The instructor would debrief for at least an hour, going over the entire flight. If it was a weapons flight, they would view the cockpit video tape. A single flight, from briefing to debriefing, might take five to six hours.
They did this twice a day. Wedged in between the flights were simulator sessions, lectures, all-officers meetings (AOMs), and stints as squadron duty officer. Days at the squadron could stretch to twelve or fourteen hours.
The only time the class was together was during one of the lectures. An instructor would talk about some upcoming phase of training—formation flying or air traffic control procedures or the like. Sometimes it would be one of the “touchy-feely” square-fillers like “sensitivity” training—response to the newly mandated policy toward homosexuals in the service (“Don’t ask—don’t tell”). And there were lectures on the hot potato subject of “gender integration,” which produced hee-haws and wise cracks among Class 2-95, whose membership included not just one but two aviators of the feminine persuasion.
By now the nuggets had fallen into routines of their own. Road Ammons was the top jock of the bunch. His typical day began at six in the morning, when he would suit up and go to the squadron. In between training events, he would put on shorts and T-shirt and jog for four or five miles around the perimeter of the base. In the evening, before heading for home, he’d stop at the gym to pump iron.
Road still had the thickly muscled build of a linebacker. It was back at Tennessee State that Road had wrestled with his first big career dilemma: play professional football, for which he already had a tantalizing offer, or take his commission in the Marines and pursue his dream of being a fighter pilot. Football was something he already knew. Something he was good at. Man, he was good at bashing heads with guys out there on the playing field. And, besides, it was seriously good fun. On the other hand, the Marine Corps and the very long shot of getting into fighters—well, all that was a very iffy proposition.
Football lost. Here he was, a first lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps, learning to fly fighters. And working his butt off doing it.
But sometimes in a private moment, good old Road would fantasize. When he let his imagination roam back, it would be a Sunday afternoon. . . the autumn of the year. . . the roar in the stadium swelling like thunder. His cleated shoes would dig into the artificial turf and he’d launch himself into the play—Whap! Slam! Thunk!
Yeah, football was neat, all right. Road loved the game. But in the final analysis, that’s what it came down to: Football was a game. Flying the F/A-18 Hornet was much more than a game. Flying a fighter put you way out there in a place that few other mortals knew about. You knew you were doing something that only a handful of other human beings on the planet would ever be allowed to do.
So here was good old Road, one time prospective pro football player, trudging along the Cecil Field perimeter road, grunting through a dozen reps of bench presses at the base gym, just to keep some semblance of his college jock condition. Someday, he told himself, when life steadied down a little, he might like to do something really jock-like: run a marathon, do a triathlon, something. Once a jock, always a jock.
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That was just another of the ways in which they, the new kids, were different. Jogging! It was a mutation of fighter pilot character that would make the older generation of Right Stuffers puke in their hard hats.
Times had changed. These days staying in shape was a high priority among the new generation of naval aviators. A fighter pilot who smoked these days was as rare as a rocket-boosted biplane. This new bunch didn’t even drink like the pilots of yore, at least not in the same prodigious quantity and frequency as the previous generation, whose sacred duty it had been to belly up to the bar virtually every afternoon after flying.
These days a pedestrian could get trampled to death at any naval air station by the herd of joggers that hit the sidewalks every morning and evening. Physical fitness was prized by the nuggets nearly as much as brains and talent.
Like most of the other nuggets, Shrike was a jogger. She was also a weight lifter, and two or three times a week she could be seen there in the gym, right alongside Road and the others, sweating and grunting, hoisting barbells and pumping iron.
Outside of the squadron, Shrike didn’t have much social contact with her classmates. She lived in a small rented house on a tree-shaded street in a Jacksonville suburb. On weekends she liked to “feed the right half of my brain,” as she put it. This meant going to a concert, or the theater, or just listening to some good jazz at one of the beach clubs. And she loved ball room dancing, when she could find it, and didn’t mind the fact that her partners were usually over sixty. “They’re the only ones who know how.”
