Last week, the commanding general of SOCOM Africa was reprimanded over an October 2017 skirmish/ambush in Niger that left four special forces soldiers dead. In all likelihood the actual issue is that the incident brought unwanted attention on the American presence in Niger. Nevertheless, Army’s attitude toward this incident reminds me of Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff:
Barely a week had gone by before another member of the Group was coming in for a landing in the same type of aircraft, the A3J, making a ninety-degree turn to his final approach, and something went wrong with the controls, and he ended up with one rear stabilizer wing up and the other one down, and his ship rolled in like a corkscrew from 800 feet up and crashed…after dinner one night they mentioned that the departed had been a good man but was inexperienced, and when the malfunction in the controls put him in that bad corner, he didn’t know how to get out of it.[…]Not long after that, another good friend of theirs went up in an F-4, the Navy’s newest and hottest fighter plane, known as the Phantom. He reached twenty thousand feet and then nosed over and dove straight into Chesapeake Bay. It turned out that a hose connection was missing in his oxygen system and he had suffered hypoxia and passed out at the high altitude…How could anybody fail to check his hose connections? And how could anybody be in such poor condition as to pass out that quickly from hypoxia?[…]When Bud Jennings crashed and burned in the swamps at Jacksonville, the other pilots in Pete Conrad’s squadron said: How could he have been so stupid? It turned out that Jennings had gone up in the SNJ with his cockpit canopy opened in a way that was expressly forbidden in the manual, and carbon monoxide had been sucked in from the exhaust, and he passed out and crashed. All agreed that Bud Jennings was a good guy and a good pilot, but his epitaph on the ziggurat was: How could he have been so stupid? This seemed shocking at first, but by the time Conrad had reached the end of that bad string at Pax River, he was capable of his own corollary to the theorem: viz., no single factor ever killed a pilot; there was always a chain of mistakes. But what about Ted Whelan, who fell like a rock from 8,100 feet when his parachute failed? Well, the parachute was merely part of the chain: first, someone should have caught the structural defect that resulted in the hydraulic leak that triggered the emergency; second, Whelan did not check out his seat-parachute rig, and the drogue failed to separate the main parachute from the seat; but even after those two mistakes, Whelan had fifteen or twenty seconds, as he fell, to disengage himself from the seat and open the parachute manually. Why just stare at the scenery coming up to smack you in the face! And everyone nodded. (He failed—but I wouldn’t have!)–Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff
Feel free to read the whole thing, it’s worth it. Anyway, contemporary “flight test”, and later NASA, were organizations with no tolerance for human error. If cultivating such an attitude required occasionally blaming someone for something that was not, objectively speaking, their fault, well the payoff in effort and vigilance were worth it. Better to reprimand one innocent man than let two others make avoidable mistakes.
