chaise lounge and jdams

November 19, 2000, Sunday, Final Edition

SECTION: MAGAZINE; Pg. W17

LENGTH: 5287 words

HEADLINE: WAR and SLEEP; Why an $8 chaise longue became a prized accessory on the B-2 during the bombing of Yugoslavia

BYLINE: Dana Priest

BODY:

In the days leading to the air attacks against Yugoslavia last year, Lt. Col. Eric N. Single lived in the basement of a top-secret vault on Whiteman Air Force Base.

There, 15 feet under the rolling plains of central Missouri, Single memorized the silhouette of every combat plane in the enemy's inventory and the location of all its known surface-to-air missile sites. He reviewed code names, moonlight charts, grid coordinates for the 16 spots his bombs were supposed to hit. He painted a mental picture of the bend in the small river that would signal the target's approach. He learned by heart the tiny window of time and space in which he had to squeeze among dozens of allied aircraft. So secret was his mission that the other pilots would not be told that he was there.

Single would be the first pilot to fly the B-2 -- America's stealth bomber, the result of $ 45 billion worth of research and development -- into a war zone. To do so, he would fly over the eastern half of the United States, then over the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and Italy, then over the Adriatic and into Yugoslavian airspace; after dropping his bombs, he would reverse course all the way back to Whiteman. He and his copilot would have to be in the air for nearly 30 hours straight.

As he sat in the vault, Single opened an Excel spreadsheet labeled "Sleep Cycle for Pilot" and studied the one-hour blocks when Air Force sleep doctors figured it would be best for him to catch a nap.

Hmm. A nap at age 41, he thought. In a 4-by-10-foot space behind the B-2's two ejection seat rails. Atop the roar and rumble of 80,000 pounds of thrust.

After he paid all his bills, answered all his mail, said all his goodbyes, Single added one more task to his preflight list: He stopped at the nearest Wal-Mart and bought a blue vinyl chaise longue. The cashier gave him a receipt for $ 8.88.

When people think about war, they rarely think about sleep. But Single's $ 8.88 special quickly became the most popular accessory on the $ 2.2 billion B-2 bomber. A week into the air campaign in Yugoslavia, Maj. Bob Duncan, 37, strolled the locker room of the 509th Bomb Wing at Whiteman and noticed, among the standard-issue olive-green flight jackets, gray helmets and oxygen masks and black visors, that each one of the doorless lockers also had a flimsy chaise longue.

Of course, the Yugoslavia campaign lasted only 11 weeks, and the 509th hasn't been on a war footing since June 1999. If you strolled through the locker room today, you would find no chaises among the oxygen masks.

But you would find one across the street, in the B-2 simulator, because the effective use of a horizontal surface in mid-mission is considered essential these days to the training of a B-2 pilot. I saw one there recently as I buckled myself in for a 20-hour ride to nowhere. The ride was part of my search for the Air Force's new insights into war and sleep.

That the Air Force is interested in in-flight sleep suggests how dramatically war-fighting from the sky has changed. The number of foreign bases for U.S. warplanes is shrinking even as the long-range capacities of those warplanes is growing. These capacities are beginning to challenge those of the humans in the cockpit.

The B-2 -- which seats only two -- is a prime example.

The bomber can carry nuclear weapons and is hardened to withstand a nuclear blast. It was originally designed to sneak up undetected on the Soviet Union's Strategic Rocket Forces and destroy its intercontinental ballistic missiles before they could be launched at the United States. With midair refueling, the plane can fly as long as the two pilots can stand it. The B-2 can show up anywhere within 24 hours to drop a payload of 32,000 pounds of bombs with precision before heading for home.

But head for home it must: So complex is the plane's technology, and so tightly is it cloaked in secrecy, that it must be based on domestic soil. Air Force generals say the logistical demands of basing B-2s overseas -- a huge parcel of land, control of the airspace, dozens of warehouses for parts and machinery and thousands of Americans with security clearances -- are prohibitive.

