Bogeys and Bandits

by Gandt, Robert

Navy squadron ready rooms had a certain egalitarian quality. They were versions of Hyde Park, where the denizens could be as opinionated as they wished—within limits. At any given moment you could catch a harangue about something—the ineptitude of Congress, the shortsightedness of Navy brass, the crassness of the American voter.

  But at the Strike Fighter RAG ready room, the only real denizens, those entitled to express truly outrageous opinions, were the IPs (Instructor Pilots). They were the permanents. The RPs (Replacement Pilots) were the temporaries. RPs included not only nuggets but also more senior officers on their way to F/A-18 squadrons in the fleet. Regardless of rank, RPs tended to be boisterous, in keeping with their status as students. Most had the good sense to shut up in the ready room, speaking only when spoken to.

  Nuggets were expected to defer to everyone, even the clerks and sweepers. They were there for no purpose except to learn, which meant they kept their impertinent mouths shut and displayed a respectful awe in the presence of the Fleet’s Finest. Nuggets were supposed to know their place, which was somewhere between invisible and insignificant.

  The VFA-106 ready room was a long, cavernous space with a raised, enclosed desk area for the duty officer. On the wall behind the duty officer was the status board which showed all the flying activities for the day, the aircraft numbers, pilots, times, and comments about the maintenance status of the jets. The duty officer was an instructor. He was supposed to be the ground-based font of wisdom for questions from the air.

  “Base, Roman one-oh-six.”

  “Go ahead, Roman one-oh-six. This is base.”

  “Hey, Chunks, this is Dawg. I just had a fire warning on the right engine. I shut the sucker down.”

  “What’s your position?”

  “Thirty-five south, angels fifteen. Just leaving Rodman target.”

  “Okay, Dawg. I’m getting the book out. We’ll alert the tower that you’re inbound and you’re going to take an arrestment. And we’ll get an LSO out there to hold your hand.”

  Chunks O’Mara, the duty officer, had at his desk all the F/A-18 Hornet systems and operating procedure manuals. He could look up the problem—any problem—and feed the answer to the pilot on the radio. If it was a problem of such complexity that they needed expert advice, the duty officer could call up engineers at McDonnell Douglas, who manufactured the Hornet.

  “Here’s the procedure, Dawg,” the duty officer said on the radio. “Push the fire extinguisher light on the affected engine. The right one, is that correct?”

  “Roger, that. It’s done.”

  “Okay, single engine procedure. Half flaps, hook down, straight in to the runway, and Paddles will up on tower frequency.”

  “Roger.”

  Of course, the pilot already knew these procedures, but in the heat of an emergency it was always better to have someone on the ground backing you up.

  The drama would be followed by everyone in the ready room. Flight-suited pilots—instructors and students alike—would be standing around, coffee cups in hand, nobody saying much, casually assessing Dawg’s coolness in this little matter of an engine fire.

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  One day during a fighter weapons detachment in Key West, another instructor had a problem. This time it was Mongo, of Desert Storm fame. And this time, everyone got to watch.

  Mongo had just touched down when he decided to take off again. He was too close to the preceding jet on the runway. And as his jet was lifting from the runway, Mongo raised the landing gear. . .

  And as the landing gear was retracting, Mongo felt his fighter settle back to the runway. He felt the tail scraping the concrete!

  What the hell was wrong? There was nothing flashing at him yet on the instrument panel. No red lights, aural warnings, nothing like that. The thing was shuddering, settling, behaving as though it wanted to plunge back onto that sun-baked, mashed-sea shell shore and turn itself—with the pilot—into one glorious goddamn fireball.

  For a millisecond Mongo’s brain processed the confusing data. What the hell. . . is this sucker trying to kill me? Do I stay with it . . . or punch out?

  It was the classic jet jockey dilemma—one of those instantaneous choices you made without the luxury of careful analysis, or weighing all the data. You obeyed your gut instincts.

  Mongo obeyed his own gut instincts. He grabbed the ejection lanyard and yanked.

  Whaaam! The ejection seat—and Mongo—left the cockpit like a mortar shell.

