Grounded

Bob Burns could have stayed in uniform four more years — the law allowed thirty-five, and he had thirty-one. He retired in July 1970 anyway, and the reason cut to the core of who he was: a heart, a jog, and a refusal to be a flier who couldn’t fly.

An Episode While Jogging

By 1970 he was Chief of Staff of U.S. Air Defense Command at Colorado Springs. Then his body sent up a flare of its own.

“I retired because I’d had an episode while I was jogging that the medics up at the Academy hospital had determined was some degree of a heart attack. The EKG didn’t show any damage, but apparently their blood chemistry did, and they were going to ground me.”

The electrocardiogram came back clean; the bloodwork did not. To the flight surgeons, that was enough — they were going to take him off flying status.

Not Enough Allure

For most senior officers, being grounded would have changed nothing important; a major general’s work is mostly on the ground anyway. For Bob it changed everything.

“The most I could stand, of course, was 35 years by law. And at this point, I had 31. And I figured that being grounded just didn’t offer enough allure to me. So I opted to retire.”

He had been a pilot since he was a young man fleeing an $80-a-month classroom. He had flown 81 kinds of aircraft and logged 7,451 hours. The prospect of finishing his career as a general who watched others fly held, in his word, no allure. So he stopped — on his own terms, four years early — and moved down to Panama City, Florida.