Free Boyd by Robert Coram

Force,
     and they were about to go into combat. This was not just any war, this was a war to protect the land of the free and the home
     of the brave from the ravages of Godless Communism. Training
had
to be warlike. And if young men died, so be it. No price was too high. Not when losing meant being overwhelmed by Communism.
    Pilots fought in simulated air-to-air combat, always maneuvering to get on the other pilot’s six-o’clock position. A siren
     to rally personnel when there was a crash was located near the flight line, and its wail echoed across Nellis at least once
     each week, sometimes twice. Soon afterward an official blue staff car would drive slowly down the streets where pilots lived,
     the driver looking for the correct address. All along the way, the wives—Mary among them—who had heard the siren stood at
     the window and prayed the car would not pull into their driveway. So many pilots died at Nellis in those days that incoming
     F-86 students were told, “If you see the flag at full staff, take a picture.”
    Boyd says that one year, more than seventy pilots were killed. A historian at Nellis says he probably was conservative—that
     wing commanders sometimes doctored statistics if too many pilots died.
    Already Boyd was coming to believe there was more to air-to-air combat than “bending” the jet and muscling it through high-G
     turns. Embryonic ideas about aerial tactics were beginning to form, not so much in an academic but in a practical sense. He
     began defeating his instructors, some of whom were combat veterans of Korea.
    In December Boyd reached eighty hours of what the Air Force called “applied tactics” and was ready for Korea. His last advice
     from Nellis instructors was simple: “Stay inside. Hose him down.”
    Before departing, Boyd was allowed an extended leave because Mary was pregnant and about to deliver her firstborn. Mary and
     Boyd drove to Ottumwa. She was glad to leave Nellis: the desert and the scrubby bushes and the cactus and the endless wind
     were not like the familiar green fields of Iowa. Jets took off and landed from dawn to dusk. The smell of aviation fuel, so
     beloved by pilots, nauseated her.
    Stephen Boyd was born February 14, 1953, a child conceived in his father’s world at Nellis and delivered into his mother’s
     at Ottumwa. Boyd had a picture taken of him holding his infant son aloft, and he carried it in his wallet until it was creased
     and darkened with age and falling apart. Often a father is close to his firstborn, especially if the child is a son. But Boyd
     was unusually close to Stephen, almost as if he were unconsciously aware of what soon would come into Stephen’s life and wanted
     to hold onto the boy so he would have the good days to remember.
    Soon it was time for Boyd to depart for combat. He had missed World War II, but he would have a part in Korea. He was doing
     what the young men of Erie always do when America is at war, but in Boyd’s case, this was just the first step of his destiny.
    What Boyd learned in Korea would be the foundation for his life’s work.

Chapter Four
K-13 and Mig Alley
    O NCE again, Boyd arrived late for war.
    On March 27, 1953, he and a host of other young men, most of them sporting the silver bars of a first lieutenant on their
     collars, arrived aboard a C-54 transport at Suwon in South Korea. They looked around with all the confidence of men in their
     midtwenties who had survived Nellis and who considered themselves to be the best-trained pilots in the world. They looked
     across the tarmac at the row of shiny F-86s and they were anxious to kill MiGs.
    For the first few weeks in Korea, they flew relatively safe and uneventful missions as wingmen or the type of missions older
     pilots did not want—weather reconnaissance or escort duty. Air Force planes went into combat in flights of four. The flight
     consisted of the flight leader and his wingman, accompanied by an element leader and his wingman. The