The Right Stuff In The Wrong Place

...Before I could get a word out, he whipped around, rhetorical guns blazing, for his second pass...

...Who-the-hellwasI-to-call-him-in, and he didn't-have-to-takeanycrap-from-me, and what-he-told-the-presswasnone-of-my-goddamned-business...

...He vanished from his office, and, to the best of my knowledge, wasn't seen again in Islamabad until the war was over...

...When the situation in Pakistan had sufficiently calmed, the deputy decided to resume his interrupted vacation...

...He knew little about the Indian subcontinent and didn't really like the place or its people...

...Human fighter jet After the war, Yeager had even less to do in Pakistan since the tiny pre-war trickle of American arms had been shut off completely...

...An ardent fisherman, he found the Beechcraft was the ideal vehicle for transporting him to Pakistan's more remote lakes and rivers...

...His only piece of artwork that hadn't been supplied by the Government Printing Office was an immense oil portrait of himself—an allegorical study of Farland in a gray suit, clutching a ship's wheel, profile extended, the American flag behind him, looking rather like a corporate Columbus approaching the New World...

...Yeager had the military man's awe of high civilian authority, and he treated the ambassador with the sort of deference that Farland relished but didn't get from the rest of us...

...Another swore that he had seen Yeager emerge from a just-landed jet fighter at the Peshawar base...

...Not large enough for a separate existence, the group was part of the regular American diplomatic establishment, along with the political officers (over whom I presided), and the people who issued visas, got Americans out of jail, and handed out photographs of a smiling President Nixon...

...It wasn't made easier by Yeager's obvious lack of enthusiasm or talent for paperwork, office routines, and the principles of modern management...

...He performed these chores without complaint...

...The U.S...

...It was," he relates in his book, "the Indian way of giving Uncle Sam the finger:') At this meeting, I ventured the timid suggestion that, to an Indian pilot skimming the ground at 500 miles per hour under antiaircraft fire, precise identification of targets on an enemy airfield might take lower priority than simply hitting whatever was there and then getting the hell out...

...Farland had held several small ambassadorships in Latin America during the Eisenhower administration...

...As my colleagues quickly pointed out, I had no choice other than to call Yeager in and read him the riot act...

...Farland was reassigned to Iran, only to be unceremoniously removed after a few months to make way for Richard Helms, whose recently exposed activities as CIA director had made him somewhat of an embarrassment in Washington...

...The country's two wings were separated by a thousand miles of Indian territory and a massive cultural barrier...

...Some weeks later the next man on the totem pole decided to take his vacation...

...After Yeager's Beechcraft was destroyed during an Indian air raid, he raged to his cowering colleagues that the Indian pilot had been specifically instructed by Indira Gandhi to blast his plane...

...I once asked Yeager point-blank what he had been up to during the Indian-Pakistani war...

...His target in flames, or at least breathless, he fired a few parting shots, spun on his heels, and marched smartly out...

...There, in a large, walled palace perched on a ridge at the edge of the Himalayas, he would relax until Monday with a small coterie of court jesters, companions, and ladies-in-waiting...

...He ordered what was left of his armed forces to attack India directly from the West...

...Faced with a host of urgent decisions, he sat frozen behind his desk, unable to decide on much of anything (which, in retrospect, turned out to be the best thing to do...

...THE RIGHT STUFF IN THE WRONG PLACE by Edward C. Ingraham Most of us know by now about Chuck Yeager: World War II ace, first man to break the sound barrier, star of TV commercials, subject of a critically acclaimed book by Tom Wolfe and a Hollywood movie, and, most recently, author of a best-selling autobiography...

...And where had Yeager been during these dramatic two weeks...

...A Pakistani businessman, son of a senior general, told me excitedly that Yeager had moved into the big air force base at Peshawar and was personally directing the grateful Pakistanis in deploying their fighter squadrons against the Indians...

...Yeager relates in his autobiography that Farland, a fellow West Virginian, had personally selected him for the military advisor's slot...

...It would have been fun to hear their conversations: Major Hoople chatting with Caliban...

...He devotes just seven of the book's 340 pages to another period in his career, after age had grounded him and before The Right Stuff immortalized him...

...It was the morning after the initial Pakistani strike that Yeager began to take the war with India personally...

...The slim entries in his autobiography aren't much help...

