Till ThursdayThat bleak Sunday was to drag on four more days. The light was fading and Leo and company were out of business, but I still had a bellyful of fuel and there was still work to be done. Reluctantly, I left the area and struck out for where I might be able to do some good for Tomahawk four. Joe—the nice young guy who had come to us as an administrative officer, even though he was a rated pilot. Joe—the shy young man who had accepted my personal mantle of authority and roared through our almost impossibly inferior safety program within the wing like a bulldozer cleaning out rat's nests. He was not a Thud driver by trade, but he scrounged an hour here and an hour there until he could leap all the hurdles and qualify himself for combat. He had a hell of a time mastering the art of hanging behind a tanker and refueling in flight, but he did it. Joe—another one of my boys who had not managed to graduate from the toughest postgraduate school in the world, the school that demanded a hundred missions over the North in a Thud for a diploma.
