A pilot’s commanding role in preparing U.S. forces

Steve Marcus

Lt. Col. John “Red” Walker, the 549th Combat Training Squadron’s commander, poses in an F-16 fighter jet at Nellis Air Force Base.

By Richard A. Serrano (contact)

Sunday, Oct. 25, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Lt. Col. John C. “Red” Walker did not reach for the small volume of verse on his desk. He knows the sonnet by heart. The tall redheaded Illinois farm boy’s voice boomed through his office door, down the corridor and out across the flight line at Nellis Air Force Base.

The poem is “High Flight” and this a favorite line: “Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue ...”

Walker is commander of the 549th Combat Training Squadron at Nellis. He runs the elite Green Flag West program, sending young pilots aloft from the Nevada desert and 20 minutes by air over to the Army’s National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif. There his pilots and Army ground troops conduct a final joint exercise, one last loop in simulated, warlike training before heading to combat in Afghanistan or Iraq.

Walker helps oversee 10 exercises a year, once every month except June and December — to give his staff a rest. “It’s a meat grinder,” he said. They hold briefing sessions and weeklong training missions, practicing lifelike bombing drills and how best to provide air cover for troops facing imaginary enemy forces on the fields of Fort Irwin.

It is crucial to merge Air Force stealth with Army muscle. Training such as Walker’s exposes his troops to warlike scenarios and decision-making exercises on how to take out enemy tanks on the ground or pursue terrorist targets trying to maneuver under the radar.

Typically 26 planes are flown here, with up to 600 airmen converging on Nellis for 10-day afternoon and evening training missions. “We bring people in and hopefully make them better,” he said. “Some are just kids, still wet behind the ears.”

Walker is 37, and he has tasted the real thing — twice.

He flew bombing missions at the start of the Iraq invasion in 2003. “It was exhausting,” he said. “And it was exhilarating.”

In 1996, he was billeted at the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia to help enforce the Southern No-Fly Zone over Iraq when terrorists struck with a truck bomb. Nineteen airmen died, and Walker spent the next hours assisting cut and bleeding colleagues, searching for the dead and sweeping the U.S. living quarters for other potential bombs.

War, he said, ”shapes you. It was five years before I stopped having Khobar Tower nightmares.”

Walker still finds his own silent moments in the cockpit. Sometimes he flies to keep his skills honed. Sometimes he flies because he can remember growing up on the farm, hearing the roar of jet engines from a nearby Air National Guard unit.

“You’d have F-4s zinging around, and buzzing the place,” he said. “I just loved airplanes.”

He followed his older brother, Kjell Walker, to the Air Force Academy in Colorado. He took pilot training in Texas and learned to fly the F-16 in Arizona. “It is fantastic. It’s a rush. It sounds cheesy but the airplane really does become an extension of your body.”

Then his voice was soaring, his baritone filling the office and flying out the door. Walker was not so much reciting “High Flight” as he was embodying the poet, John Gillespie Magee Jr., a pilot killed in a midair collision at the start of World War II.

Even unto the last line, where the pilot/poet, aloft among the clouds, “put out my hand, and touched the face of God.”