Yeager an autobiography epub files

YEAGER: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY I NEVER KNEW WHEN I MIGHT BE TAKING MY LAST RIDE. With so many ways to bust my butt flying research aircraft, I knew better than to think that any test flight was routine. Even so, on the morning of October 27, , I was feeling confident in the cockpit of the X-1 research rocket airplane.

On the previous flight, the bullet-shaped X-1 had zoomed me into the history books by cracking through the sound harrier. I always had butterflies before being dropped from the belly of the B mother ship, but my tensions this day were minor compared to the sound barrier mission. "Are you ready, Chuck?" they ask from the mother ship.

"All set," I reply. The release cable pops and we plunge clear from the shadows of the mother ship, falling fast. I reach for the switch to ignite my engine. It clicks. Nothing happens. "Hey, I've got total electrical failure," I report. My words travel no further than the cabin because my radio is powerless, too.

The ship is dead and I'm dropping like a bomb, certain to blow a giant crater into the desert floor 20, feet below YEAGER: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY "Ever since Tom Wolfe's book was published, the question I'm asked most often and which always annoys me is whether I think I've got 'the right stuff.' I know that golden trout have the right stuff and I've seen a few gals here and there that I'd bet ha] it in spades, but those words seem meaningless when used to describe a pilot's attributes.

I don't deny that I was damned good. If there is such a thing as 'the best,' I was at least one of the title contenders. I've had a full life and enjoyed just about every damned minute of it because that's how I lived. -General Chuck Yeager ALWAYS THE UNKNOWN STARTING FROM SCRATCH TAKING WING ON THE RUN THE ULTIMATE HIGH ON THE DECK FLYING HIGH WINDING DOWN THE RIGHT PLACE FROM NOBODY TO SOMEBODY AGAINST THE WALL PANCHO'S PLACE THE FIRE NEXT TIME ON A PEDESTAL RESCUE MISSION FLYING IN THE GOLDEN AGE GIVING CHASE OUTFLYING THE RUSSIANS ; JACKIE GOOD-BY A NEW OLD MAN WHAT GOES UP MUST COME DOWN TO MOSCOW WITH JACKIE COMMANDANT FOR SPACE OPERATION GOLDEN TROUT GOING FOR ANOTHER RECORD A SPACE LEGACY VIETNAM A MIRACLE STAR PICKING UP THE PIECES THE FLYING GENERAL A SUMMING UP A FAREWELL TO ARMS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors wish to acknowledge the contributions of various friends and former colleagues who enriched the pages of this book with their perspectives and recollections.

Among them: Clarence "Bud" Anderson, Bob Hoover, Maj. Gen. (retired) Fred J. Ascani, Russ Schleeh, Richard Frost, Charles K. Peters, William R. O'Brien, Bill Overstreet, Robert H. Smith, Carl Bellinger, Aldene Tarter, Vi Strauss-Pistel, Margaret Ann Curlin, George Hupp, Emmett Hatch, Don Jacques Dr. Robert S.

"Buck" Buchanan, and Don Emigholz.

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Particular thanks to Glennis Yeager for her patient insights, to Del Riebe for his friendship and support, to Ian Ballantine, the wise and resourceful father of this project, and to Betty Ballantine for her skilled editing. ALWAYS THE UNKNOWN I never knew when I might be taking my last ride. With so many ways to bust my butt flying research aircraft, I knew better than to think that any test flight was routine.

Even so, on the morning of October 27, , I was feeling confident in the cockpit of the X-1 research rocket airplane. On the previous flight, the bullet-shaped X-1 had zoomed me into the history books by cracking through the sound barrier. That first Mach 1 ride launched the era of supersonic flight. I always had butterflies before being dropped from the belly of the B mother ship, but my tensions this day were minor compared to the sound barrier mission, when I was scared, knowing that many of my colleagues thought I was doomed to be blasted to pieces by an invisible brick wall in the sky.

The X-1 proved them to be wrong, and I breathed easier knowing what to expect on my second attempt to fly faster than the speed of sound. "Are you ready, Chuck?" they ask from the mother ship. "All set," I reply. The release cable pops and we plunge clear from the shadows of the mother ship, a thirteen-thousand pound load, falling fast.

I reach for the switch to ignite my engine. It clicks. Nothing happens. I try another engine switch. Nothing happens. "Hey, I've got total electrical failure," I report. My words travel no further than the cabin because my radio is powerless, too. The ship is dead and I'm dropping like a bomb loaded with five thousand pounds of volatile fuel, certain to blow a giant crater into the desert floor 20, feet below.

Without power, I can't ignite my engines or actuate the propellant valve to blow out my fuel. The X-1 can't land with fuel on board; its landing gear would buckle under the weight, and we'd dig a trench into the lakebed and blow up. My mind races. I've got only a couple of seconds to find a way to save my airplane or risk a dangerous parachute jump.

I remember an emergency valve above and behind my seat that manually opens the jettison valve to slowly blow out my fuel. I have no idea how long it will take and the force of gravity is relentless. I'm down to 5, feet and turn toward the lakebed. A chase plane is keeping up with me, but without radio contact I have no way of knowing whether the pilot can see the escaping fuel vapor streaming from my engine, the sign that the emergency valve is working.

The lakebed fills my windscreen and I reach for my landing gear release, but with no internal power the only way to lower my gear is by gravity. All I can do is rock the ship and pray. My only chance is to come in fast and high over the lakebed, keeping the nose up and those wheels off the deck until the last possible moment. I need time, every precious second I can manage to squeeze out of a delayed landing, to blow out that fuel.

