The right stuff in the wrong place.

• Author: Ingraham, Edward C.
• Position: Chuck Yeager's crash landing in Pakistan

THE RIGHT STUFF IN THE WRONG PLACE

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. Yeager's autobiography understandably focuses on his days as a war hero and America's greatest test pilot. 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. That was when I knew him, and for one rather giddy period of two weeks, I even served as his ostensible boss. The place was Pakistan, and what I saw of Yeager left me no doubt that he was a brave and courageous pilot. I much admired the man. Unfortunately, men like Yeager are well suited to play certain roles, but not others. In my guise as political counselor at the U.S. embassy there, I learned that the role of diplomat suited him as little as the role of test pilot would have suited me. I can well understand why his autobiography skips so lightly over this time of his life.

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

One might naturally think that a diplomatic assignment was about the worst place for a hell-bent-for-leather pilot. This assignment, however, wasn't as foolhardy as it looked. First, the job didn't involve diplomatic chores. We already had a whole diplomatic establishment--from ambassador to military attaches--in Pakistan. 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. The job wasn't all that difficult because the Pakistani armed forces already were reasonably sophisticated. 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.

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

The U.S. 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. Farland had held several small ambassadorships in Latin America during the Eisenhower administration. 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. 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. "Ed,' he declared...