Boyd (19 page)

Boyd shook hands with Spradling and looked around the dusty expanse of the spartan base and shook his head. “It will never
be this good again.”

O
N
September 14, 1960, Boyd began classes at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He was almost thirty-four years old, had four
children and a pregnant wife, had served in two wars, and had spent the past five years or so teaching men the business of
aerial assassination. All in all, not the background of the typical undergraduate.

But Boyd shared a surprising number of similarities with many students at Georgia Tech. To appreciate those similarities,
one must first know what the school was like in 1960. Some 6,488 students were enrolled. Tech was considered a men’s school,
a place where men studied hard during the week and partied hard on weekends. Most students wore tee shirts and shorts and
flip-flops to class, while some fraternity boys, particularly the SAEs, ATOs and Kappa Sigs, dressed as they thought students
at Ivy League colleges dressed: Weejun loafers and Gant shirts during the week and three-button suits when attending Saturday
football games at Grant Field.

About half the students at Tech were from Georgia, with the remainder from all over the world. (One of the largest contingents
of foreign students, until the Bay of Pigs debacle, was from Cuba.) The first female students—both of them—were admitted to
Tech in 1952. Two more enrolled in 1953. By 1960 Tech had twenty. A male
student could go through four years at Tech and never have a class with a woman. The Rambling Wrecks of Georgia Tech called
female students “co-odds” or “co-techs.”

Tech was ranked one of the top state engineering schools in America and was said to accept only one of eight applicants. The
academic program was the intellectual version of advanced jet training and with an even greater bust-out rate. At freshmen
orientation, students were told to shake hands with the person on either side and say “good-bye,” because half of those present
would flunk out their first year. “You are too dumb to graduate from Georgia Tech” was a frequent comment of professors. Students
who survived their four years did not talk of graduating, but rather of “getting out.”

The 1960s were years of protests and demonstrations on college campuses across America. But not at Georgia Tech. In 1961 the
president of Tech called a mandatory all-student meeting and announced that the first black students had been accepted, that
all students would welcome them in friendship and cordiality, and any student who behaved otherwise would be dismissed and
there would be no appeal. Thus, Tech became the first major state university in the South to desegregate peacefully and without
being forced to do so by court order. Tech and its students were too serious about academics to become sidetracked by such
issues. During the 1960s the most avant-garde activity at Tech was the English professor who sometimes held classes at Harry’s
Steak House on Spring Street. This professor’s “liberalism” was the talk of the campus.

All in all, Georgia Tech was a place of high standards, a place for serious students to obtain a first-rate engineering education,
a place where the 1960s did not arrive until about 1975. It was a place where competition was tough and where only the dedicated
and committed survived. Like Boyd, the school was intolerant of the slothful or the second-rate.

Boyd wore civilian clothes to class and no one knew he was an Air Force officer; he was simply an older guy, someone else
to compete with in class. The biggest difference between Boyd and other students was one of attitude. Many Tech students were
impressed with the fact they had been admitted to Tech. The school’s demanding academic standards and its willingness to kick
out those who did not perform made them walk around campus as if on hallowed ground.
Not Boyd. He walked as if he owned the campus. His voice could be heard a block away and his language could peel the paint
off the old buildings. One man who was in a thermodynamics class with Boyd said, “I’d love to have introduced him to my brother
or my daddy, but not to my mama. That was the cussingest man I ever met.”

The new year brought in a series of events that later would have a profound impact on Boyd’s career and personal life.

President John F. Kennedy took office on January 20, 1961. His secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, was hardly in office
when he ordered the Navy and Air Force to coordinate plans to build a new tactical aircraft. General Curtis LeMay became the
Air Force chief of staff in 1961, a promotion that led to SAC virtually taking over the Air Force and causing even greater
damage to the Tactical Air Command. And in a curious twist of history, it also laid the foundation for one of Boyd’s greatest
achievements.

