Chip Van Doren was the exception. Van Doren would sit there with a silly half-smile on his bland face, pale blue eyes following the action, but he seldom joined in. It was as though he was taping the whole scene for some future playback.
Van Doren was the computer geek of the class. In the Jansport back pack he hauled around, along with his training manuals and class paraphernalia, he had a notebook computer. On his wrist he wore a Buck Rogers-style watch that looked the size of a lunch pail. It beeped and glowed in the dark and was equipped with a micro-keyboard with which Van Doren could insert and retrieve data.
“Chip, what the hell is that thing on your wrist?”
“My watch. Sort of. Actually, it’s a data bank.”
“What’s it for?
“Numbers. Addresses. Data. Want to see all the stuff I’ve got in here?”
“No.”
Van Doren was a nerd, at least in the techno-freak sense. But he was an amiable nerd, with a quick smile and a genuine friendliness about him. Everyone decided they liked Chip Van Doren, though no one quite knew how to talk to him.
Though Chip Van Doren was a nerd, he didn’t look like one. He didn’t walk around with a sheaf of pens in a nerdish plastic pocket holder, nor did he wear a haircut that looked like a badly-mowed wheat field. He was an ordinary-looking guy, of medium height and build, with a bland, unlined face. In fact, it was his blandness—that half-smiling, unlined face—that made you look again, thinking, there must be more to this guy. And, of course, there was.
It took everyone a while to learn about Van Doren. Not until they got into the ground school portion of their training, learning the intricacies of the F/A-18 systems, did it begin to dawn on the members of Class 2-95: This guy Van Doren was very smart. Maybe, some thought, too smart.
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He couldn’t remember ever wanting to be anything but a fighter pilot. And to be one, even when he was a kid back at Shepaug Valley High School in Connecticut, Chip Van Doren knew he would have to win a service academy appointment or an ROTC scholarship.
In high school he took all the right courses—mostly math and science—that would enhance his chances of getting a service academy appointment. Though he disliked team sports, he joined the cross country team because he knew it would look good on his academy application.
Even in high school, the two facets of his personality revealed themselves. The summer of his junior year, he soloed an old Piper Cruiser at the local grass strip airport. By the time he went off to the academy he had logged nearly a hundred hours and earned his private pilot’s license. And, of course, he already knew computers. His first one, a hybridized IBM AT, he cobbled together at the age of fourteen from components he scavenged at yard sales.
He was number three of two hundred some in his high school graduating class. His grade point average of 3.88 and combined SAT of over 1400 were impressive enough to win him several scholarships and entrance to half a dozen blue-ribbon universities, including M.I.T. and Yale.
He passed them up. Van Doren already had in his hand the prize he wanted: an appointment to the U. S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland. Going to the Naval Academy was the surest route he knew to becoming a Navy fighter pilot.
Why the Navy and not the Air Force?
“I was hedging my bet,” Van Doren said. “I thought about the Air Force Academy. But there was always the chance I wouldn’t get into flight training. You know, my eyes could go bad, or feet go flat, something like that. In the Air Force, that meant you were stuck as some sort of ground officer, or at best a non-pilot back-seater. In the Navy, I figured that if I couldn’t fly, I’d go to subs. The submarine service—that would have been my next choice.”
And after you got to know Van Doren, you could see it. That was a role—future commander of a nuclear submarine—that fit the bland-faced young man, with his passion for computers and his inherent streak of techno-nerdiness. Submarines. Next to flying supersonic fighters, it was the ultimate computer game.
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He was a good-looking kid, with whitish-blonde hair, close cropped in the standard Navy way (but not side-walled and bristle-topped, like the Marines). At five ten and a hundred sixty pounds, Van Doren had the lean and wiry build of a cross country runner, which was what he had been all through high school and college. Running, in fact, was his only athletic interest.