There has been talk of basing it in Guam or on another remote island, but for now, the B-2 will stay at Whiteman. To qualify to fly the plane overseas, pilots must first pass the rigors of a 24-hour ride in a B-2 simulator here.

There was a time when the macho approach to such feats was encouraged, both by the Air Force and by the civilian culture. That was certainly Charles Lindbergh's way, which he described in The Spirit of St. Louis:

"My mind clicks on and off . . . I try letting one eyelid close at a time while I prop the other open with my will. But the effort's too much. Sleep is winning. My whole body argues dully that nothing, nothing life can attain is quite so desirable as sleep. My mind is losing resolution and control."

Maintaining Lone Eagle Mode may be good for national mythmaking, but for ordinary humans it can be disastrous. Investigators say that sleep deprivation of key staff members played a part in such landmarks in human error as the meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, the gas leak in Bhopal, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the Challenger space shuttle explosion, the Exxon Valdez oil spill and the crash of Korean Air Lines Flight 801.

As terrible as they were, none of those calamities involved nuclear weapons. Under certain circumstances, the B-2 could carry nukes. Lt. Col. Larry Hooper, a flight surgeon at Whiteman who trains pilots in fatigue countermeasures, says the effects of sleep loss quickly become acute: 24 hours and the body acts as if it had a blood alcohol level of 0.1 percent, which could bring criminal charges if you were behind the wheel in the District; two to three days without sleep produces hallucinations; more than three days can bring seizures. Ten to 14 days and you're dead.

"You can't practice bleeding and get better at bleeding," Hooper tells B-2 pilots-in-training during his sleep classes.

Mindful of the implications for modern air warfare, Air Force generals sent their scientists into the laboratory to come up with ways to help pilots relax on demand and to wake up refreshed and with a couple of hours of wakefulness in the bank.

The regenerative power of napping is not quite a military secret -- famous daytime snoozers range from Napoleon to Thomas Edison to Albert Einstein to Alfred Hitchcock to Presidents Kennedy, Reagan and Clinton -- but the Air Force scientists did come up with some specialized techniques that would help long-range bomber pilots.

As it turns out, these techniques should prove useful to anyone who must endure marathons of alertness and productivity -- people like lawyers cramming for litigation, government executives pulling yet another four-hour night, working parents with a newborn child, or the increasing number of people who juggle two jobs. Typical Washingtonians, in other words.

During three days at Whiteman Air Force Base, including those 20 hours in the B-2 simulator, I gathered the first on-the-record accounts from the pilots who flew the stealth aircraft into Yugoslavia. I also came away with The Unofficial Power Napping Secrets of the B-2 Bomber Pilots.

To get into the building where the simulators sit, you've got to give up your cell phone, your PalmPilot and your tape recorder. Then you pass through four vaulted doors and under a bright red "Top Secret" sign. The swipe cards that open the doors are on such a short cord around the pilots' necks that they just about have to kiss the wall to get the card through the little wall-mounted decoders.

On the other side of the last door is a gigantic hangar, white and glove-clean. An American flag the size of a swimming pool hangs on one wall. A bank of consoles lines an observation room above. From the consoles, operators monitor the two identical white boxes that sit atop hydraulic jacks and are hooked up with wires and black boxes, like a patient in a sleep experiment. These are the B-2 simulators.

Inside, the cockpit is identical to the real B-2's -- a surround-sound wall of computer screens, buttons and knobs. All major systems are redundant -- four engines, four cooling systems, four fuel systems, four electronic systems. There's a "declutter" button to minimize the information on the pilot's computer screen.

The only out-of-date-looking items are the boxy red switches within easy reach of my left hand. One says "Conv," for conventional weapons, such as the 656 precision-guided weapons -- more than 1.35 million pounds in all -- that were dropped on Yugoslavia last year. Next to it are two others. "Nuc" is written above them.

Much about the plane has been declassified, but no one is allowed to show me the radar imagery and cross hairs that would reveal how detailed a look at the target, from various angles, the pilots have at altitudes above 30,000 feet.

