by Ward Carroll
Punk looked over at the Pats, comfortably seated and perturbed the video wasn’t playing yet. “What did you guys tell the skipper?”
“The skipper has standing orders with his intelligence support to let him know of any items of interest,” Holly said. “What we told him is privileged information.”
Punk could stand the attitude no longer. “Look, you two. You’re not spies; you’re information managers.” He pointed at himself, and then swept his arm around the room. “We’re your customers, the war fighters, remember? We have good reason to know what the skipper knew. Otherwise you two come off as a couple of opportunists.”
“VF-104 only has one commanding officer,” Steven counseled.
“You mean only one guy who signs your fitness reports,” Punk said.
Holly moved to the VCR and yanked the tape out of the player. “I knew this was a bad idea. Let’s get out of here.” With that, the two of them briskly marched toward the door.
“Hey, before you leave mad, let me tell you the truth,” Biff offered, stopping both of them dead in their tracks. “The skipper—your idol—screwed up.”
“Yeah, but don’t say that outside of this room,” Punk added. “You might be charged with sedition.”
The Pats both stammered a couple of incoherencies through clenched teeth in response and then exited the Cheesequarters with a slam of the door.
“Man, I’ll bet you guys used to pick on kids getting off the short bus, too,” Trash said as he moved to retrieve the mini basketball hoop jarred off the back of the door by the Pats’ exit.
“Yeah, real nice, you two,” Fuzzy added. “We were so close to having the gouge.”
Paul casually reached into the right leg pocket of his flight suit and produced a tape of his own. “Copies don’t compare to the original,” he said as he threw the tape into the machine. “Shall we continue?” The gathering gave him a polite golf clap for his forethought, risk-taking, and verve.
“Again, the skipper and I manned the alert,” Paul continued with growing confidence. “I think intel told the CO we had activity out of Bushehr significant enough to trigger the tripwire of us launching. They didn’t know it was an F-4, but they knew it was a military aircraft.
“So when we launched, we thought we’d be given a hot vector right off the cat, but we weren’t, and that started to piss the skipper off a bit.” Paul turned toward the VCR and started the tape. “I started the mission recorder with our first bit of bogey dope from the E-2, and I think tape speaks for itself.”
The video rolled and the crowd leaned forward and watched intently, listening to the calls and trying to figure the geometry of the encounter.
“Hold it,” Biff said quizzically. “The first call has the contact due south of you and the second call has him 190? That’s already between you and the carrier. There’s no way you’re going to make that intercept.”
“What radar mode were you in?” Trash asked.
“I started in Track-While-Scan, but once I realized we were looking at him in the beam, I switched to Pulse Search,” Paul said.
“So, you’re looking down in Pulse Search from fifteen thousand feet at a bogey at two hundred feet and in the beam?” Trash continued. “That’s a tough problem for any RIO.” All nodded in agreement as the tape continued.
The gasps at the Iranian missile shot were similar to those noises Paul had heard in Flag Briefing and Analysis, then not another word was said until the tape was over. Unlike the chief of staff, those proficient in the art of reading HUD symbology knew instantly why the F-4 had managed to escape. No words needed to be spoken, and no review was required. A few seconds of silence was broken when Punk asked, “Was that really, ‘No goddam shit, Einstein’?”
“That’s what I heard,” Biff said. The roommates looked at each other, and then, all apparently thinking the same thing, at Paul.
“Gentlemen,” Punk said, “we have a call sign.” He rose and grasped the new RIO on each shoulder and directed him to take a knee at the center of the group. Punk stiffened his right arm, and, as with a sword, tapped Paul alternately on each shoulder, while Monk chanted, “Bless this knight, your servant, from now on known as ‘Einstein.’”
“Einstein, huh?” Einstein muttered as he stood up.
“You don’t like it?” Trash asked. “That’s good.”
“Yeah,” Fuzzy followed, “if you liked it, we’d have to give you another one.”
