‘In what kind of way?’
DeWitt shrugged, like he couldn’t explain it. ‘We learned everything as we went along, just made it all up. Fact is, our training was shit. It was like being shown a little round thing and being told this is a baseball and then getting sent straight out to play in the major leagues. That’s something I’m trying to put right, now I’m here running this place. I never want to send boys out as unprepared as we were.’
‘Hobie was good at learning on the job?’ Reacher asked.
‘The best,’ DeWitt said. ‘You know anything about helicopters in the jungle?’
Reacher shook his head. ‘Not a lot.’
‘First main problem is the LZ,’ DeWitt said. ‘LZ, landing zone, right? You got a desperate bunch of tired infantry under fire somewhere, they need ex-filtrating, they get on the radio and our despatcher tells them, sure, make us an LZ and we’ll be right over to pull you out. So they use explosives and saws and whatever
the hell else they got and they blast a temporary LZ in the jungle. Now a Huey with the rotor turning needs a space exactly forty-eight feet wide and fifty-seven feet nine-point-seven inches long to land in. But the infantry is tired and in a big hurry and Charlie is raining mortars down on them and generally they don’t make the LZ big enough. So we can’t get them out. This happened to us two or three times, and we’re sick about it, and one night I see Vic studying the leading edge of the rotor blade on his Huey. So I say to him, what are you looking at? And he says, these are metal. I’m thinking, like what else would they be? Bamboo? But he’s looking at them. Next day, we’re called to a temporary LZ again, and sure enough the damn thing is too small, by a couple of feet all around. So I can’t get in. But Vic goes down anyway. He spins the chopper around and around and cuts his way in with the rotor. Like a gigantic flying lawn mower? It was awesome. Bits of tree flying everywhere. He pulls out seven or eight guys and the rest of us go down after him and get all the rest. That became SOP afterward, and he invented it, because he was cold and logical and he wasn’t afraid to try. That manoeuvre saved hundreds of guys over the years. Literally hundreds, maybe even thousands.’
‘Impressive,’ Reacher said.
‘You bet your ass impressive,’ DeWitt said back. ‘Second big problem we had was weight. Suppose you were out in the open somewhere, like a field. The infantry would come swarming in on you until the damn chopper was too heavy to take off. So your own gunners would be beating them off and leaving them there in the field, maybe to die. Not a nice feeling. So one day Vic lets them all onboard, and sure enough he
can’t get off the ground. So he shoves the stick forward and sort of skitters horizontally along the field until the airspeed kicks in under the rotor and unsticks him. Then he’s up and away. The running jump. It became another SOP, and he invented it too. Sometimes he would do it downhill, even down the mountainsides, like he was heading for a certain crash, and then up he went. Like I told you, we were just making it up as we went along, and the truth is a lot of the good stuff got made up by Victor Hobie.’
‘You admired him,’ Jodie said.
DeWitt nodded. ‘Yes, I did. And I’m not afraid to admit it.’
‘But you weren’t close.’
He shook his head. ‘Like my daddy told me, don’t make friends with the other pilots. And I’m glad I didn’t. Too many of them died.’
‘How did he spend his time?’ Reacher asked. ‘The files show a lot of days you couldn’t fly.’
‘Weather was a bitch. A real bitch. You got no idea. I want this facility moved someplace else, maybe Washington State, where they get some mists and fogs. No point training down in Texas and Alabama if you want to go fighting someplace you get weather.’