  And fifty feet down below, pilots sitting in their cockpits, waiting to be cleared for take off, were astonished at what they saw: A jet!. . . sailing right over their heads, wobbling and floundering as though it had no pilot. . .

  Which, of course, it hadn’t, as they quickly realized when they saw the white blossom of Mongo’s parachute. The chute made one swing, then fluttered down on the soft dirt a hundred yards from the runway.

  Meanwhile, the pilotless jet kept flying.

  Everyone watched the spectacle, including Mongo, who by now was climbing to his feet and trying to disentangle himself from the parachute. The unmanned fighter continued on its way. It wobbled through the sky like a disoriented duck, dipping and swooping, skimming the earth, then soaring upward. When it came to the expanse of a mangrove swamp, it seemed to find a home. The jet dropped its nose and plunged into the green mire.

  Kaaablooom! A brief fireball, a cloud of black smoke floating over the swamp, and the Navy’s inventory of fighters was reduced by one.

  It was embarrassing.

  In the subsequent investigation, nothing could be found wrong with the jet. It looked like the pilot might have punched out of a perfectly good airplane. If so, it wouldn’t look good on his record, dumping expensive equipment in mangrove swamps.

  But on the other hand, this was Mongo, not some yahoo who didn’t know a fighter from a flytrap. Maybe something was amiss with the jet. Clearly, something had been wrong, or was giving strong evidence of being wrong, to persuade an experienced fighter pilot like Mongo to pull the handle.

  In the end, the investigators decided that, yes, the pilot may have erred in his decision to abandon the airplane. But in any case, it was a judgment call, just as it had been a judgment call that day in 1991 when Mongo squeezed the trigger and downed the oncoming Iraqi MiG.

  The Navy, like Mongo’s peers, was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. After all, fighters were replaceable. Guys like Nick Mongillo were not.

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  Jacksonville, Florida, or “Jax” as it had been called by generations of sailors, was a Navy town. More specifically, it was a naval air town, being home to two major air stations, NAS Cecil and NAS Jacksonville, as well as NAS Mayport, which was the air facility immediately adjoining the berthing docks for the supercarriers that home ported in Jacksonville. Entire squadrons of airplanes could land at Mayport, then be hoisted by cranes, one by one, aboard a carrier.

  In the old days, not long after WWII and before the migration of business and industry to the sun belt, the Navy was about the only serious enterprise Jacksonville had going. The sleepy old river town was headquarters for a small hub of southern insurance companies, and it maintained a steady but lethargic shipping business through its seaport. But for years the paychecks of thirty or so thousand uniformed personnel provided the life blood for old Jacksonville.

  By the booming eighties, all that was changing. An infusion of prosperity and high tech industry transformed Jacksonville into a pulsating mini-metropolis. Its downtown area had been razed and replaced with a picture-book riverfront commercial area. A professional football team, the Jacksonville Jaguars, came to town. The rate of violent crime soared, putting Jacksonville in the big league of homicide and mayhem. Even culture had arrived in the form of symphony and theater and an annual jazz festival.

  Like most Florida cities, Jacksonville was an amalgam of cypress-shaded elegance, bustling nouveau prosperity, and a sub-tropical roach-and-mosquito bugginess. Waiting at a stop light you would see a glistening Merced
es 450 SEL, its tanned and coifed driver chatting into a cell phone. In the adjoining lane would be a rusty pickup, one fender missing, a yellow-eyed Rottweiler glowering from the back, the bearded driver knocking back a can of Rolling Rock. Those were the two faces of north Florida—upscale yuppiness sharing the same space with the piney woods bubbas. Georgian mansions gazing across the river at tumble-down trailer parks. The eternal duality of the haves and the have nots.

  Such a dichotomous culture suited the needs of the Navy just fine. Out there in the open flatlands around Cecil Field, where no one complained about the thunder and nuisance of the jets in the traffic pattern, the lower-paid enlisted people could find inexpensive housing—mobile home parks and tract developments. Officers and the senior enlisted ranks drifted towards Orange Park, a graceful suburban village on the banks of the St. John, on the southern flank of Jacksonville. Orange Park, if you could afford it, provided a certain country club gentility—good restaurants, bars, golf courses. It even had a Florida staple—a dog racing track.

