Boyd (48 page)

Not all officers were careerists. There were young men who believed there was a better way. Throughout the military were hundreds
of company-grade and field-grade officers who were contemptuous of senior officers and of their outdated dogma. Unlike their
superiors, they had done a lot of soul-searching about Vietnam. They came back from Vietnam and said, “We got our asses kicked.”
They had seen their friends killed because of the idiocy of their commanders, and they felt an obligation to their departed
comrades to hang tough and fight for change. They looked at senior generals and saw men who had done nothing but get promoted.
They were ashamed that these generals blamed everything on politicians and the media.

Young officers, primarily in the Army and the Marine Corps, talked often about strategy. But the talks swirled and eddied
and all too often were vague and formless. There was no organized movement, no coalescing force. There were only small and
widely scattered groups, most unaware of one another’s existence.

These officers needed new ideas about war. They needed something they could hold in their hands and study far into the night,
something they could debate and argue, something that had the power to galvanize them and the troops under them with new and
powerful knowledge. In short, they needed a military theory that would enable them to win wars. They also needed a leader
to whose flag they could rally. He must be untainted by the disgraceful past. He must be a man of far different character
than their present leaders, a man uncorrupted by the system and committed to cleaning it up. He must love America more than
he loves his career. Young officers emerging from the dank careerist swamps of the post–Vietnam era would accept no other.

When Boyd retired as a full colonel with twenty-four years of service, his retirement pay was $1,342.44 per month plus COLA-the
cost-of-living allowance. Even in 1975 that was a pitifully small sum to support
a wife and five children. Boyd could easily have followed the route of many senior officers and gone to a well-paying job
with a defense contractor. But his real life’s work lay ahead and he sensed the dangers of accepting a civilian job. Boyd
knew he had to be independent and he saw only two ways for a man to do this: he can either achieve great wealth or reduce
his needs to zero. Boyd said if a man can reduce his needs to zero, he is truly free: there is nothing that can be taken from
him and nothing anyone can do to hurt him.

Boyd stopped buying clothes. The cars that he and Mary drove would, over the next decade, become rambling wrecks. He even
refused to buy a case for his reading glasses; instead, he carried them around in an old sock. And despite the rising anger
of his children, he said the family would continue to live in the basement apartment on Beauregard.

Boyd disappeared for about a year. But if he was not seen, he certainly was heard—in almost nightly phone calls that lasted
hours. Sprey referred to these calls as the “pain” and said they were the price of admission for Boyd’s friendship. One weekend
Christie and Spinney and Burton were out of town and Boyd spent much of Friday and Saturday night on the phone with Sprey.
On Monday, Sprey called the others to complain about their leaving town at the same time.

It was obvious from Boyd’s phone calls that he was not only spending a disproportionately large amount of his retirement pay
on books but was reading them all. Christie’s phone might ring at 2:00
A
.
M
. and

when he picked it up Boyd would say, “I had a breakthrough. Listen to this.” And without a pause he would begin reading from
Hegel or from an obscure book on cosmology or quantum physics or economics or math or history or social science or education.
Christie thought Boyd had taken leave of his senses. Except for the year at NKP, the past nine years of Boyd’s life had been
devoted to hosing his superiors. He was a man of action. But when he walked out of the Building, he walked into a world of
ideas. There was almost no transition. One day he was on the phone checking on the progress of the F-16 and the next he was
calling people at 2:00
A
.
M
. to read German philosophy. And for what? What was this learning theory he kept talking about? He said he had begun work
on the thing back at NKP and he still had nothing to show for it. Why didn’t Boyd just
retire?

Tom Christie now was a Pentagon superstar about to be promoted
to deputy assistant secretary of defense. He knew how to say “no” to things not relevant to his work, and now he was growing
impatient with his old friend. “John, I read that in college,” he said. Or, “John, I can read it myself.” Boyd ignored him
and continued to read. When he was through with a twenty-minute passage he said, “Now, what do you think of that?” In the
end Christie forgot how to say “no” and he and Boyd talked until the predawn hours.