My fuel gauge is as dead as everything else, and I can only go by feel. We feel lighter by the second, but we're almost out of seconds. The ground is sweeping by as we glide in for a touchdown. My eyes are on the ship's raised nose. In a moment we are going to stall, I can sense it. Inches from the lakebed I feel the X-1 shudder slightly.

We've slowed into a stall, and the ship's nose lowers. Instinctively I hunker down, bracing for the impact. If there's still fuel in those tanks, I'm finished. The wheels hit hard. STARTING FROM SCRATCH When President Truman presented me with the Collier Trophy in for breaking the sound barrier, my dad attended the White House ceremonies, but refused to shake hands with the President.

He glowered at Truman, acting like a revival preacher trapped into meeting the pope. As far as Dad was concerned, the first good Democrat had yet to be born. Mom had battled to get him to the ceremony, then chewed him out glory for being so rude. But Dad wasn't going to shake that damned Democrat's hand; hell, he hated Truman.

Mom tried to cover up by exchanging corn bread recipes with the President, while Air Force Secretary Stuart Symington and Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg saw what was happening and fought against the giggles. "My husband is a little firm in his ways," Mom explained to Symington. He broke up. There were two Methodist churches in Hamlin, West Virginia: one was for the Southern Methodists, all Democrats; the other congregation was Northern Methodists, the hardcore Republicans of Lincoln County.

You can guess which church we belonged to.

Yeager an autobiography epub files Those who have read Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff also know he did it with broken ribs from a nocturnal horse race. This information helps us design a better experience for all users. Find this title in Libby, the library reading app by OverDrive. The entire story is here, in Yaeger's own words, and in wonderful insights from his wife and those friends and colleagues who have known him best.

On election day, Dad traveled the hollers armed with two-dollar bills and pints of whiskey, trying to buy votes for the GOP. But there wasn't enough booze or bucks to beat FDR Democrats, and Dad fumed. Albert Hal Yeager had plenty of Dutch and German blood. He was stubborn and opinionated about what he believed and didn't care who knew it.

He stood only about five feet, eight inches, but weighed two hundred pounds-about half that weight in each of his two powerful arms. Dad's word was his binding contract; if he said he'd do something and shook hands on it, that was his unbreakable commitment. Susie Mae Yeager was a couple of inches taller than her husband, a big-boned, no-nonsense churchgoer who lowered the boom on any of us if we got out of hand.

Mom was half-Dutch with some French ancestry in her family. Like the Yeagers, her kin were West Virginia country people, small farmers planted in the hollers of the Appalachians since the early nineteenth century. Dads family name was originally "eager," but it was changed phonetically; in German, Yeager means "hunter. ' My parents were in their mid-twenties when I was born on February 13, , the second of their five children.

My brother Roy, a year-and-a-half older, was in every way my big brother: he would grow up to be six feet, four inches and weigh about pounds. My wife Glennis called him "the gentle giant," but as a kid, I gladly trailed behind a big brother twice my size. Nobody picked on me. We lived in Myra, on the upper Mud River, which was just a few farmhouses, a post office, and a country store.

Our white clapboard house stood next to a cornfield. When I was about three, we moved to Hubble, where Dad went to work for the railroad. I remember him coming home with his face and hands bandaged from a flash fire when he shoveled coal into the firebox. As young as I was, that incident made a deep impression: I realized for the first time how hard he struggled to shelter us from the cold.

Until then, I had no idea what Dad was up against, how tough life really was. But Dad wasn't a brooder or a complainer. In fact, he was a great prankster, and a real marksman with a slingshot. An old lady neighbor had a milking cow and every evening she'd come out and milk it in a field next to the railroad tracks.

Dad would sit on the porch and shoot pebbles at that cow; the old lady milking on the other side couldn't figure out why Bessie kept kicking over her bucket. Dad made home-brew with yeast and malt, and wine in grape season. I worked the bottlecapper, the first mechanical thing I ever understood. Mom got all over him because he stored his bottles in the basement to keep them cool and they were always blowing up.

West Virginia was a dry state, and you either made your own or got mighty thirsty. I was still a preschooler when we moved to Hamlin, which seemed to me like a big city, with a main street and a bunch of stores schools, and churches. Hamlin was a town of four hundred. We moved because Dad began work as a natural gas driller, contracting out with a string of tools in southern West Virginia and Kentucky.

We lived in a three-room house across from the grade school. Roy and I slept in the family room on a studio couch that opened into a bed. By then we had a two-year-old baby sister, Doris Ann. Shortly before Christmas, when I was four-and-ahalf and Roy was six, we were sitting on the floor in the family room playing with Dad's gauge shotgun.

Roy found some shells and loaded the gun; he accidentally fired and the baby was killed. For our little family it was a time of terrible shock loss, and suffering. I suppose some parents would've locked away any guns following such a tragedy but Dad didn't. Shortly after the funeral, he sat down with Roy and me. "Boys," he said, "I want to show you how to safely handle firearms." I'm sure Roy carried this heartbreak with him until his own early death from a heart attack at age forty-one.

He and I never again discussed it, nor did my parents. Years later, Glennis asked my mother about the accident but she just didn't want to talk about it. That's the Yeager way; we keep our hurts to ourselves. Those were tough times with Dad just starting a new occupation. If you've ever seen two growing boys wolfing down food, then you know what Mom was up against.