On the personal side, the Boyd family welcomed another child, a daughter named Mary Ellen, born February 12, 1961, at Piedmont
Hospital on Peachtree Road. She was the fifth and last Boyd child. Those who were close to Boyd later in his life see only
coincidence in the fact that Boyd came from a family of five children—three boys and two girls; that Mary was one of five
children—three boys and two girls; and that Boyd stopped when he had five children—three boys and two girls. They say he never
talked of such things, that he was too pragmatic and too fixated on his work and too devoid of the emotion surrounding family
to plan for five children.

Nevertheless, he impregnated his wife twice after the doctor said having more children would endanger her health. And after
Mary Ellen was born, he did two things that indicate he knew his family was complete: he had a vasectomy, and he began looking
for a house.

Two months later, in April 1961, he bought a house in Doraville, a lower-middle-class industrial suburb in northeast Atlanta
about a half-hour drive from Georgia Tech. The three-bedroom ranch house at 2860 McClave Drive cost $16,400, the loan being
repayable in monthly installments of $105.67. The house cost $100 less than his father paid for the property on Lincoln Avenue
more than thirty-five years earlier.

Mary liked the idea of having a house of her own. But she did not understand why Boyd bought a house when he would have a
new
assignment in little more than a year. Boyd replied that the house was a good investment.

Living on McClave Drive was similar to living in the home where Boyd grew up. The ranch house was on a quiet, tree-shaded
street and was so small and so filled with children that it always seemed crowded. Mary and Boyd had one bedroom, the two
girls had another, and the three boys shared a third. The dining-room table was used as an exercise table for Stephen.

Stephen entered the first grade that year. The curvature of his spine made it too painful for him to sit up all day, so the
school supplied a chaise longue for him. He had a difficult time in class and it appeared he might have a learning disability.
Then the teacher realized Stephen could not see what she was writing on the blackboard. In addition to having polio, Stephen
was almost blind. Glasses brought an immediate improvement in his vision but not in his classroom work. He missed much of
the first year of school because he was in the hospital at Warm Springs. Stephen swam in the warm waters and had his braces
adjusted and his young body pulled and stretched and examined by the doctors. But he did not improve. And Mary, who was never
quite sure about any decision she made, began to wonder if she should have picked some other place for treatment.

Boyd was in Atlanta to go to college and did little except study, while Mary handled all the traveling back and forth to Warm
Springs. When Mary Ellen was born Boyd was at the hospital, but he was in the hall, bent over his books. He did not swim and
he stopped working out. The Georgia Tech annual contains no class picture of Boyd during the two years he was there, nor was
there any graduation photo. The single mention of Boyd in the
Blueprint
is when his name appears in agate type among the list of 1962 graduates.

In addition to his studies, Boyd always kept in mind his desire to expand the “Aerial Attack Study.” There had to be a way
to reduce the 150-page narrative to the purity of a mathematical formula. Boyd often called Spradling or Catton and talked
of the ideas swarming through his mind, about the breakthrough he hoped to find. Spradling and Catton listened for hours.
It seemed as if each session took Boyd one step closer to a dim and distant goal. Spradling and Catton were proud that Boyd
called them, even if it was in the middle of the night.

Spradling knew Boyd was walking a high-wire. While Boyd was obsessed with pushing the “Aerial Attack Study” to a higher level,
his first priority had to be keeping his grades up. The Air Force would take a dim view of an officer who was sent to college
at taxpayers’ expense and did not do well.

Spradling was right to be concerned. Boyd’s transcript from Georgia Tech shows his grades were erratic, ranging from A to
D, with several dropped courses. But he doubled up enough in later quarters to receive his degree one quarter sooner than
expected. His Air Force Training Report—the equivalent of an ER—said his academic performance was “above average” and that
“he complied with Air Force Institute of Technology directives promptly.”