Van Doren had zero interest in organized sports, at least of the home team, rah-rah variety. His notion of unbearable torture was to be locked in front of a television during a football game. He didn’t have the patience for golf. Tennis was too much trouble, requiring appointments for a court and somebody to play with. Weight lifting was a bore, and, anyway, he disliked the claustrophobic sweatiness of gyms.
He was a runner. Long distance running required no one else’s participation, no special equipment , no special place. It was something Van Doren did almost every evening, usually five miles or so. Sometimes when he was sorting out a technical problem in his head, he would keep on loping for ten or more miles. The space and the solitariness of long, slow jogging suited Van Doren.
Another thing his classmates began to notice about Chip Van Doren: He was a blusher. He had this pale complexion that reddened whenever anyone poked fun at him. Or when a female spoke directly to him. That’s all it took, a female voice. A woman—any woman, young, old, foxy, pig-ugly, it didn’t matter—would say, “Chip. . .” and Van Doren’s cheeks would redden like a traffic light. He even blushed talking to women on the telephone.
Back when he was a midshipman at Annapolis, he had dated a girl from Baltimore. Her name was Amy, and after nearly three years of going with her, he was still blushing when he spoke with her. She was a nursing student and the daughter of a real estate agent who had made it big during the eighties when Chesapeake property values took off like a rocket.
As Chip and Amy settled into a steady relationship, her father became nervous. Things were looking too serious to suit him. The father worried that his daughter might wind up spending her life as a Navy wife, living in tacky military quarters, shopping in military exchanges, living a middle class life.
A couple of months before Chip’s graduation, she made an announcement: “My father thinks I should make a decision about my future.”
“Your future?” said Van Doren. “You mean our future?”
“You’re going off to flight training, and I’m going to finish my degree in nursing. I think we should take some time to think it over.”
That’s what they did. They took some time. Half a year, in fact, which was how long it took Amy to meet the intern at Johns Hopkins to whom she became engaged. The next spring, about the time Ensign Chip Van Doren was finishing basic flight training at Meridian, Mississippi, he received the news that Amy and the doctor were to be married. Her father, by all accounts, threw the most lavish wedding anyone had seen for years in Baltimore.
Chip got over it. By then he had his Corvette nearly restored. His computer with the 486 CPU and sixteen meg of RAM was up and running. And he had just received orders to advanced jet training.
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The Corvette went with the territory. For any self-respecting fighter pilot, or fighter pilot in training, or aspiring fighter pilot, the Corvette was the only automobile. For four decades the low-slung, grossly impractical, over-priced (by Navy pay scales) sports car had been the earthbound form of locomotion that most closely approximated flying a fighter. It had that rude abundance of horsepower, the cramped-cockpit feel of an A-4 Skyhawk with absolutely no interior space allotted for non-essentials like kids and groceries. The Corvette possessed the streamlined grace of an artillery shell, and it could burn rubber from a stop light for half a block. Over the years, countless Chevy dealers near Navy and Air Force bases had cashed in and retired early from the windfall profits dumped on them by generations of Corvette-coveting fighter jocks.
Chip Van Doren bought his Corvette a month after he reported for flight training at Pensacola. It was a do
g, a ‘78 with multiple dings and over a hundred thousand miles on the odometer, but it was the best he could afford. Van Doren lovingly restored the beat up sports car to a near-pristine condition. He rebuilt the engine, had the body resurfaced and painted, replaced every stitch of the interior. When Van Doren left his Corvette in parking lots, he would come back to find notes from people who wanted to buy his car.
Those were the two sides of Chip Van Doren: the Corvette and the computer. He was a techno-freak who loved blazingly fast machines—electronic, aerial, or earthbound. He had a passion for speed. Like most unchecked passions, it was one that would get him into trouble.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE FACTORY
To be assigned as an instructor in VFA-106 was a distinction. The instructors took a private pleasure in their unofficial appellation: the Fleet’s Finest. Being an instructor meant you had been screened and culled from all the Hornet jocks out there in the fleet. It amounted to a large gold star on your career grade sheet.
