Joint Task Force #4: Africa

by David E. Meadows

  Others had the fire drills and ditching drills, but right after becoming airborne, he always had a bailout drill. Wasn’t required for every mission, but with this young crew deployed from Rota, Spain, he wanted to make sure they knew what to do in an emergency. And he wanted to make sure that those who provided input to his performance evaluations were aware how professional he was.

  He pushed his way down the fuselage toward the cockpit, checking each and every one of the crew, including the officers. No one had ever bailed out of an EP-3E. Urban legend had it that the antennas stretching from top of the four-engine turboprop would slice you in half as you jumped out the lone entry hatch to the aircraft, but NATOPS—the acronym for Naval Air Training and Operating Procedures Standardization—said you could do it. Therefore, someone somewhere must have tried it. EP-3Es had been around longer than computers, so someone had to have actually bailed out and lived for them to put it in NATOPS. Chief Razi may question others, but if the “ by-God” United States Navy put it in writing, then “by-God” it had to be true.

  Even so, Chief Razi doubted they would ever bail out unless the aircraft was on fire, pieces were falling off of it, and it was nose-down heading toward the ground. He had these “Walter Mitty” moments where he fantasized how he saved fellow shipmates from a burning aircraft, receiving a hero’s recognition and fawning attention. He stopped in front of a sailor who was already in the middle of taking off his parachute. The man’s helmet was already off, laying on its top along one of the narrow operating shelves. It tittered back and forth to the vibration of the aircraft.

  “MacGammon, what in the hell are you doing?”

  “Chief, what the hell I am doing is taking off my parachute,” the second class petty officer snapped. Sweat-soaked hair hung down, matted across the stocky man’s forehead.

  “I can see you’re taking it off, but if I’ve told you once, I’ve told you thousands of times: Wait until I tell you to take it off before you decide you know it all and don’t need someone to check.”

  Razi waited for the smart-ass to say something. One of these days he was going to take MacGammon to Captain’s Mast and teach him that the United States Navy wasn’t the great liberal state of New Jersey.

  “How’s it going, Chief?”

  Razi glanced up. Lieutenant Commander Peeters stood there. Razi straightened, almost to full-attention stance. “Going very well, sir.” He jerked his thumb at MacGammon. “Just giving Petty Officer MacGammon some additional instruction on his rigging so he’d understand why we have these bailout drills.”

  Peeters nodded. “Keep up the good work, Chief.”

  Razi thanked the mission commander as the lieutenant commander stepped by them.

  “Hey, Chief. Peeters wasn’t wearing his parachute. . . .”

  “Shut up, MacGammon,” Razi said in a low voice. “You ain’t an officer, and the way you’re going you aren’t even going to be a petty officer.”

  “Look, Chief, I’ve got nearly three thousand hours in the EP-3E, and I’ve done more bailout drills than most of these people have time in the Navy.”

  “Just take the damn thing off, MacGammon, and quit giving me a rough time every time we do this. If you’re so damn good, then set a good example.”

  Razi stepped past MacGammon, feeling good about Peeters acknowledging his great work and feeling pissed-off because MacGammon didn’t recognize that he—Chief Petty Officer Razi—was in charge. He cleared the next two aircrewmen quickly, letting them shed the bulky gear. His eyes arched as he stepped in front of the new third class, female, officer. He reached up and jerked the center strap crossing her chest, letting the back of his hand rest for a moment on those huge, beautiful tits.

  “Good job, Petty Officer,” he said to her, taking his hand away.

  “Thanks, Chief,” she said.

  He smiled. A bubbly reply, one full of promise, he said to himself, but he wore khaki and wearing khaki meant not fooling around with the junior help. Of course, what the Navy doesn’t find out—

  “Chief, would you bail out, if you had to?” she asked.

  “Petty Officer, if they ring that bailout alarm, I’ll probably be right after you.”

  She smiled and blinked her eyelashes. “I think I might like that.”

  “Um . . . um,” he muttered, shaking his head and moving past her.

