Punk's War

by Ward Carroll

  But even with his unlimited supply of idealistic, bright-eyed can-do, Paul had to admit to himself that the skipper’s irascibility had started to mute the overall level of excitement. Why did he get so angry? Is it something I’m doing, the young RIO wondered, or is he always hair-trigger in the jet? Paul had already proudly e-mailed his dad to let him know he was crewed with the CO, in theory a coveted role for any backseater, not to mention a brand-new guy. Paul had only known success in his short life and wanted to make the pairing work. If the task required enduring some abuse then he’d just have to muster up a thicker skin. He was sure that in time the skipper would see how good he was.

  He focused on the tactical display before him and crosschecked their position with the jet’s inertial navigational system and the hand-held GPS strapped to his left thigh. Nav was tight. He’d deftly used the limited number of waypoints available in the F-14’s mission computer and oriented the display to a god’s-eye view that he hoped would keep the skipper happy in spite of their precarious station.

  “How’s the nav?” Commander Campbell asked. “The admiral will rip my face off if we fly somewhere we’re not supposed to, and if he rips my face off then I’ll rip yours off.”

  “No, we’re fine, skipper,” Paul replied with feelings mixed between pride for anticipating his pilot’s immediate concern and frustration because he had absorbed another draconian barb.

  Too much time had passed. The skipper began to think the Pats had given him a bum scoop with their “possible tripwire player” leak, and that this flight was going to turn out to be another in a series of dull flights he had endured during this cruise. The operations officer is going to pay for this, he thought, ignoring the fact he wasn’t actually scheduled for the alert. I’ve got too much going on to waste time up here doing nothing.

  “Are we having fun yet?” the skipper thought out loud, interrupting an all-source silence that had lasted at least five minutes.

  “I’m just happy to be here, skipper,” Paul returned enthusiastically. A nice word? Dare he call it a breakthrough in crew relations?

  The harmony was short-lived. The AEGIS cruiser’s enlisted controller jumped on Strike with, “Hawkeye, are you going to do something about that track?”

  “I’ve got it,” the E-2 controller said. “Slinger 102, snap 180.”

  In the back end of the Hawkeye, the controller had been monitoring this particular track for almost twenty minutes, a track that had been the only activity in the E-2’s three-hour flight so far. The track had started from Bushehr and worked its way east over a mountain range and into Iranian exercise airspace. It had flown in circles for a while and was now headed back to the west . . . and quickly. Whereas most of the tracks the E-2 crews had observed turned north as soon as they hit the water, well inside the territorial limit, this one kept going west at more than five hundred knots. This ain’t good, the controller thought. At this rate he’ll be over the Boat in a few minutes.

  “One-zero-two copies the vector,” the skipper said. “Say weapons’ status.”

  “Red One,” another voice answered on Strike. The skipper recognized the midwestern nasal twang as the admiral’s. Obviously this track had grabbed the battle watch captain’s interest, to such a degree that he’d quickly brought the boss into the loop. The admiral, a ship driver by trade, didn’t want anybody lobbing missiles yet. He had stated during the battle group’s preparation phase that his greatest concern was trigger-happy U.S. Navy fighter pilots starting wars.

  “What do you think, skipper? Commair?” Paul found it impossible to suppress the excitement in his voice. They were actually going to intercept something. Even an airliner would be something to e-mail home about.

  “I dunno, goddam it,” the skipper replied. “We’re not going to see anything if you don’t get a radar contact.” The CO keyed the radio. “Bogey dope for 102.”

  “One-nine-zero now for twenty-five miles,” the controller responded. One-nine-zero? He’s already behind us.

  “Say bogey’s angels,” the skipper demanded, trying to figure out where to direct Paul to point the radar antenna.

  “Negative altitude readout, Slinger,” the controller replied. “Estimate angels medium.”

  Angels medium? Paul ciphered as he ratcheted the antenna up and down, desperately trying to get radar contact with anything at all. That could be any altitude between ten thousand and twenty-five thousand feet . . .

