The Bridges at Toko-Ri (James A. Michener, 1953)
When James A. Michener wrote these words almost forty-five years ago, carrier decks were straight and made of wood, and the first generation of jet naval aviators were still learning to fly off them. Carriers, jets, and piloting have changed greatly since then, yet the words ring as true today as they did then.
Naval aviators are a national treasure. They are, first of all, America’s front-line combat aviators. Much like their Marine Corps brethren, when there is trouble out there, they expect to be the first called. Though this is an attractive challenge for some people, there is more to the naval aviation profession than just being first in line to be shot at. Flying for the sea services requires unique dedication and skills (such as exceptional eyesight and hand-eye coordination under stress), and demands sacrifices that other military pilots don’t even have to imagine—all of which has endowed naval aviation with a (mostly) well-justified mystique.
Flying on and off aircraft carriers is a big part of that mystique. There is an old saying among pilots that flying is not inherently dangerous, just very unforgiving. Though there are no truer words, there are also notable exceptions—“trapping” aboard a rolling and pitching aircraft carrier deck on a stormy night, for instance. It is this skill—landing aboard a moving flight deck in all sorts of conditions—that most clearly differentiates naval aviators from all other pilots. There is simply no way to compare flying from a runway on a land base with the stress and responsibility that sea service pilots have to contend with every time they launch. Every time you take off from a carrier, you leave knowing that you might not find your way back onto the “boat” and will have to eject into a hostile ocean. Clearly, there is more at stake than just a $50 million airplane (and a career). Mastering the stress and responsibility of such flying requires a special kind of flier.
Fortunately for Navy fliers, achieving that mastery is not laid solely on their shoulders. They don’t have to do it alone. Since naval aviation is only a fraction of the size of the U.S. Air Force, everyone knows everyone else—and pays attention to everyone else. It’s a lot like being part of a college fraternity (for good and for bad). Or—to put it more precisely—U.S. Naval aviation is a collection of small communities (F-14, F/A-18, EA-6B, etc.) in which an aviator spends his or her life for upwards of two decades. The good news here is that there’s lots of support. The bad news is that aviators are hugely competitive. Your peers are always keeping score.
Such a world creates larger-than-life personalities—powerfully evolved human beings at the top of the food chain. To succeed you need a cast-iron ego, a lightning intellect, an excess of ambition, and fluent social skills. And the most successful have the ability to spread all this to others in their profession.
A Navy pilot (in legend, at any rate) began shouting, “ I’ve got a MiG at zero! A MiG at zero!”—meaning that it had maneuvered in behind him and was locked in on his tail. An irritated voice cut in and said, “Shut up and die like an aviator.” One had to be a Navy pilot to appreciate the final nuance. A good Navy pilot was a real aviator; in the Air Force they merely had pilots and not precisely the proper stuff.
The Right Stuff (Tom Wolfe, 1979)
The Navy likes to train its air crews hard. Frankly, they train the hell out of them. While other services emphasize providing officers with a “well-rounded” career, naval aviators in front-line units focus on getting ready for battle. This is not to say that Navy fliers are liberated from down-to-earth duties. They do paperwork like anybody else. Rather, the forward-deployed focus of the Navy requires more emphasis on combat training than usually is provided for the “garrison” units of the Army and USAF. An average naval aviator will spend fully half of his time getting ready to fight and staying proficient. While naval aviators fly about the same number of hours every month as their USAF counterparts, how and when they fly is vastly different. More of their flying is focused on actual combat and tactical training. And there is an almost manic devotion to flight safety, requiring extraordinary amounts of study and practice.
When a carrier air wing (CVW) is preparing to deploy, the air crews spend fully six months training and qualifying to prove their readiness for the job. This is concentrated training, with the entire CVW deploying to a special air warfare training center at Naval Air Station (NAS) Fallon, Nevada, for several weeks to learn composite strike warfare. Just before their deployment, they fly in a series of joint war games, which normally have higher operations tempos (Optempos) than actual warfare. Thus, by the time a naval aviator heads out to the carrier to begin his six-month overseas deployment, he is one of the best-prepared combat aviators in the world. That is not bragging. Consider, for instance, that no U.S. naval aviator has been shot down in air-to-air combat since 1972, and that in a generation of combat from Vietnam to Desert Storm, naval aviators have accumulated an average kill-loss ratio in the neighborhood of 17:1.
Along with the dangerous flying, the life of a naval aviator brings with it the expectation of long overseas deployments, usually lasting six months or more. A “normal” twenty-year career might send an officer on eight or ten of these “cruises.” Once a carrier group is forward-deployed, even in relatively “friendly” waters like the western Pacific or the Mediterranean, the aircraft always (even when training) fly with live ordnance loaded. This means that when you are on cruise, the only difference between peacetime and combat flying is the position of the Master Arm switch on the control panel in front of you. As a result, national leaders have to put a lot of trust in individual naval aviators. With only the judgment of a young pilot between the President and a potential act of war, you can understand why they are trained so hard, and held to such exacting standards.