  Life was good in Jacksonville. By comparison to the rest of the country, living was still cheap. The natives were friendly, even if the government payroll didn’t have such clout anymore. If you liked water sports, it was heaven. You could spend your off duty time in the ocean or anywhere on the thousand miles of the St. Johns River and its tributaries water skiing, fishing, scuba diving, watching cranes and alligators and manatees. The weather ranged from winter chilly, though it seldom touched freezing level, to a four month stretch of shirt-sticking, bug-swatting steaminess.

  But more than anyone else, the fighter pilots loved Jacksonville. Unlike out west, at Miramar or Lemoore where they had to deal with the unbelievable air traffic glut of southern California, Jacksonville was a piece of cake. Jax Air Traffic Control would clear an F/A-18 through their air space like he was a local celebrity: “Roger, Roman 0ne-oh-four, great to talk to you again. Where do you want to go today? Out to the warning area? Sure thing. Take a heading of one-zero-five and climb to one-five-thousand feet. . .”

  Just offshore were the warning areas—restricted air space for the exclusive use of the military. That was where the F/A-18s practiced air combat maneuvering. It was also a place where they could make sonic booms—push the Hornet past the speed of sound—without worrying about broken windows and traumatized old ladies down in the suburbs.

  Within five minutes’ flying time from Cecil were the Pinecastle and Rodman and Lake George target complexes. You could zip down to the targets, work them over with your practice bombs, then take a leisurely, scenic cruise at a thousand feet or so up the river to Cecil.

  Since the entire Florida peninsula was flat as a molten cow pie, low level flying was a snap. And that was the best part, flying low and fast over the sparsely settled piney woods, not worrying about anything except the occasional civilian bugsmasher airplanes and the television towers that could stick up a couple thousand feet and jumped out at you like apparitions from nowhere.

  The flying weather in Florida was of two varieties—perfect or abominable. You flew, or you stayed on the ground and waited for it to clear. In the summer months, Florida thunderstorms swelled to forty-plus-thousand feet and looked like the anvils of God. They were evil black things that pulsed and throbbed and possessed the collective energy of several small nukes. You didn’t mess with Florida thunderstorms. But they were almost always quite localized and well defined. It was possible to find a route around them, or between them, or sometimes over the top. Thunderstorms were like the television towers—just another item you tried not to hit.

  CHAPTER SIX

  SEMPER FIDELIS

  J. J. Quinn’s wife figured he was having a mid-life crisis. It was the only explanation. “What else?” she asked him. “Why else would you being doing something so stupid?”

  It was a question Quinn was hearing a lot these days: Why would you be doing something so stupid?

  “Hornets, for Christ’s sake! Don’t you know people get killed flying those things?”

  “Have you lost your marbles? You had a great career going, and now. . .”

  “At your age? Learning to fly fighters is for kids. . .”

  J. J. Quinn was not a kid. He was a tall, long-limbed Marine captain who looked like Lurch in the old television show, “The Addams Family.” He wore the ubiquitous squared-off Marine crew cut, though not cut as close and white-sidewalled as his younger colleagues. His black hair was beginning to show flecks of gray—another feature that distinguished him from the real nuggets.

  No one could understand why Quinn, at age thirty-five and otherwise blessed with a successful career as a Marine Corps helicopter pilot, had chosen to transition to fighters.

  J. J. was having trouble understanding it himself. He only knew that the answer had something to do with the chemistry of advancing age, male pride, curiosity, the mystique of the fighter business.

  He tried explaining it to his wife, Dorothy: “I don’t want to wake up someday, sixty-five years old, and wish I had been a fighter pilot.”

  To which she replied, with characteristic bluntness, that given his new line of work, he wouldn’t have to worry about waking up at age sixty-five. He probably wouldn’t be waking up at age thirty-six.

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  Until one afternoon in the summer of 1980, J. J. Quinn had no notion what he was going to do with his life. He had never given a moment’s thought to the military or the Marine Corps or airplanes. But that afternoon something happened. He was standing there in the July sun, baking on the ramp of the Willow Grove Naval Air Station with several thousand other air show spectators. Silhouetted up there against the Pennsylvania sky, trailing smoke like a swarm of flaming arrows, were the Blue Angels, the Navy’s crack aerobatic formation team.