  The scripted warning came over the military distress frequency, generated by the back-up controller on the cruiser: “Unknown aircraft, unknown aircraft, you are steering toward United States naval forces conducting routine training. Alter your course to the east or you will be subject to defensive measures.”

  “Alpha Whiskey’s showing angels low,” the AEGIS cruiser’s tactical action officer (TAO) interjected onto Strike. “Look two-zero-zero, twenty miles, two hundred feet.” Although the AEGIS cruiser was thirty miles north of the aircraft carrier in the battle group’s “shotgun” position, the ship’s phased array radar system and digital tactical information processing gave it an impressive look at the air picture over the entire northern half of the Gulf.

  “Alpha Whiskey, what are you showing for his IFF?” the admiral asked.

  “Non-squawker, sir. No ID at all,” the TAO replied. “Alpha Whiskey can take with birds, if required.”

  “Sit on your hands, damn it,” the admiral sharply directed toward all, but mostly at the overly aggressive initiative demonstrated by the cruiser’s TAO. Airliners sometimes had faulty transponders, and the battle group commander was in no hurry to have another accidental shoot down of innocent civilians splashed all over the world’s airwaves. All we need is for the AEGIS to go robo-cruiser on us, he thought.

  The admiral assessed their options. The Hornet was too far to the North. “Slinger, can you make the ID?”

  “Need bogey dope, sir,” the skipper answered, his voice showing increasing irritation over their invisible opponent. It was now personally and professionally embarrassing, and Soup hated being embarrassed more than anything else. “Paul,” he pleaded with his last bit of civility, “we need to find this guy on the radar . . . please. I’m saying ‘please’ and I never say ‘please’ in the jet.”

  “Skipper . . . I’m . . .” Paul fished for the contact while performing a full suite of mental gymnastics. He mashed the radar mode buttons before him and switched from the Doppler mode he’d been using to pulse search. Contact! “There he is. Two-four-zero for thirteen miles.” He looked at the range and bearing to the Boat. “He’s flying right over the carrier!”

  “Alpha Bravo, we have radar contact,” the skipper said on Strike. “Show him over your posit at this time.”

  “Yeah, thanks a lot,” the admiral replied dryly “We just made the ID using the PLAT camera.” The faint roar of a jet flying by could be heard in the background of the transmission as the admiral spoke.

  “What kind of airplane was it?” the cruiser’s TAO thought to ask.

  The admiral keyed the radio before he was prepared to answer and the flurry of surface warfare officers trying to identify the aircraft in question could be heard by all monitoring Strike.

  “What was it . . . no, no, the jet . . . the one that just flew over . . . no, it’s not one of ours. What kind was it? That jet on the TV there . . . I need to know what kind it is . . . an F-4 . . . an Iranian F-4 . . .”

  The warning was given again by the cruiser: “Unknown aircraft, unknown aircraft, you are steering toward United States naval forces conducting routine training. Alter your course to the east or you will be subject to defensive measures.”

  Things didn’t get much worse in the world of fleet defense. A fox was loose in the hen house and the farmer was looking at his dog wondering how it had happened. Soup ran both throttles against their forward limits and resolved to get close enough to the Iranian jet to snap photos in which the Pats could count the whiskers in the pilot’s mustache, or to flame out tryin
g.

  “Don’t lose the lock or you’re dead meat,” the skipper said to Paul.

  “Show your bogey north for ten miles, angels low, estimating one hundred feet,” the E-2 added.

  “Oh, now the clairvoyance,” the skipper muttered over the intercom, more thinking out loud than talking to his RIO. He keyed Strike: “Cease chatter. We’ve got him on radar.” All controllers could kiss his ass about now.

  Paul noted the range to and closure on the contact: Eight miles away and 100 knots of overtake. He switched his display, from the puzzle of lines and digits that was the tactical presentation to the view of the television camera set under the nose of the Tomcat, and watched an object pass through the picture as the system worked to obtain a contrast lock. Paul looked to the left console to verify that he had the mission recorder working and the television camera slaved along the axis of the Tomcat’s radar lock. As he looked back at the display a second later, the distinctive shape of the F-4 Phantom appeared. It appeared that the Iranian was in a turn, although the view through the TV was sometimes deceptive in terms of actual angular difference between the Tomcat and another aircraft.

