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limits, or the airplane’s limits, and you will live to be an old man.” As I approached Goodfellow—low to the ground, without extra airspeed, and overshooting the final approach—I was contradicting all his maxims at once.
    I turned too sharply, dipping my left wing down too far. I was losing lift. To counter, I stupidly applied a bit of right aileron. Bingo! I’d just set up a snap roll.
    If I had done the logical thing—reversing and trying to roll back to the right—it would have been over. It was much faster and used less altitude to accelerate the roll all the way around and back to level wings. Call it instinct, luck, divine intervention, whatever—it was a lesson that vividly lived in my memory room’s Flying box.
    As I thought about it, I realized that the process that had made me a flyer had also made me a man. I had entered the Air Force because I didn’t have anything else to do. But I soon discovered that I had found a profession rather than just a place to bide time. Once I was married and a father, I wanted to get ahead, and the Air Force let me. I attended night classes offered by the University of Maryland while we were stationed from 1959 to 1963 at Spangdahlem Air Base in Germany. (That was the height of the Cold War and, in four years in Germany, I rotated regular work, night classes, and 72-hour tours sitting at the end of the runway with a nuclear bomb in an F-105 bomb bay. We slept in concrete bunkers near the end
of the runway so we could be airborne within 15 minutes if the “bell went off.”) After four years of study and night school, I was within six months of receiving my degree. When we left Germany for Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, I was allowed to stop at the University of Omaha and finish.
    At Nellis, I continued night school aiming for a master’s degree in aerospace operations management from the University of Southern California. (We rented a house in Los Angeles so that both Dawn and I could register for school, and I returned to Nellis every month to fly enough hours to stay current in the F-105.) Each quarter I had one engineering course and two or three other courses. The other courses I aced. But engineering was a nightmare. (Literally: when I was in the Hanoi Hilton, I had recurring dreams of trying to cope with these courses and would wake up momentarily thankful that I was in North Vietnam rather than at USC.) Gaylee, who was good at math, helped me, but most nights I stayed up until 2 or 3 a.m. memorizing formulas I didn’t understand and math concepts I had never heard of.
    After miraculously receiving the degree, I cleaned out our West Covina rental home, and returned to Nellis. The first day at work the operations officer said, “Welcome back, Leo. Congratulations. And, by the way, this morning your assignment to Southeast Asia came in. You were at the top of the heap—lots of F-105 flying time and good gunnery and bombing scores. You are now a Wild Weasel.”

CHAPTER 4
    DOWN THE MOUNTAIN
    A fter a hard, sleepless night in the bamboo hut, Harry and I were untied and moved a few miles to the edge of the foothills. We arrived just as light was breaking and were locked in adjacent rooms in a small building. A wooden cot was the only furniture. I was asleep within minutes. But I almost immediately awoke to the sound of loud noises in the next room. It was Harry being taken out. “I’m hurt,” I heard him shout in response to whatever orders the North Vietnamese were giving him.
    Fifteen minutes later I heard him stumble back into his room. Then there was a jingling of keys—a sound that would soon take on sinister implications—and my door opened. They let me use sticks for support as I dragged myself out. As I passed Harry’s door, he hollered, “Geneva Convention, Leo. Hold out.” I shouted back: “Do my best.”
    We had all been taught about the Geneva Convention when