She cooked us mush for breakfast which was plain boiled white cornmeal served in a bowl with milk and sugar. She made more than we used and set it aside until it got rubbery, then she sliced it, fried it, put butter on it, and that was supper. Some evenings we'd have only corn bread and buttermilk. When the weather turned cold, rats nested in that little house, and I once chased an enormous rat running off with Mom's pan lid.

Around that time, I also started school. We were seated alphabetically, and I sat back in daydreamer's row with the other Ys. I lived for vacations and weekends. We kids spent most of our free time running around in the hills. We made walking stilts from tree limbs or spent whole days up in trees, jumping like monkeys from one sapling to the other to see how far we would get.

We built log forts and staged wars, using slingshots and rubber-band guns. By the time I was six, I knew how to shoot a rifle and hunted squirrel and rabbit. I'd get up around dawn, head into the woods, and bring back three or four squirrels, skin them and leave them in a bucket of water for Mom to cook up for supper.

Sometimes I got so engrossed in hunting, I was late for school and got chewed out by the principal. I also used to fish for suckers and bass in the Mud River. We ran barefoot all summer. On Saturday night Mom made us wash our feet, getting ready for Sunday school. On Sunday night, our feet were sore and blistered from wearing shoes, and our family joke was that the first pair of shoes we had, we wore out first from inside out.

In summer, Mom canned blackberries and made jelly and jam; Roy and I sold blackberries for ten cents a gallon, a source of additional income. Dad was gone all week, but sometimes when he came home on the weekends, he brought a cantaloupe-a real treat-or a watermelon, which you could buy in those days for a nickel.

The Great Depression began when I was eight, but it had no real impact when you were already so low on the income scale. Dad got regular work in the gas fields. When a family named Baker was forced into foreclosure on their mortgage and lost their home, the bank approached Dad, and we moved into what I thought was a palace on a hill-a two-story, four-bedroom house with a big parlor and a smokehouse in back.

Dad got the place, plus two small city blocks that went with it, for signing a note for $1, He worked hard, was known for his integrity, and the bank figured he'd manage somehow to keep up on his monthly payments. Now we had a garden and a cow, slopped hogs, and raised chickens. I could wring off a chicken's neck when I was six. Mom pickled corn and beans and made sauerkraut.

In the fall she made apple butter in a thirty-gallon copper kettle, and as a treat, she added sprigs of peppermint. We kids had the job of keeping the fire going. She also boiled sorghum molasses, a source of syrup all winter. We had no refrigeration, but we used the smokehouse when Dad slaughtered a hog.

One time, he and a neighbor teamed up to kill a five-hundred-pound hog. The guy shot it between the eyes and Dad walked up to it to slit its throat and bleed it, when that hog suddenly got up and ran off. Dad jumped on and rode it through the streets as if it were a runaway horse. It carried him two hundred yards before he succeeded in slitting its throat.

After a hog was killed and bled, we kids covered it with burlap sacks and poured steaming water over it, to set the hair before scraping it off. Dad did the butchering. The hams were cured with salt and hung m the smokehouse; meanwhile, Mom cooked and canned souse meat (better known as Philadelphia scrapple).

She also cured bacon, rubbing sides with salt and pepper and hanging them in the smokehouse. Vines of Concord grapes grew out back, and we kids harvested hickory nuts and black walnuts in the woods, as well as berries and wild persimmons. Mom used the nuts in cakes and candies. We also brought back pawpaws, an almost tropical fruit that grows only along the western edge of Appalachia, in West Virginia, and tastes halfway between a banana and a peach.

From time to time, Dad let me go on hunting trips with some other local men, shooting deer, bear, quail, and wild turkeys. To us, hunting was like harvesting nuts or fruit; we never killed more than we could use. Every kid in Hamlin was raised with a gun and there were few, if any, poor shots; even so, I was pretty good. Shooting is a matter of good eyesight, muscular control, and coordination.

Roy, for example, was a little more high-strung: his hands shook before he squeezed the trigger. I never got excited or flustered sighting on game, that wasn't my nature. And somehow I was usually able to spot a deer hidden in brush before anyone else. I had exceptional 20/10 vision. My sister Pansy Lee and younger brother, Hal, Jr., were born in the house on the hill.

But for a long time, Roy and I did all the chores. With Dad being gone so much, Mom raised us. If we got too rambunctious, she told Dad about it when he got home, and he brought out the heavy artillery-his leather strap. I got my first licking for calling a neighbor "McCoglin," instead of "Mister McCoglin." Roy and I ran errands, weeded in the garden, slopped the hogs, and milked the cow twice a day.

I cannot remember a moment when there wasn't something to do. I wasn't big enough to be a rowdy kid, but I wasn't above mischief either. We spent so much time in the woods, we got to be like little animals, knowing everything that went on. Once Roy and I watched a moonshiner named Bill Lawson hiding jugs of white lightning in a hollow log.

We stole his jugs and sold them in town for a quarter a gallon. But even Roy was plenty scared of ol' Bill Lawson, so we never did that again. Of course, we had to drink some and it nearly killed us-pure alcohol. Dad grew some tobacco for his smoking; I tried chewing some and it wiped me out. In summer, we swam up the river to steal watermelons in the bottomlands, where they grew best.

We'd roll those big melons into the river and float them downstream, where we could feast in safety; the farmers kept shotguns loaded with rock salt to sting the butts of kids like us. When I was nearly thirteen, I climbed into a '33 Dodge truck belonging to our neighbor, Mr. Sites. Dad let us fool around with his truck, and I thought I knew how to drive it.