  “Is he turning?” Paul asked the skipper.

  Vanity prevented him from ever admitting it, but his aging-fighter-pilot eyes weren’t what they used to be. “I can’t really tell,” the skipper said.

  Paul continued to watch the television view. “He looks to be nose-on now, heading right for us,” he reported. The young RIO stared at the screen with the calm curiosity of disbelief as a cloud formed under the opposing jet and an object fell away from it.

  “He shot at us!” the skipper screamed on Strike. He wrapped the Tomcat into a hard right turn in an attempt to avoid the Iranian missile. The CO repeatedly depressed the expendable button on the stick, which rifled a series of flares and chaff bundles out of the underside of the F-14 in an effort to decoy the incoming weapon. He continued the turn, pulling for all the G his airspeed would allow.

  Before the G forces had surprised him and pinned his head to his knees, Paul had looked out the right side and noticed they were right over the Boat. Now all he could do was study his thighs at close range. He accidentally keyed the radio and transmitted to the fleet a loud gag followed by a series of grunts as he fought to sit upright once again.

  The noise of human suffering caused the admiral to look around at the officers gathered in his command center and ask, “What the hell was that?”

  “E-2 is showing merged plot,” the controller offered matter-of-factly, but the skipper was now ahead of the rest of the battle group. Although he had watched the Iranian missile fall harmlessly below them, Commander Campbell still had the Tomcat in a right-hand turn. He realized he had turned too far. He had almost solved the Iranian pilot’s problem and rolled-out in front of the F-4. The skipper reversed back into his opponent, reefing his jet into a left-hand turn. The momentary return to one-G flight during the reversal allowed Paul to sit up and brace against the next onset of gravity-plus.

  “One-zero-two, what is going on?” The crew was far too busy to answer the admiral’s query. The Phantom shot by them 180 degrees out in a nose-low, left-hand turn.

  “Let’s blow the tanks,” the skipper said over the intercom. Paul felt two distinctive thumps as he flipped the proper jettison switches in his cockpit and the skipper did the same.

  Reduce the drag, Paul thought. Good call.

  “I own you now, Abdul,” the skipper declared over Strike with an eye to the Classic Quote. Years of personal sacrifice and administrative gamesmanship and finally his name would be where it belonged: among those of the great air warriors. Rickenbacher, Bong, Olds, Cunningham, and Campbell.

  The skipper’s excitement and desire for the kill caused him to bleed airspeed during the last two hundred degrees of the turn. As they rolled out of their series of hard turns, the Iranian was headed east toward home in full afterburner, and the skipper noted the two bright orange circles going away from them.

  “What’s the range?” the skipper asked Paul.

  “Two miles, two hundred knots, opening.” Opening? The skipper looked at his airspeed indicator. Two hundred knots. Damn. In spite of forty-four thousand pounds of thrust pushing out of the back of the jet, he’d ham-fisted the turns and bled off too much energy. Now they couldn’t use the Sparrow or Phoenix missiles. Those weapons needed closure and lots of it.

  “One time, babe! One time!” the skipper shouted through his oxygen mask without keying the intercom. He was a raging madman now, not at all the cold, steely-eyed killer. He jammed the toggle switch on the stick down in an attempt to switch from Sparrow to Sidewinder and pulled the trigger.

  The bbwwwwwooooopppp of the gun mocked them like laughter from the streets of Tehran and the hundred rounds of 20-millimeter ammunition fell about two miles short of their intended target and into the Gulf. In his near-hysteria the skipper had overshot the Sidewinder detent and selected Guns.

  “I think he’s too far away for guns, skipper,” Paul suggested.

  “No goddam shit, Einstein!” the skipper screamed in return. After overshooting the Sidewinder selection one more time going the other way, he finally zeroed in on it. He fired, but it was too late. The Phantom had used the time to get out of the Tomcat’s range for good, and in a matter of minutes the Iranian crew would be safely on deck at Bushehr enjoying lamb’s meat shavings on pita and flat cola. The Sidewinder followed the bullets into the sea.

