Gabby

by Gabrielle Giffords

  She looked at me and said nothing.

  I gave it another shot. “What . . .”

  “Tired,” she said. “I’m tired.”

  “I know you’re tired, Gabby, but let’s try this. Try to start a sentence with the word ‘what.’”

  She struggled to think, and I could tell she wanted to please me by responding. A minute went by. Finally, she was ready to talk.

  “What I’m tired,” she said.

  I shook my head. “Gabby, that’s not a question.”

  She cast her eyes downward. She knew she hadn’t come through the way I wanted her to, but the ability to ask a simple question was beyond her grasp.

  Sometimes, I’d think about the fact that all my adult life, I’d been a guy whose dreams were big and ambitious. I used to dream of flying fighter planes, and that dream came true. I used to dream of being the first human to walk on Mars. Though I’m still about 40 million miles away from that one, I made a good effort.

  But after Gabby’s injury, I often felt as if my dreams had become completely basic. I spent my days hoping that Gabby would be able to end a sentence with a question mark. And then at night, after I’d drift off to sleep, she would appear to me, asking about everything.

  When I look back at my life, I see certain experiences and lessons that helped prepare me to be a caregiver to Gabby. At the Merchant Marine Academy, I learned to appreciate that actions have consequences; how you respond in a situation determines the chain of events that follows. You can’t just rely on your gut. You have to think about the ramifications of every decision. After Gabby was hurt, I saw that was especially true when determining her medical treatments and therapies.

  Twenty-five years in the Navy and at NASA taught me to prioritize, to ask the question: “What’s the most important thing I should be doing right now?” Sometimes that meant making a split-second decision, and it had to be the right decision because your life depended on it. But I also embraced the mantra of NASA’s first flight director, Chris Kraft: When you don’t know what to do, don’t do anything. I kept that in mind, as I tried not to rush into decisions about Gabby. If there was time to collect facts and weigh data, I did it.

  Training for and then flying the space shuttle, I learned how to think clearly under pressure, and how to avoid making mistakes when I was incredibly tired. That’s a learned skill as well, and I’d need it in the early days after Gabby was shot, when I was functioning on just a couple hours of sleep.

  During all my years of education, training, and flying, it wouldn’t have occurred to me that I was also preparing to serve as a caregiver. But I was.

  I entered the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy after graduating from high school in 1982. My brother, Scott, meanwhile, attended the State University of New York Maritime College. Throughout our younger years, we’d both become confident and able on the water, and we were influenced by our grandfathers. Our paternal grandfather served in the Navy in the Pacific during World War II, and our mom’s dad served in the merchant marine before becoming a New York City fireboat captain. Their legacy led us to consider a career at sea.

  The Merchant Marine Academy was a demanding institution with high academic standards. When my class of 350 midshipmen gathered together for the first time, we were given that old line “Look to your left. Look to your right. One of you won’t make it to graduation.” That turned out to be true.

  I really buckled down when I was there and was near the top of my class academically. As a senior, I was named the regimental executive officer, which was the second-highest position in the military command structure among students. One of my duties was to oversee the indoctrination of the new midshipmen.

  The first year was tough for them, along the lines of boot camp. My job as executive officer was to motivate them, to let them know what was expected, to hold them to high standards. My message was this: They were capable and smart, and if they followed instructions and worked hard, we’d all succeed together. (Decades later, I’d command the space shuttle using similar motivational tactics. And I’d spend countless hours reminding Gabby that, despite her injury, she was still capable and smart, and the harder she worked, the more she’d improve.)

  What I loved best about the Merchant Marine Academy was that we were required to spend six months of our sophomore and junior years at sea aboard commercial ships. I made two trips through the North Atlantic on a container ship, carrying U.S. goods to Europe and then returning with European products for American consumers.

  Long before I saw the world from space, I saw the world from these ships, and it was a great adventure—sort of like Gabby’s forays through Mexico. I worked diligently, but I still hadn’t shaken all of my juvenile-delinquent tendencies. One day, off the coast of Egypt, our ship was tied to a Saudi Arabian merchant ship so we could unload grain onto it. Late that night, the other midshipman at sea with me said, “I dare you to sneak onto that ship and steal the Saudi Arabian flag from the mast.”

