"ArVa" wrote:


"Ed Rasimus" a écrit dans le message de

Well, for most of us, it's the first fighter, not the last that holds
the special place. Here's what no less a personage than Ernest
Hemingway had to say about love of fighters:

"You love a lot of things if you live around them, but there isn't any
woman and there isn't any horse, nor any before nor any after, that is
as lovely as a great airplane, and men who love them are faithful to
them even though they leave them for others. A man has only one
virginity to lose in fighters, and if it is a lovely plane he loses it
to, there his heart will ever be."

- Ernest Hemingway, August 1944.

I first thought that the plane you are about to fly for the *last* time was
the most important, as a career's achievement and the last opportunity to be
part of a rather special community. But reading your answer and Ernest
Hemingway's statement I guess both of you are right. I didn't pay attention
enough to the emotional factor.

Well, you didn't ask, but the reason I had the Hemingway quote handy,
is that I'm using it in my current project which is the story of my
F-4 combat tour during Linebacker I/II. Here's the follow up (in my
words) to the quote:

"Poppa was right on. I'd lost my cherry to the Thunderchief long
before I got my Phantom assignment. I'd wanted to fly the Thud from
the first day I'd seen one and I'd been fortunate to have been able to
meet the girl of my dreams, woo her and take her to bed in the vicious
days of Rolling Thunder. I'd lost my heart, my soul, my virginity to
an airplane with one seat, one engine and a gun. I'd been alone in bad
guy land in what was absolutely the best airplane in the world and I'd
been brought home safely more than one hundred times. How could one
not love her?

Now I was headed to F-4 school. I'd spent the last five years sparring
with Phantom drivers, sometimes seriously, sometimes jokingly about
the deficiencies of their airplane and the superiority of mine. There
were some deep-rooted issues regarding the views of the airplanes. On
the one hand, there was the simple issue of assignment out of pilot
training. I'd been fortunate enough to have the skills, the desire
and, most importantly, the healthy dose of luck required to gain an
assignment to a single seat fighter. The numbers told the story. There
were eight undergraduate pilot training bases pumping out USAF pilots
in a class every six weeks all year around. That meant about 325 new
second lieutenants joining the force every month and a half of which
nine would get to fly the F-105. The Phantom community was restricted
at that time to experienced pilots in the front seat and new graduate
pilots in the rear cockpit. In my graduating class there had been one
hundred and forty guys sent to back-seat pilot duties in the F-4. It
wasn't difficult to feel a bit superior. Nine guys got laid by a queen
of the prom and 140 got sloppy seconds with a fat, smoky,
double-breasted ex-Navy airplane that didn't even have a gun."




Ed Rasimus
Fighter Pilot (ret)
***"When Thunder Rolled:
*** An F-105 Pilot Over N. Vietnam"
*** from Smithsonian Books
ISBN: 1588341038