When Boyd had drained Christie, he called one of the other Acolytes and went through the same process. All of these men were
well educated and widely read. But by the end of 1975 and certainly by the early months of 1976, the depth of Boyd’s study
was moving beyond what any of them experienced in graduate school. Boyd was charging into esoteric and arcane areas of knowledge.
And the Acolytes were far too proud to simply agree with Boyd on everything he said. If they were going to hold up their end
of the conversation they had to buy whatever book Boyd was reading. They read and when Boyd called they were ready. And while
the Acolytes did not discuss it with each other, they knew that Boyd was fortune’s child, that he had passed beyond the E-M
Theory and was venturing into more rarefied heights. They sensed he was about to give birth to his greatest work.

But they wished the birth were not so painful and protracted.

Boyd’s calls tied up the phones of his friends for hours. Burton became the envy of the Acolytes when his wife installed a
separate line for a “Boyd phone.” Only Boyd had the number.

Boyd had less formal education than did any of the Acolytes. But he was their intellectual leader—not only in the number and
substance of the books he had them read, but in his passion and his obsession and his iron discipline about getting to the
truth. Boyd had a different relationship with each of the Acolytes. Christie served in an oversight capacity; that is, he
suggested adding to one part, taking out from another, and doing more research on still another part. Burton and Spinney were
like sons—very bright sons who contributed so much to his work that at times they seemed extensions of his brain. The cross-fertilization
between Boyd and Burton and between Boyd and Spinney was extraordinary.

Sprey was in still another category. In one sense, he was closer to Boyd than any of the Acolytes. The two men were like brothers.
But
while the others encouraged Boyd’s research into his learning theory, Sprey was not at all sympathetic. He said Boyd was wasting
his talents. Sprey knew that Boyd, like many autodidacts, craved sanctification from academics, from those he considered “real”
scholars. Sprey told Boyd the learning theory was far too abstract, another “philosophy of science sort of thing” that held
no promise. Sprey had become increasingly interested in ground warfare since his work on the A-10, and he was convinced it
was the only sort of warfare that really mattered. He urged Boyd to drop this dalliance and to study ground warfare. But Boyd
was obsessed with the learning theory. He did agree to read a few of the books Sprey recommended, but that was the end of
it. Or so Sprey believed at the time.

Boyd was sensitive to criticism from Sprey. Each time Sprey challenged him he plunged deeper into his research and dug up
new references. He knew if his work passed through the Pierre Sprey buzz saw there would be little substantive room for anyone
to criticize it.

Boyd wrote draft after draft of his learning theory on yellow legal pads. He called the Acolytes to discuss the meaning of
a word for hours. “What do you see when you hear that word?” he asked. “What picture comes to mind?” It was an exasperating
business. Boyd liked ambiguity, believing it opened new vistas and led in unexpected directions. Burton was uncomfortable
with Boyd’s lack of fix. “You are taking advantage of the fact words can have more than one meaning,” Burton said. “You are
using words and ideas and concepts in ways that people don’t use those words and ideas and concepts.”

It all became even more exasperating when Boyd told the Acolytes that he did not know where he was going with his research
and that he deliberately refused to set a goal. He was simply letting it carry him along. The Acolytes reeled when Boyd said
his work would link Godel’s Proof, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and the second law of thermodynamics.

Godel’s Proof holds that there are certain mathematical statements about a mathematical system that can be true yet cannot
be proven or derived from that system. Or, as Boyd put it, the consistency of a system cannot be proven within that system.
Heisenberg, a physicist, said it is impossible to simultaneously determine both the position and the velocity of a particle.
As Boyd learned at Georgia Tech, the second law says all natural processes create entropy; that is, they go
from order to disorder. Philosophers such as Jacob Bronowski sensed relationships among these disparate elements, but no one
had ever linked all three, raised them to a higher level, and from them synthesized a new idea.