I decided to drive Mr. Sites's truck off our hill. I kicked it out of gear and took off, going fifty-five with no brakes on. I tried, but failed, to get into low gear and barely turned the corner at the bottom of the hill, where there was a vacant lot loaded with empty asphalt drums from recent road paving. I hit those drums with a crash that was heard for miles.

Man, I got out of there using my own two feet. I was a competitive kid. Whether it was swinging from vines over the swimming hole or skiing down hills on barrel staves during the first snowfall, I always tried to do my best. We made and raced our own bobsleds too, so I knew what a skid was when I first learned to fly. Students skidded in the sky when they didn't properly coordinate aileron with rudder.

I had plenty of experience fighting ice skids down steep hills on sleds and homemade skis, that's probably the reason I flew coordinated and kept the ball in the middle. Dad was an expert mechanic; he had clever hands with generators and motors and was always tinkering with his old Chevy truck or his drilling equipment.

Roy and I inherited his mechanical ability. I was only seven when I helped Dad in the gas fields. He was drilling on the side of a hill, and I helped him rig up a series of single-cylinder engines to pump water uphill to a big tank. My job was to keep feeding gasoline into those small engines, which had magnetos for spark-control that knocked me on my fanny every time they stopped or started.

When we were older, Roy was a bigger help to Dad than I was. I was just too small; Roy could easily move a section of four-inch drill pipe; I couldn't even lift one. But when I encountered dome regulators flying in the X-1, I knew more about them than the engineers, from working with Dad's regulators as a kid. By the time I reached high school, I excelled at anything that demanded dexterity or mathematical aptitude.

My best grades were in typing and math. My geometry teacher, Miss Gonza Methel, considered me one of her better students. But my English and history teachers had to search for excuses to pass me. In sports, I was terrific at pool and ping pong, good in basketball and football. I played trombone in our high-school marching band, and would've been a damned good trombone player if only I practiced.

But in high school, I discovered girls, and between them, chores, homework, and hunting and fishing, I was stretched thin. We teenagers hung around the recreation center in town, called "The Chicken House," playing ping-pong and listening to records. In those days nobody went steady. Guys played the field and made sure we always carried rubbers-the big thing to do.

I carried mine in my watch pocket; when it got worn out being in there so long, I bought another. But through a combination of trial and error, my luck changed in my senior year, and Mom began raising hell when I came home at two in the morning. She locked me out, so I began climbing a tree and crawling into an upstairs bedroom window. West Virginia still leads the country in unemployment and Lincoln County, where I was raised, remains one of the poorest counties in the state, but I never thought of myself as being poor or deprived in any way.

Like most everyone else in town, we managed to scrape by. Kids learned self-sufficiency from their parents and made their own toys and invented their own fun. Life was basic and direct: people said what they meant and meant what they said. I learned face value. We wore our moods right on our faces; trying to deceive somebody to make a sale, for example, was nonexistent in the hills.

For openers, you might get your ass shot off. By big-city standards, we might seem raw and uneducated, but we knew right from wrong and could spot a phony even before he said his first words. Mom and Dad taught us by example. Mom worked as hard as any of the pioneer women, from dawn to dark, cooking and mending and cleaning. Dad got home late Friday and left on Sunday; in between he worked like a dog.

They never complained. We country people had our own way of life. We didn't sit around worrying and were contented with the little we had. We didn't know any better or any different. The mountains kept us isolated from the rest of the world, and we didn't wonder much whether things were better or worse over the next ridge.

It was only when some of us traveled out into the world that we realized everyone wasn't like us. Once you began talking, people looked at you in amazement, wondering what in hell you were trying to say. I discovered fast that not everyone said "bidy" when they meant "body," "paper poke" instead of "sack," "simon" for "salmon" "hit" for "it," and so on.

But, like Dad, I had certain standards that I lived by. Whatever I did, I determined to do the best I could at it. I was prideful about keeping my word and starting what I finished. That's how I was raised. I never got into fights, but nobody pushed me around, either. Mountain people are damned stubborn about their grudges and don't easily forgive or forget.

If I thought I was being put down unfairly, I was one mean son of a bitch. I never thought about going to college; Dad just wasn't that well off. I wasn't much of a scholar, but I was always eager to acquire practical knowledge about things that interested me. That was a big reason for my success as a pilot. I flew more than anybody else and there wasn't a thing about an airplane that didn't fascinate me, down to the smallest bolt.

And I was blessed with a sharp memory for detail. I was that way as a kid, too. J.D. Smith was the town lawyer and a former state senator. Smith talked to me about hunting and fishing and the habits of different animals. We smalltown kids mixed easily with people of different ages: old guys like Mr. Smith had reputations, and we wondered how they got them.

When I got married, I asked Mr. Smith to fill in for Glennis's dad, who couldn't be there and give away the bride. Grandpa Yeager fascinated me, too. He was a tough little guy with a glass eye, who farmed deep in a holler. He showed me how to hunt bear and wild turkey, and how to stalk game so it didn't run and lower the quality of the meat.

Although Mom raised us, I think I was more "turned" like Dad, which is West Virginia for "taking after." I'm stubborn and strong-willed too, and opinionated as hell. My folks weren't well-educated, but they never lacked country wisdom and common sense. As hard as Dad worked, he enjoyed it, and that was an important lesson, too.