With such distinction, of course, went a predictable inflation of ego. The instructors knew they were good. Sometimes it was impossible for them not to say as much, particularly late at night in the bar, and most particularly in the presence of lesser mortals like the pilots of slow-moving S-3 submarine hunters or P-3 patrol plane pukes.
The lesser mortals had their own opinion. Around the bar you could hear them referring to the F/A-18 instructors. They didn’t call them the Fleet’s Finest. They called them the Fleet’s Favorites—a clear implication that the perks and strokes enjoyed by the Hornet hot shots had as much to do with politics and ass-kissing as it did with talent.
If being chosen as one of the Fleet’s Finest amounted to a gold star for an instructor, then being selected as the commanding officer of the Fleet’s Finest was like a standing ovation. The Finest of the Fleet’s Finest. You had arrived! Being the commanding officer of the Hornet RAG made you, in effect, the spiritual leader of the strike fighter community.
At age forty-three, Captain Matt Moffit had reached the zenith of the strike fighter business. For nearly twenty years he had steadily ascended the invisible Navy ziggurat. Most of that time he had spent in the cockpit of a Navy attack or fighter jet. He had managed to please his superiors and, equally important, dodged the political missiles that had snuffed the careers of so many of his contemporaries. He had avoided all the career wrong turns and dead ends that took you out of the game.
Now he ran the RAG. It was the most highly visible job in the strike fighter business and, depending on your luck, would make or break your career.
Good luck had marked Matt Moffit’s career. He came from a Navy family—his father was a two-star admiral—which counted for a lot in the tradition-bound, nepotistic naval service. His older brother, Mike, preceded him by two years in the Navy.
For a couple thousand hours Matt flew A-7 Corsairs, deploying on carriers to the Atlantic and Mediterranean. He was chosen to help devise new strike fighter tactics in a special think tank unit at the weapons facility in Fallon, Nevada. He was one of the first pilots to fly the new F/A-18 Hornet, and for a while he served as an instructor in the RAG.
Luck stayed with Moffit. Just after he took command of VFA-131, an F/A-18 squadron deployed aboard the U. S. S. America, a Middle East dictator handed him the greatest favor he could have hoped for: Saddam Hussein took on the aggregate military forces of the entire western world.
For Navy fighter and attack pilots deployed on aircraft carriers in the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, it was heaven! For six weeks they bombed, strafed, rocketed and blew the living shit out of every vestige of the Iraqi army.
It came just in time. The era had been shaping up to be the longest period the country had gone without a war since the dry spell between WWI and WWII. No air medals, no distinguished flying crosses, no silver stars. Now all that had changed. Now there were chestfuls of medals to be had, and they owed it all to Saddam, bless his lunatic soul.
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One day early in the war, Moffit was leading a flight of four Hornets to a target in the western Iraqi desert. The mission was to bomb a concrete Scud launching complex. The war had been going on for a week.
By now, you could feel sorry for the troops down there in the bunkers. You knew they sure as hell didn’t want to be there, hunkered down in the bottoms of their eight or ten foot deep bunkers, wishing they were a hundred feet deeper, wishing they were back in Baghdad or Basra or anywhere besides there in the Kuwaiti desert getting their ear drums ruptured by the ceaseless bombing.
And you could feel a little bit sorry for the Iraqi fighter pilots, who didn’t have decent radar command control to keep them out of trouble, and who never knew they were about to die until a Sidewinder missile suddenly came at them from out of nowhere. The Iraqi fighters were in the air mostly to keep from getting blown up on the ground, which was a bad choice because they were being felled like clay pigeons.
But nobody felt sorry for the bastards in the anti-aircraft sites. They were a mean-spirited bunch whose work was to kill fighter pilots. And their efforts had already met with some success: In the first week of the air war, they had shot down over a dozen allied aircraft.
Now they were trying to raise the score. The flak was thickening as Moffit and his flight approached their target. But where the hell was it coming from?( You couldn’t see them. The anti-aircraft positions were well concealed. In the haze and smoke from already-bombed targets, they were invisible.
