I had about two weeks to go to complete my navy pilot training. About 10 more hops to get the coveted gold wings...all in the air combat maneuvering (ACM) syllabus. Dog-fighting.

I'd done an awful lot of intense flying over the prior two years. Aerobatics. Formation flying. Instrument flying. Low-level navigation. Air-to-ground weapons (bombs, rockets, and strafing). Air-to-air gunnery. I'd also carrier qualified. I was quite the killing machine. And I'd done the dual instruction part of this ACM phase. An instructor had ridden in the back seat for a dozen or so hops to make sure I wouldn't inadvertently kill anyone. Now it was time to go solo...Me in one jet, my instructor, and adversary, in another.

So, today, I drew a Marine-Corps captain with the call-sign "Pud." I don't know how he got that call-sign. I was sure I didn't want to know.

(My own call-sign was "Animal." The story of how I got that one is much less interesting, and much more humiliating, than you might guess. I don't want to talk about it.)

Pud had been in the Marine-Corps about 15 years. He'd flown A4 Skyhawks all the way back to Vietnam. They were phasing out the A4, so Pud had no career path. They were forcing him out. For some reason this made him rather bitter. He was still a marvellous pilot and a tough, mean son-of-a-bitch.

We briefed the hop, he quizzed me on emergency procedures like always, and didn't see any reason to fail me then and there. So we went to the maintenance shack, checked out our jets, and walked out to preflight.

The TA-4J was the 2-seat trainer version of the A-4 Skyhawk. A very, very, slick little airplane, though markedly underpowered in comparison to later Navy tactical aircraft. It was still the finest, most intense flying experience I'd ever had. The plane was up. I strapped into the Escapac ejection seat, plugged in my radio cable, oxygen mask, and g-suit connector, and started up. The plane checked out, and I followed Pud out to the runway where we had no wait. The two of us taxied out, ran our engines up, and released brakes for a formation takeoff from NAS Chase Field in Beeville, Texas. We made a climbing left turn to 15,000 feet and proceeded to the ACM area, a marked-off piece of airspace over the vast expanses of south Texas, where you could crash a plane with assurance that you wouldn't hurt anyone or damage anything valuable.

I split out to a combat-spread position relative to Pud's aircraft. About a mile off his wing on the 90 degree bearing, stepped up a thousand feet. Over the decades, the navy had determined this to be the optimum formation for penetrating hostile airspace. Each plane can maneuver and clear the other. If a bogey appears, a pair of aircraft in combat-spread can quickly maneuver to counter. You have to keep your head on a swivel, even here. Twice I'd seen a private plane blunder into this airspace, unaware. A doctor with too much money and not enough flying hours, no doubt. Don't know why they put windows on the darn things, they never look out 'em. If I'd had any ammo, I could have had a kill.

We did some 90-degree crossunder turn drills, and a coordinated bogey response drill called the 'loose-deuce' maneuver, just to warm up. The pneumatic bladders in my g-suit puffed up as I put 'g' force on the aircraft, squeezing my lower extremities to retard the drain of blood from my brain in the high-g turn. You get an extra couple of g's margin with one of these before you black-out. There was a typical, scattered-puffy cumulus deck at 8,000, not really a factor. The 95 degree South Texas heat faded with the cockpit A/C going full blast.

"All-right Animal, level it out, I'll take an offensive position, we'll have a look at your rolling-scissors."

"Rog."

Pud maneuvered back to a 45-degree bearing on my left wing, stepped up a couple of thousand feet, and called "fight's on."

He immediately rolled in on me. I immediately countered with a left turn. Amazing that WWI ace Oswald Boelke's rules of air-combat still apply after all these years. Always turn in to the attack. Since Pud was coming in from a vertical offset as well as a horizontal one, my countering turn was not flat, but a climbing one. I hoped to force Pud to overshoot, in both the vertical and horizontal planes.

You have to understand how fighter tactics proceed from both fighter aerodynamics and fighter weapons. This was the early 1980s, bear in mind, and air-to-air weapons still had significant restrictions on the parameters at which you could fire them. You needed to be behind your opponent to employ the main dogfight weapon, the Aim-9 Sidewinder. This is a missile with an infrared, or heat-seeking warhead. So you needed to be within about a 45 degree cone extending back from your target's tailpipe to fire. (Modern versions of the Sidewinder can home in from any angle...much more lethal, but in some respects, less sporting.)

You also needed to be pretty close to your target's six-o'clock line in order to employ guns with any high probability of getting hits.

So in the situation I was in, I was in a race with Pud that I desperately wanted to lose. I needed to force Pud out of his position behind me. I pulled on the stick for all I was worth.

At 5 g's, your cheeks feel like they weigh 50 pounds each. You've got a 100 pound bag of flour strapped to each arm and leg, and another attached to your head.

The bladders in my G-suit squeezed my legs and abdomen like a giant blood-pressure cuff. I supplemented its effort with the "grunting" maneuver they teach: you repeatedly, rhythmically grunt and clench your abdominal muscles as if you were constipated, straining on the toilet.