  “You’re on,” I replied. I climbed on the Saudi ship, carefully avoiding the crew member on watch on the bridge. I quietly walked behind the pilothouse and up the stairs that went to the mast. I lowered the flag, stuffed it in my shirt, and got the hell out of there as fast as I could.

  I’m lucky I wasn’t caught, arrested, and sent off to Chop Chop Square in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, where public beheadings are conducted. They also cut off hands there, a bigger concern for a flag thief like me. (I kept that flag for years as a tangible keepsake of some of the idiotic things I did when I was young.)

  On another ship, with twenty-five crew members, I made two trips through the Panama Canal to the west coast of South America. This was a six-hundred-foot-long “break-bulk” ship, which meant it carried cargo that needed to be loaded and unloaded individually, rather than in large freight containers. We’d head south with barrels of chemicals, a few cars, and someone’s grandmother’s junk in a trunk, and we’d return with a hold filled with bananas.

  I learned how business was conducted in South America, at least back in the 1980s. The bananas could have been boxed up, put on large pallets, and loaded by crane onto our ship. That would have been quick and efficient. Instead, there’d be a string of guys loading two boxes at a time by hand, and it took forever. It was a way to keep more people employed, but it was maddening to watch. My experiences on those trips also taught me to always wash bananas. There weren’t necessarily restrooms on the docks, so workers would disappear into a stack of thousands of boxes of bananas to relieve themselves.

  I had considered myself street-smart as a teen, but in South America I saw that I was still a somewhat naïve nineteen-year-old kid from New Jersey. One day, along with the other midshipman at sea with me, I went to an Italian restaurant in Miraflores, a shopping district of Lima, Peru. A riot broke out, with hundreds of people piling into the streets and throwing rocks. We had no idea what the rioting was about, but it was quite a spectacle, and so we hung around to watch.

  Eventually, a truck arrived and a bunch of military police got out the back of it. One officer stopped about twenty feet from us. He didn’t say anything. He just pointed his gun at us, ready to shoot. In the mayhem as we ran away, it sounded to us as if he had fired that gun several times and that the bullets had whizzed over our heads. Maybe he was a bad shot, or else he was trying to deliver warning shots to break up the crowd. Either way, we quickly realized the risks of being tourists at a riot, and we took off back to our ship.

  The day after graduating from the academy in 1986 with a degree in marine engineering and nautical science, I got in my car and drove from New York down to the U.S. Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida. While many of my classmates took the summer off to relax and clear their heads, I started training in Pensacola the following Monday. I had become too driven a guy to sit around and lose time. I had decided I wanted to fly, and I didn’t want to wait.

  During my training, however, I quickly found out that I wasn’t a particularly good pilot
. Boy, did I struggle. I failed a couple of check rides with instructors, and barely reached the point where I was considered safe enough to make an attempt on an aircraft carrier. When the Navy sends you out to the ship for the first time, there isn’t anyone crazy enough to go with you. No instructor. It’s just you, by yourself, with whatever skills you have accumulated from countless hours of practice.

  So in July 1987, I flew out to the USS Lexington by myself. It was cruising in the Atlantic, and I was instructed to do two touch-and-go landings and four arrested landings. In arrested landings, you put down an extended hook attached to your plane’s tail, and you’re stopped by a long cable strung across the back of the ship. Then you taxi to the bow and are catapulted off to go around for another landing. After returning to shore you get debriefed by the instructor, who has been watching you from the deck. In my case, I’d been pretty awful. I barely passed.

  I discovered during training that we all don’t learn at the same rate. The student pilots who were great on their first aircraft carrier landings didn’t necessarily go on to be astronauts. How well you perform when you start trying something difficult is not a good indicator of how good you can become. Looking back, I’m a prime example of someone who was able to overcome a lack of aptitude with persistence, practice, and a drive to never give up. By working hard, I went from a bad student pilot to an OK test pilot to a pretty decent astronaut.