They formed an impromptu reception line, seven men long; and each roommate passed and shook Einstein’s hand in official welcome. Then the circle was reformed.
“So what’s the big deal with the tape?” Biff asked as he retook his seat. “So the skipper had a switchology problem in the heat of battle. So he’s human. Is that why I went through so much pain with the schedule rewrite? Is that why we had the AOM?”
“It seems that way, doesn’t it?” Fuzzy replied. “And the five-hundred-hour thing kind of left me with the feeling that Paul, er, Einstein, was the one who gooned it. This wasn’t a new-guy thing at all. From what I could see on the tape, it seems like he did the best he could have given the shit sandwich he was handed.”
“I’ll tell you what this is about,” Biff said. “This is about the difference between theory and reality.” He leaned forward in his chair toward the center of the group as he continued. “Think about it. The skipper made a lot of professional money, if you will, at air shows with the Blues and in the schoolhouses of Topgun. Neither of those really involves the man in the arena.”
“Hold it,” Punk interjected. “Are you telling me that the flying the Blue Angels do is easy stuff?”
“No,” Biff returned. “I’m telling you they practice those moves for three months straight at El Centro before they ever perform at an air show. The skills he drew on as opposing solo for the Blue Angels are not the same skills that a pilot needs in combat. He got the Blues gig because he looked good in a flight suit, was a smooth stick and a good formation flyer, not because he was a killing machine.”
“So being a Blue Angel doesn’t involve any amount of stress?”
“What are you, a Blue Angels groupie? You’re missing my point, Punk. There is nothing spontaneous about a Blue Angels air show.”
“And combat is all spontaneous?”
“More than a bunch of canned moves are spontaneous, yes. I’m not saying I couldn’t make the same mistake. Hopefully, I wouldn’t. I’m saying I don’t represent myself to be better than anybody else.”
“So you’re not a better pilot than, say, Fuzzy?”
“I didn’t say I wasn’t better, I just said I didn’t represent myself to be better.”
“Do you really think you’re a better pilot than I am?” Fuzzy asked.
“I don’t think I’m better, Fuzzy,” Biff said. “I am better. There’s a big difference.”
Following the few seconds Fuzzy wrestled with the semantics of Biff’s retort, he asked, “Why am I always the victim in here? Whatever we talk about, I always wind up taking the hit.”
“Stop complaining,” Biff commanded. “You get your hits the old-fashioned way: you earn them.”
“This whole thing is one of those things you never know,” Trash threw out philosophically. “You never know how you’ll react until you’re faced with the situation. Talk is cheap.”
“That’s what I’m saying,” Biff agreed. “So are we allowed to learn from the skipper’s mistake? Hell, no. There’s no learning going on. He’s too busy covering his ass with all the shingles on his wall to let us know how we might avoid this sort of thing in the future. That’s leadership?”
“He’s just embarrassed,” Punk said.
“You’re really turning into a careerist, Punk,” Biff said sharply, squaring off with his roommate.
“I’m not even sure what that means, but I’ll deny that I am one,” Punk said, quickly defusing the tension Biff had sought to explode.
“The bar lives here,” Biff said, running his meaty hands
along an imaginary ledge slightly above the level of his head. “It doesn’t live with the personalities of those in charge.”
“So you have an authority complex,” Punk observed. “I’d rather be a careerist.”
“Does it not bug anybody else here that the Iranian got away a couple of hours ago without so much as a mild scare?” Biff asked. “So he goes back to home base and tells his buddies, ‘Hey, I flew right over those guys and nothing happened to me at all. I think the whole thing’s a bluff.’ So little by little, the Arab world starts to get enough confidence to ignore our presence in the region. And then where are we?”
“Here, I guess,” Punk answered.
“No, we’re not here,” Biff retorted. “Here is a place where Iranians and Iraqis run scared when we launch.” He pointed to the other end of the room. “There is a place where they figure out we can’t back up our words, or at least not for very long. Look what happened to the Marines in Beirut. They study us. They probe our defenses, looking for a weakness, and then—wham—Pearl fucking Harbor.
