Priceless Memories - Bob Barker [48]
We studied everything from engines to navigation to airplane identification in preflight. They wanted us to be able to identify all the different kinds of airplanes in the enemy’s arsenal. We also had to study all the American aircraft as well. The navy considered it bad form to shoot down your own planes. The curriculum was quite intense. For example, to train us in identifying aircraft quickly, the instructor flashed a picture of a plane on a screen and we had to instantly identify it in a fraction of a second. It was thorough and professional training. We studied meteorology, navigation, engines, Morse code. You name it. We studied it.
But the most demanding part of preflight was not ground school, it was the athletic program, and the most grueling part of the athletic program was said to be the obstacle course. The course incorporated all kinds of physical rigors—not just running, but acrobatics, tumbling, crawling, climbing, scaling, jumping, and more running. It was brutal.
Now, you will recall I indicated that I had lucked out. Well, let me explain. When I got to preflight school in Georgia, they had tryouts for the preflight basketball team. All branches of the service had athletic teams, and they were an important part of morale. I had played basketball all my life, so I tried out and was selected for the team. I could hardly believe my ears when I was told that playing on the basketball team meant that I avoided all other athletic training, including the dreaded obstacle course. I went to ground school for four hours a day and I played basketball four hours a day. Just too sweet! Unfortunately, as irony had it, in our first scrimmage, I went up for a rebound, came down on another player’s foot, and severely sprained my ankle. It popped so loudly that everyone thought it was broken. I had been playing basketball since I was seven years old and never sprained an ankle before, but this was really a bad sprain. I was in the hospital for three days, and my leg was black-and-blue almost to my knee.
When I got out, my ankle was still too bad for me to march with my platoon. I had to join the crippled platoon. This was a group of cadets with broken arms, broken collarbones, separated shoulders, and every other injury known to man. Still unable to play on the basketball team, I ended up shooting free throws for four hours a day. As you can imagine, I got to be a pretty good free throw shooter, but one day the coach came to me and said, “Look, Barker, you’re not helping the team. If that ankle isn’t better and you can’t play, I’m going to have to send you back to the platoon.”
That meant the obstacle course. Fear is a great motivator: I said, “I can run, Coach. I can play.” And to demonstrate to the coach, I started racing up and down the gym. I practiced from that day forward. Miraculous healing started right then and there. I am still one of the few cadets from World War II who can tell you he never saw the obstacle course at preflight. I will always be grateful to basketball.
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With each step in our progressive cadet training, we gained more knowledge and flight experience. After preflight, I went to Millington Naval Air Station just outside of Memphis, Tennessee, where we really got into flight training, including night and formation flying. At the Memphis base, we were trained to fly the Stearman, which was a biplane—upper wing and a lower wing and an open cockpit. It looked like an old World War I fighter plane. They were great airplanes. I always said if I ever had an airplane, that would be the one I wanted to own.
The Stearman was called the yellow peril because it had a very narrow landing gear. If you came in for a landing and you weren’t lined up well with the wind, the wind would lift one wing so high that you would scrape the opposite wingtip on the ground, but you could really have fun in those planes. You could do acrobatics. You could loop it. You could do almost anything with