Shrike, technically, wasn’t a nugget. Nuggets, by definition, were aviators fresh out of the training command with no previous operational experience. Shrike had already completed a tour flying jets in a utility squadron based in the Philippines. But her flying career had been suspended for two years while she was earning her master’s at the naval postgraduate school in Monterey, California. The two years out of the cockpit were now causing her problems. Her stick and rudder skills were rusty. She was playing catch up.
But that was only one of Shrike’s problems. Her mouth was another. She could be heard saying, not too discreetly, that she thought the instructors were down on her. And they were down on her, in her opinion, for no other reason than who—and what—she was. “They don’t want me here,” she said. “I’m a threat to them because I’m a woman.”
There it was, out in the open. Shrike was invoking the Gender Thing. The hot potato. These days, it was the one subject guaranteed to start a fire fight.
Her classmates in 2-95, when they heard her talk like this, would sneak nervous glances at each other. One of the goals of being a nugget in the Fleet Replacement Squadron was to slide through the place as slickly as possible. Avoid friction. Offer no opinions, especially opinions on a subject as dangerous as the Gender Thing. Keep your mouth shut.
It just wasn’t in Shrike’s chemistry to keep her mouth shut. Another RP from a couple of classes ahead was a lieutenant commander who had been around the Navy for a while. He tried to explain it to her.
“Chill out, Shrike,” he said. “The instructors are just macho guys who expect you to show them a little deference. Around here, you gotta be a little humble.”
“Humble? Why should I --“
“Pretend. It’s a game. Play like you’re humble.”
“I don’t see why I should have to kowtow to someone who thinks they’re so damned superior.”
“Hell, they are superior, at least here in the RAG. It’s their show. Live with it.”
She was having trouble living with it. In Shrike’s opinion, the instructors were talking down to her. “In a briefing, they talk to the guys in the class. They talk right through me, as if I weren’t a real person. “
She thought she was being short-changed in the amount and quality of instruction. An instructor’s post-flight critique, to her, would come off sounding like personal criticism, without anything constructive. Every flight seemed to be a check flight. “Too much evaluation,” she complained about her instructors. “Not enough instruction.”
And so it happened that Shrike was the first in the class to get a SOD. “SOD” meant Signal of Difficulty, what they used to call a “down”—a flunking grade for that particular activity. SODs were like strikes in a baseball game. You could collect a few before you were out. Then you might get another chance at bat. Or you might not.
She was on her sixth FAM (familiarization) flight, still doing the get-acquainted maneuvers out in the training area and then coming back to do bounces—touch and go landings—at Cecil. She entered the traffic pattern back at Cecil by coming into the “break,” which meant flying overhead the landing runway, then “breaking” to the left or right to join the traffic pattern parallel to the runway and lower the jet’s landing gear and flaps for landing.
All this she did correctly. After the break, on the downwind leg parallel to the runway, she identified herself on the radio for the benefit of the landing signal officer, who was stationed at the end of the runway. The LSO was out there to monitor the touch and goes of the new FAM-stage students, just in case they did something stupid.
Shrike did something stupid. She made her approach turn to the runway, lining up nicely with the runway. The wrong runway. Cecil Field, being a Master Jet Base, was blessed with dual east-west runways, side by side, which were aptly named Two-Seven-Left and Two-Seven-Right. The left runway was the landing runway, and the right was used for taking off. It was important to know which was which.
Shrike was aimed at runway Two-Seven Right.
“Wave off, wave off!” said the LSO on the radio. Shrike pulled up and went around the pattern again. On her next pass she was careful to land on the left runway.
She might have gotten away with it. All she had to do was shut up.
“Not good headwork, Shrike, trying to land on the wrong runway,” the LSO said in the debriefing.
“It wasn’t a big deal. There wasn’t anyone on the right runway.”