Tramping alone through the woods with a rifle, or in a cockpit with a throttle in my hands-that's where I was happiest. And that's how I've lived my life. My beginnings back in West Virginia tell who I am to this day. My accomplishments as a pilot tell more about luck, happenstance, and a person's destiny. But the guy who broke the sound barrier was the kid who swam the Mud River with a swiped watermelon, or shot the head off a squirrel before school.

TAKING WING MARCH You're whipping through a desert canyon at three hundred miles an hour, your belly just barely scraping the rocks and sagebrush your hand on the throttle of a P fighter. It's a crystal-clear morning on the desert of western Nevada, and the joy of flying-the sense of speed and exhilaration twenty feet above the deck-makes you so damned happy that you want to shout for joy.

A hillock rises ahead, and you ease back, skim over the top of it, dropping down above cottonwoods lining the bank of a stream. You feel so lucky, so blessed to be a fighter pilot. Nearly one hundred of us are testing our skill and courage by leaving prop marks on the dirt roads, stampeding grazing cattle (a few angry ranchers even take pot shots at us) and raising the shingles off ranch houses.

Swooping over the desert like a horde of metal locusts, we practice for strafing runs, the most dangerous missions that will eventually kill many of us. Our instructors warn us to get down on the deck as low as we can, staying below the beeline, where enemy machine guns can't target a clear shot. That was Tonopah, where thirty fledgling pilots began six months of intensive training to become a combat fighter squadron-the rd.

We lived surrounded by Nevada sand dunes in tarpaper shacks belching black smoke from the oil-burning stoves that only warmed themselves on cold desert nights. The wind never stopped blowing and the chow was awful, but none of us complained. We flew from dawn to dusk, six flights a day, six days a week, dogfighting, buzzing, and practicing gunnery.

We crawled exhausted into the sack at ten and straggled to breakfast at A.M., taking off on our first flight of the day just as dawn broke. I logged one hundred hours of flying that first month. Hog heaven. No matter what happened later, the war had already changed my life forever. Unlike others in the squadron I had never dreamt of being an aviator.

Even as kids, guys like Bud Anderson and Jim Browning used to hang around airports and wash old Boeing tri-motors to get a free ride. Me, I was a pool hustler from the West Virginia hollers. I saw my first airplane close-up when a Beechcraft bellied into a cornfield on the Mud River, and I went to look at it to see what all the excitement was about.

I was fifteen, and stopped by on my bike to see the wreck before heading out to the county poor farm where I helped out on Saturday afternoons, giving shaves to the old codgers. Between running chores, playing kelly pool in the poolhall or poker under a covered bridge at the edge of town, and catting around with three or four different gals, there wasn't a helluva lot going on in my life in the summer of I had my diploma from Hamlin High School tucked in a drawer somewhere, and I fished it out, together with my birth certificate proving I was eighteen, when an Army Air Corps recruiter came to town.

I enlisted for a two year hitch. I thought I might enjoy it and see some of the world. Dad never preached at us, and I can recall him giving me only two pieces of advice: never buy a pickup truck that wasn't built by General Motors and, much later, on the day I left for the service, he said, "Son, don't gamble." He hadn't been pleased with a job I had had sweeping up and racking the balls at the poolhall for ten bucks a month, and especially he hadn't liked it when I picked up side money hustling games.

I became an airplane mechanic. Growing up around truck engines and drilling equipment generators, I was one of the few kids in town who could take apart a car motor and put it back together again. Dad was an expert mechanic, and I just understood motors-a natural ability, like having exceptional eyes and the coordination to be a crack shot.

Hand a rifle to a hillbilly and he'll hit a bull's eye every time. So, without knowing or even caring, I had the talents needed for flying in combat. But after taking my first airplane ride, I'd rather have crawled across country than go back up. I took off for a spin with a maintenance officer flight testing a ship I had serviced, and I threw up all over the back seat, staggering out of that damned thing as miserable as I'd ever been.

But teenagers blot out the past when the present seems appealing. I saw a notice announcing a "Flying Sergeant" program. I'd take my chances with trying to become a sergeant. Three stripes and you were out of pulling K.P. and guard duty. I applied. The war was only a few months old when I was accepted.

There were only a few of us enlisted men; the rest were college boys, cadets who would become commissioned officers when they received their aviator's wings. At first I worried about keeping up with guys who were a little older and a whole lot better educated than I was, but once we took off in a trainer, we were all created equal.

I got sick the first few flights, but quickly overcame it. Because I was well coordinated, I had less trouble than most handling a stick and rudder. But it was hard work learning to fly, and like everyone else, I sweated through my first solo and bounced in for a landing in one piece. But rather soon, the differences between students began to show.

After fifteen hours of flying, an instructor complimented me by assuming I had flown a lot in civilian life. He was damned impressed when I told him I was just a learner. Flying became fun. I knew what I was doing in the cockpit and understood the airplane. In only a month, I graduated from being air-sick even while flying level to actually enjoying spins and dives.

I was lucky; some cadets never made it past the airsick phase. Being cocky and competitive, I began bouncing other students and staging mock dogfights. I could line up on air or ground targets before others in the class even saw them. My instructor knew who was best in the group, and in the end, I was the one he recommended to become a fighter pilot.

I was thrilled. Dad and my kid brother, Hal, Jr. came to Arizona to see me get my wings, but I didn't report to the rd Fighter Squadron as a flying sergeant. By then, the regulations had changed, and those of us receiving our wings as enlisted men were made noncommissioned flight officers, wearing blue bars instead of gold.