  In December 1987, after eighteen months training on the T-34C Mentor, the T-2B Buckeye, and the TA-4J Skyhawk, I was designated a naval aviator. I spent all of 1988 training to fly the A-6E Intruder attack aircraft, after which I was assigned to the “Eagles” of Attack Squadron 115 in Atsugi, Japan. It was from there that I’d be deployed twice to the Persian Gulf aboard the aircraft carrier USS Midway.

  Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990, and for a few months, the international community tried diplomacy and sanctions to convince Saddam Hussein to withdraw his troops. In November, our ship was sent to the Gulf, where we waited to see if the United States and a coalition of thirty-four other nations would opt for military action. On January 17, 1991, at about 3 a.m., the Persian Gulf War began with a massive aerial bombing campaign. My first flight into battle would begin much later that day, at 9 p.m. I was twenty-six years old, the same age Gabby was when she returned to her dad’s tire store.

  The A-6E was a two-man aircraft, and my bombardier/navigator was a smart, laser-focused guy named Paul Fujimura. While many of us were from the service academies or ROTC programs, Fuj was a rarity—a graduate of the very liberal University of California, Berkeley. Back at his alma mater professors and students were mounting antiwar protests. And here he was with me, planning to fly into Iraq carrying twelve thousand-pound bombs.

  Fuj was steady. I felt I was a bit more nervous. I kept thinking, Well, this is the real deal.

  We flew north toward our target, an airplane maintenance hangar at the Shaibah military airfield, southwest of Basra. I wasn’t thinking about how many Iraqi soldiers or civilians might have been in that hangar late that evening. I wasn’t thinking of the politics of the war. I’d just spent five years training for one purpose: to drop bombs on a target when my country asked. Now I was going to try my best to do just that.

  As we got to within fifteen miles of the target, I looked over my left shoulder and saw a white dot snaking through the sky and coming directly at us. It was a Russian surface-to-air missile fired by Iraqi forces.

  Earlier, I had turned down the volume on our plane’s antimissile countermeasure system because another U.S. plane had been tracking us with its radar, and the resulting noise had been a distraction. I had forgotten to turn the volume back up, so I never heard the warning about the missile.

  But now the thing had my attention. “Fuj,” I said, “there’s a missile coming at us.”

  “Roger,” he replied. “Tracking the target.”

  The missile got closer. “Fuj, this isn’t good,” I said. Again he told me, “Tracking the target.”

  “Fuj, I’m going to have to do a last-ditch maneuver to beat this thing!”

  His job was to run the weapons systems and track the target. So that’s what he did. “Roger, tracking the . . .”

  OK, I heard him!

  I’m sure my heart rate shot up. In addition to high explosives, this kind of missile had an expanding rod, which is a circular wire-cutting device designed to slice through an airplane and its crew.

  We hadn’t practiced for this. You can practice dropping bombs, flying low in formation, dealing with bad weather in mountains. But there’s no good way to prepare for a real surface-to-air missile.

  We were at about 15,000 feet, and I rolled inverted, added full power, and planted the stick in my lap, trying to confuse the missile into avoiding us. It worked. The missile missed us and exploded above our aircraft. I saw the flash as it detonated, but fortunately, as I scanned the engine instruments, I could see that it hadn’t done any damage.

  I was relieved, of course, but now we had a job to do. We had to drop those bombs. Fuj remained focused, never taking his head out of the radar boot.

  Just then, damn it, I spotted another missile. Having survived a near miss with a Russian SA-6 surface-to-air missile, there could be no worse feeling than to see a second one coming your way.

  I did the same last-ditch maneuver that worked earlier, and the missile missed us. I was pleased. Having learned from my encounter with the first missile, I avoided the second one more easily. It was on-the-job training. As Fuj and I encountered this fusillade, another A-6 in our strike group jettisoned his bombs and high-tailed it home. He’d seen the missiles guiding on and detonating near us, and he wanted no part of it.

  We were able to get the nose of the plane climbing again, so we could get back to the right altitude to roll into our 30-degree dive and drop our bombs. If Fuj hadn’t been so focused through those two missile attacks, we’d never have been able to hit the target.