Also, pilots can't talk much about what happens when they go into "Pen Mode," or "Penetration Master Mode," some kind of boy talk for how the plane makes itself hard to detect. Pilots "stealth up," as they say, by pushing a fingernail-size button when they approach enemy territory.

Then, everything goes black and quiet. The jet's exterior lights switch off and the interior lights dim. Planes flying in pairs instantly lose sight of each other, except on moonlit nights.

In flight, the B-2 looks a lot like the flocks of European starlings that fly around Whiteman every day, vanishing for seconds at a time when they swoop at a certain angle. The jet appears to disappear because its bomb bays, engines, landing gear and fuselage are wrapped in a curvaceous body that at certain angles looks as thin as a dinner plate.

The bomber looks like one big wing -- its wing span is nearly 21/2 times its body length. The trade-off for this design is that the jet can fly only at subsonic speeds.

This profile causes an inquiring radar beam to flow over the

B-2's body, rather than bouncing back to the radar operator in a revealing shape. The body's coating material absorbs most of what would be left to bounce back. Radar will pick up something, but not enough to identify it as a B-2, say Air Force officials.

Fuel additives make the contrails hard to trace, and the internal exhaust system recycles and cools most of the engines' heat before it escapes, foiling thermal sensors. To reduce noise, the engines are buried in the fuselage, and giant fanlike compressors reduce the sound of air intake.

Still, a lot of the time the plane is far from invisible, as pilots on the Yugoslavia mission learned when civilian air traffic controllers would chatter with them on their outbound flight.

"Good luck!" the well-meaning civvies would call out. "Hey, you going to Kosovo?" "Go get 'em!"

Base commanders called the Federal Aviation Administration to silence them.

The B-2 is, essentially, a flying computer, one that costs $ 11,000 an hour airborne, according to the General Accounting Office. As much as the pilots love the plane, flying a computer for 30 hours straight can be boring. They had to learn to stay awake and alert. And to do that, they had to learn to sleep.

We take off and head toward Montana -- well, the simulator makes us believe that we are taking off and heading toward Montana. We'll be flying across the northern United States, back and forth, back and forth.

Maj. Duncan, 37, a former B-1 bomber pilot and the senior pilot of the five who will take turns traveling with me during this simulation, asks me to lift up the yo-yo-shaped landing gear knob. Just for fun, we buzz the control tower, bank to the right, and head up into the clouds. The simulator tilts right. My eyes follow, and my stomach and inner ear try to catch up. Wheeeeeeeee. The screen that fills the windshield shows a scale replica of Knob Noster, the town that hosts Whiteman Air Force Base, and its surroundings.

Duncan, a Lee Majors look-alike with every hair in place, doesn't seem like the kind of man who would give up control easily. In fact, he says, that was exactly his problem during his missions in Yugoslavia. He and his copilot had planned to take turns sleeping on the way over, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. "Once I got there I didn't want to give any of it up," he says. "I didn't take my turn."

Fully awake, and running on adrenaline, Duncan was startled when he got near Belgrade some 14 hours after takeoff, and about 18 hours after he had begun his work day. "It was a lot like flying over the States," he says. "They had all the lights on. I remember saying, 'This is Belgrade?' I guess the word would be 'surreal.' "

After he dropped his bombs and started back home, he bottomed out -- just in time for his third midair refueling. "It was really a struggle, really tough, to stay awake." So he turned the refueling over to his copilot and, when it was completed, slept for four hours.

"When I woke up, I said, 'Hey, how are things going?' I couldn't believe I'd been asleep that long."

Duncan fell asleep from pure exhaustion, which is certainly an easy way to do it. His muscles relaxed, his heartbeat and breathing slowed down. Had he been hooked up to an electroencephalogram (EEG), which records the brain's electrical charges, it first would have noted the slow, large waves of "orthodox" sleep on his way to a good night's rest.

