PILOTS IN 'FRIENDLY FIRE' CASE USED 'GO PILLS'

WASHINGTON - A military hearing into the deaths of four Canadians in an
airstrike by two U.S. pilots in Afghanistan has focused attention on the
military's long-held but little-known practice of using drugs to keep its
weary forces awake and alert - or to help them sleep off the stress of combat.

Amphetamines and tranquilizers - "go pills" and "no-go pills" - are
considered useful tools for a modern U.S. military that likes to fight at
night, given its technological superiority in finding targets in the dark,
and to an Air Force that must order its pilots to fly longer missions from
fewer overseas bases. Scientists are researching ever more potent pills,
including some that may keep combat forces alert for 40 hours or more.

"The 'go pill' is a tool of last resort," said Maj. Gen. Dan Leaf, the Air
Force director of operational capability requirements. "It is an insurance
policy. When they're in the air, there is no place to pull over. It's a
life-or-death situation. The decision to take a pill is made by the
individual pilot in the air."

Lawyers for the pilots, Majs. Harry Schmidt and William Umbach of the
Illinois Air National Guard, said that the men had felt compelled to take
the amphetamine Dexedrine or be scrubbed from their mission, and that the
drug might have clouded their judgment on that clear night last April.

Even though the case has brought new scrutiny of amphetamine use in the
military, the defense attorneys' central argument is that the pilots should
not be held responsible because they were not informed that ground fire
they spotted near Kandahar was a Canadian military exercise.

The government argues that Schmidt ignored an order to hold his fire, and
that Umbach, the lead pilot, failed to exercise good leadership.

The use of amphetamines as a combat tool is not new. Military historians
say they were dispensed to German and British forces in World War II. The
U.S. military gave amphetamines to pilots on trans-ocean missions in the
1950s and '60s, to air and ground combatants in Vietnam, and to Air Force
pilots in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Scientists outside the military who research the use of amphetamines say it
is impossible to know whether Dexedrine muddled the pilots' thinking
without knowing how fatigued they were at the time, whether they had been
taking the drug for many days in a row, and how strongly their bodies
responded to the drug.

The most important factor in whether their judgment was impaired, these
specialists said, is not the use of amphetamines, but whether the pilots
were sleep-deprived before the mission.

"Some people are more sensitive to amphetamines than others," said Dr. Eric
Nestler, a psychiatrist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical
Center at Dallas. "Even the same individual can differ in sensitivity from
day to day, depending on their level of fatigue or stress. So it's
impossible to say what was going on in that plane with those pilots on that
night."

Studies conducted over the last 40 years suggest that low doses of
amphetamines do not affect alertness, reaction time or decision-making
ability in well-rested people. The drugs do improve the mental performance
of people who are fatigued.

Researchers at Columbia University's medical school, for example, have
recently tested amphetamines on people undergoing abrupt changes in their
sleep patterns. The subjects were kept awake at night for one week, and
switched back to a daytime schedule the next. Immediately after making such
shifts, the subjects performed poorly on tests of cognitive ability and
reaction time, said Dr. Carl Hart, an assistant professor of neuroscience.

But when given 5 to 10 milligram doses of amphetamines - the size
prescribed by Air Force flight surgeons - the subjects performed as well as
when they were rested.

Air Force officials say that amphetamines have never caused a flight
accident. "The pill has never been found to cause or contribute to a mishap
before," Leaf said.

But exhaustion is a constant concern on lengthy missions, officials say.
The Air Force conducted one study, "Air Crew Fatigue as a Human Factor in
USAF Class A Mishaps - a Twenty-Year Review," that found that fatigue was a
factor in 101 accidents from 1977 to 1997.

Air Force officials deny that pilots are forced to ingest the "go pills,"
although an agreement to carry them into the cockpit in case they are
needed is one of many criteria that may be used by a commander and flight
surgeon in approving a pilot for a mission.

The use of "go pills" has been opposed at even the highest levels of the
Air Force. When he was Air Force chief of staff in 1992, Gen. Merrill
McPeak told his service's medical corps to stop dispensing amphetamines to
pilots.

"I was a fighter pilot for 37 years, and I had been issued 'go pills' on
occasion for long, over-water flights and so on," McPeak, now retired, said
in a telephone interview. "I always just threw them away. Most of the guys
I knew just threw them away."

McPeak said his decision to ban the pills was prompted by personal
experience, and not based on any formal research. "I have absolutely no
science in back of that," he said. "It was entirely subjective. It just
didn't match my style. Jedi Knights don't need them."

The Air Force reinstated the use of Dexedrine in 1996.