Naval Aviation Culture
Though I’ve met fighter pilots that enjoy getting shot at and being missed (they love living at that high pitch of excitement), by any true measure, no war is a good war. War is in no way “fun.” Still, for the young men who served in it, World War II was the best of wars. They had good airplanes to fly, enemies to fight who were real enemies, and a just victory to win. American industry produced splendid aircraft (like the F-6F Hellcat and TBF/TBM Avenger) in which a young man with a couple of years of college and five hundred hours of flight training could expect to fly safely into combat, return to base, and go up to fight again. All kinds of young men flew into combat off carrier decks, from movie actors and Kansas farm boys to future U.S. Presidents. The string of victories that they achieved—Midway, Coral Sea, Leyte Gulf, and many others—testifies to the Navy’s skill and wisdom in deploying and fighting naval aviation.
The key to this success was the vast array of training bases, which turned out naval aviators and crews by the tens of thousands. By comparison, as the war went more and more against them, the Japanese and Germans turned out air crews with ever fewer and fewer flying hours of training. American naval aviation leaders considered it a crime to let a young “nugget”16 into the fleet with less than five hundred hours of flight time. Instead of leaving combat veterans in the fight until they died, as the Axis nations did, American naval aviators (often against their wishes) were sent home after a combat tour to rest and train new pilots before returning to combat. In that way, the veterans got a chance to recharge their batteries while the rookies got the benefit of their experience.
This meant practically that late in the war (the Battles of the Philippine Sea and Leyte Gulf in 1944, for example), American carrier air groups were being led by second- and third-tour commanders (O-5’s). The Japanese units were lucky to have lieutenants (O-2’s) with a few hundred flying hours. The results were predictable. In repeated one-sided victories, the Americans shot their opponents out of the air at a ratio of over ten to one.17 So effective was the American juggernaut that the Japanese had to resort to Kamikaze suicide planes to try to stop the onslaught. But this too failed. Naval aviation had won the Great Pacific War, making the island assaults by Marine and Army un
its possible, as well as helping sweep the seas of enemy naval units. When surrender finally came, following the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the bombs were more an excuse than a reason.
How, you might ask, did the war impact on the culture of naval aviation in the U.S.? It gave it a tradition of success and confidence—success and confidence built on intense training. This tradition would hold, even in the dark days of Vietnam and the years following that horror.
Corrosion: The Vietnam Years
Even before the end of the Korean War, new carriers had been laid down, and a new generation of supersonic jets began to appear on their decks. Every month seemed to bring a new carrier aircraft, weapon, or innovation. This was a very good time for Naval aviation. Out of it came, for example, many of the astronauts who would take America into space and to the moon. There was a downside, however. The new jets were unreliable—their new engines being both underpowered and prone to fires and explosions. The practical consequence: Naval aviation, always a dangerous profession, became truly deadly. Naval aviators, always high-spirited and daring both in the air and their personal lives, began to take on a fatalistic attitude about their chances of reaching retirement age. The result was a “live for today” mentality, which they took with them into the 1960’s and Vietnam.
This fatalism grew exponentially with the start of the Vietnam conflict, when losses to naval aviators who flew missions over Southeast Asia were staggering (due to enemy ground fire, surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), and MiG interceptors), and the chances of surviving a twenty-year Navy flying career became almost nil. Desperate for combat-ready air crews, and unable to send veteran Naval aviators on more than two “war” cruises because of personnel policies, the Navy suffered a severe pilot “crunch” during the conflict. Worse than just a shortage of fliers were the corrosive effects of the conflict itself on the culture of the community as a whole. Atlantic Fleet air crews, whose carriers rarely rotated to Southeast Asia, became almost second-class citizens next to the combat-hardened veterans from the Pacific Fleet. Even worse was the effect on the morale and morals of the aviators who went to Vietnam and came home.
I doubt that Mister McNamara and his crew have a morale setting on their computers.
Rear Admiral Daniel V. Gallery, 1965
Vietnam was a winless war for naval aviators. They lost their first comrades months prior to the Gulf of Tonkin Incident in 1964, and were the last Americans “feet dry” during the evacuation from Saigon in 1975. During the intervening dozen or so years, the Navy kept two or three aircraft carriers continually on “Yankee Station” (the U.S. code name for the carrier operating area in the northern Tonkin Gulf) as part of the bombing campaigns against North Vietnamese forces. It was a new kind of war for the Airedales,18 most of who had grown up in the “Doomsday” mentality of the Cold War. Now they were saddled by absurd ROE (“rules of engagement”), guidance on targets, tactics, and weapons use. The brilliant but ultimately wrongheaded Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara, and his crew of “whiz kids” devised this absurd situation. In one of the greatest military blunders in a century full of military misfortune, they failed to listen to on-scene commanders about how the air war should be fought. Instead, they tried to “micro-manage” the war from afar, and turned it into one of the worst military fiascos in America’s history.
Denied the means to victory, the pilots on the carriers flew daily from Yankee Station, getting shot down, captured, and killed in numbers that still numb modern-day historians.19 Their mission: not to take effective military action that could lead to victory, but to deliver to an enemy “political messages” from leaders in Washington who did not understand that the enemy did not care to listen to those messages. To say that air crews suffered a great deal of job-related stress is an understatement.