“It’s about readiness, gentlemen,” Biff announced with finality. “Today one of us wasn’t ready. That’s serious, and we all need to assess where we are in terms of readiness. But, hey, we’re not even allowed to talk about it.”
The circle sat in silence for a few seconds pondering Biff’s truth until Punk declared, “That does it. I’m quitting.”
“Yes, you are, and so are many like you,” Biff said, rising out of his chair and picking up a pace around the room, his pink face growing a deeper shade as he spoke. “The Navy wonders, or appears to wonder, why retention is so bad, and why morale is so low. They blame the Tailhook scandal, they blame MTV, and they blame video games. ‘We don’t understand these young officers,’ they say.” He motioned toward the general direction of the ready room. “Look no further. There’s the problem. In fact, I’m going to document this whole series of events on my web site.”
“Biffsroom.com?” Punk asked. “That’ll certainly guarantee nobody sees them.”
“Not true,” Biff defended. “I’ve had hits. I have had hits.”
Silence followed as Biff’s vitriol was eclipsed by a sense that they needed some down time. Today was going to be a long one. As the circle began to disband, Einstein came out of the shadows of the conversation and said, “I feel much better. Do we talk like this a lot in here?”
“Only when required,” Punk said as he got himself ready for as much sleep as he could get before his first brief, “or when Biff needs to vent.”
“This was awesome. I’ll be a fleet guy in no time, huh?” With that he moved to the left sink, ran some water, and splashed it on his sweat-streaked face.
FOUR
Life itself passed through Punk for the third time that day, right through his stomach. That was how he’d come to describe a catapult shot: life passing through him, perpendicular to his spine. All the “accelerated roller coaster” and “car crash and orgasm mixed into one” analogies did not do the feeling justice. For two seconds he was along for the ride, no more in control of the jet than Spud in the backseat, as flesh and steel were joined in the short trip to flying speed.
He tried to anticipate the shot by watching the cat officer, or his flashlight, but that first compression of the nose strut always seemed to happen when Punk least expected it. And then all he could do was gasp, lock his left arm so the throttles didn’t creep from the military power stops, attempt to set the jet’s correct 10-degree attitude once airborne, and hang on until all the parts caught up to one another several hundred yards in front of the carrier and several hundred feet above the water.
His faith was in the gauges and video screens before him; there was no other reference available on moonless nights like the one into which they’d just been thrown. The altimeter started to wind upward, confirming the jet was in a climb, and after a one potato, two potato, Punk was reasonably sure they’d survived another takeoff. He gathered his thoughts enough to reach for and raise the gear handle as he programmed the stick slightly aft and increased their rate of ascent.
“One-zero-three’s airborne,” Spud reported on Departure.
“Roger, one-zero-three aaaiiirrr borne,” a voice sang back cheerily.
Hurtling into the darkness, Punk found the perky tenor of the Departure controller irritating. He pictured the controller hunkered over his coffee mug, seated in a comfortable chair, occasionally taking a break from his scope to comment to the controller next to him how flying wasn’t that hard and he could’ve done it but he just didn’t want to.
After several minutes in a climb, Punk eased the nose back to the horizon at twenty thousand feet and banked the Tomcat in the direction of Waypoint 1 on his tactical display, a repeat of Spud’s primary scope in the back seat. The efficiency and maturity of their pairing were evident in the silence as the airplane was groomed to fighting trim. The navigation plan, missile selection, radar modes and range scales, and multi-radio frequency selection all happened tacitly.
Spud switched his radio from Departure to Strike and checked in. They touched their station and Punk picked up an arc, similar to the one that the skipper had scribed nineteen hours earlier and dozens of crews from VF-104 had scribed throughout the day, and waited for Fuzzy and Turtle to join up. Punk looked around the blackness that was punctuated only by the red flashing lights of American aircraft, and tried to pick up the ones that might be rendezvousing with him.
