| Larry Schwartz |
| IT’S time to dispense a little justice. Below him, the earth has vanished momentarily from sight and all he can see is a field of azure blue. He should be unconscious, but for a special suit he wears. With the force of gravity bearing down, his blood should be rushing to his toes as his body bears back in the seat, eight times its normal weight. In the moments it takes the F/A-18 Hornet to surge into the skies, fighter pilot Stuart Baker tenses his stomach and leg muscles again and again, pumping himself up as if preparing for a big game. Except that this is war. Kilometres apart in the skies, he and his wingman, John Paul “JP” Conlan, encounter four enemy aircraft. Their brief is to escort the two bombers and fighter accompanying each, out of Australian air space. “Tally pair spread below me.” “Whelper Two press.” “Southern group two zero four miles.” In the skies above Williamtown, outside the New South Wales city of Newcastle, an aerial dogfight has begun. Finally, there comes the command they have been awaiting: “Whelper kill.” By the time they return to their hangar, each will have downed a fighter and saved the free world again. “Dispensing justice,” is an expression the men around No.2 Operational Conversion Unit are wont to use. And way up in the azure, justice has been done. Back on the ground, “JP” Conlan concedes that until his hair began receding a few years ago, he had more interest in flying fighters than dating women. “We know who we are,” says Conlan. “We don’t force that down anyone’s throat. Quiet confidence would be the way I’d describe it. “Do we know that we’re the best guys around? Sure as shit we do. There’s no doubt in our minds.” THIS being peacetime, theirs is a mock victory. Armed with red and blue markers, Flight Lieutenant Stuart Baker, 26, will stand before a whiteboard at debriefing to pick apart the encounter. Squadron Leader Conlan will be there along with Flight Lieutenant Rob Saxton. Alongside them will be the “enemy”, including the downed pilots from the Royal New Zealand Air Force’s No.2 Squadron, playing the part of the enemy from Camaria, a fictional country commonly used in military exercises. The New Zealanders are here on the week of our visit to help with the practical side of the fighter combat instructor training course at Williamtown, said to be one of the most intensive and prestigious in the Australian armed forces. Baker is one of five young pilots undergoing a course that will culminate with simulated aerial and air-to-ground combat over Darwin, a dawn bombing strike over Singleton, an air defence of Williamtown. They hope to join the 123 in the RAAF’s 73 year-history to have earned the fighter combat instructor’s pale blue and gold shoulder patch featuring a gunsight, aeroplane and missile. “You can’t steal one of those patches off someone,” says Conlan, 32, a 1989 FCI graduate now running the course. “If he wears the patch, don’t touch the patch. Sometimes in the bar people might be swapping patches back and forth all in good fun and all good natured. But no one steals an FCI’s patch … Conlan likens the high regard in the air force for the FCI to a scene in the movie `Wayne’s World’ where two central characters supplicate themselves before veteran art rocker Alice Cooper, saying: “We are not worthy. We are not worthy.” A blue-eyed ex-naval pilot with a habit of knocking down his own questions like skittles, he talks in terms that suggest something mystical will happen to the men in his charge in the next few months. “When they come out of the FCI course they bear that stamp of authority. When they talk to you it’s not as if they are Joe, Bag of Doughnuts … They are very direct. They are positive. They probably speak with less words than they did in the past. So much so that people go, `Whoah, there’s a changed personality here. This guy is a guru’.” After a rigorous four months in which they eat, sleep and think aerial combat tactics, they emerge as “the keepers of the knowledge”, retained at Williamtown to train instructors for pilots to fly the F/A-18 and later initiate the next batch of FCIs before being posted out to the squadrons around the country. “When you get through this, you can look at your `buds’ here and you know what they’ve been through,” says CPI trainee Flight Lieutenant Paul Proudfoot. “There are some really testing, trying times.” “They are considered to be the creme de la creme and the cutting edge of our tactical fighter force,” says a note from a RAAF Air Command public relations officer. She has written that they will become role models instilling confidence among their peers. Even acknowledgement of their failings will inspire others to learn. “. . . These pilots are hand-picked – the best of the best – and the coveted FCI badge is worn with pride.” “They looked upon themselves as men who lived by higher standards than civilians, as men who were the bearers and protectors of the most important values of American life.” (Tom Wolfe, `The Right Stuff’) The Right Stuff? The chosen five have few illusions about the special quality that has elevated them to the FCI class of ’94. “Hard yakka,” says 28 year-old Flight Lieutenant Paul Proudfoot, whose experience includes an exchange stint with the United States Marine Corps. “WE’RE not a lot of elitist guys … We’re a bit focused and we’re working real hard at the moment. But everyone here’s a normal bloke. If you saw us at the weekend at the shopping centre, no difference.” But there is one. Not many people leave work at the end of a day having seen one of their colleagues killed. Each man has lost friends with a regularity other professionals might find alarming. There is little margin for error in their job. The slightest lapse can mean death. The men share a seeming obsession with getting it right that is not always appreciated by others. “If you talk to other people around the air force, fighter pilots are just a bunch of arrogant arseholes,” says Proudfoot. “… They teach us to be reasonably well spoken and confident and knowledgeable in what we do. Every aspect of it. People see that as arrogant. And they often don’t understand why we want such perfection. We want to live. People will go, `So what if your tyre is a little bit flat? So what if you are off-height here a little bit’. That can get you killed.” They talk about their fears, as though they are relieved to unburden themselves of a topic you might think taboo. Mike Kitcher has twice flown in formations where a pilot has died. Stuart Baker has lost a friend in each of the eight years he has been in the force. “Every now and then it becomes a domestic issue, the dangers of it,” he says. Tim Churchill says: “You talk to people who have been in 20 years and its 20 people. So it’s about one a year average … It makes you feel very mortal. It can happen to me. You are not invincible. We’re talking about coming to terms with death and what it can mean.” Proudfoot has lost four very close friends in the past three or four years. It’s a small fighter force, he says. So you tend to know everyone. “We lose guys but not that often and you would not believe the safety restrictions that apply. “We’ve all lost mates but you also really never dwell on that subject,” he says. “Usually at their funeral it’s a pretty good … wake to send them off. And usually when you think of those guys you always think of the good times you had flying together. “Me and `Gecko’ used to live with a guy who died recently. Any time we talk about him it’s: `S…, remember this. Remember that.’ It’s always the good fun times.” INEVITABLY, there are those who drop out of the course. But all five this year are expected to receive their badge at a champagne breakfast on 2 December. After listening to their squadron leader, you might expect some brash, macho cock of the walk. But it soon becomes apparent the men are unpretentious, weary mortals. Conlan took his mum to see the film `Top Gun’ and concedes it gave her a better idea of what he does for a living. But he notes that the `Top Gun’ school in San Diego, California, is a US navy fighter pilot school that focuses on air-to-air combat, whereas his is an air force unit that instructs also on air-to-ground war and is thus more comprehensive. “The stereotype that people associate with `Top Gun’ is that they don’t look like real people,” says Proudfoot. “Whereas everyone’s pretty normal. We don’t go to bars to stare each other down. We go to bars to get pissed and fall over just like everyone else in Australia …” And that only on a Friday night. Until then, there is little time for carousing. Most are at the base 12 hours a day, five days a week. Weekday nights and at least one day of the weekend are for study. Proudfoot has wanted to be a fighter pilot since he was 10. That, or a Grand Prix driver. The others laugh when he jokily concedes: “I just thought it would be the best job and would pull the chicks.” The only one to live at the base, he rarely sees his one-year-old daughter before leaving for briefing after 7am. Half an hour before leaving work generally at 7.30pm, he will telephone his wife, Amelia, “so she knows to get dinner ready”. Within half an hour of his return, he is at his studies, resuming a 14-to-16 hour work day. “So it’s basically 15 minutes or 30 minutes contact with the family all day.” Conlan says he tells the men on the course: “Speak to your wives and girlfriends and tell them we own you for the next six months.” “Will they interact with their wives? Yeah. They will have dinner. The wives will say, `All he does is come home and study. Never talks with anyone. He’s always with his buds.’ He’s doing his male bonding all week. How come he has to do it on Friday night as well?” The oldest on course, Mike “Kitch” Kitcher, 29, is married with with a one-year-old boy, Danny. He lives at Salamander Bay, 25 minutes’ drive away. “I get to see him in the morning before I go and sometimes he’s up when I get home but very rarely. “On Friday most everyone goes to the bar. It’s good that our partners are understanding. You let your hair down and have a couple of beers. Friday night is the night for letting your hair down.” Bushfires had raged around the base. A gusty cross-wind buffeted our small aircraft landing at Williamtown. The men were confined to the classroom. Ground school, they call it. There is much more to becoming an FCI than flying. They must gain an intimate understanding of the F/A-18. “We and tear the aircraft apart piece by piece by piece in some detail,” Conlan says. The FCI course aims to train pilots to clinical precision, discipline in demeanor, responsibility not just for the $30 million craft they fly but entire squadrons they will lead. There is no room in this for daredevil tomfoolery. “Controlled aggression” is the virtue extolled again and again. “At the bar and stuff like that I have never seen any one of these guys get into a fight or pick a fight,” Proudfoot says. “Airborne, there’s not one of us who won’t do what we can to kill the adversary. That’s controlled aggression.” These men are wound as tight as can be. Some admit to extreme fatigue. Kitcher is red-eyed. Proudfoot says he wakes at 3am thinking about the next day’s demands, so abuzz with thoughts he struggles to get to sleep again. The unit badge features a kangaroo in flight with its young in its pouch and the motto, “Juventus non sine pinnis” (“The young shall have wings”). “They get you when you are young and stupid and you will put all your energy into it,” Proudfoot says of the FCI course. “Later on, your priorities change.” IN a foreword to `The Right Stuff’, Tom Wolfe cited a 1920s prediction by author Charles Moran in `The Anatomy of Courage’ that the military pilot would come to be viewed this century “as the quintessence of manly daring that the cavalryman had been in the 19th”. “Say what you will about him, cocky, boisterous and an unloving fool to boot,” says a brass plaque near the bar in a room where staff and trainees meet to relax. “He’s earned his place in the sun.” One of the unit’s pilots flew over Bosnia while on exchange with the RAF. A few took part in Desert Shield in the Gulf War. Few have seen military combat. “I don’t think anyone in this course can say categorically how they would react under the stress of combat,” Kitcher says. “What you would hope to do is to react in a similar fashion to what we do now. If it happened, I’d be s…-scared without a shadow of a doubt.” The men speak lovingly of the Hornet, as it is known. They share an unbridled enthusiasm for flying that reminds you that for all the rigors of FCI course, there is still an element of joy. “Whether it’s the first time you’ve flown the aeroplane or the thousandth, the exhilaration is quite remarkable,” says Conlan, who was on the first FCI course for this particular craft. “If you’ve ever driven a fast car, being pushed back into the seat as it accelerates, that happens in the aeroplane the whole time. The rate of climb … into the cloudline and you are climbing 45, 50 degrees nose up and everything is disappearing in a heartbeat … There is a lot of power. There is a lot of menace, I guess in an aeroplane such as ours. It’s kind of nice to be in charge of that.” In his mid-teens, Stuart Baker, was in a seemingly endless queue of cars to attend an air show at Williamtown and discovered what he wanted to do with his life. “I had been interested in flying up to that time but once I saw the F/A-18 I thought, that’s amazing. That’s when I dreamed of flying. There were so many hurdles to that point but it just continually got closer and closer … It’s just the most amazing aeroplane to fly. Its performance, its speed, its capability. “When you fly the Hornet, it’s exhilarating. The aeroplane is climbing so rapidly and it’s got so much power just by moving the throttle a small amount, you feel the surge.” On a recent flight to RAAF Tindal, in the Northern Territory, Baker found time to reflect. “It’s just you up there at 30,000-something feet. And you can’t see a house or anything. You are in the middle of Australia. You sit back and, for all the work you do, all the hardships and dangers involved, there are just times that you will remember forever.” THE SUNDAY AGE, 09-Oct-1994 |
Larry Schwartz Writer 