I didn't care. In fact, I felt damned lucky that because of the war mobilization, my military records had not caught up with me. Otherwise, I would have probably been bounced from flight school when they discovered I had been court-martialed as a corporal for shooting a horse with a thirty-caliber machine gun. On guard duty one night, I showed a guy how to fire the gun by shooting bursts out into the desert.

I saw the horses grazing, but thought I would fire short; I didn't, and an angry rancher demanded that the Air Corps pay for his dead horse. In Nevada, we trained in the Bell Airacobra, the P, a compact tricycle-geared fighter, with the engine mounted behind the cockpit and a millimeter cannon barrel protruding through the prop shaft.

You entered the cockpit through a car-type door, which made you wonder how quickly you could get out if the ship spun in. But I was excited to be flying in a real fighter plane. I remember my first morning there, Bill "Obie" ' O'Brien, one of the squadron leaders, with three hundred hours more flying time than the rest of us, checked me out in the ThirtyNine.

Obie was tough and demanding. I sat in the cockpit while he explained all the switches. "Okay, Yeager," he said, "when you take off, raise the nose-gear at sixty miles an hour-it'll get airborne about ninety or one hundred. Then, raise your landing gear and keep the son of a bitch wide open until you get out. Then, cut the power back.

Same way on landing. Hell, it's no problem." Then he slammed the cockpit door and signaled for me to fire up my engine. Instruction over. There were three squadrons in our fighter group, and among all those pilots, I was one of the few who loved the Thirty-Nine and would have gladly flown it off to war. The British refused it, and so did our own Air Corps, except for instruction, so we gave Ps to the Russians to fight in.

Our guys even sang a song about it: Don't give me a P With an engine that's mounted behind. It will tumble and roll And dig a big hole- Don't give me a P Well, it was true that the drive shaft ran right up the center of the cramped cockpit, that the airplane performed beautifully at low altitudes but was underpowered up high, and that if you stalled it, you might wind up boring a deep hole because it spun like a top going down.

But once you had a feel for the ship and understood it, the Thirty-Nine was a fun airplane to fly. Another problem was maintenance. We flew so much, yet there were few old hands among the ground crews working on the airplanes. There was a lot of trial and error, both on the flight line and in the sky. "Crash" is not a word pilots ever use.

I don't really know why, but the word is avoided in describing what happens when several tons of metal plows itself and its pilot into the ground. Instead, we might say, "He augered in." Or, "He bought the farm." However you chose to describe it, we were doing it. Hell, the sky was filled with green pilots practicing night landings, dogfighting, and strafing, so accidents were inevitable, although our kill-rate cost the group commander his job.

We lost thirteen pilots in six months. And in nearly every case, the worst pilots died by their own stupidity-making a low-altitude turn that dropped them into the ground, or waiting too long to come out of a dive. One pilot dropped out of formation for no apparent reason and plunged like a boulder into the ground; guys snapped wings off their planes doing crazy power dives, or buzzed into the side of a hill.

And if something went wrong, they made the wrong decision about whether to jump or stay. I saw a guy try to land with his engine on fire, Flames streaming, doing at least mph, skidding off the runway in flames and smoke. The crazy bastard hit the ground on the run just as his tail melted off. A gruesome weeding-out process was taking place. Those who were killed in Nevada were likely to have been the first killed in combat.

But those of us who did survive the training were rapidly becoming skilled combat pilots and a cohesive team. I turned my back on lousy fliers as if their mistakes were catching. When one of them became a grease spot on the tarmac, I almost felt relieved: it was better to bury a weak sister in training than in combat, where he might not only bust his ass, but do something (or, more than likely, fail to do something) that would bust two or three other asses in addition to his own.

But I got mad at the dead: angry at them for dying so young and so senselessly; angry at them for destroying expensive government property as stupidly as if they had driven a Cadillac off a bridge. Anger was my defense mechanism. I've lost count of how many good friends have augered in over the years, but either you become calloused or you crack.

By the time we flew combat in England, most of us had reached a point where, if a pilot borrowed our Mustang on our day off and was shot down, we became furious at the dead son of a bitch. The dead pilot might have been a friend, but he wasn't as special as our own P that loyally hauled our own precious butt through the flak and tracers.

Some losses, of course, tore into your guts as if you'd been shot. Then there was nothing left to do but go out and get blind drunk-which is exactly what we did.

Yeager an autobiography epub files free A file might appear in multiple shadow libraries. You may be interested in. The entire story is here, in Yeager's own words, and in wondeful insights from his wife and those friends and colleagues who have known him best. For large files, we recommend using a download manager to prevent interruptions.

Those who couldn't put a lid on their grief couldn't hack combat. They were either sent home or became a basket case. Death was our new trade. We were training to be professional killers, and one day at Tonopah, we crowded into the day room to hear an early combat veteran in the Pacific, named Tex Hill, describe his dogfights against the Japanese.

Man, we were in awe. Shooting down an airplane seemed an incredible feat. I had no idea why the German people were stuck with Hitler and the Nazis and could care less. History was not one of my strong subjects. But when the time came, I would hammer those Germans any chance I got. Them or me. Even a "D" history student from Hamlin High knew that it was always better to be the hammer than the nail.

Those six months of squadron training were the happiest that I've ever been. Now that I was a fighter pilot, I couldn't imagine being anything else. We were hell-raising fighter jocks with plenty of swagger. When we weren't flying, we zipped on our leather night jackets that told the world who we were and crowded into Anderson's Ford convertible or Willet's Essex and drove into Tonopah, a wide-open silver-mining town.