“It’s quiet out here,” Spud said, the first words passing between them since they performed the takeoff checklist on the flight deck.
“What do you want?” Punk responded. “It’s one in the morning.”
“I want some action,” Spud said.
“You’ve come to the wrong place, my friend,” Punk said. “There’s nothing but anti-action here.”
Their radar warning receiver blinked and hummed with an air-to-air indication, signaling that Fuzzy was most likely in the final phase of his rendezvous. Punk looked out to his nine o’clock and picked up a couple of red and green glows closing on them.
“Is that you, Fuzz?” Punk asked over the front cockpit radio, dialed into the squadron’s discrete tactical frequency.
“That’s a roger, Big Daddy. I think I finally have this night rendezvous stuff down.”
“At least somebody’s getting something out of being out here,” Punk said. “Position yourself wherever you want. Just don’t hit us.”
Punk did his best not to overfly Kharg Island, and Spud played the part of the diligent radar intercept officer, painting the skies over Bushehr and the rest of northwestern Iran. He stared intently at the radar display, willing out of sheer boredom the appearance of a contact. But, like all who’d plied the skies that day, he came up empty. The Great Iranian War had come and gone with a hundred and two shots fired (including all the bullets), no casualties, and in most forward-deployed minds, no closure.
The quiet continued and Punk’s mind wandered back to the e-mail he’d downloaded before the skipper walked in for the AOM. The message was only two lines long, and the salutation was strange: “Yikes, Jordan.”
Yikes? What happened to “I love you” and other such sentiments? Yikes? What the hell did that mean? He didn’t like the pattern emerging before him. What people did with their time was a matter of priorities, and it seemed like he was headed for Jordan’s B list. Significant others didn’t normally reside on the B list. And if a love interest gets bumped down, then someone else has usually moved up, and if so, who was it? The same yearning that had kept him awake all morning burned in his gut again, but he couldn’t afford to feel that way now.
Damn, there was that attitude again. Was the fact that he flew jets the only thing he had going for him, his only emotional leverage over the rest of the nation’s suitors? Typical fighter pilot . . .
“How do you feel?” Spud asked over the intercom.
“What?” Punk asked, coming out of the robotic daze in which he’d placed himself
with his love-life musings. With their level of fatigue, the silence bathed in red cockpit lighting was perhaps a bit too conducive to excursions of the mind.
“Are you tired? I’m really starting to drag back here,” Spud said.
“Yeah, I think I’m hitting the wall,” Punk returned. “My eyes are burning. I’m having trouble focusing on anything.”
“That’s not good,” Spud said. “You’ve still gotta dig deep for one more landing, amigo.”
“We’ll be fine. One no-grade is as good as another.”
“Hey, remember our deal,” Spud retorted. “You don’t kill me; my kids don’t sue your estate.”
“My estate . . . yeah, they can split my CD collection between them.”
“So, what did the LSOs give you on the last pass?”
“A fair.”
“Well, it didn’t look like a fair pass from where I was sitting. I can’t account for gifts.”
“It wasn’t a gift. It should have been an okay. The ball never moved.”
“Exactly. The ball never moved from a cell low.”
“Whatever. I’m done caring about landing grades. They’re more subjective than a beauty pageant.”
“That’s fine as long as you stay out of the running for Miss Ramp Strike.”
Punk checked the time, looked at his fuel gauge, and then scanned the fuel matrix he’d scribbled onto his kneeboard card. The community rule-of-thumb was twelve hundred pounds of fuel burned every fifteen minutes on a lazy profile like the one they were on tonight. They should be fat.
Fuzzy was also feeling the effects of a long day. “Punk, I’m having trouble concentrating here,” he passed over the squadron’s common frequency. “I’m going to fall into trail.”
“Roger. Just stay safe. I don’t think war is going to break out in the next twenty minutes.”
Ever mindful of the tactical concerns, Spud added, “You guys will have to check your own six back there.”
“Roger that,” Fuzzy sang back sardonically, “although I agree with Punk.”