What his transcript cannot reveal is the profound and lasting contribution Boyd made to aviation during the winter of 1962.
In one sense, all that happened in Boyd’s life up to this point was laying the groundwork; the real story of his life was
about to begin. He was about to take the first faltering step in a process that would change aviation forever. What he discovered
late one night in the second-floor classroom of an old building is today as fundamental and as significant to aviation as
Newton was to physics.

One of several disciplines associated with mechanical engineering is the study of thermodynamics.
Thermo,
as the course at Georgia Tech is commonly called, was in 1962 and remains today near the top of the list of the toughest
classes on campus. Thermo is a physical science that some define as the study of energy. Thermodynamics encompasses but then
goes beyond Newtonian mechanics. A big part of thermo is the mathematical relationship between the amount of energy that goes
into a substance and the resulting change in the properties of that substance.

Thermo can be peeled layer by layer, with new revelations at every level. The first law of thermodynamics is usually studied
in physics and concerns the conservation of energy. The best layman’s explanation is a checkbook analogy: money goes into
a bank account, money goes out of the account, but a balance must be maintained. Energy, like money, does not disappear; it
must be accounted for.

The second law is unique to thermo and puts limits on what is physically possible in the conservation of energy. It is called
the “law
of entropy” and applies to all systems but is most easily introduced by its effects on a closed system—that is, one not acted
on by outside forces. The second law postulates that the expenditure of energy does not ebb and flow like the bank account.
It says that in a closed system, the transfer of heat goes only in one direction, from a high temperature to a low temperature.
A good example is an ice cube and a small amount of water, both within a sealed enclosure. As heat is transferred from the
surrounding water, the ice melts until all the water in the container is the same temperature. The transfer of energy ends.
The system is closed, stable, homogenous, uniform. But it is considered to be in a greater state of disorder than before the
ice melted.

The first law seems simple and obvious, when in fact it is extremely complex and one of the more difficult parts of thermodynamics
to understand. The second law was the first nonreversible law in physics—something almost beyond the pale of science. It says
the universe goes from order to disorder. Separate cold and warm bodies represent a higher state of order. When the warm body
has heated the cold body to an equilibrium temperature, disorder has increased—a concept difficult for many to grasp.

The second law is one of the weirdest creatures in all of science. Interpreting and defining the second law, playing with
its implications, can become one of those endless academic exercises for which there is no answer. For instance, what if the
second law, this one-way system, this order-to-disorder, is the arrow of time that is reality? That means the world we think
of as real is instead an aberration.

Some even use the second law to try and prove the existence of God. This argument has it that God established order (low entropy),
and since then the universe has progressed and continues to progress to disorder (high entropy). Since this has been a one-way
evolution, there had to be a God to establish the order in the first place, otherwise there would be nothing to decay into
disorder.

In the winter of 1962, Boyd wrestled with thermo.

Charles E. Cooper was 19—a junior majoring in aeronautical engineering and fascinated, indeed, mesmerized, by anything and
everything to do with aviation. He was from southwest Atlanta and had the southerner’s respect for all things military. Thermo
was easy for him, just another course between the really great classes in aeronautical
engineering, where he could work with lift and drag coefficients, structures, propulsion, and flight control systems, and
spend long hours over a drafting table designing military aircraft. One day he might work for defense contractors and with
aviators. All America was talking about the “Space Race” and there was even talk of going to the moon. As a graduate of Georgia
Tech with a degree in aeronautical engineering, he could be involved in whatever course America took.

The student sitting next to him in the classroom on the second floor of the mechanical engineering building was an older guy
who walked around the campus as if it was his personal property and who talked as if he learned the English language in a
New Orleans whore-house. The older man introduced himself as John Boyd. He was having trouble understanding thermo in general
and the second law in particular—especially the mysterious, bewildering idea of entropy, of unavailable energy. How in the
hell can you have energy that is not available? Cooper and Boyd talked, and Cooper explained what the second law meant and
how it was relevant.