In between periods of orthodox sleep, however, would come small, fast waves of "dreaming sleep" with rapid eye movements (REM) that his copilot would be able to see. Duncan would look as if he were watching a movie on the inside of his eyelids. The flow of blood and oxygen to the brain would increase, and he might start to twitch.

Sleep is not just about shutting down. In fact, it is about the body's parallel life. During sleep, a legion of invisible do-gooders scamper out of their mysterious cupboards. Like little fairies in the night, they sprinkle about hormones, electrical charges and immune-system regulators that, in non-REM sleep, restore the body, reinvigorating the brain's control over the muscles, glands and nervous system.

In REM sleep, the fairies work to revitalize the brain. Some scientists believe that every 90 minutes, for periods lasting five to 30 minutes, they fire off neurons from the brain stem upward, wheel in a bigger blood supply and increase the number of neurotransmitters that together enable the brain to learn, reason, create and maintain emotional health.

Sleep is governed by the body's circadian rhythm, or internal clock, which links humans to time and their environment. Within a 24-hour period, the average person sleeps about eight hours and feels like falling asleep about eight hours after waking, when he or she hits the circadian trough.

In 1992, the Air Force adopted the concept of Global Reach, Global Power. The goal was to develop systems -- planes and pilots -- that could launch large-scale, sustained attacks against distant enemies from military bases in the United States.

The generals at Air Combat Command, whose job this would be, asked scientists at the Armstrong Laboratory at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas to study the effects of sleep deprivation on pilot performance and to figure out how to ameliorate them. Their initial guinea pigs were C-141 air crews that flew during Operation Desert Storm and B-1B pilots who flew a simulator for 36 hours straight.

The scientists found that fatigued pilots had slower reactions and less fine motor control. They reversed digits more often, couldn't speak clearly, missed radio calls and had a decreased tolerance for

G-forces. They also found that fatigue was related to a pilot's most recent sleep history and, in the case of the B-1B pilots, that they had difficultly napping on the first mission, but as they got used to the idea, they were better able to fall asleep.

Train to sleep was a leading recommendation. Develop "low-fatigue schedules" that incorporate circadian troughs into mission planning. To help induce sleep, build a comfortable environment in the cockpit and follow certain eating guidelines (see box, page 20).

I was hitting my own circadian trough just as Duncan handed over the controls inside our B-2 simulator. It was about 3:30 p.m., a time when I would normally have bought a cup of coffee to carry me over the trough. Instead, I had to try to land the world's most sophisticated airplane.

Whether from fatigue or inexperience, I felt the nose dive as we neared the runway. Reflexively, I yanked on the joystick. The plane went into a bank, and I saw the earth spinning in the wall-size screen in front of me. Suddenly, the entire screen flamed bright red. Sirens blared. I was toast.

During the Yugoslavia campaign, commanders in Europe were working around the clock. Gen. John P. Jumper, who was then in charge of allied air forces, would nap a few hours at night and usually between 2 and 4 p.m., after meetings. To get himself to sleep quickly, he says, "I'd go home, put my pajamas on, turn the lights off, cover up."

This may seem a little domestic during wartime, but Jumper was only following the zeitgebers rule.

Zeitgeber is German for "time giver," or cue. Zeitgebers act as a sort of feng shui for the psyche: To invoke them is to surround yourself with the personal touches that help you relax -- things that would help you recall your normal sleep environment, which usually means nighttime, at home, in your bed. The Air Force directs pilots to know their zeitgebers.

The strongest time fixers are light and other sensations, such as the smell of coffee (which you'd want to avoid for a good nap) or particular music, and the typical pre-sleep routine of brushing teeth, changing clothes, reading.

"I do the old trick where you close your eyes, try to make everything as black as you can," says Jumper, who is now in charge of Air Combat Command, headquartered near Hampton, Va., "and you fade off in eight seconds."

Ultimately, power nappers have to figure out how to get themselves to relax. This they can do by experimenting with their zeitgebers. To a person, pilots who are Air Force Academy graduates say they learned by necessity during the gruelingly long days in school.