A fighter pilot soon found he wanted to associate only with other fighter pilots. Who else could understand the nature of the little proposition (right stuff/death) they were all dealing with? And what other subject could compare with it? It was riveting!
The Right Stuff (Tom Wolfe, 1979)
In any group that regularly undergoes stress, tragedy, and the insanity of a “limited” war, the survivors bond in unique ways. Thus it was with Vietnam-era naval aviators. They had faced off with death, and won (never forget that fighter pilots are incredibly competitive). They were the possessors of “the Right Stuff,” the keepers of the magic combination of courage, ego, and skills that allowed them to accomplish with fiendish precision actions that no machine could reliably repeat day after day. They were true warriors who—after the day’s fighting was over—could imagine nothing better than to spend their off-duty time only with each other.
Soon, the entire naval aviation community had isolated itself, not only from American society in general, but even from the Navy that took them into battle. The result was a subculture that lived in the air wing spaces aboard ship and in the officers’ clubs of the liberty ports (like Cubi Point in the Philippines) and home bases. Quite simply, naval aviators fresh from combat were permitted almost any behavior short of murder. This included drinking parties in the air wing berthing spaces on Yankee Station and wild sexual antics back at base, as long as they could get up the next day and fly again. Ships’ captains and squadron commanders were not simply turning a blind eye on this madness of youth. The wild behavior of naval aviators was actually sanctioned and tolerated by senior Navy leaders all the way up to the Pentagon. The rationale was that the ugly nature of the Vietnam war entitled naval aviators to “blow off steam” in an equally ugly fashion. The fallout was a dozen years of drunken antics, womanizing, and wild partying anytime the air crews were not actually flying or in combat.
A law of nature holds that alcohol fuels all wars. And the lads at Cubi never suffered a fuel crisis. They got knee-walking, commode-hugging drunk the first couple of days, then recuperated with golf, swimming, or deep breathing.
On Yankee Station (Commander John B. Nichols and
Barrett Tillman, 1987)
The effects of the Vietnam-inspired debauchery remained an integral part of naval aviation culture for a generation. Even though the end of the war restored a modicum of peacetime decorum to life aboard ship (alcohol under way became a major no-no!), it left a lasting mark on the souls of naval aviators. They now saw themselves as the keepers of a special tribal knowledge—the deep and esoteric knowledge only they possessed, that told them how wartime carrier operations had to be run. As tribal elders, they saw it as an imperative of their calling to pass their tribal knowledge on to the next generation of naval aviation leaders. Thus, when the junior officers who came of age during Vietnam became squadron commanders and carrier captains, they passed on to the new aviators they commanded the hard-drinking, hard-living, womanizing, daredevil culture that they grew up with. It would become a ticking time bomb.
The remaining years of the Cold War saw naval aviation and its personnel safely insulated from the great social changes that were taking place in American society. While the air crews went out on their regular rotations and cruises, thanks to the protection of their senior leaders, they lived in a virtual stasis, immune to outside forces, totally disconnected from the civilian culture. A disaster was waiting to happen. The storm hit in 1991 at the Las Vegas Hilton.
Dry Rot: The End of the Cold War
During the two decades following Vietnam, the civil rights and women’s movements transformed American society. During those same two decades, those revolutions barely touched the military in general, the sea services in particular, and naval aviation least of all. In spite of reformers like Admiral Elmo Zumwalt (Chief of Naval Operations in the early 1970’s), the culture of naval aviation remained unchanged.20 As ever, it was a professional haven for middle-class white males, with strong second- and third-generation family associations. But a funny thing happened on the way to Desert Storm: Naval aviation found itself—slowly, reluctantly—setting off on the same road the rest of America was trav
eling.
The desegregation of the military began as far back as the late 1940s, when President Harry S. Truman issued an executive order to that effect. However the order had very little immediate effect on Naval aviation, for few Americans of color chose to make that a profession. Still, a tiny cadre of brave young men took the plunge; and the first of these, Jesse Brown, gave his life in combat while flying during the Korean War. Sacrifices like Brown’s and others’ went a long way toward validating minority naval aviators. The admission of women into naval aviation took much longer. Un-fortunately,their acceptance there, with anything like real equality, remains to be achieved. All the same, the feminist revolution changed the U.S. military—even naval aviation—forever.
Broader questions still remain: Does humankind need women to be warriors? Does human nature demand it? Do equal rights before the law demand it? I’m not going to hazard an answer to these questions. But there’s a much easier one I can safely field: Will women serve in combat in United States military services? The answer to that one, of course, is “yes.” They already have and do. In principle, at least, there is no combat action that qualified women cannot handle. Meanwhile, fueled by the new all-volunteer military of the 1970s, the military began to recruit large numbers of women into the ranks. Initially they were limited to non-combatant and support jobs. But before long, the understanding of “non-combatant” and “support” began to change, and with those changes came an expansion of women’s roles. By the early 1980s, they were flying transport aircraft and helicopters, as well as training and support aircraft.
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