“It’s a very big deal anytime you land on a runway you’re not cleared to land on.”
“Well, sure, but there wasn’t any harm done. You don’t have to make a big fuss about—”
“It was more than bad headwork,” said the LSO. “It was unsatisfactory. I’m writing it up as a SOD.”
Shrike was stunned. And then furious. She sat through the rest of the debriefing red-faced and tight-lipped. A SOD! She knew it! They were setting her up. This was probably just the beginning. They weren’t going to give her a chance!
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They all made mistakes, of course. Nuggets, by definition, were prone to making boneheaded errors, which was why they were kept under protective scrutiny. Whatever they did, wherever they flew, it was under carefully controlled conditions. During the familiarization stage of training, the weather had to be forecast to remain VFR (visual flight rules), meaning the students weren’t allowed to fly on days when the sunny Florida skies were likely to turn dark and violent. They weren’t allowed to fly with less than substantial reserves of fuel, just in case they committed the error of getting temporarily lost, or in case they needed to buy time to sort out a mechanical problem with their jet.
Nor were they allowed to fly together, students out there gadding about on their own, without the watchful guardianship of an instructor. The instructors were like mother geese tending flocks of inept goslings.
Only as the students moved into the tactical phases of training, with more Hornet time behind them and more experience getting themselves out of trouble, would the strict control start to relax.
Little by little, in carefully controlled increments, the nuggets would be treated less like hapless airborne incompetents and more like fighter pilots.
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Chip Van Doren’s first boneheaded mistake was less serious. He was supposed to do the flight planning for his fourth FAM stage hop, an instrument training flight to another base and return. He spent more than two hours planning the mission. He obtained the weather, both current and forecast. He pulled out the approach charts for the flight-planned destination, Moody Air Force Base, which was a couple hundred miles northwest of Cecil. He studied the route and memorized the en route air traffic control frequencies. Then he filled out all the briefing data on the big wall board in the briefing room.
Van Doren was pleased with his work. He had gone above and beyond what was required, down to drawing multi-colored lines on the chart showing courses, distances, times for each leg of the flight. The chart looked like an abstract art piece. Van Doren sat there in the briefing room waiting for the instructor to show up, thinking about how impressed the instructor would be with his preflight preparations.
The instructor showed up. He was a taciturn lieutenant named Phil Cauley. “What the hell’s this?” Cauley asked when he saw the briefing board. “Moody Air Force Base?”
“Our destination, sir,” said Van Doren.
“Didn’t you check the schedule?” said the instructor. “We’re supposed to go to Patrick Air Force Base.”
Patrick? Van Doren groaned. Patrick was another base, down south by Cape Canaveral. Shit. I read the wrong damned schedule.
“This flight,” said the instructor, “has just been delayed for as long as it takes us to re-file our flight plan. Training time is valuable here, Lieutenant, and you just wasted some of it. It’s your responsibility to read the schedule and plan accordingly.”
“Yes, sir.” Van Doren scrambled to fill out the new flight plan while the instructor watch him dourly.
Despite the lousy start, the rest of the mission went without further calamity. For his blunder in flight planning to the wrong airport, Van Doren received a “below average” on his grade sheet. But at least it wasn’t a SOD. SODs were handed out for blunders of a greater magnitude.
For Chip Van Doren, the blunder of greatest magnitude was yet to come.
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The commitment kept going up for the newly designated aviators. Back in the late eighties and early nineties, when most of the current RAG instructors were still nuggets, the service obligation was six years after receiving your wings. Then it went to seven years. Now, in the post-Cold War downsizing mid-nineties, it had been raised to a whopping eight years of service from the time they received their wings. That meant a fighter pilot would be well into his thirties before even being eligible to leave the service. He was obliged to spend, including Naval Academy or ROTC time and the two or so years in flight training before winning his wings, nearly a decade and a half in uniform.
