who is benefiting and why, and perhaps you’d like to introduce that here.”

Roger then proceeded to criticize Boeing for conducting inadequate emergency-exit tests to justify their regulation—tests that were not in full compliance with strict FAA regulations, but which were nonetheless used as the basis for extrapolating “applicable” results. “I think full-scale demonstrations were required at that time,” Roger said. “And the Boeing Company in that test did not [comply].... And that test became your baseline for analysis, or a ‘give me’ factor that I’m sure Jack Nicklaus would like to have when he plays golf....

“Now, as an airline captain,” he continued, “I’m required to take a check ride every six months. And in no instance have I ever passed a check ride by analysis, based upon my previous performance.” At this point the audience laughed—at least that portion of it enjoying the methodical way in which Roger Brooks was taking Boeing’s—and the FAA’s—case apart. “And if I can’t do that, then I don’t think you should be able to do that, either.

“The customers wanted it,” Roger concluded. “But I don’t think the customers’ customers want it. And I think that’s the point here, that there is an economy involved in doing this. That economy is not passed on to the airline customers. Their safety is being degraded at no benefit whatsoever to them. And I don’t think that that is legitimate. I don’t think that is an honorable philosophy to use in this industry.”

Shortly after the symposium, for the first time in its history the FAA effectively rescinded a regulation. An FAA administrator wrote a letter to all of the airlines, informing them that, while removing the No. 3 pair of emergency exits over the wings on a Boeing 747 was legal, they didn’t recommend doing it. Nobody did. Before long, the FAA created a rule stipulating that there had to be no more than sixty-six feet between emergency exits on a commercial airplane. That rule, thanks to Roger Brooks, is still in effect today and applies to all new aircraft.

Later, Roger became the litigation manager on behalf of Frontier Airlines pilots, and spent part of almost every day for eight years preparing suits against two major airlines, United and Continental. When the Air Line Pilots Association union leaders shrank from the legal fight, Roger pursued it himself, from court to court, with some of the appeals reaching the United States Supreme Court.

The smaller-minded often make the mistake of ascribing to people of integrity one of two qualities: a superior morality that enables them to resist the easy choice or, on the other hand, a kind of vanity that motivates them to do the right thing in order to feel morally superior. At least for Roger, something much simpler was at work. Roger felt the sort of resistance to irresponsibility that everyone would feel about crossing the yellow dividing line and driving into oncoming traffic. It was not open to discussion, but an imperative for self-survival.