Chapter Text
Ever since he first spotted it above the Minnesota hills, John “Jack” O'Neill had been in love with the sky. He built model airplanes and poked around grass airstrips. He sucked up to World War and Korea pilots. Finally, at the ripe old age of twelve, he convinced one of them to give him very informal flying lessons.
Despite his instructor’s past though, Jack had no real desire to go to war. He didn’t like society very much. When he couldn’t be in the air or working at the airstrip, he’d hide away from his parents and sisters in the Minnesota forest.
All this abruptly stopped being so simple in late 1965.
Jack was barely thirteen. In November of that year, his flying instructor’s son was shot dead in the Battle of Ia Drang. The elder man, wrought with grief, took off from the airstrip while Jack was again stuck grounded at home. This veteran of the Greatest Generation crashed directly into a snowy hillside.
Seeing flames from his bedroom, thirteen-year-old Jack snuck out and sprinted to the fire. He collapsed there exhausted, only to watch his beloved mentor and war hero bleed out, caught in his precious Cessna 150 and the black willow trees.
At thirteen years old, Jack was devastated, and then immediately livid. He hated that plane, he hated that tree, he hated those killers in that far-off land. He hated his parents for keeping him from the airstrip. He ran off into the snowy forest. He never did tell them the whole story.
Jack was eventually found, freezing but still evading capture, by a sheriff's deputy. The concerned man talked him out of his winter hideaway by promising to contact a Korean War friend who could get him flying again. He still hadn’t embraced anything besides flying.
Of course, when Jack did get home, he was grounded from literally everything. Not that he paid much attention to rules.
Now he wanted to go to war.
In the age when boys like Dan Bullock still regularly faked their birth certificates, his mother barely caught him in time.
Pissed at life, teenage Jack spent the next three years getting into progressively worse and more dangerous trouble. His parents even let him fly again, hoping to settle him. But the teenager still regularly came home bloodied after the cops broke up whatever street fight he'd started. Given the circumstances, Jack was also generally high, and by the second overdose of her then fourteen-year-old son, his mother was beside herself.
On another sad Independence Day, three months shy of his sixteenth birthday, Jack got drunk and high, stole his father's car, and crashed it into the airstrip hangar on his way to fly alone in the middle of the night. He was found days later in the woods again, nearly dead.
After too many long nights at his bedside, the addition of some military discipline no longer seemed so terrible to his parents. His mother, at a total loss for what to do for her hospitalized son, deferred to her ex-husband.
His father, an Army draftee in Korea, did the only thing left he could think of. He helped his nearly sixteen-year-old son enlist as a barely seventeen-year-old 31J Typewriter Repairman. He did this under the rule that Jack could not deploy for at least a year, and then hopefully only from behind a typewriter. It was certainly better than being drafted to the frontlines in a couple years, that much the Inchon veteran knew.
The senior O’Neill could only hope that the Army discipline would do for his son what it did for him, minus the Purple Heart for a boy who had already made more than his share of bloody mistakes.
1968 Army Basic Combat Training was tough on the still scrawny sixteen-year-old Jack. As per the norm, though, he and the other oddly young-looking teens were helped through by the older recruits. That relieved Jack some. But he was still quite concerned about this being a typewriter repairman business.
Jack tried and failed throughout basic training to explain that he was a pilot—certainly not some lame typist—and should be sent to flight school. While several of his fellow enlistees were, Jack wasn’t among them. Frustrated but presented with a different opportunity by his drill sergeant, the young recruit amended his request to simply not being some lame typist.
In the Army at the time, that generally meant one thing: infantry.
Now a would-be infantryman, Jack underwent infantry training alongside several other perceptibly young “seventeen”-year-olds. Much as at basic, O'Neill told everyone who walked close enough to him that he was a crack pilot. He may have exaggerated slightly. Again, several of his fellow soldiers got orders to flight school after training. Yet no dashing ace in the sky swooped down to pluck Jack from obscurity. Private O'Neill spent the next two months learning how to be basic cannon fodder. The teenage soldier chafed under the injustice with each passing day.
Finally, Jack’s infantry graduation ceremony came to a close. To his legitimate surprise, a not-at-all-dashing flight officer walked up to the newly minted infantryman. “Hey, hot shot. So, you still want to be a pilot?”
O'Neill, all of one hundred and forty pounds counting his fresh infantry silver, lit up. “I am a pilot, sir.” The teenager would repeat this phrase to another Army captain years later deep in the jungles of Vietnam, sealing the end of his Army career.
But this was the beginning. The officer just smirked. “Tell you what, Private. You're gonna take this class, see. And if you pass the test I give you, Papa Army might just let you fly.”
Jack beamed and straightened even further into his fresh uniform. “Who needs a class, sir? You got that test on you?”
As it turned out, one Private O'Neill needed that class. He was surprised by the content: nothing to do with flying. All school stuff. Jack never really had embraced high school. This became the first time he really applied himself. It was hard. But after many a long night regretting the naiveties of an infantryman’s misspent youth, he passed on his second try.
Finally triumphant, Private O'Neill did not go to flight school. In quintessential Army style, he instead shipped off to preflight warrant officer training. Here, Jack really was the youngest-looking soldier around. Again he was helped through by a couple of now “eighteen”-year-olds, including Tom Murphy.
It’s worth talking a bit about Tom to put Jack’s own life into perspective. Also destined for Vietnam, the slightly older teenager would be shot down during his second week in-country. Surviving this and many other close calls, Lieutenant General O’Neill would attend his old friend’s retirement ceremony no less than forty-one years later. Chief Warrant Officer Five Murphy retired with two Distinguished Flying Crosses and over thirty-five Air Medals—the award Jack would later earn for blowing up two motherships.
The long weeks of warrant officer candidacy dragged on for the eager teen. It was all “spit and polish” detail stuff. When he finally got to flight training, though, the time zipped by. This was unfortunate, because it turned out helicopters were far finickier to him than fixed-wing aircraft.
Nonetheless, before the clock ran out on 1969, soon-to-be seventeen-year-old Warrant Officer O'Neill had indeed become an “eighteen”-year-old Huey helicopter copilot in Vietnam. As Jack understood it, he'd be flying reconnaissance for infantry platoons, saving downed pilots, conducting Army Ranger airlift operations, and supporting Marine Force Reconnaissance. So he was like a high-speed flying super special operator. Finally.
Unfortunately, as an Effing New Guy, Jack’s ideas of all that mattered little to anyone. It turned out he was mostly entrusted to fly second-seat for veteran pilots delivering ammunition and chow down to busy infantry firebases.
In his time off, the young aviator listened to the radio and developed a voracious reading habit. Back home, new president Richard Nixon announced that the “silent majority” supported his Vietnamization drawdown plan. The restart of the Paris Peace Talks began a tenuous ceasefire. And Dodge came out with a new Challenger that every pilot was definitely buying when he got home.
Sure, Warrant Officer O'Neill figured after a couple months of doing it: November 1969 was as a good a time as any to fly in Vietnam. He felt like a new (teenage) man.