  Well, you may bail out, young lady, he thought, but no way was he going to jump out of a perfectly good aircraft, and with three-backup avionic systems, it would take a lot of damage to knock one of these aging warriors out of the sky. Ditch the plane was his mantra. Halfway down the fuselage, he did a double take.

  “Sorry, sir,” he said through clenched teeth. “The moment you jump out of the aircraft you’re going to be some thirty pounds lighter because that parachute is going to go one way while you go the other.”

  The young ensign, wide-eyed, ran his hands over his straps and buckles, trying to see what Razi saw. After several seconds, Razi reached over, “Allow me, sir,” he said, pulling the two straps running down each side of the chest. “See these, sir?”

  “Yes, Chief. They’re suppose to run down the chest like this, aren’t they?”

  “Yes, sir, they are. See this clasp here between the two straps? You’re supposed to snap them together, otherwise the wind blast from the bailout is going to whip that parachute off you like a nymphomaniac slams a man into bed. You’re not going to have time to react. You ain’t gonna have a chance to buckle that clasp once you’re out of the hatch.” He reached up, grabbed the clasps on the two straps, and buckled them. “Other than that, Ensign, your straps are tight, your lanyard’s clear, and your SV-2 is aligned. You’ll live until you get to the ground. Then, it’s up to terrain, vision, and God.”

  Razi didn’t wait for the man to comment. For most chief petty officers, ensigns were fair game. Ensigns were a blank chalkboard upon which every chief petty officer was mandated to write the rules of leadership upon them. If your junior officer screwed up, the command master chief of VQ-2 always called in the chief petty officer and chewed him or her out for allowing their junior officer to fuck up.

  He passed the aviation technicians to his left, stepped by one of the techs, who with his parachute still on, leaned under a console, probably repairing some glitch before they reached track. The radioman stood beside his console on Razi’s left, one arm spread to the right, the other shielding his eyes as he posed looking upward. “What do you think, Chief Razi? Am I going to make a good chief petty officer or what? Damn, you guys are lucky—damn lucky the board choose me for chief. You think this is the right pose for my service record?”

  “Devine, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you were an arrogant son of a bitch.”

  “Damn, Chief. You think maybe that’s why they call me ‘Little Razi?’”

  “Eat my shorts, Devine. Get that parachute off and stored properly and bring lots of money for your initiation. You’re going to need it.”

  The first class petty officer straightened, dropping his hands by his sides. His eyes narrowed. “I keep telling them, don’t call me ‘Little Razi’ because you’re not my dad and there’s not an arrogant bone in my body,” he said, then started laughing.

  “September fifteenth. That’s your day, Devine. That’s the day we’re gonna initiate you, and we ain’t in Rota, Spain. We’re deployed to Monrovia, Liberia, so there ain’t no holier-than-thou types to tell us what we do at our initiation.”

  “Ah, Chief. You guys can’t do anything I can’t take. I’ve been a chief for several years. It just took the Navy a few years to figure it out.”

  “Make sure your page two is up-to-date, asshole,” Razi said with a smile, referring to the next-of-kin notification sheet every sailor had in their personnel record. He pushed the lanky radioman slightly, nearly knocking him down. “You know what, Devine. I think you just might make a fair chief petty officer, if someone takes you under their wing and works really hard for twenty or so years.”


  “Thanks, Chief. I can’t tell you how much that means to me. Yuk yuk. Shit, Chief. I could even be like you if I gave up things such as modesty, humor, integrity.”

  “Bite me, Devine.” Razi turned and jerked the curtain back from the small cubicle where the cryptologic technician communicator, hidden from prying eyes, sat. “Okay, Johnson. You gonna sit in there and not give me a chance to see your parachute.” He motioned to the passageway. “Get your ass out here!”

  “But, Chief, I still have to raise Naples on the SATCOM,” the second class whined as he unbuckled his seat belt and slid sideways, extricating himself from the tight confines of his communications position.

  “Johnson, cut me some slack. Have you managed to get Naples on satellite communications once in the thirty days we’ve been here? Besides, Naples ain’t going to be there much longer. Some flag officer is gonna shovel them out so he can have an office.”

