By Robert E. Barr

Let me take you back to a place that still shows up in my dreams sometimes. I’m in the cockpit of an OV-10 Bronco, flying low and slow over the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Not a road, really, more like a hidden underground railroad of supply routes, truck parks, and bamboo bridges, all tucked beneath a triple canopy of jungle so thick you could walk on top of it if you were brave enough.

Before I ever got to that cockpit, I had to earn my way. Fighter school. Gun school. Water survival. POW school. Jungle survival school. A full country checkout. And I learned to trust the Martin Baker zero-zero ejection seats strapped beneath me, because if everything went wrong, those seats were my last conversation with gravity.

Here’s what they don’t tell you in training: when you cross the fence into Laos or Cambodia, the mission is you, the airplane, and God. That’s it. FACs fly alone. No wingman. No one to check your six. You work solo, and you hope your mistakes are few.

You cannot fly in a straight line. Charlie loves a straight line. That’s how you get blown out of the sky. Constant weave, constant turn, constant scan. Every glint of light, every trail of smoke, every sudden shadow means something.

My job was simple: find the enemy, mark targets, call in strikes. But what I learned about survival up there? It had almost nothing to do with weapons or tactics. It had everything to do with patterns.

And here’s the thing, those same patterns are playing out right now, all around us. We just don’t want to see them.

The Fog of War and the Fog of Denial

You’ve probably heard pilots talk about the “fog of war.” It’s that feeling of flying blind, incomplete information, high stakes, every decision feeling like a coin flip. We trained to cut through that fog with instruments, experience, and a deep understanding of our aircraft. But there was another fog we rarely talked about: the fog of denial.

I remember one mission over the Laotian panhandle like it was yesterday. Intelligence said the trail was quiet. Weather was marginal. Easy day, right?

Except something felt off. The rivers below were running brown, way muddier than usual for that time of year. That didn’t sit right with me. Muddy water meant heavy truck traffic churning up the banks upstream. So I dropped down through a pass, below the canopy, and sure enough, forty trucks hidden under bamboo matting. I marked them, called in the fighters, and those trucks never made it south.

Now, what would have happened if I’d just trusted the intel? If I’d stayed at 5,000 feet, safe and useless? Denial would have cost us that mission.

And honestly? I see the same thing happening today with climate change, extinction, and all the other big problems we keep pushing aside.

The data is right there in front of us: carbon dioxide levels higher than anything humans have ever experienced. Species disappearing at a terrifying rate. Ocean temperatures breaking records year after year. And yet we keep telling ourselves, “It’s always been this way” or “Technology will fix it.”

No. That’s the fog of denial talking. And trust me, denial doesn’t keep you safe. It just keeps you from seeing the mud in the river until it’s too late.

One Day’s Mission

Let me tell you about a particular mission, because it says everything about what it means to fly alone and trust your training.

Seventh Air Force sent an intelligence officer to fly a combat mission with me. Just once. He wanted to see what we actually did out there. I briefed him on the ROEs, rules of engagement, and told him to hang on.

We crossed into Laos. I put in four sets of fighters that day. That meant diving at a 60-degree angle, pulling 4 Gs on the way out, every single time. My backseater, that intelligence officer, was a wreck by the end of the first run. But we weren’t done.

Another FAC had some VC on a hill and radioed to ask if I had any 7.62 ammo left. I did. So he put me in on some VC trying to hide in the jungle. Three more passes with the guns going. Three more 4 G pullouts. By then, we were at Bingo fuel, just enough to get home, no reserves. Rifle ammo nearly gone.

We headed to Pleiku. De-armed. Parked. I climbed out and helped my backseater down.

He looked at me and said he had never had such an experience. Then he said he would never do it again. Ever.

That’s the thing about this job. No matter what headquarters said back in Saigon, you were the one in the cockpit. You had to make the target decisions. You had to obey the ROEs. You had to live with the consequences. Alone.

Small Moves, Big Consequences

Flying taught me that survival isn’t about one heroic moment. It’s about a thousand small, boring, correct decisions made over and over again.

You don’t dodge a missile by yanking the stick at the last second. You dodge it by never being where that missile is aimed in the first place. That means thinking ahead: where’s the gunner tracking? What’s my exit route? Where’s the nearest cloud to hide in? Never fly straight. Never stop thinking.

That kind of thinking sounds exhausting, I know. But it’s exactly what we need right now.

In my research on mass extinctions, especially the Permian extinction, the so-called “Great Dying” 252 million years ago, I learned something surprising. For a long time, geologists thought it was caused by one big thing: massive volcanic eruptions in Siberia. But the more we dig into it, the more we realize it was a cascade of small failures.

First, volcanic gases warmed the planet a little. Then that warmth released methane from the ocean floor. Then that methane caused even more warming. Then the oceans lost oxygen. Then species started collapsing, one by one, then by the thousands. A cascade. A slow-moving disaster that looked harmless at first.

Sound familiar? It should.

Today, we’re seeing the same pattern. A fraction of a degree of warming here. A wildfire there. A crop failure. A refugee wave. A political crisis. Each event seems small enough to ignore. But together? Together they become a storm you can’t outrun.

From the cockpit, I learned to respect those small failures. A single bullet hole in a fuel line means nothing at takeoff. But at 10,000 feet over hostile territory? It means everything. So you check the small things. You fix them early. Or you pay the price later.

Trust Your Training

You know what else you learn flying combat missions? You never really fly alone, not because there’s another plane next to you, but because you carry everyone who trained you in that cockpit with you.

No wingman. But you have your instruments. You have your hours in the seat. You have the voice of every instructor who ever yelled at you for getting sloppy. And if you believe in that sort of thing, you have God.

We developed shorthand with other FACs on the radio: “Smoke on my position” meant I’m in trouble. “Off dry” meant out of ammunition. “Bingo fuel” meant time to go home. We couldn’t see each other, but we listened. We trusted each other’s calls without hesitation, because hesitation meant a body bag.

And honestly? That’s the piece we’re missing today.

No country can solve climate change alone. No technology can replace biodiversity. No single book, not even mine, can wake everyone up. We have to trust each other. We have to act like we’re all on the same radio net.

I’ve spent the last decade talking to scientists, energy experts, and military strategists. And here’s the good news: we have the tools we need. Thorium reactors. Regenerative agriculture. Carbon capture. Early warning systems for extreme weather. The solutions exist.

What we don’t have is trust. We hoard resources. We blame previous generations. We wait for someone else to go first.

But in the cockpit, waiting to go first got you shot. On a warming planet, waiting means losing your coastal city, your drinking water, your harvest.

Survival Isn’t Guaranteed, But It’s Possible

I walked away from Vietnam. A lot of my friends didn’t. I don’t say that to be dramatic, just honest. Survival is never promised. You earn it, day by day, choice by choice, pattern by pattern.

The Ho Chi Minh Trail is gone now. The jungle took it back. But the lessons are still here: watch for the anomalies. Respect the cascade. Trust your training. And for heaven’s sake, stop mistaking denial for safety.

We’re all in the cockpit now. The planet is sending signals, brown rivers, silent forests, record heat. No matter what headquarters says, you have to make the decisions. You have to obey the rules, but you also have to see what’s right in front of you.

The question isn’t whether we see the signals. We do. The question is whether we have the guts to act, to break the pattern, to drop low when everyone else stays high, to trust our eyes over the intel, before the missiles start flying.

Because out here, in the real world? There’s no such thing as a quiet trail.