On paydays, we crowded around the blackjack tables of the Tonopah Club, drank ourselves blind on fifths of rotgut rye and bourbon, then staggered over to the local cathouse. Miss Taxine, the madam, tried to keep a fresh supply of gals so we wouldn't get bored and become customers of Lucky Strike, a cathouse in Mina, about thirty miles down the road.

But we went to Mina anyway, wrecked the place, and the sheriff ran us out of town. The next morning, a P strafed Mina's water tower. My roommate and closest buddy was the only other flight officer in the squadron, a lanky Texan named Chuck McKee; I called him "Mack." Being the only two guys in the squadron who hadn't gone to college and weren't commissioned officers, we thought of ourselves as a different breed of cat.

We were both rural boys who loved to hunt and fish, and we wore the blue flight officer's bars on our leather jackets as a badge of honor. So, it was natural that we paired off. On Sundays, we would drive jeeps out into the desert and hunt rabbits with Springfield rifles. We raced our jeeps through the sage and rocks and why we weren't killed right then and there, I'll never know.

But one Sunday we went roaring up a dirt road into a canyon we had buzzed a few days earlier, causing a herd of cattle to stampede, and to our embarrassment the rancher happened to be on his front porch that morning. Instead of grabbing his shotgun, he signaled to us to stop and say hello. His name was Joe Clifford. His place was called the Stone Cabin Ranch.

He invited us to stay for Sunday dinner and introduced us to his two boys, Joe, Jr., and Roy. Ma and Pa Clifford and their boys became like family, not only to Mack and me, but to all the other guys in the squadron. Ma cooked on a wood stove for sometimes as many as ten or fifteen hungry fighter jocks. I remember huge roasts, mounds of mashed potatoes, three different pies and cakes.

We'd waddle out of that place. We buzzed the ranch all the time, and if Pa Clifford came out and waved a bed sheet, it meant yo'all come over tonight for Ma's chow. Mack and I used to fly over and drop the Clifford boys all kinds of ammo for their hunting, whole belts of thirtyought-six, since bullets were hard to come by in wartime. There was a dry lakebed about a hundred yards from the house, and we would practice divebombing over that lakebed dropping practice bombs while Pa Clifford, down below, watched and laughed like hell.

One day I heard Pa mention that he'd like to get rid of a tree that stood near the roadway to the house.

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The next day, I buzzed that tree in my P and carefully topped it with my left wingtip. I enjoyed that kind of challenge, but when I landed there was hell to pay. The maintenance officer demanded to know why my smashed wingtip looked as if it were taking root-hunks of wood were rammed into it. "l hit a bird," I told him. "Well," he replied, "that son of a bitch must've been sitting in one helluva nest." I was grounded from flying Ps for a week.

But there were several BTs available, and I flew them instead. A few nights later, when most of the squadron was seated around Ma Clifford's table, I came in on them in a BT, raised the shingles on the roof from my prop wash, while the guys inside never doubted who was buzzing them. "I wonder which crazy hillbilly did that?" I was always up to something.

In late June, we left Nevada to begin training in bomber escort and coastal patrol operations at Santa Rosa, California. The morning we left from the train depot, Taxine and the gals from the local cathouse came down to see us off with sandwiches, doughnuts and hot coffee, and gave us a heroes' send-off. For us the war was drawing ever closer.

But I unexpectedly found myself close to home. Travel orders sent me to Wright Field in Ohio, to be-of all things-a test pilot. The assignment was temporary: to do accelerated service testing on a new propeller developed for the P I was chosen because of my maintenance background and flying ability, and all I had to do was fly as much as possible and keep careful records.

And because I couldn't keep my hands off airplanes, I managed to get checked out in the P fighter, and began to fly that big old fighter regularly. Early one morning, I took off thinking that my hometown of Hamlin was only miles away and I could make it down there in only half an hour. I had about two hours of fuel. I followed the Ohio River into Huntington, West Virginia, then banked south across the thickly-wooded rolling hills.

Hamlin looked a lot smaller from the air, although even on the ground it was only a few city blocks. I could pick out streets and my high school, but I had trouble finding my house. It was about seven in the morning when I kicked everything wide open on that P and dived on Main Street, shooting across town at mph. Then I pulled up, did some rolls, and came in again just over the tree tops.

That night, back at Wright Field, I called home. I think if I had been there, my folks would've shot me. I was accused of wrecking the town and causing such fright to one old lady that she had to go to the hospital. One farmer claimed I blew down his entire crop of corn; another complained that I terrified his horse while he was plowing, and ruined his crop.

God knew how many cows and sows miscarried because of me. One old guy even insisted that I flew underneath his pasture fence. And everyone knew who was flying; I was Hamlin's only fighter pilot. Anyway, I didn't stop. I buzzed Hamlin regularly and people gradually got used to it and actually began to enjoy the air show. Once, I even buzzed Grandpa Yeager's place.

He lived on a small farm so deep in a holler that you had to pipe in sunshine. I spent a summer up there once slopping the hogs and hoeing in his garden. I flew to his place in a P, but that damned holler was so crooked and narrow, I couldn't get down in it. Finally, I discovered that if I turned extremely tight around the hilltops and kept my wing pointed straight at Grandpa's house, I could corkscrew my way down.

And sure enough, I saw Grandpa standing on the front porch, shading his face from the sun. I found out later, he called into the house for Grandma to come out. "Adeline," he said "come out here. There's an airplane up there with no wings on it." My wing was pointing straight at him and he was looking only at the fuselage.

