His troubles began back in the RAG. There was the famous occasion, for example, when he sauntered out to the flight line, preflighted his jet in a hurry, manned up and launched. On the way down to Pinecastle target, where his flight was scheduled for a bombing exercise, dash four—the number four pilot in flight—noticed Ricochet’s jet had no bombs on the weapons rack. He was about to suggest to Ricochet that it might be awkward, bombing without bombs.
But then the squadron duty officer came up on the tactical frequency. “Ricochet, this is base. I want you to push the data link button on the up front control panel and check your aircraft number.”
“Roger. It says number 334.”
“Terrific. Now check your briefing card. What aircraft does it say you are supposed to be in?”
Ricochet checked. Hmmm. Aircraft number 331. Wrong jet.
Taking the wrong jet was an error that could have disastrous consequences, especially if the jet had a maintenance problem, the wrong fuel load, the wrong weapons load.
That had been SOD number one for Ricochet.
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A couple weeks later Ricochet was with his class out at Fallon for Strike phase. The final event in strike phase was an exercise wherein the entire class of students jointly planned a coordinated deep air strike on one of the target complexes at Fallon. The targets looked real, with derelict tanks and trucks and fabricated buildings.
The flight of eight Hornets set out for the target area. According to plan, they took different approaches to the target. The F/A-18s converged on the complex. Some were assigned strafing missions, some to drop their weapons in a “lay down” delivery from low altitude. Two, including Shea, were supposed to fly over a designated initial point, pull up steeply, then dive bomb their assigned target. Ricochet’s target was a prefab building, a plywood structure the size of a small hangar.
Things were going okay—until Ricochet was supposed to reach his pull up point, an intersection of two roads. He missed it. So he kept on ripping across the floor of the desert, looking. . . looking for the damned intersection. . .
Eventually he saw a couple of roads that intersected. Sort of.
Up he went. He rolled inverted. He looked for his target, pulling his nose downward, ready to aim his bombs. . .
Where the hell was the target?
Well, there was a structure down there that looked more or less like his target. Ricochet went for it.
Later, everyone agreed that it was indeed a blessing that Ricochet’s bombs that day were only Mark 76 twenty-five pounders. Practice bombs. All a Mark 76 did was make a nice smoke plume so it could be spotted. Nonetheless, having twelve such twenty-five pound projectiles come raining down on your pasture, through your barn, scaring the living shit out of your cows, was enough to make one old Nevada rancher very pissed off at the U. S. Navy.
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They convened a FNAEB for Shea after the bombing incident at Fallon. The board carefully reviewed his records, all the way back to primary training. Ricochet, it turned out, had above average flight training grades. His problem wasn’t flying airplanes. It was headwork, an old aviation label for mental activity—good or bad—in the cockpit. So far, Ricochet’s headwork had been appallingly bad.
But the board decided that Ricochet must be intelligent, or he would never had gotten through all the layers of the Fine Mesh, all the way to strike fighter training. They decided in his favor. Ricochet’s problems were just isolated aberrations. His headwork was bound to improve.
They were wrong.
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Ricochet graduated from the RAG and reported to his fleet squadron, based there at Cecil Field. Within a month, he had insured for himself a place in Navy legend.
It happened on a multiple-weapons flight—a bombing hop followed by an air intercept exercise.
They were carrying AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles on the wingtip stations. They had finished the bombing portion of the mission, and now Ricochet was making intercepts on a section of two other Hornets, led by the squadron commanding officer.
Ricochet was supposed to be “sorting” the bogeys, meaning separating and identifying the potential targets using his air-to-air radar and the heat-seeking head of his Sidewinder missile.
He sorted out a target—the Hornet being flown by the skipper. Ricochet pressed the attack, obtaining a “lock” with the Sidewinder. All he needed was a “tone”—the squalling noise in his earphones that told him the Sidewinder’s guidance system was tracking the target and was ready to be launched.
Suddenly Ricochet felt a Whoosh! To his everlasting horror, he saw his Sidewinder missile leave its rack on the wingtip! The thing had fired! The missile took off like a greyhound out of the chute, its smokeless motor leaving no trail as it whooshed off in the atmosphere.
It was whooshing toward the commanding officer’s jet. There was no way to recall a launched Sidewinder missile. It carried its guidance system in the head of the missile. Once fired, the Sidewinder was off on its own seek-and-destroy mission.
Ricochet waited an eternity. Ten seconds. Twenty. Half a minute.
