A Reflection on My Dad

"The difficult we do immediately—the impossible takes a little longer."

by BILL DETTMER

As I makes more turns around the block of life, I've had a natural tendency to reflect on everything that's transpired to bring me to the place where I am now. I'm a great believer in the Hidden Hand, or Divine Intervention, or whatever you choose to call it. I believe that God works in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform. One of those wonders happened to me in early 1969.

I came of age at the beginning of the Vietnam War. After graduating from college, I entered the US Air Force and reported for navigator training in Sacramento, California. I had desperately wanted to be a pilot, but my eyes weren't quite good enough. So I "settled" for being a navigator, little realizing that fate had set me on a path that would change my life forever—a path that would cross that of Edward L. Bennett.

I was no great shakes academically, either in high school or college. Not for want of ability, you understand, but because I was not motivated. And motivation does not come from without; it comes from within. I think that part of my motivation problem is that I had never had a firm, coherent direction in life. So, I finished Undergraduate Navigator Training with the same lackluster performance that characterized my high school and college years...not bad, just not great. I went on from basic navigator training to Navigator-Bombardier Training, and not much changed. But after that training was complete, I was assigned to Beale Air Force Base, near Marysville, California.

Within a year after my arrival and assignment to combat crew E-16, Ed Bennett came into my life. In the B-52, there are two navigators. One does the actual navigation of the airplane. (We liked to refer to that as "Telling the pilots where to go.") That would be me—navigator. I make sure we don't get lost on our way to the target. The second navigator, a much more seasoned officer, was the radar-navigator. He assisted me in navigating, but his primary job, owing to his greater experience, was "bomb aimer." That would be Ed. He was responsible for putting the cross-hairs on the target. The pilot followed the crosshairs, and shortly a million tons of nuclear fire would be on its way to dig a 1,000-foot wide, 300-foot deep smoking hole in the ground where the target used to be. Simple. Well, no...actually it was a lot more complicated than that.

The aspiration of every young navigator (like me) was to amass enough skill and experience to move over to the left seat (navigators sat on the right) of our windowless compartment where they could be a radar-navigator. But first, we had to have experience. We had to excel at our navigation job before the wing staff would consider moving us up to aim bombs.

I had been underperforming for so long that I didn't have much self-confidence. Sure, I could navigate reasonably well. We never got lost, or even very far off course. But I wasn't much for precision, giving that extra ten percent. There was a popular phrase at the time: "That's close enough for government work." Meaning that less than total precision was acceptable. If it was reasonably close, that was good enough. But not for Ed Bennett.

When Ed was assigned to our crew, he had probably forgotten more about navigating airplanes than I knew at that point. He obviously knew that my skills were not very well developed, but in the entire time I knew him, I never "heard a discouraging word" from him. There were only two expressions ever on Ed's face: an infectious smile, and a severe look of determined concentration, the latter most frequently when we were "at work"—navigating a 500,000 pound airplane or practicing to drop multi-megaton bombs. While the pilot was nominally the crew commander, Ed never failed to remind him that he and I were two of only 36 people on the base that had two pilots to drive them to work in a seven million dollar airplane. (Things were cheaper back then—that same airplane, if you could even buy one, would be closer to five hundred million dollars today.)

Though I didn't know it at the time, my life was about to change forever the day that Ed Bennett reported to our crew. Ed made sure that everything we did, we did as a team. He and I did things together that most navigators did alone. And we also did things together that radar-navigators did alone. He insisted that we train so that either of us could sit in the other's seat for any mission, and the results would show no difference afterward. Ed always cross-checked every calculation I made for navigation, and I checked his bombing ballistics the same way. You think it's not easy to make a math error in flight planning? Try adding in base 60: How much is 37 minutes and 54 minutes, in your head, quickly now! 91 minutes? Wrong. It's an hour and thirty one minutes. Add an hour an forty minutes to that...go ahead, use your fingers if you have to. Two hours and eleven minutes. There are those who have screwed up such computations, and those who will. But I never did, because Ed Bennett checked every one of my calculations during flight planning. No other radar-navigator in the squadron did that for his navigator. But within a month or two, it would have been unthinkable to me to do it any other way.

Ed Bennett insisted that both of us pay full attention to what was happening and to actively navigate throughout every phase of flight. There was no "dead-heading"... a term used to describe navigators who sat back during flight and let the pilots fly by reference to radio navigational aids on the ground, the way airliners do today. During one late night mission, returning from low-altitude bombing runs at St. George, Utah, one of our pilots said, "Well, I guess you guys downstairs (meaning the navigation team) can kick back now..." Ed keyed the microphone put the pilot in a verbal "brace" against a notional wall: "Pilot, we're navigating down here. We're always navigating. And don't you ever forget that!" And we did, all the way to final touchdown. We watched to make sure the pilots leveled off at the right altitude in the traffic pattern. We monitored the airspeed, to make sure we didn't stall out of the sky. On final approach, Ed would always put the radar cross-hairs on the approach end of the runway, so we could cross-check whether the pilot was on course and glide slope for a safe landing. We 're always navigating, pilot.