  Johnson grabbed the sides of the cubicle and pulled himself into the passageway. “Once, Chief. Did it the other day for a few minutes. Remember? I gave you the baseball results and you won several . . .”

  Razi glanced behind him. Devine leaned back against the radio console, smiling and making a sharpening motion with his fingers.

  “Johnson, you gotta lose some weight and learn when to keep your trap shut.” Razi touched the straps and checked the buckles as Johnson talked.

  “I think I’m going to have to go HF to reach Naples.”

  Razi stepped back. “Now, why doesn’t that surprise me? You’re fine, Johnson. You’ll live if you bail out, but I’ll be surprised if you don’t shit yourself when those straps compress that big belly. Plus, I can’t guarantee you’ll survive the landing, but it’s not the fall that kills you. It’s that sudden stop when you reach the ground.”

  “Ha, ha, Chief. That joke is as old as you are.”

  “Thanks, Johnson. Just what I like on a flight. Respect from junior petty officers. Remind me to kick your ass when I have a free second or two.”

  Johnson turned back to the cubicle. “Can I take this thing off now, Chief?” He drew back and gave Razi a light backhand slap. “And how can a sailor with fifteen years be a junior petty officer—Wait! Don’t tell me. Keep his nose clean and quit fucking up.”

  “You should have been a chief by now, Johnson.”

  “I know.”

  “If you keep your nose clean and quit trying to break the noses of everyone you meet who you don’t like, then you might even make first class petty officer before the Navy chucks you out.”

  “One thing I can count on, Chief, and that is your great disposition toward positive counseling. Now, can I?” Johnson asked, holding his hands out by his sides and glancing down at the straps.

  “Go ahead.”

  Razi looked toward the cockpit, but that wasn’t his territory. In the cockpit the pilot, copilot, and flight engineer wore their parachutes continuously. If the aircraft reached a point where they might have to hit the silk, those three would be too busy trying to keep the aircraft level so the crew could bail out to spend any time putting on their own parachutes.

  He turned and started working his way back down the fuselage toward the rear of the aircraft. Razi unzipped his upper-right-arm pocket and pulled out a pack of gum, slipping a piece into his mouth. He watched the motion of the aircrew slow as everyone watched him move aft. Their lives depended as much on how well those parachutes were packed as with how well they strapped them to their bodies. He pulled his left sleeve back and pressed the timer on his watch. Saw the time and grunted.

  “Listen up, my fine fellow sailors!” he shouted as he neared the entrance hatch to the plane. “We don’t have these drills when we take off so you can grab your flight book and notch off a bailout drill. We do it so when—or if—the time comes for you to bail out of an aircraft that has decided to land without the discretion of the pilot, you’ll do it automatically because you’ve done it so many times as a drill.” He tapped his watch. Looking aft he saw Peeters step out of the rear galley to listen. “Nearly three minutes it took to get ready. That’s unsatisfactory. We’re going to do it again during this flight and we’re going to keep doing it until we get it down to a minute and a half. A minute and a half was what we were doing while we were in Rota and a minute and a half is what we’re going to do while we’re deployed to Liberia.”

  “Ah, Chief,” MacGammon said, his head bopping and weaving as he pushed the parachute off his back. “We’ve done these drills so much we can do them in our sleep.”

  “MacGammon, if you have to bail out, you think this aircraft is going to be flying along nice and level, not on fire, and not trying to fight the force of gravity? You think that? What the hell do you think an engine fire is going to do during those three minutes? I’ll tell you since you asked. It’s going to burn into the fuel tank. Then, it’s gonna cause an explosion that rips the wing off.” He put both hands on his hips—his John Wayne pose. “You can no more put on a parachute with the aircraft spinning around and around than you can shit gold.”

  “Chief—”

  “Sailor, stow that parachute properly and quit your backtalk.”

  MacGammon shook his head.

