The Fighter Pilot with a Thousand Faces

This chapter establishes a working definition for fighter pilot culture and how it operates. It describes how and why the fighter pilot emerged as a distinct cultural category during World War I and explains the key mechanisms by which that culture was able to persevere and evolve for over sixty years, through the Vietnam War and beyond. The chapter looks at militaries as large organizations, which generate cultures in specific ways. It zooms in on the formation of subcultures in the Air Force, centered broadly on the two main “families” of aircraft: large, crewed bombers, and single-seat fighters. The chapter underscores that the division between bomber and fighter culture was a hallmark of the Air Force for most of its existence, at least through the late 1960s. Fighter pilots in those years tended to be marginalized. As the fighter subculture gained more of a voice and more influence within the Air Force, the service began to produce technologies that were more in line with that culture's values. The culture of fighter pilots was passed down through word of mouth, behavioral expectations, peer pressure, training, popular media and fiction, shared rituals, and institutional structures.