...His voice resounding through the embassy, he proclaimed that the Indian pilot not only knew exactly what he was doing but had been specifically instructed by Indira Gandhi to blast Yeager's plane...

...As it happened, Farland's deputy, the career officer who had actually been running the embassy, was halfway around the world on a long-delayed vacation...

...Although he rushed back, it was several days before he could reach war-torn Islamabad...

...IfI-had-any-complaints-I-could-take-them-upwiththe-Defense-Department, and he-was-sickofmush-mouthed-diplomats-screwing-things-up...

...the Indians took only two weeks to trounce the Pakistanis...

...I never found out how the United Nations reacted to the destruction of its plane, but Yeager's response was anything but dispassionate...

...Farland's habit of referring to him publicly as "my pilot" didn't help...

...Yeager's mission was not only to fly Farland to the fishing grounds, but to take on such logistical details as prepositioning the fishing poles, bourbon, and other essentials at the site...

...He divided his time largely between the Pakistani air force, where he was a welcome compatriot in the mess halls, and the mountains of the far north, where he carried on a running war with the resident population of wild sheep...

...I don't recall the exact words—something about Indian perfidy and the resumption of American military aid to Pakistan—but when I saw the piece it was all too obvious that the source could only have been Yeager...

...He had obviously seen the offending news report and knew exactly why he had been summoned...

...That was when I knew him, and for one rather giddy period of two weeks, I even served as his ostensible boss...

...We argued over what we should recommend to Washington, and we were troubled by the complex questions that the conflict raised...

...Somehow he also took a fancy to Farland, who had met with him on several occasions to deliver suggestions and ukases from Washington...

...Meanwhile, Farland was quite uncomfortable, since he was now in actual, rather than nominal, control of the embassy...

...He raged to his cowering colleagues at a staff meeting...

...First, the job didn't involve diplomatic chores...

...The destruction of the Beechcraft was the last straw for Yeager...

...The result was a campaign of brutal oppression, followed quickly by a civil war, the flight of ten million refugees into neighboring . India, and, in due course, Indian intervention in support of the resistance...

...In any event, Farland quickly enlisted Yeager to play two key roles: weekend courtier at Murree and aerial chauffeur...

...embassy there, I learned that the role of diplomat suited him as little as the role of test pilot would have suited me...

...This puzzles me because, arriving a few months later, I found that Farland had only the vaguest idea of Yeager's history, didn't realize he had broken the sound barrier, and wasn't ail that sure what the sound barrier was...

...East Pakistan, known as Bangladesh, became an independent country, and Yahya resigned in disgrace...

...What's wrong with being loyal...

...I leaned back, wondering which approach to use with him: a stern fatherly lecture (I was a year older than he), a cold, level-voiced scolding, or a more-in-sorrowthananger admonition...

...The downtrodden masses of East Pakistan united behind a single candidate, swept the polls, and ended up in complete control of the nation's parliament...

...Yeager had the military man's awe of high civilian authority...

...Pakistan in 1971 encompassed both the present-day country and the more populous East Pakistan, now Bangladesh...

...But that's the way I'll always remember him, straight as a ramrod, striding out of my office, rectitude intact—and with the Right Stuff...

...It was into this sad little court that America's greatest test pilot was inducted when he and Glennis arrived in Islamabad in 1971...

...I recall one weekend when Yeager brought up to Murree a movie projector and a Pentagon film showing how he had broken the sound barrier...

...The job wasn't all that difficult because the Pakistani armed forces already were reasonably sophisticated...

...On the eve of their attack, the Pakistanis had been prudent enough to evacuate their planes from airfields close to the Indian border and move them back into the hinterlands...

...Thus, when an Indian fighter pilot swept low over Islamabad's airport in India's first retaliatory strike, he could see only two small planes on the ground...

...heh, heh . low, lying people:' In early 1971, the Western rulers inexplicably permitted a free, nationwide election—the first in the country's history...

...ambassador to Pakistan was a political appointee named Joseph Farland, a captain of industry from West Virginia, who had become president of a large coal company through perspicacity, hard work, and marrying the owner's daughter...

...The other was a plane used by United Nations forces to supply the patrols that monitored the ceasefire line in Kashmir...

...The depth of Farland's political understanding can be deduced from his rejoinder to an uncomplimentary remark I once made about the late dictator of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo, one of Latin America's more notorious thugs, in whose capital Farland had once served as American ambassador...

