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superiors had already used him to shoot down a project foisted on them by civilian overseers in the Pentagon, in this case a joint fighter development project with the Germans. Boyd had accomplished this by touring Luftwaffe bases and explaining how they would be shot down in droves if the proposed fighter ever saw action.
    In April 1972, just after fleets of enemy tanks and artillery had unexpectedly emerged from the trail for that year’s devastating spring offensive, Boyd arrived at Nakhon Phanom, assigned as the new base commander. By that time the huge base displayed many features emblematic of the disintegrating American war effort in Southeast Asia. Packs of wild dogs roamed unmolested across the secret base. Racial tension was so high that black and white servicemen dared not venture near each other’s quarters. Behind the double razor-wire fence and the armed guards surrounding the Infiltration Surveillance Center, the heart of Task Force Alpha, the mess hall provided metal forks and knives but only plastic spoons; all the metal spoons had been stolen by heroin-addicted personnel to use in cooking up their fix.
    After giving orders to shoot the dogs, Boyd set to work researching the truth behind the system’s reported successes. One suggestion actively touted by an air force research base, the Rome Air Development Center, closely linked to IBM, had been to use the system to pinpoint enemy artillery in South Vietnam from the sound of its guns. Seven hundred sensors were accordingly dropped around the battlefield in a precise pattern decreed by the technologists. Boyd made an on-the-spot inspection and immediately saw that the idea could never work because the sound of enemy guns was inevitably drowned by the noise of friendly artillery. Bypassing intervening layers of command, he sent word to his sponsors in Washington that the scheme had been an utter failure. Other initiatives by barrier partisans, such as an attempt to locate antiaircraft missile batteries, or to monitor possible peace accords, proved no more successful. “They sent me to close it down,” Boyd told me before he died in 1997, “and I closed it down.”
    The war that had begun with such promise for American technology was ending in futile retreat, but not before the air force’s mightiest bombers, the B-52s, were sent out on one last campaign of destruction into the heart of Hanoi itself, the enemy capital previously off-limits. Rex Rivolo, the fighter pilot whose high-tech navigation aid had led him to bomb the American base at Da Nang, was assigned to fly escort on the first raid, December 18, 1972.
    “I wasn’t worried,” he told me years later. “We were briefed that the B-52s would be using their most secret ‘war mode’ electronic counter-measures, previously reserved for World War III with the Soviets, that would easily blind the Vietnamese SAM missiles. I knew the counter-measures in my plane didn’t work, but I believed the B-52s had secret, magic stuff that would make them invulnerable. So I thought everything would be OK. That was until three SAMs flew right by me and then hit a B-52 high above. The magic boxes didn’t work.” Rivolo watched in amazement as the giant plane cracked open “like an egg” and slowly turned over. Burning jet fuel streamed out in a wave that split into two and then four in vast cascading sheets of flame. “The sky,” he told me, recalling the vivid scene in every detail after forty years, “was raining fire.” Fourteen more B-52s were to go down before the raids were called off eleven days later. By that time, Rivolo’s previously unquestioning faith in the promises of the technologists had disappeared forever. “I had really believed all that hype,” he told me. “And then I realized it was all bullshit. None of it worked.” That searing moment of truth would cause a lot of trouble in Washington later on.
    Task Force Alpha was finally switched off on December 31, 1972. Out in the