I got back to California on the day my squadron flew from Santa Rosa to Oroville, the next stop on our training schedule. That first day in Oroville, Mack and I went over to the local gymnasium to try to arrange a USO dance, a way for our guys to meet the local girls. I remember walking the length of an enormous gym to a small office where a very pretty brunette was seated behind the desk.

Her name was Glennis Dickhouse. She was eighteen, had just graduated from high school, and was holding down two or three jobs, including social director for the town's USO. I asked her if she could arrange a dance that evening for about thirty guys. She looked so annoyed I thought she might throw me out. "You expect me to whip up a dance and find thirty girls on three hours' notice?" Glennis exclaimed.

I said, "No, you'll only need to come up with twenty-nine, because I want to take you." Glennis did it. The Elks Club gave her their hall and it looked as if every available woman in Oroville showed up. I took her, and she was both the sharpest looking and the best dancer there. I could two-step, but we sat out anything faster; so we sat out a lot, and it was tough to make small talk with her because she complained that she couldn't understand my West Virginia accent.

"That's how they talk in your neck of the woods?" She couldn't believe it. But I made her laugh, and that's always a good start. I asked her out again, but I had to wait my turn. She didn't lack for dates, including our squadron's physical training officer, "Muscles" Muldoon. Glennis was too young to take to a bar (I was underage, too, but being in an officer's uniform, nobody asked to see my I.D.), so we went to the movies and ate popcorn, and discovered that we had similar backgrounds and interests.

She had been raised on a small ranch and her Dad taught her how to shoot, hunt, and fish to help put food on the table.

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She was a great shot. Not only was she a champion swimmer and dancer, but she was also as tough and gutsy as she was good-looking. Glennis was living alone. She stayed behind to finish high school when her parents moved to Oakland, where her Dad found a job in the shipyards. She held down three jobs-as secretary to the superintendent of schools, as bookkeeper for a drug store, and as social director at the USO.

Hell, I couldn't help getting serious about a girl as pretty as a movie star who made more money than I did. Mack dated her girlfriend, and the four of us spent the weekends together going on picnics, swimming in the Feather River, or hiking in the hills. Glennis had her own apartment, but some people in town did not think too highly of local girls who dated fighter pilots.

Working for the school superintendent, she had to be careful, especially living alone without her parents. So, it wouldn't do for her landlady or anyone else to see me visiting. I used to climb out the back window and shimmy down a tree.

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One night, I slipped and crashed on to the back porch below, knocking over two garbage cans and scattering half a dozen cats. By the time the squadron left Oroville (we were there only two months), Glennis gave me her picture, and we promised to write. We never talked about the future because in a few months I'd be in the middle of World War II.

We would wait and see what happened, and try to get to know each other better through the postal service. Sorry as I was to be leaving Glennis, I was glad to be leaving Oroville. I was in trouble at the base. There was a basic training school for cadets about twenty miles away, at Chico, and I flew over there one day and bounced those cadets right in the traffic pattern and began waxing their fannies in dogfights.

They flew BTs, and one of them followed me back to Oroville and landed right behind me. I thought "What now?" when out charged a furious bird colonel. He was Chico's commanding officer and he wanted me drawn and quartered on the spot. He accused me of busting through the traffic pattern, endangering the lives of his cadets, and disrupting his training program.

Boy, he chewed on me. Then he blasted into base headquarters and began chewing on all our squadron's officers for allowing a menace like me to fly without proper supervision. So, moving on to Casper, Wyoming, for the final phase of our training, was welcome to me: I needed all the mileage that I could get between me and Chico airspace.

At Casper, the group commander led us in a simulated attack on a box of bombers, but instead of turning to the left, as he instructed us, he turned right and had his tail chewed off by another P We were in such a tight formation that the tail pieces nearly knocked us out of the sky; but all of us chuckled watching the old man bail out. We lived in drafty barracks with coal stoves.

One freezing day, I came in and saw a bunch of guys sitting around the stove shooting the breeze. I walked up to the stove as if I had some coal in my hands and dumped it in. It was actually a handful of fifty-caliber bullets. I put the lid back on and then began to walk fast to get out of there. The guys detected something wrong in my actions and scrambled in every direction.

One dove under a bunk, but the others ran for the door just as that ammo knocked off the lid in a big cloud of soot. They never trusted me after that. The word on me was, "Keep your eye on Yeager and your back to the wall." Wyoming was great hunting. The ranges were full, and because of the war, no one was hunting those big herds of deer and antelope.

We went out with carbines in weapons carriers. That's how I lost Ed Hiro, one of our squadron leaders. It was night, and we had about six deer in the back that I had shot. I cleaned them and piled them in the back of the carrier, and I was driving like a son of a bitch to get back to the base for chow. Hiro was sitting next to me when we skidded out, bounced across a ditch and nearly turned over.

I finally recovered and began talking to Hiro, but he didn't answer me. Damned if his seat wasn't empty. So, I stopped and turned around. I found him doubled up, holding his side, madder than hell about falling out and busting a couple of ribs. We laughed about that episode for months afterward. Ed was later shot down and killed over Holland.

Sergeant Miller, who ran the flight line, knew how to make antelope roasts and steaks. One day, I drew a map for Miller and a few other enlisted men, who left base before dawn, armed with knives, carbines, and a map showing the backroads to a place where I had seen thick herds of antelope. I took off in a P and began herding the antelope toward the road where Miller and his boys stood waiting.

I charged one of the guns to fire one shot at a time and laid about ten