  Quinn watched the jets. He appreciated the beauty of the maneuvers. He liked the precision of the whole thing. But more than that, he thought there was a purity to their routine. Flying had a logic and a method to it that appealed to him.

  Standing there on the scorching ramp, watching the sleek jets, Quinn suddenly knew! That’s it! That was what he’d been looking for. J. J. Quinn wanted to be a pilot.

  He was accepted as an officer candidate in the Marine Corps. After going through Marine basic school, like every Marine officer was required to do, he was on his way to flight training. And it was there that Quinn learned a basic truth about himself: He wasn’t the best aviator in the world. He was, in fact, quite average.

  And so were his flight grades, a reality that caused him to be assigned to helicopters. He wouldn’t fly the jets that he had once dreamed about. Quinn’s memory of the Blue Angels trailing smoke against a Pennsylvania sky dissolved. He would be a helo pilot, whop-whop-whopping across the fields and swamps with all the other grunts.

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  Marine Corps aviation was divided into four communities. Two were jets: the F/A-18 Hornet community, and the vertical-take-off-and-landing Harrier jets community. The Marines also had multi-engine units consisting mostly of four-engined C-130 Hercules transports. And the Marines operated a large force of helicopter squadrons, whose mission was most closely tied to the traditional ground-pounding Marine infantry units.

  Over the years each community had developed its own unique culture and traditions. The differences between the communities were as marked as differences between real towns. Fighter pilots, for example, could instantly spot “foreigners” from outside their community by little telltale signs—the tilt of their uniform caps, the fit of their flight suits, jargon on the radio, the way they maneuvered their hands when they told flying stories at the bar.

  In the Marine Corps, the distinction between flying communities was a little fuzzier, because in the Corps you were first and foremost a Marine. Semper Fidelis, the Halls of Montezuma, the shores of Tripoli. Thereafter it was okay to be an aviator. First you were a Marine, secondly an aviator.

  J. J. Quinn had lived his entire Marine life in helicopters. And for most of his thirteen
years in the Corps, that had suited him fine. It was something he had done well, and he had risen steadily in the hierarchy of Marine aviation. In a few weeks he would pin on his new gold major’s leaves. He was of squadron department head rank, meaning he was only two or three slots away from command of his own helicopter squadron. Quinn had a textbook career going.

  And then one day at Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station, Quinn heard about a strange idea that was coming down from headquarters. Someone with at least two stars on his collar had been smitten with the notion that this closed-door compartmenting of Marine aviation—helo pilots flying only helos, and fighter pilots knowing nothing except how to fly fighters—wasn’t healthy. After all, they were naval aviators one and all, weren’t they? Such undemocratic elitism wasn’t healthy for the Corps. Everyone should share the glory, and they should all experience some of the mud and dirt. And they could all have a taste of danger.

  As an experiment, six volunteer helo pilots would be allowed to transition to jets. They would be highly qualified pilots, of course, but it was not necessary that they have any previous jet experience. After all, they were naval aviators, just like everyone else.

  In theory and on paper, it looked like a reasonable idea, spreading the varied experience of Marine Corps aviation around. It challenged the idea of “communities” in naval aviation. It amounted to multi-culturalism of the flying business.

  But if you asked any fighter pilot—any real fighter pilot who had spent his career in pointy-nosed jets—it was an idea that portended disaster. Multi-culturalism in tactical aviation was stupid. It meant that you spread your talent around in a thin film over all the specialized areas of aviation. Everyone would be an amateur, having already left the cockpit of the machine he knew the best.

  Actually, it went deeper than that. Naval aviation, which included the Marines, had a deeply ingrained caste system. At the apex of the system, wallowing in glory and exhibiting the most highly developed sense of snobbery and elitism, were the fighter pilots. In Air Force, Navy, and Marine ready rooms throughout the world, a ubiquitous plaque could be found stuck on a wall somewhere: If you ain’t a fighter pilot, you ain’t shit.