Lt. Gen. Norton Schwartz, until recently the deputy commander of the secretive U.S. Special Operations Command, says that to make himself nod off, "I think about waterfalls," which he says he can do just about anywhere, anytime. "It takes discipline," he adds. "It's the same thing I do when I take my blood pressure test to get the numbers down low."

Maj. Gen. Leroy Barnidge Jr., who commanded the 509th Bomb Wing of

B-2s during the Yugoslavia campaign, says the thought of "waves slapping against my boat" can put him to sleep.

To help pilots nod off, Barnidge encouraged them to bring onto the plane anything that would help them feel more comfortable, more relaxed. "The last thing we wanted to do was interrupt what made them happy," he says. With that, the B-2s rapidly took on the appearance of a frat room, say the pilots who flew them.

Along with their parachutes and survival gear, pilots brought Coleman coolers filled with water and soft drinks, lunch bags stuffed with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, homemade brownies and chocolate chip cookies, leftovers from Outback Steakhouse. One put his chips and salsa on the Environmental Control System Panel between the two pilots. The most popular meal was Bomber Dogs -- chili dogs heated in the electric hot cup that is the plane's sole nod to cooking needs. Alternatively, the hot cup was used to heat shaving cream.

To stay alert, pilots played a miniature version of the board game Battleship, using a board strapped to the knee and calling out moves over the radio to fellow fliers. They chatted with the boom operators whose gigantic KC-135 or KC-10 re-fueling planes would pull within 14 feet of the jets to pump fuel into them at the rate of 5,000 pounds a minute.

Some pilots dialed up radio stations on the high frequency radio. One called an air traffic controller at Lajes Air Base in the Azores to find out the weather. "Who are you?" the controller inquired, not having detected a thing in the air.

But it's only 4 p.m. where I am, no time to be thinking about sleep, even though the sides of my head hurt from the tight headphones and it's so dark and quiet that my circadian low is taking hold of my eyelids and lowering them like Venetian blinds.

Maj. Scott Young, 38, steps through the door, slides into his seat and tosses the headphones onto the dashboard. We've taken off again, flying over the northern United States again.

Young flew B-52s for six years, then became an expert in electronic warfare. He was part of the mission planning cell that mapped out the Yugoslavia runs. "It was the easiest flight I had in my life," he says of the run he made over Yugoslavia. "Short of refueling, you can take off, punch two or three buttons and land."

And nap.

One of the first things he did when he slid into the cockpit before he took off for Yugoslavia was to strap a sleep chart onto his knee board. Behind him, on the chaise longue, was his zeitgeber, a pillow from his kid's crib. It worked. When the time came, he took his boots off, put his earplugs in, plopped down on the blue vinyl and got an hour of sleep on the way and a couple more on the way home.

I'd like a pillow, too, because the darkened cockpit is tricking my senses and I could swear it's the middle of the night -- somewhere over Wyoming, for the third time. Lucky for me, Young is an engaging conversationalist.

At 8 p.m. Maj. Britt "Woody" Bankson, previously part of the nuclear alert force of B-52 pilots stationed at K.I. Sawyer Air Force Base in Michigan, trades places with Young. He wants to show me how he made himself at home.

Bankson, 35, stuck two Beanie Babies next to the Safety Norm Test Switch within his reach -- Angel Bear, white with wings, and Black Panther, the name of his squadron. He brought in Tylenol for aches and pains, Afrin to moisten his nasal passages, Wash 'n' Dry to keep clean. Oh, and the Kansas City Star crossword puzzle to "keep your brain engaged."

With all that, he was still too nervous to sleep on the trip out, especially the first bombing run. That, he says, included an Easter Day takeoff and conjured up a bellyful of conflicting emotions rooted in his religious beliefs.

But remembering the importance of sleep, he tried a compromise: He stayed hooked up to the communications radio using a walk-around line that let him lie down and listen to the other pilots and controllers. Unfortunately, it didn't allow him to sleep. Besides, his was not a very stealthy night, he says, and the thought of his vulnerability made it that much harder to relax. All the lights in Yugoslavia were on and it was a clear, moonlit night.