Despite these measures, my vision began to go all grey at the margins. Bullets of sweat, forced down by the g-force, rolled down my forehead, over the bridge of my nose, and joined the wet film on which my oxygen mask slid, slickly. As I decelerated to the velocity at which the aircraft could no longer aerodynamically sustain the g-load I was applying, it began to enter "stall buffet"...the wings biting on the thin edge of aerodynimc stall. The ride was like driving at speed over a washboard...

It worked, though. Pud's plane crossed my six with a high rate of overshoot. I kept pulling, going nose-high, rolling left. Pud, being nose-down, started to move ahead, neutralizing his initial offensive advantage.

At this point I was rolling inverted, looking down on Pud's plane. We began to describe a double-helix path through the sky...

I had amassed enough hours on the A4 so that maneuvering it, to some extent, had become a subconscious motor-skill. So a part of my mind could step back and objectively marvel at the situation I found myself in. The sky and the earth whirled around me. I looked down on Pud's plane, crawling like a salamander across the green and brown of the Texas landscape 15,000 feet below. A white and dayglo-orange salamander. The colors were beautiful. The geometry was beautiful. This was what I'd got into this business for.

As I rolled, Pud duplicated my countering maneuver, forcing me back out in front. I countered again. Around and around we went.

Finally, after several complete turns around, Pud came back up on the radio: "Ok, you seem to know what you're doing here, but you gotta remember not to waste time. You gotta make an offensive move...you can't just keep going around. Let's knock it off."

We levelled out. Pud came back: "Okay, let's separate out to one mile, and we'll see what you got."

We flew on diverging paths until we were level with each other at one mile separation. The textbook here called for each plane to accelerate to 300 knots before commencing the dogfight. Each of us cheated on this, though. In naval aviation, like big-league baseball, the operative motto is: "if you ain't cheatin', you ain't tryin." I waited until my airspeed indicator read 350 before saying "okay, I got 300."

Pud came back, "okay, fight's on."

We each instantly roll 90 degrees angle-of bank and pull 5 g's until we are nose-to-nose, heading striaght towards each other.

A game of chicken at 700 knots relative rate of closure. Point your nose at him, deny him any horizontal separation, he can use that to convert to an offensive position.

We pass each other at 100 yards separation, each going 350. I'm banked left, he's banked left, I can look up through the top of my canopy and see him. He's got his oxygen mask off, he's chomping on the stub of a cigar. Right out of a comic book, but it's happening to me.

Okay, now I gotta make my move. Dogfights, from time immemorial, have been about horizontal tail chasing. Each contestant chases his opponent's tail, madly, until someone gets a shot. It's different with jets; there's so much more energy to be managed. My first move is a vertical one. If he follows me, we'll see who has the most energy. The first one to poop out loses, because he has to start down, and his opponent can just follow him.

So I make a pull into the vertical. I try to keep my eyes on him. This is crucial, he who loses sight of his foe quickly loses the fight.

There's a piece of framework structure down the top spine of the TA4's canopy...I can't see him, Goddammit. What to do?

We are each zooming up vertically. The TA4 does not have enought thrust to sustain this for long. The airspeed indicator quickly begins to unwind...

I frantically swivel my head around to try to keep him in sight. It's difficult...I'm pulling g's, my head is encased in a bulky helmet and oxygen mask, and weighs a couple of hundred pounds...on top of which I'm a pencil-necked ectomorph. Pud's a football player, he has the physical edge.

...Okay, what if I move my head to the right, here, and rotate it back between the canopy and the headrest of the ejection seat. Okay, there he is...

The sun glints through the plexiglass of the canopy, with a brightness groundlings never witness. The sky is just bluer than you people ever see.

My head is stuck.

I can't get it out.

The radio microphone switch is on the throttle, on the left side of the cockpit. I can't reach the damn thing, so I can't even tell Pud what's wrong.

The airspeed indicator continues to wind down. Before long, I'm out of knots. The A-4 departs controlled flight, pivoting from a nose-high vertical zoom, through some whiffordill maneuver that I can't identify, into a vertical nose down dive at the ground. I'm helpless. My head is locked in position; I see sky, sky, sky, cloud, cloud, ground, ground...

Pud's got his eye on me. He comes up on the radio: "What are you doing?. I can't answer him.

Well, this is not promising. The altimeter would be unwinding, now, faster than it wound on the way up, if I could see it, which I can't. All I can see is whirling greens and browns.

This is starting to look like a mis-spent youth coming to a bad end. What in the hell do I do now?

Somehow, I have a flash. I reach up and un-hook the oxygen mask, and pull my head from the helmet, leaving it wedged between headrest and canopy. The airplane is spiralling down, more or less vertically, passing through 10,000 feet. It's a simple matter to recover. And, since my helmet is no longer filled with head, I can pull it out, too. When I'm finally hooked back up, Pud is frantically trying to find out what the hell happened.

...I did not get good marks on this flight. But I did learn what not to do in a dogfight.