  Chief Razi drew himself up to his full height, turning his head right and left so he could see everyone in the aisle. The officers did their bailout drills with them and while he wasn’t adverse to helping the new officers, once they reach lieutenant commander rank, they were on their own. Lieutenant commanders could be a pain in the ass; just senior enough to not think of themselves as junior officers and junior enough to still need some professional guidance that only squared-away chief petty officers such as himself, Cryptologic Technician “R” branch Wilbur “Badass” Razi, could provide. Of course, even his wife didn’t call him Wilbur. What in the hell were his parents thinking to name a badass like him Wilbur?

  “Take ’em off!” he shouted to those still wearing them. “Pack them and put them in their places. We’re going to try it again—”

  Groans filled the fuselage.

  “—later in the flight.”

  The groans subsided.

  “Sometimes Badass forgets,” Rockdale whispered to MacGammon.

  “Man, don’t let him hear you call him that. Badass will feel he has to make us do two drills instead of just one, and he’ll use you and I as examples to the officers on how good he is in straightening us out.”

  “Yeah, you know how he is,” a third aircrewman piped up as he shoved his parachute into the racks above the four lounge seats near the entry hatch to the plane.

  “Oh, Stetson,” Rockdale grunted, struggling out of the tight straps. “I thought you Texans were mean, tough fighting machines.” The parachute eased off his shoulders. “There.”

  “I prefer the Texan image of a love machine,” Tommy “Stetson” Carson replied.

  “Yeah, longhorn steers,” MacGammon added.

  Rockdale placed the parachute on the deck, the side previously against his back faced up. He laid the top straps across it, lifting the bottom straps over them.

  “About the only image of a lover I can see of you is one with a fistful of dollars.” Rockdale lifted the parachute, leaned over the passenger seats along the rear left side of the EP-3E reconnaissance aircraft, and shoved it on top of another parachute someone had stowed.

  “Better than what you’ve got in your fist.”

  “You three gonna keep grab-assing,” Razi said, “Or, you gonna stow those parachutes and get to your positions?”

  “Chief, mine’s already up there,” Rockdale said, smiling.

  “Yeah, and with your aircrew skills, you probably got the straps tied together so they don’t fall apart. And, you, Carson. You gonna carry your parachute around with you for the mission or you gonna stow it properly?”

  “Chief, I was just waiting for MacGammon to move out of the way.”

  “Gee, thanks, Stetson,” MacGammon moaned.

  “MacGammon, hurry it u
p. Why is it whenever there’s a problem, you seem to be nearby or in it?”

  MacGammon shrugged. “Lucky?” MacGammon turned and threw his parachute up with the others. Standing on tiptoes for a couple of seconds, the experienced aircrewman shoved the parachute into its rack. When he turned, Chief Razi still stood there. “Hey, Chief, how come I don’t have a nickname like Stetson, here, and Rocky Rockdale?” He clinched his fist. “I want a name that sounds studly—”

  “How about dickhead?” Razi said. “Now, shut your griping, stow that parachute, Carson, and you three get to your positions. We’re going to cross the border into Guinea shortly and you can’t tell me you three have pre-missioned your positions. You think the mission commander is gonna delay on-track time so you prima donnas can finish telling each other how much you like each other?” He jerked his thumb toward the row of operating consoles. “Get your ass in gear,” he ordered. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Peeters watching him. Damn good thing, too, he thought.

  “Here,” Rockdale said, taking the parachute from the shorter Carson. He twisted and shoved the parachute on top of another one above the passenger seats.

  “You three are the last in the aircraft. You got FOD walk-down tomorrow. Maybe that’ll help you get your acts together.”

  “Yes, Chief,” they all said in unison. Foreign Object Damage—commonly known as FOD—was something everyone did, searching the ground for objects that could be sucked up into the engine intake and cause damage or an explosion.

  Razi watched the three hurry to their positions. He pulled the gum out of his mouth, wrapped it in the original paper, and twisted it with his fingers. Razi watched until the aircrewmen slid into their seats . . . waiting— There! They buckled their seatbelts. They’d learn. He turned and walked past the two cryptologic technicians manning the special console near the bulkhead of the small kitchenette at the rear of the aircraft.