“Ah, Skipper?” he said on the radio.
“Go ahead.”
“Uh, I had a TFOA.” TFOA was shorthand for “Things Falling Off Aircraft.”
“What’s missing?”
“A Sidewinder.”
“Did you lose it?”
“Sort of, yes, sir.”
“How?”
“Well, it might have. . . uh, gotten itself launched--“
“Launched? When?”
“Just now.”
Silence. The commanding officer sat in the cockpit of his fighter, looking around, waiting to see if he was going to die. As the seconds ticked past, a single well-defined objective swelled in his consciousness like a thundercloud: If he lived through this, he was going to kill that dumb sonofabitch who had just shot a missile at him.
He lived through it. The missile vanished. Back on the ground, the skipper wanted to see Ricochet’s cockpit video tape. It was all there on the tape: Ricochet had turned on the master armament switch during the bombing exercise, then forgot to return the switch to the safe position. With the switch still “on,” Ricochet’s Sidewinder missile was fireable and lethal.
Then he had done the last thing necessary—he squeezed the trigger. The only thing that had saved the skipper was that the missile had been fired before the acquisition tone had come on. The Sidewinder’s guidance system needed about three more seconds tracking time to home in on him.
It was the end of Ricochet. The commanding officer ordered another FNAEB convened. And he made it clear that he was in no mood to hear any bullshit from the board about how smart the guy was, about “isolated aberrations,” about what a peachy training record he had. What he wanted to hear was that Ricochet was gone. Out of there. History. Toast.
And so he was.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“F” IS FOR FIGHTER
“Only the spirit of attack borne in a brave heart will bring success to any fighter aircraft no matter how highly developed it may be.”
—LUFTWAFFE GENERAL ADOLPH GALLAND
Berlin, Germany
“Anything is fair in knife fights and air-to-air combat.”
—ANONYMOUS
Tijuana, Mexico
The best part of strike fighter training, everyone said, was the fighter part. The nuggets loved it. What they loved most about it was where they did it.
Fighter weapons phase, like strike phase, was done on detachment—away from home. But instead of the sagebrush-and-rattlesnake remoteness of Fallon, Nevada, fighter weapons phase was in Key West.
Everyone, it seemed, loved Key West. “It’s awesome! The flying, the base, the weather, the beach.”
Not to mention the topless bars and the cheap drinks and the hordes of groupie girls down there on spring break.
Key West was to Navy fighter pilots what the old Muroc Field (later, Edwards Air Force Base) had been to Chuck Yeager and hi
s comrades of The Right Stuff. It was a place nearly forgotten by the brass hats of the Navy, a little atoll so far out of the main stream that a man could get lost there.
Key West was the site of Boca Chica Naval Air Station, the Mecca of raw, unfettered, envelope-punching, fighter jockeying. It was freedom! No commodores, no ill-humored brass watching you like cops at a school crossing. If you ripped into the break at Key West just a little hot, rattled a few windows. . . well, hell, hadn’t the windows at Boca Chica always rattled? They were supposed to rattle, maybe even shatter once in a while, like cheap china. This was Key West! You could push your airplane and yourself right up to the limits, maybe even a little beyond.
Fighter pilots loved everything about the place—the glorious weather, the uncrowded air space, the ramshackle, go-to-hell ambiance of the old air station. The flying was all daytime, clear weather, air-to-air combat training. Key West possessed the sort of Margaritaville decadence that matched some maverick chromosome in the fighter pilot chemistry.
The best part was at the end of the day. Every evening, with a day’s hard air combat training behind them, and before the Caribbean sun had slipped into the gulf, they were out the gate, barreling toward the old town of Key West and the pier-side honky-tonks and the splendid sinfulness of Duval Street. They loved it.
Key West had developed a culture all its own. The island was a lively colony of Hemingwayesque drinkers, artists, brawlers, prostitutes, gays, fishermen, druggies, smugglers, treasure hunters, groupies of every persuasion—and fighter pilots. The most famous bar in the old town was Sloppy Joe’s, where Hemingway used to hold court and where his picture now adorned every wall and was even on the T-shirts they peddled to tourists.
It didn’t take long for young Navy pilots to slip into the mode of Key West living. In the uniform de rigueur—shorts, sandals, reasonably clean T-shirt—they hit Duval Street. It didn’t matter that they were instantly recognizable to the locals as a G. I. The Key Westers had been seeing short-haired Navy jocks on their premises for half a century. Anyway, the natives were friendly, especially the girls in the bars who, when you bought them a drink or two, would demonstrate that they just loved Navy pilots. . .