Lest you think this is an insignificant thing, in 1975 a personal friend of mine from pilot training was the aircraft commander of a C-141 cargo plane returning from Japan to McChord Air Force Base in Tacoma, Washington, in the middle of the night—a 14-hour mission. And once the C-141 was under positive radar control by the Seattle Air Route Traffic Control Center, the navigator kicked back to "dead-head" the rest of the way in. A poor choice of terms. You see, the navigator dead-heading made that crew and sixteen passengers...well, dead. That cargo plane drilled a smoking hole into the northwest side of Warrior Peak in the Olympic Mountains—because the navigator wasn't paying attention when the air traffic controller addressed a Navy A-6 aircraft by the C-141's call sign, telling that pilot to descend to 5,000 feet. So my friend, the C-141 pilot, acknowledged the direction to descend...when there were 8,000-foot mountains in the way. That would never have happened on our crew. Ed would not have let it happen, nor would I— because we navigated all the way to touchdown. If our pilot had received an erroneous command such as that, either Ed or I would have insisted he not follow the it until it was safe to do so.

Ed Bennett's effect on my self-confidence was immediate and profound. One of Ed's favorite sayings was, "The difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little longer." This was Ed's way of saying, "Navigator, there's nothing we can't do." Funny thing is, I bought into that load of malarkey, hook, line, and sinker. Only it wasn't malarkey, and Ed proved it to me time and time again. We consistently did things on missions that others in the squadron didn't think were possible. Things like executing bomb releases within one or two seconds of the clock time scheduled before takeoff, after flying for four or five hours. Or scoring a direct hit on a target, in the dark, with half the equipment failing. Or completing two or more hours of celestial navigation (navigating only with reference to the stars) within a minute of the scheduled time and no more than a couple of miles off.

In 1969, our crew was tapped to fly what was known as a Giant Lance mission. This was a simulated airborne alert mission. Until January 1968, Strategic Air Command (SAC) kept a certain number of B-52s, loaded with nuclear weapons, in the air over the US or Canada, where they would be safe from destruction if the Soviet Union ever launched a surprise missile attack. This was common practice for the eleven years after 1957, when the Russians put Sputnik into orbit. It stopped after the second crash in two years of a nuclear-armed B-52. The first, over Palomares, Spain, caused an international incident. The second, over Greenland, convinced SAC's generals that this was too risky to keep doing. So they made do with ground alerts—crews able to run to fully loaded bombers and get rolling and into the air in five to seven minutes. But were we to have to strike the Soviet Union, it would be a mission longer and more tiring (and stressful) than any mission most crews had flown. So, the Giant Lance mission was to give crews the chance to practice navigating and refueling for 25 hours straight, over open ocean or Arctic icepack where there was nothing to see to determine our position.

Crew E-16 took off on one of these missions in August 1969. Our route of flight took us out over the Pacific Ocean near the California-Oregon border. From there, we were to fly a great circle arc to Japan, never coming within radar range of land until we met up with an airborne tanker that was to launch from Okinawa. About halfway to Japan, some seven hours since our last sight of land, we received a radio transmission from Headquarters SAC, saying that a typhoon over Okinawa would cancel our planned refueling. Instantly, Ed and I started recalculating how much farther toward Japan we could fly, turn around, and still make it back to our base without running out of fuel.

We had been navigating by shooting the sun with a sextant for seven hours. We did it for another two hours, then turned south (farther away from land) before turning back east. And we droned on for another nine-and-a-half hours, navigating by the sun and stars, without reference to any land-based navigation aids. Celestial navigation in the air is inherently fuzzy. A navigator considers himself lucky if he ends up within ten miles of the planned destination after two hours. After nineteen hours, to be within 50 miles would be just fine for most navigators. When we crossed the northern California coast on our way back home, after nineteen hours out of sight of land, using only the sun and the stars to navigate by, we were five miles off of our planned coastal penetration point. I don't know of anybody else who has ever done something like that. But Ed and I did. He checked my calculations, check my lines of position, and as we said to the pilot that night months before... we're navigating down here—and don't you forget it.

Ed Bennett instilled in me a standard of performance in which anything less than perfection was not acceptable. It could always be better. And because we made it better, my confidence in myself and what I could do skyrocketed. In fact, my wife reminded me that there's a fine line between supreme self-confidence and cockiness...implying that I frequently crossed it. But as Ed used to say, "If you can do it, it ain't bragging."

Which brings us back full circle to the question of government work. Ed Bennett redefined the phrase "good enough for government work." It meant something different to the slackers than it did for us. To Ed and me "good enough for government work" meant there was zero distance between the target and where the bomb hit, zero time difference between the planned release time and the actual release time, and zero distance between the planned end-celestial-navigation point and the airplane's actual position. In other words, perfection. We didn't always achieve it, maybe one time our of ten. But whenever we did, Ed would announce to the crew, "That's close enough for government work."

The difficult we do immediately, the impossible takes a little longer.

Close enough for government work.

If you can do it, it ain't bragging.

Those three phrases symbolize what I learned from Ed Bennett: there's nothing we can't accomplish if we decide to do it; exceedingly high personal standards of performance; and supreme confidence in our abilities.

These lessons served me well in the remainder of my Air Force career, and in my two subsequent careers, teaching graduate management courses for the University of Southern California and in international consulting. In the Air Force, I went on to nine more professional military training schools, including pilot training (yes, I finally got to fly the airplane!), Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Launch Crew training, and an assortment of other formal training schools. If I didn't finish first in my class in any one of these, I was a distinguished graduate (top 10 percent). I subsequently built a thriving international consulting business...and you know, I didn't realize I couldn't do that. So I did it.

This may sound a lot like bragging, or as my wife said, cockiness. But see, a wise man once taught me: If you can do it, it ain't bragging.

Ed Bennett set me on the course to being the person I am today: self-assured, confident, and with higher standards of performance than almost anyone else. Ed, God bless you, and keep you, and make His face to shine upon you. I know he will... and that's close enough for government work.