Moffit rolled in on the Scud sites. They appeared to be abandoned, which was no surprise. There were no vehicles around them, no trailers, no sign of life. The Scud shooters had gotten smart and hauled ass. Well, here were the Hornets, and their mission was to bomb everything in the place that looked hostile, even if it was empty.
It was then that Moffit, midway through his dive to the target, saw them. Over to the left, several hundred yards from the concrete Scud launching pads—tents and nets and—yes!—an anti-aircraft emplacement. It was very busy. They appeared to be having a merry old time down there, banging away at a flight of Hornets that was just pulling off another nearby target. Flak was spewing into the sky like dirty black cumulus puffs.
Moffit was hurtling toward the desert at over four hundred knots. It would be a hurry up, improvised, change of plan—the kind that rarely worked out. But it was within the scope of their assignment, which was to bomb any hostile emplacements in that area. He slewed his target designator—the little lighted pipper in his windshield display—away from the Scud pad over to the left, onto the anti-aircraft site. He banked and skewed the Hornet over to the left. He hit the pickle button. It was a snap shot, depending as much on luck as on the Hornet’s computer-guided bombing system.
Pulling off the target and peering back over his shoulder, Moffit got a glimpse of all six of his Mark 83 bombs, their long, dark cigar shapes aimed downward, directly at the flak site.
KaaWhump!. . . a great orange eruption, a geyser of sand and smoke and flame, shredded debris from the enemy gun position. The flak stopped.
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The war had been good to Matt Moffit. From it he collected a row of medals, a promotion to captain and, best of all, the assignment to command VFA-106. The Factory.
Most of the instructor pilots, like Matt Moffit, had flown combat missions in Desert Storm. Most had distinguished themselves, mainly by blasting to smithereens large examples of Iraqi architecture. Which was what strike fighter pilots were supposed to do.
But that, as the fighter pilots say, was air to mud stuff. Only a few, a very few, had distinguished themselves in the way that every real fighter pilot dreams about.
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Air to air. That was what flying fighters was supposed to be all about: You sallied forth, like a knight of old, and met the enemy one on one. Eyeball to eyeball. You in your fighter, he in his. Like Rickenbacker had done. And Richthofen, Boyington, Galland. All the great single combat warriors of fighter legend.
There hadn’
t been much of that in the Gulf War. Early in the game the Iraqi Air Force caught on to a dreadful reality: If they sallied forth to join battle with the enemy, they were dead meat. Which, of course, was a great disappointment for the Navy strike fighter pilots launching from their aircraft carriers in the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. They felt cheated. In the good old days, in Korea and Vietnam, the air wars had been more sporting. At least the Vietnamese and Korean and Chinese MiG pilots had been willing to play their part. They’d sometimes come up and do battle with the Navy and Air Force, and of course, they too were usually dead meat. But not always. Some were erstwhile combatants, and they managed to take out enough Navy and Air Force fighters to make the game sporting.
It would be argued long after Desert Storm ended that the Air Force had managed to steal most of the glory, at least in the air combat arena. This was thought to be because in the coalition command structure, the Air Force was given the overall responsibility for assigning targets and CAP (Combat Air Patrol) assignments to all the allied air units, including the Navy. So it should have come as no surprise that—who else?—Air Force F-15s were on station to intercept the first Iraqi MiG and Sukhoi fighters sent up to do battle.
Navy pilots, in fact, accounted for only two MiG kills in the Desert Storm air war. And now both the veteran MiG killers were stationed there at Cecil Field, where they dwelled among the new fighter pilots like living icons.
One such icon was Nick Mongillo—“Mongo”—who as a nugget had earned a silver star on the first day of the Gulf War when he downed an Iraqi MiG. Now Mongo was an instructor in VFA-106. He dwelled there among the mortals—the other instructors and the lowly students—like a deified being.
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