If you're a follower of college football in the Intermountain West, the last thing you probably recall about Chad Hennings of the Air Force Academy is that he won the Outland Trophy as the nation's best lineman in 1987 and then just kind of disappeared.
It turns out Hennings was busy, but not with football. With other conflicts. Such as Iraq. When the Air Force was through with him as a lineman they put him in an A-10 tankbuster fighter plane (also referred to as the "Warthog") and asked him to sack the Iraqis. If it came to that."They waived the seat height regulations for me," said the 6-foot-6, 272-pound Hennings yesterday, "and off I went."
Hennings talks about his Warthog days in the past tense now because he's out of his captain's uniform and back in a football uniform, getting ready to wear it tomorrow in Super Bowl XXVII. Time flies when you're flying. His military obligation expired in June and he reported post haste to the Dallas Cowboys training camp in Texas. He reminded the Cowboys that they drafted him in the 11th round in the 1988 draft. He jogged their memory that he was the guy who was supposed to be the next Roger Staubach. In a round-about way. Staubach, too, took a four-year furlough from football after college so he could fulfill his armed services obligations.
Hennings wasn't sure what kind of reception he'd receive since it was the old Cowboys of Tex Schramm, Gil Brandt and Tom Landry who drafted him - not the new Cowboys of Jerry Jones and Jimmy Johnson. But it's worked out well enough. He added an inch in height and almost 20 pounds in weight during his service days, and somehow got faster in the process. He isn't the same man who won the Outland. He's his big brother.
So Hennings, who has played a lot of special teams and a little tackle this Super Bowl season, became an instant hit with the Cowboys. And not just because he could still rush the quarterback. Also because they found him interesting. Whenever the team would take a break they would huddle around the pilot and beg him to tell them more war stories.
"My experience is that most football players like the military," said Hennings. "They could sit and listen to me talk about it all day."
Which is fine with Hennings, because he could talk about it all day. Flying fighter jets is all it's cracked up to be as far as he's concerned.
"I'd pay a million dollars to do what I did," he said. Then he paused and said, "I think the government paid a million dollars so I could do what I did."
He ended up flying 45 missions over Iraq, although he never fired a single shot. His duty didn't come at the beginning of the Persian War but during the final days, when relief supplies were being dropped to the Kurds in northern Iraq. Hennings' job was to make sure nobody shot at the relief planes. He and his Warthog were the bodyguard.
"There was quite a bit of small arms fire," he said. "But I never caught any."
His closest brush with danger came when he was deployed to Iraq from his home base near London. He got the word to ship out on a Sunday morning and jumped in his single-seat plane and took off.
"It was an eight and a half hour flight to our base in Turkey," he said. "And somewhere over the Mediterranean one of my engines started to lose oil pressure and I had to shut it down. I was about 30 miles from Crete, in Greece, and I had to set the plane down.
"As it turned out, it was Easter Sunday and and they were undermanned in their control tower. And the guy I finally talked to couldn't speak English very well. As a matter of fact, he couldn't speak English at all. So I basically had to find the airstrip and get my aircraft down. That was kind of interesting."
Hennings said the transition from fighter pilot to football tackle hasn't been difficult - for reasons you might suspect.
"I remember my first NFL tackle," he said. "First game, first tackle, against Mel Gray of Detroit. It was the same kind of rush as getting a bulls-eye on the target."
And of course there's the similar terminology and officers-enlisted men type atmosphere.
"A lot of the phrases are the same," said Hennings. "In the trenches. It's a battle. There's a war going on. Throwing the bomb . . . although I must say there's a lot less actual physical risk involved in football.
"And the chain of command is kind of similar. Coach Johnson is our Chief of Staff. Mr. Jones is our Commander in Chief. Our coaches are our generals. The veterans are our captains. And guys like me, we're the lowly grunts."