  When we came through the clouds, with our target ahead of us, it was a sobering sight. It looked as if all of Iraq was on fire, and we were about to add to the chaos. At 6,000 feet, I pulled the trigger, directing the computer to release the bombs. The airplane hangar was destroyed.

  Now we had to get back safely to the USS Midway out in the Gulf. Our planned egress route was the same as the route we took to the target, but there was no way I was going to fly back through the area where the Iraqis were launching those missiles. So I flew as far east as possible, forty or fifty miles into Iran, before making a right turn to head south, where the aircraft carrier was waiting.

  That’s when I heard on the radio that an enemy airplane had been spotted by U.S. forces, and they were preparing to shoot it down. When they gave the aircraft’s altitude and airspeed, I noticed, Hey, that’s my altitude and airspeed. That’s when I realized: Because Fuj and I were speeding toward the Persian Gulf from Iranian airspace, they thought we were an enemy fighter. They were getting ready to shoot us down.

  Nearly getting shot by the enemy is one thing, but being blown out of the sky by your buddies is a recipe for a bad night. Iraqi missiles I could deal with. Air-to-air missiles from a U.S. Navy F-18 Hornet or F-14 Tomcat would present a much more difficult challenge. Once they got their missiles in the air, Fuj and I would certainly be dead.

  “FUCK!” I said to Fuj as I realized how badly we had screwed up by not letting our guys know that we had sneaked into Iran. Two decades later, I can’t recall exactly what I said on the radio at that moment, but it was immediate, loud, and conveyed this message to everyone listening: “Please don’t shoot down the morons in Iranian airspace!”

  After my radio transmission was acknowledged, we slowed down and took a deep breath. “It’s not a good idea to fly out of Iran looking like an enemy aircraft to coalition forces,” I told Fuj, stating the obvious. He agreed. We quietly flew back to the ship and landed without incident.

  I didn’t find it easy to fall asleep knowing I was almost killed thre
e times that night.

  It was the first combat mission of my life. I’d fly thirty-eight more before the war ended six weeks later.

  Some missions are a blur. Others, like the one on January 30, 1991, remain clear in my head. On that day, Fuj and I spotted two ships motoring together toward Iran. They appeared to be Russian-made Polnocny amphibious personnel carriers. Were they carrying Iraqi troops? We had to make certain.

  From 5,000 feet I could see that one of the ships was flying a flag. I dropped to just a hundred feet above the water, and got out a picture guidebook I had of the flags of every nation. Middle Eastern countries have flags that look strikingly similar. It can be maddening to figure out which is which. Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Syria, United Arab Emirates—they’ve all got blocks or stripes of red, white, and green.

  I flew right alongside the ship, from stern to bow, as fast as the A-6 would go, and held up my picture of the Iraqi flag to compare it to the flag on the mast. “Yep,” I said to Fuj, “it’s an Iraqi ship.” In hindsight it was very risky to fly so close to that ship, giving its troops such a clear shot. But we were young and felt somewhat invincible after a couple weeks of combat.

  We flew higher and radioed what we’d seen back to the Midway. Minutes later, we got clearance to sink both ships. We rolled into a 10-degree dive and let loose a thousand-pound, laser-guided bomb. Unfortunately, it missed the ship. These things don’t always go as planned. The bomb pierced through the water a couple hundred feet away. It was the first time we had missed in fifteen combat missions and neither of us was happy about it.

  The Iraqis weren’t happy either. They began shooting at us with the antiaircraft artillery gun mounted at the center of the ship. We pulled up and jinked a few times to maneuver and avoid the enemy fire. Fuj quickly reconfigured our weapons system so I could deliver the two cluster bombs that remained by visually aiming for the target. I pulled hard on the stick to keep the A-6 turning, trying to make the shot more difficult for the Iraqi gunner. Then, as one of our more colorful squadron mates liked to say, “Now we’re on government time.” (By that he meant: We are serving our country, and whatever happens, happens.) That was the crappy part of these bombing runs, where we had to stay pointed at the target, get to the correct release conditions, and hope that those bullets coming at us just plain missed.