Boyd might read a paragraph aloud one night and the next night call, voice filled with excitement, to say he had another breakthrough.
He would read the same paragraph. The person to whom he was reading could discern no difference. In a pained voice Boyd would
say he had changed one word. The Acolytes joked among themselves about Boyd’s “breakthroughs.” Sprey said if Boyd moved a
comma he considered it a breakthrough.

“If you want to understand something, take it to the extremes or examine its opposites,” Boyd said. He practiced what he preached.
He considered every word and every idea from every possible angle, then threw it out for discussion, argued endless hours,
restructured his line of thought, and threw it out for discussion again. Creativity was painful and laborious and repetitive
and detail-haunted—not just to him, but to a half-dozen people around him. Boyd needed the dialectic of debate. Often he abandoned
the entire line of inquiry and went back to the beginning. Burton and Spinney and Sprey began to wonder if Christie was right,
if Boyd was putting too fine a point on everything, if he were pushing his ideas into fruitless areas. “How long will this
go on?” Burton asked. “At some point you have to finish it.”

“That time will reveal itself,” Boyd said. “I will know. But I am not there yet.”

To complicate matters, Boyd received a small grant from NASA to determine why fighter pilots flew simulators differently than
they flew airplanes. His findings accelerated work on “A New Conception for Air-to-Air Combat,” a briefing he had begun researching
in 1975. He also revealed, to Sprey’s delight, that he was beginning to work on a briefing he called “Patterns of Conflict,”
a survey of ground warfare since the beginning of time. He continued to research and write drafts of his learning theory while
he worked on the two new briefings.

It was an extraordinary burst of creativity, especially considering it came from a man who was retired, almost fifty years
old, and entering a time of life when many people begin to slow down.

The Acolytes thought it would never end.

But it did. Or at least the intense work on the learning theory did when, on September 3, 1976, Boyd came forth with the eleven-page
“Destruction and Creation” paper he had been working on since 1972. With the exception of those few articles for a Fighter
Weapons School publication back in the 1950s, it is the only thing Boyd ever wrote.

The hosannas that had accompanied the E-M Theory were absent when Boyd finished “Destruction and Creation.” In fact, considering
the years of toil that went into the paper, finishing it was anticlimactic. Boyd simply passed out a few copies.

Burton and Spinney pleaded with Boyd to have the paper published. It would have been relatively easy for Boyd to do so in
one of several military magazines. But he never submitted it. One reason is because he did not believe that intellectual works
are ever finished; he would revise “Destruction and Creation” for years to come. A second, more speculative reason is that
he might have been fearful of the criticism that comes to such works upon publication.

Because Boyd spent more than four years researching and writing and then distilling his work down to eleven pages, the result
has a specific gravity approaching that of uranium. It is thick and heavy and ponderous, filled with caveats and qualifiers
and arcane references that span theories never before connected. To read “Destruction and Creation” is to fully appreciate
the term “heavy sledding.” The most important part of “Destruction and Creation” is Boyd’s elaboration on the idea that a
relationship exists between an observer and what is being observed. This idea is not original. One of the oldest questions
in philosophy concerns the nature of reality. But Boyd presented a new explanation of how we perceive physical reality.

A half-dozen people can look at the same process or the same event and each might see the process or the event in an entirely
different fashion. For a simple example, a crowd streaming into a college football stadium is looked upon one way by a fraternity
boy, another way by a television cameraman, another way by a beer distributor, another way by a security officer, and still
another way by the college president.

Atop this insight Boyd placed an idea borrowed from Heisenberg: the process of observation changes what is being observed.
To continue with the simplified example, people in the crowd, knowing
they are being observed by a television cameraman, might wave or shout or begin spontaneous demonstrations. The same crowd,
knowing security officers are observing, might become subdued and decorous. Or it might become confrontational. If we are
aware that these changes take place we reassess and recalculate our relationship with whatever it is we are observing. In
other words, the process not only shapes what is being observed but feedback reshapes the observer’s outlook. The television
cameraman searches out people who are not waving. Security officers become more vigilant because they know people in the crowd
are disguising their behavior. Thus a cycle begins. And the cycle is repeated again and again.