  “One-zero-two, I ask again . . . what is going on?”

  “Unknown aircraft, unknown aircraft, you are steering toward United States naval forces conducting routine training. Alter your course to the east or you will be subject to defensive measures . . .”

  TWO

  The personal call sign: a fighter aviator’s nom de guerre. Often painful or embarrassing, sometimes flashy or predictable, the nickname not only served a tactical function during communications between jets, it frequently acted as a guide to human frailty in olive drab packaging or served as the title to an anecdote.

  Within the world of call signs there existed an unspoken hierarchy. At the bottom were aviators without one. Some were never given call signs simply because their existence was too neutral to earn them. Bill Thompson was in this group. Several names had been thrown at him during his also-ran days in VF-104, but neither B.T. nor Butter nor T-Dog nor B-Man stuck for the length of time it took to get a nametag made. He remained just plain Bill over the long haul, which was as strong a statement to insiders as the most colorful call sign. “Bill” spoke of an aviator who’d found the squadron’s collective blind spot and stayed there—without the flair and popularity of the charismatic, the faculties of the well-timed, good-natured buffoons, or the talent of the naturally blessed—and of a man who’d also avoided dubious and spiteful appellations reserved for the infamous among them: the Snakes and the Darths. A Bill, whether or not actually average, was guilty of exuding the dull, ineffectual resonance of average, and that, in some sense, was a greater crime than being a flaming asshole. The punishment awarded was the scarlet letter of a real name.

  Just above the Bills were aviators whose call signs were formed by mindlessly placing a y at the end of their last names, like Jonesy and Smitty. At the same level were the what-else-are-you-gonna-call-’em guys like Soup Campbell, Mac McManus, Pink Floyd and Taco Bell.

  All hosannas were reserved for those who practiced the art of commission, those iconoclasts who brightly forged a path through the jungle of the mundane and across the tundra of textbook etiquette, who reached out for what they knew in their hearts to be rightfully theirs: the call sign earned by a quirk, a habit pattern or a single stupid, perhaps compromising, and most likely embarrassing act—the call sign that begged the tale, that demanded the answer to “why?”—a call sign like Punk.

  Punk had dutifully served the Arrowslingers for a few weeks under the name of Rick Reichert, the same name that he’d used for the first twenty-five years of his life. One fate
ful night during his first deployment, as the Boat transited across the Atlantic toward the Med, hours after taps had been called over the 1MC by the bosun’s mate of the watch, the junior aviators worked to deaden the initial sting of family separation and the ennui of six straight no-fly days. The mouthwash bottles circulated, the movies rolled on the VCR, and the stereo volume rose to keep pace with the din of animated chatter among the eight officers who would call the stateroom home for the next six months. At some point, the door to the room opened and a silver-haired figure with gold-framed aviator glasses peered in. He stood there for a time, unnoticed by the denizens within.

  Ignorance turned to curiosity followed by recognition. Somebody screamed, “Attention on deck!” In one fluid motion, Punk rose to his feet, reached above his locker and shut the CD player off. The Boat’s captain acknowledged the demonstration with a wave of his hand as he took a half step into the stateroom without relinquishing his grip on the life ring that was the doorknob.

  “What the hell are you listening to?” the captain asked, eyes working the room in strokes of either disgust because of the mess or nostalgia because of the apparent bonding in progress. “Is that some of that new punk rock?” He chuckled at his own quip and followed with, “Anybody in here got their hair parted down the middle?”—a dated reference to the seventies-coined adage that certain hairstyles were synonymous with illicit drug use.

  “It’s actually the Beatles, sir,” Punk replied with a hint of sarcasm to the captain’s original question.

  The captain missed it. “Whatever. There’s nothing wrong with blowing off a little steam, gents. Let’s just keep it down, okay?” He performed a rapid-fire eight-beat roll with the fingers of his right hand on the doorframe, and then he was gone.