"You're a Professional"

After six months in command of the 4th Fighter Interceptor Group in Korea, Colonel John C. Meyer, 32, the country's top living air ace, was back in the U.S. for a rest and reassignment last week. He was credited with 37 1/2* Nazi planes (four on one mission) in Europe during World War II, had added two Communist MIG-15s to his bag in Korea, and was just half a victory short of the alltime record put up by the late Major Richard Bong. His group, flying sleek, swept-wing F-86 jets, had destroyed or damaged 91 Russian jets, had lost only two of their own.

Tall, rugged (6 ft., 190 Ibs.) Johnny Meyer is no wild-blue-yonder flyboy. A married man and a Dartmouth graduate (specialties: geopolitics, lacrosse, swimming), he is of the new Air Force breed: a cool, workaday airman who talks in terms of "considered audacity" and is proud that in his 2,500 hours of flying he has never washed out or damaged a ship.

Wing to Wing. The MIG and the F-86 are just about a dead heat, he says, with a slight edge to the F-86: the U.S. superiority these days he attributes mainly to the fact that its combat pilots are handpicked, while the Communists have little high-altitude combat experience. Matter-of-factly, Colonel Meyer told how it felt to fight in the swirling, 700-m.p.h. battles each day 45,000 feet above the Yalu:

"The Reds would come up and fly parallel with us on their side of the river. We'd fly back & forth, so close that the man on the inside of the formation would be as close to a Red plane as he was to his own wingman.

"You're a bit scared, but you're a professional, so you concentrate on not being afraid. Until you get used to it, you've got that go-to-the-dentist's feeling in your stomach. Everyone is quiet on the radio. This is the time when every pilot is a philosopher: he's just sitting there and thinking. Then the leader gives the word. I just say 'follow me.' "

Mach One. "You pick out someone to fight and you try to get on his tail. Everyone's flying all around you and you're a bit afraid of a collision. You're only human and you're worried. Yet the speed is so great that you'd have a hard time trying to ram someone if you wanted to.

"You feel pretty good when you're on someone's tail and shooting at him. You don't know there are other planes in the sky. The speeds are terrific--we actually dogfight at Mach 1.0, the speed of sound. The controls are hard to move and you have to use both hands on them.

"Someone tells you there's a MIG on your tail. Then you don't feel so good. You want to get out of this mess and go home. You know he isn't a good shot, but he's pointing a couple of guns at you. This is the worst feeling of all."

Pilots in Korea have the same kind of mental approach to combat as a gun-toting infantryman, said Meyer. "It's simply a matter of killing him because he is trying to kill you and killing him because he has killed your buddy."

* Whenever two pilots have a band in shooting down the same plane, the Air Force credits each with half a victory.

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