NIGE EVENTUALLY RELEASED ME, set me free like a wounded bird restored to health, and with his certification the Army pronounced me ready to
fly Apaches.
But nope—it was a trick. I wasn’t going to fly Apaches. I was going to sit in a windowless classroom and read about Apaches.
I thought: Could anything be crueler? Promise me a helicopter, hand me a stack of homework?
The course lasted three months, during which I nearly went insane. Every night I’d slump back to my cell-like room in the officers’ mess and vent to a mate on the phone, or else to my bodyguard. I considered leaving the course altogether. I’d never even wanted to fly Apaches, I said to everyone, petulantly. I wanted to fly the Lynx. It was simpler to learn, and I’d get back to the war faster. But my commanding officer, Colonel David Meyer, quashed that idea. Not a chance, Harry.
Why, Colonel?
Because you’ve had operational ground experience in reconnaissance, you were a very fine FAC, and you’re a bloody good pilot. You’re going to fly Apaches.
But—
I can tell from the way you fly, the way you read the ground, this is what you were meant to do.
Meant to do? The course was torture!
And yet I was on time every day. I showed up with my three-ring binders full of info about the Apache engines, and listened to the lectures, and fought like crazy to keep up. I tried to draw on everything I’d learned from my flight instructors, from Booley to Nige, and treated the classroom as an aircraft going down. My job was to regain control.
And then one day…it was over. They said I’d be permitted at long last to strap myself into an honest-to-God Apache.
For…ground taxiing.
Are you joking?
Four lessons, they said.
Four lessons…on taxiing?
As it turned out, four lessons was barely enough to absorb all there was to know about ground taxiing that massive bird. I felt, while taxiing, as if the aircraft was on stilts, set on a bed of jelly. There were moments when I truly wondered if I’d ever be able to do it, if this whole journey might be at an end here, before it had even begun.
I blamed part of my struggle on the seating arrangement. In the Firefly, in the Squirrel, the instructor was always right next to me. He could reach over, fix my mistakes straightaway, or else model the correct way. Booley would put his hand on the controls, or Nige would do the pedals, and I’d do the same. I realized that much of what I’d learned in life had come through this sort of modeling. More than most people I needed a guide, a guru—a partner.
But in the Apache the instructor was either way up front or way in the back—unseen.
I was all alone.