...I much admired the man...

...He gave me a withering glance...

...Before Yeager left Pakistan in early 1973, I had one last memorable encounter with him...

...I suspect the story was the product of some casual comments to newsmen that Yeager hadn't really intended to be repeated and that he was as surprised as anyone to see them in print...

...The career officer who had quietly run the embassy for Farland had become the embassy's acting chief upon Farland's departure shortly after the war...

...Yeager's autobiography understandably focuses on his days as a war hero and America's greatest test pilot...

...A flood of cables quickly went out to our missions in every world capital I could think of...

...Since I was a civilian wearing a gray sweater at the time, I didn't fully grasp his nuances, but the essential meaning was clear...

...The wire services were carrying a story from Islamabad quoting an unnamed American embassy official as making some dreadfully undiplomatic statements...

...Had I seen that morning's news summary...

...I saw Yeager a few other times before he left Pakistan...

...In any event, Yeager had decided on an age-old strategy of his own—that the best defense is a good offense...

...And Farland wasn't around much, spending most of his time on vacations and incessant "business trips" back to the United States...

...Yeager was uncharacteristically close-mouthed in succeeding weeks, but a sly grin would appear on his leathery face when we rehashed the war in staff meetings...

...But try as he might to be a good sport, he didn't seem happy with his lot...

...One of the perks of Yeager's position was a twin-engined Beechcraft, a small airplane supplied by the Pentagon to help keep track of the occasional pieces of American military equipment that sporadically showed up in the country...

...They would play bridge and parlor games, crack off-color jokes, serve bloody marys, and even dress in funny clothes and women's hats, secure from the world outside the walls...

...One might naturally think that a diplomatic assignment was about the worst place for a hellbentfor-leather pilot...

...The place was Pakistan, and what I saw of Yeager left me no doubt that he was a brave and courageous pilot...

...Disloyally, I slunk away...

...Major Hoople meets Caliban While Farland and his court cavorted at Murree, the country outside the palace walls began to crumble...

...Meetings became more frequent and more tense...

...Unfortunately, men like Yeager are well suited to play certain roles, but not others...

...Yahya's attack caught the embassy more than normally unprepared...

...I once asked him point-blank what he had been up to during the war...

...It wasn't a long period...

...In December of 1971, with Indian-supplied guerrillas applying more and more pressure on his beleaguered forces, Yahya decided on a last, hopeless gesture of defiance...

...He was so drunk during his televised farewell speech that the camera focused not on him but on a small table radio across the room...

...It was,' he later wrote, `the Indian way of giving Uncle Sam the finger...

...Yeager says that he "didn't get involved in the actual combat because that would have been too touchy...

...From its inception, Pakistan had been ruled by the politicians and soldiers of the West Wing, whose view of their Eastern compatriots was best expressed to me by a Pakistani general: "Our East Wing, you see, is a low-lying country inhabited by...

...His air force roared across the border on the afternoon of December 3 to bomb Indian air bases, while his army crashed into India's defenses on the Western frontier...

...Edward C. Ingraham, a retired foreign service officer, lives in Bethesda, Maryland...

...With some reluctance, I asked my secretary to phone General Yeager and have him come to my office...

...I went fishing," he growled...

...I had been able to get across a total of four, perhaps five, words before being blasted out of the sky...

...The other courtiers made funny remarks, while, as I remember, Farland and his wife dozed...

...Dodging antiaircraft fire, he blasted both to smithereens with 20-millimeter cannon fire...

...After the meeting, I mumbled soniething to Yeager about perhaps being a little more even-handed in his comments...

...He then goes on to explain casually that he did "fly around" on such chores as picking up Indian pilots who had been shot down, interrogating them, and hauling them off to prison camps...

...The dictator of Pakistan at the time, the one who had ordered the crackdown in the East, was a dim-witted general named Yahya Khan...

...Trujillo was a fine man, an upstanding man...

...One was Yeager's Beechcraft...

...We already had a whole diplomatic establishment—from ambassador to military attaches—in Pakistan...

...The link proved less useful than we hoped, however, as it became clear that Yahya was more interested in having a drinking partner than an advisor...

...You win some, you lose some...

...As I opened my mouth to suggest he sit down, Yeager began his first strafing run...

