In Nevada: A Rodeo for Throttle Jockeys

On a hazy desert morning near Las Vegas, growling high-performance engines warn of unseen jet fighters. Images of war darken the imagination. Moments later four slender U.S. Air Force F-16 fighter-bombers are framed against a hot blue sky. From a distance they are lethal mosquitoes: stiletto nose, ! bulging belly, tightly angled wings. Passing over their target area, the fighters roll out into a curved line, vanishing behind a range of mountains. They are preparing to drop bombs on American soil, but groundlings needn't worry. The object is to dominate a point spread, not an enemy.

This is the third day of Gunsmoke, a bombing contest held every two years at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada. Afterward, the Air Force will name its "top guns" -- an individual pilot and a high-scoring team from a field of 90 active-duty, reservist and Air National Guard pilots flying in from bases as close as Colorado and as distant as Korea. Much of the costly $1.2 million exercise is calculated to impress Congress. It provides comparative statistics measuring the high-tech F-16 against older planes such as the F-4s, A-10s and A-7s flown by Guardsmen and some reservists. Computerized bombing, applied by man, usually triumphs, and the Air Force needs the results to justify an increasingly high-tech budget. Gunsmoke's backdrop is 3 million acres of training range just north of the slot machines and bright lights.

The team passing overhead, one of nine to compete this morning, is led by Major Bob ("Cowboy") Dulaney, 36, from Homestead A.F.B., Florida. His teammates, all Air Force captains from Homestead, follow in a prearranged sequence: Rex Carpenter, 28, Steve ("Wheels") Wheeler, 29, and Nick Anderson, 26. Each was graduated first in his pilot class and has an amiably arrogant opinion of himself as a hot "throttle jockey." At Gunsmoke, every pilot feels that way.

For the moment, the cowboys are simply trying to shoot straight. "Cowboy four," Captain Anderson, an earnest young Florida-born pilot whose dentist father talked him past a water-skiing career by providing flying lessons at 16, is up. Circling a mile high around the mountains, Anderson suddenly dives to 200 feet to avoid "enemy" radar and screams at 600 m.p.h. toward the intended victim, an Army surplus M-47 tank having a bad day. The desert is a Jackson Pollock abstract, and Anderson is so low that when he is just four miles away, he can't see the tank. He searches for a clump of bushes named in briefings as a pretarget landmark. Reaching it, he tugs slightly on the F-16's stick. The jet rockets up 3,000 feet in a standard "pop up" bombing pattern. Climbing, Anderson feels his face droop and his body react "like a marshmallow" to a gravity force four times his weight. Through heavy eyelids, he finds the tank.