To keep awake, he brushed his teeth frequently and drank coffee. But midway on the trip back home, he, too, climbed onto the chaise and nodded off easily.

After he woke up, on his last leg, he saw the Concorde flying at 50,000 feet at Mach 2. "I wanted to be him," he says, recalling what he was thinking in the cockpit of his subsonic jet. "He's probably thinking, he wants to be me."

At midnight, in walks a former B-1 pilot whose call name is Postal. He doesn't want his real name in print.

Fatigue in combat is nothing new, he's telling me. Pilots who grew tired during missions used to put tobacco in the corner of their eyes so the pain would keep them awake. He had to settle for drinking coffee, he says disappointedly.

Well, that sounds fine, but it's 12:40 a.m. I've been in the same seat for 12 hours and 40 minutes. So I unbuckle my seat belt, make my excuses to Postal and climb onto the chaise longue. Remembering the lesson on zeitgebers, I take my stiff black flight boots off and tuck my feet into the sleeping bag. To be warm. A simple zeitgeber.

It's comfortable, all right, this $ 8.88 bed. After three minutes, it could have been a cloud. And I could have been in heaven. Out like the sun setting. Power napping. On my way back home. Dreaming.

But the sleep doctors have cautioned me not to dream -- or at least not to awaken in the middle of dreaming. This means awakening either before or after REM sleep, because otherwise it will take you longer to become alert again once you wake up. To avoid a mid-REM awakening, you must nap for either 15 to 30 minutes or two to three hours. Naps of 15 to 30 minutes, according to the flight surgeon's sleep charts, can buy two to four "hours of vigilance." Three to four hours can buy the next day.

I'm out for nearly four, just like Postal after his bombing run in Yugoslavia. His body crashed during his third refueling, he recalls, and he headed for his four hours on the chaise longue. "I remember the other pilot shaking my leg, and I'm saying, 'Where am I? Oh yeah, I'm in the airplane on a combat mission.' "

Getting a good rest on a bombing run seems one more logical, if surreal, extension of warfare American-style. Technology has made more than the B-2 nearly invisible. It has rendered the violence and destruction of war hard to see, hard to feel, hard to grasp, say the pilots. At the moment they drop their bombs, they have their faces right up next to their computer screens, matching cross hairs to images and images to maps.

Some pilots say their heart rates sped up when they approached their targets in Yugoslavia, others describe things going in slow motion. Young says he prayed as he was going in: "Lord, let no one of innocence die." Some 500 civilians did.

"The bombing part of the mission was unremarkable," says Col. Tony Imondi, who was commander of the 509th Operations Group at Whiteman. "At the altitudes and speeds we fly, it's kind of a challenge not to fly out of a country the size of New Jersey."

Because he was in charge of all air operations at Whiteman, Imondi had to fit going to war around his regular schedule. "I had to go on the weekend because my boss didn't want me gone during the week, when everything was happening . . . It was kind of strange."

A sense of the surreal hangs over some of the pilots even today.

You walk out of the house. Hours later you take off. Fly hours in darkened peace. Blow up a patch on the earth. Fly through a sunrise. Land. Go home. As Young describes it, you sit down in the den, turn on CNN and watch a refinery go up in flames. "You can't say to your wife, 'Honey, come look at what I did.' "

When I wake up, at 4 a.m., Postal is climbing out of the simulator, giving his place up to Maj. Paul Tibbets IV. At 33, and looking 23, he is the youngest of the group. "I took a nap before I came in, and I'm rested," he says when I apologize for getting him up so early.

Tibbets and the other young pilots in training at Whiteman are tomorrow's Air Force leaders. With amazing fluidity, he and his contemporaries are absorbing the techniques pioneered by their elders, incorporating the advances in technology and physical conditioning as if they had been imprinted on their genes. In fact, a slight generational divide has opened over the kiss 'n' bomb concept of warfare -- it has come more easily to the younger, clean-slate pilots than to their more seasoned colleagues.

