“Ironically—and according to the conventional wisdom of four decades ago—it was the fighter pilots, the bomber crew’s so-called “little friends,” who came up with a name that stuck. The jocks had intended it as a pimp job, a derogatory term they could hurl at those they deemed their “inferiors,” the heavy bomber pilots. The occasion served as yet one more reminder of the vast (though usually latent) intellectual powers that had long resided within the Dilettante Air Corps, a priceless moment of inspiration the single-seat, ready-room kiddies were able to sandwich in between snapping towels at each other’s butts and pulling on jumpy suits—all those crucial preliminaries to still another of their excruciatingly fatiguing nine-minute hops.”
― Flying from the Black Hole: The B-52 Navigator-Bombardiers of Vietnam
― Flying from the Black Hole: The B-52 Navigator-Bombardiers of Vietnam
“The pilot was an old man. At that time I was nineteen or twenty, the pilot was 28 or 29, and that was very old. He didn’t take the wire out of his hat, his garrison hat—there was a wire that if you took it out and crunched it, you got that fifty-mission Air Corps look. He had transferred from the infantry, and was Southern, and I don’t think he realized that the Civil War was over.”
― The War in the Air Book One
― The War in the Air Book One
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