...In 1971, with his wife, Glennis, in tow, Yeager arrived in Pakistan's shiny new capital of Islamabad to head the group...

...I went fishing,' he growled...

...That is, most of us were troubled...

...Farland, however, had other designs on the plane...

...I found it fascinating...

...In my guise as political counselor at the U.S...

...Yeager, meanwhile, spent the first hours of the war stalking the embassy corridors like Henry V before Agincourt, snarling imprecations at the Indians and assuring anyone who would listen that the Pakistani army would be in New Delhi within a week...

...He would invite the reluctant ambassador over to his office to drink and brood with him...

...But try as he might to be a good sport, Yeager didn't seem all that happy with his lot...

...I suddenly found myself elevated to the position of mission chief ad interim, complete with a flagflying limousine and the right to sign my name to all cables leaving the embassy...

...The ambassador fulminated against our consulate in Dhaka, East Pakistan's capital, for reporting to the State Department the enormity of the slaughter...

...I don't think we ever got an answer...

...Every Friday—Thursday on occasion—he would be chauffeured to his summer residence in the cool heights of Murree, a mountain resort an hour from Islamabad...

...In 1970, the Air Force faced the problem so often encountered with aging super-pilots who manage to stay alive—namely, how to extract the 47-year-old Yeager from the cockpits in which he had spent his adult life and put him behind a desk...

...But no one thought to warn General Yeager...

...Ed," he declared, "you don't understand...

...Restraining himself with difficulty, Yeager informed me that anyone dumb enough not to know a deliberate attack on the American flag when he saw one had no business wearing his country's uniform...

...One morning, as I contemplated the world from my exalted position, the embassy's public relations officer frantically called...

...I can well understand why his autobiography skips so lightly over this time of his life...

...By virtue of this diplomatic experience, enhanced perhaps (or so Farland told me) by a generous contribution to Nixon's campaign, he had obtained the appointment to Pakistan...

...I remember one occasion on which Farland asked Yeager for his assessment of how long the Pakistani forces in the East could withstand an all-out attack by India...

...I had tentatively decided to blend the latter two techniques when my secretary buzzed me, the door flew open, and in marched Yeager...

...Shopping around for a quiet corner to place a brigadier general who also didn't fit comfortably into the mainstream of the military bureaucracy, someone finally suggested that he be sent off to head our Military Assistance Advisory Group in Pakistan...

...Yeager's new command was a modest one: about four officers and a dozen enlisted men charged with the equally modest task of seeing that the residual trickle of American military aid was properly distributed to the Pakistanis...

...Way over his head in events he couldn't begin to understand, Yahya took increasingly to brooding and drinking...

...Back in Islamabad, we at the embassy were increasingly preoccupied with the deepening crisis...

...All the chief of the advisory group had to do was teach Pakistanis how to use American military equipment without killing themselves in the process...

...This assignment, however, wasn't as foolhardy as it looked...

...It was made still easier by the fact that, at the moment, they weren't getting any new American military equipment, having temporarily fallen out of our favor after attacking India in 1965...

...There are clues, however, that suggest a more active role...

...Our response to this Indian atrocity, as I recall, was a top priority cable to Washington that described the incident as a deliberate affront to the American nation and recommended immediate countermeasures...

...Conscious of his limitations, he left the running of the embassy largely in the hands of his deputy, a talented career officer with decades of experience on the Indian subcontinent...

...It took the rest of us a moment to fathom what he was saying, not realizing at first that the "we" was West Pakistan, not the United States...

...He did, however, have two virtues...

...Goddamn it, we're assigned to Pakistan," he said...

...During the time he was unavoidably in residence in Pakistan, Farland developed a weekly routine that separated him as much as possible from the lively, dirty nation beyond his doors...

...No such doubts seemed to cross the mind of Chuck Yeager...

...Farland was inordinately vain, "in love," as one of my political officers put it, "with his own right profile...

...We could hold them off for maybe a month," he replied, "but beyond that we wouldn't have a chance without help from outside...

...The ambassador's habit of referring to him publicly as `my pilot' didn't help...

...The dumbfounded Westerners promptly annulled the election, tossed the victorious Eastern leaders in jail, and shipped a good part of Pakistan's army to the East to ensure tranquility...

...He was just misled by evil companions...