Tibbets is not conflicted about sleeping during war because that's the way he was raised.

"I grew up napping," he says. "You have to make yourself sleep. Eat when you can eat. Sleep when you can sleep."

In the simulator, he is wearing his call sign as his name patch. Today is Warrior Day at Whiteman, he explains, and anyone who doesn't wear his call sign has to buy drinks for everyone at happy hour. His says "Nuke," as in Col. Paul W. Tibbets Jr., his grandfather -- who flew the Enola Gay and dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima during World War II.

Where older pilots had to calm themselves down to sleep, Tibbets and his co-pilot found themselves having to psyche themselves up. "We had to remind ourselves, hey, this is real." He read Consumer Reports and Money magazine and ate his wife's homemade cookies to stay alert. He went over his mission plan several times, trying to memorize the target imagery.

Sleeping was no problem. On the way over, "I remember saying, 'I gotta sleep, I gotta sleep, I gotta sleep.' " It worked. He was out for nearly an hour.

It was a clear night. When he dropped his bombs, "the whole sky lit up," he says. "The whole sky was orange." He had hit a fuel storage site. Flying home, he slept for three hours, then awakened to a sunrise.

On his second mission, the weather was undercast and he was flying without another B-2 around. "I had all the confidence in the world that the jet and the plan would take care of us," he says. He napped for three hours on the flight over, and another three on the way home.

Rest for the Weary

When you need to nod, you need to nod. Here are some simple steps to help you nap opportunistically, courtesy of B-2 pilots and the Air Force flight surgeons who coach them.

1. When the going gets tough, the wise get some rest. Circumstances permitting, of course. But generally, it's better to catch a nap when you can than to tough it out in some highly stressful environment.

2. Put a little something in the bank. If you know you will be going on a mission -- or pulling an all-nighter, or going several days with little sleep -- get two or three days of good, normal sleep beforehand.

3. Eat for vigilance. Keep your meals small, and higher in protein than normal. By Air Force guidelines, sleep-inducing foods include bananas, cheese, eggs, ice cream, lobster, beef, milk, pineapple, potatoes and turkey. Stimulant foods include avocados, aged beef, aged cheese, chicken, chocolate, Coca-Cola, coffee, canned figs, fish, garlic, ginger ale, horseradish, persimmons, sour cream, soy sauce, sprouts and yogurt. And while you're menu planning, remember:

4. Drink for vigilance, too. Avoid alcohol for two days before a particularly arduous day, because alcohol can interfere with a good nap and a good night's sleep.

5. Listen to your body. The best time to power-nap during the day is during your body's circadian nadir. At this nadir -- about eight hours after waking up -- your body temperature rises, which is conducive to sleep. We usually treat this phenomenon with coffee, tea or sweets. But then, that would violate . . .

6. Cut the chemicals. Use caffeine and sugar sparingly, and eliminate caffeine four to five hours before trying to nap.

7. Put nature's call on hold. Stop drinking fluids two hours before napping so your bladder won't wake you up.

8. Get comfy. Make your space as dark and warm and quiet as possible. Use earplugs and a face mask if you have to, and wrap up in a blanket or jacket if you are at all cold.

9. Know your zeitgebers. This is the most highly personalized part of power napping, and probably the most important. Figure out what helps you relax -- a certain kind of music, a certain ritual or smell, a certain memory -- and put it to use.

10. Sleep, but don't dream. This means avoiding awakening during REM (for rapid eye movement) sleep, because it will take you longer to become alert again. To avoid this, nap for either 15 to 30 minutes or for two to three hours. But if you can't sleep, remember . . .

11. Don't watch the clock. Get up and do something mind-numbing, like reading a technical manual. Try again later or the next day. -- D.P.

LOAD-DATE: November 19, 2000

don't forget the chaos

erik riker-coleman