The reason for the whopping commitment was the whopping cost of the training. Each of the fine Meshers’ college degrees had cost the taxpayers a hundred or so thousand dollars, followed by initial flight training with a total bill of something over a million. And then the newly winged nugget went to a RAG like VFA-106, running up a bill of several hundred thousand more dollars just to become qualified in a real fighter like the F/A-18.
It was a hell of an investment-consuming nearly eight years and roughly two million dollars—to acquire the services of a single fighter pilot. And the services lasted, maybe, four years.
That was it. Four years in a squadron, and often less. After the pilot logged a thousand or so hours in his jet, landing two or three hundred times aboard an aircraft carrier, surviving at least two lengthy deployments at sea—he was replaced. Gone. Back to the beach.
Which didn’t make sense, of course. It seemed an incredible waste because the fighter pilot was, by now, a valuable national resource. It was like a baseball coach yanking his players from the lineup as soon as they started hitting home runs.
But that was the Navy way: Keep ‘em rotating. Three or four years in a squadron, another three or four in a shore billet, back to sea for another stint. You went from sea duty, which meant the combat squadrons out there on the aircraft carriers, back to shore duty, which meant a job as an instructor, or perhaps a cushy assignment to postgraduate school or test pilot school.
Sometime during that first shore duty period, when the fighter pilot’s obligated service time was ending and he was faced with going back to sea duty, he confronted the Big Decision: Stay in, or get out?
It was too soon for the nuggets of Class 2-95 to make the Big Decision. They still had most of their commitment ahead of them. But it was in their thoughts, something they talked about late at night with their wives, a pending decision that each knew he would have to make: Be a life, with all that that entailed—long separations, hazardous duty, a modest, rather scrimpish life style on Navy pay. Or get out. Take a seniority number with an airline and live the good life, at about twice the compensation of a military career. Or take your advanced degree to the marketplace and work in one of the rarefied disciplines of aerospace engineering.
Some, like Road Ammons and Shri
ke Hopkins, were already sounding like lifers. They were talking about assignments they might have in the next century. And J.J. Quinn, of course, was a bona fide life, having already put in thirteen years in the Marine Corps. The others—the McCormacks, Angie Morales, Chip Van Doren—weren’t so sure. They said they were keeping their options open.
Burner Bunsen was the only one to declare that he was definitely not a lifer. To Burner, flying fighters and shooting missiles and being a bristle-headed Marine were a hoot. But then you moved on. Burner said that when his obligation was finished, he was going to grow up and get a real job. “I can see it now on the résumé,” he said. “‘Marine Corps fighter pilot.’ Man, they’re gonna love me on Wall Street.”
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From familiarization flights they moved on to the tactical phases: formation flying, air-to-air refueling, and AWI (all-weather intercepts). The nuggets loved it. This was more like it! They were getting closer to the real thing.
Formation flying was a requisite skill that every naval aviator learned early in basic flight training. Everything in tactical aviation that involved more than one fighter was done in formation. The Hornet was a superb formation airplane. It was so superb, in fact, that it was the vehicle of choice by the Blue Angels demonstration team, who flew their entire performances with plane-to-plane separations of only three feet.
Formation flying was a specialized hand-eye skill, like musical ability or language fluency. To some pilots it came easily, naturally. For others, flying precise formation would always be a harrowing, sweaty-palmed ordeal.
Maintaining your position a few feet away from the lead jet was something akin to zooming down a freeway, staying three feet away from the fender of the car in the next lane. But in the jet you had the third dimension—the up-down axis. Tight formation flying was an internal mind game, a reflexive activity that occurred at a subliminal level of consciousness. It was like the thrust-and-parry of fencing, the fencer reacting to events with almost instantaneous response. His brain interpreted problems and issued solutions at a vastly swifter speed than he could think on a conscious level. It was as though his eyes and hands were being controlled by a different command center. And, in fact, they were.
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