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Not everyone in the military felt the same way about Key West. To the real Navy, which was to say the hard-shelled surface sailors who valued things like shipshapeness and glistening decks and gray-painted edifices, Boca Chica was an embarrassment. A black-shoe naval officer’s first glimpse of the ramshackle hangars, decrepit outbuildings, crumbling stairwells, the sagging, rain-stained ceilings, grass-thatched huts at the water’s edge that served as off-duty drinking and fishing shelters would leave him gagging. It was the kind of place only the airedales could love.
The Boca Chica air station had a collection of gale-battered hangars and a sprawling, sun-scorched ramp. Land crabs scuttled like miniature tanks between the buildings. A steady offshore wind blew in from the straits of Florida, rattling the ancient doors of the WWII-era hangars. Tropical showers meandered through the leaking roofs, puddling in the ceilings of the ready rooms, staining walls and mildewing the furniture. Pilots soon learned to avoid those chairs in the briefing room that lay under the cracks in the ceiling tiles.
One autumn afternoon an Air Force F-16 squadron arrived for temporary duty at Boca Chica. They were there to take advantage of the glorious weather and to utilize the Navy’s high tech weapons range facilities. The Air Force unit was assigned to occupy Hangar 17, the same one favored by the Navy detachments from Cecil Field.
A blue-suited colonel with spit-shined shoes came to inspect his squadron’s new quarters. For a long while the colonel studied a hangar door, which would not close. The door had been rusted in place, he guessed, since about 1942. Then the colonel inspected the stairwells to the office spaces. He noted that they seemed to be shored up by timber pilings. He sniffed the dank, mildewed air. The colonel thought the ancient hangar was disgusting.
Then he entered a dark and mold-encrusted maintenance shop. He opened a metal locker. He found himself eyeball-to-eyeball with a Florida land crab the size of a cocker spaniel.
Yaaarrrggghh! The colonel bolted from the hangar. The inspection was finished. No way was any flying unit of the United States Air Force going to be billeted in a place so unhealthy, unsafe, and disgusting as Boca Chica’s Hangar 17.
The story, of course, got back to the Navy pilots at Cecil, who loved it. It confirmed everything they had believed about the Air Force: The poor uptight blue suits didn’t know paradise when they saw it!
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Who are those guys?
That was the nuggets’ standard reaction when they landed at Boca Chica. Parked there on the ramp were neat rows of fighters. But these fighters weren’t marked in the sea gray paint and distinctive U. S. stars-and-bars insignia of the Navy or Marines or Air Force. They had foreign-looking camouflage paint schemes and—my God!—East Bloc red stars on the tails.
Enemy fighters.
Which they were, sort of. They belonged to the Navy’s most peculiar fighter squadron, VF-45, whose mission was to provide bogeys—adversaries —for the Hornet and Tomcat squadrons that came to Key West for training. The adversary pilots flew an assortment of Navy and Air Force fighters—F/A-18s, F-5Es, F-16s—all painted with the ominous mottled sky-blue camouflage paint schemes and the even more ominous red stars.
Being an adversary pilot was, in the opinion of most fighter jocks, the closest you could come to heaven. The bogeys were all experienced fighter pilots and each had been hand-picked from a fleet squadron. Duty in the adversary squadron meant that you got to fly the world’s hottest fighters. And it meant you spent your days flying air-to-air combat missions, from a nice long runway and not a floating steel slab of a carrier’s flight deck, and you almost always flew in daytime and in good weather.
Briefings for the fighter weapons missions were held in a large room in one wing of the dilapidated adversary squadron hangar. The briefing room was divided down the middle. On one side sat the students and their instructors. On the other side sat the bogeys—the pilots of the adversary squadron. Good guys on the left, bad guys on the right.
A giant grease board covered the front wall. On the board were times, call signs, aircraft numbers, names of the pilots, designated operating area, radio frequencies—all the data for the coming mission.
Almost all the data. There were a few details missing, like how many bad guys you were up against.
On the side of the grease board marked BOGEYS was one call sign— “Bouncer.” Beneath it was “And Friends.” It meant that Bouncer, the adversary pilot, would be opposing the flight of students, and with him would be an unknown number of other adversaries. The mission was a four vee unknown—four friendlies versus an unknown number and type of bogeys.
It was all supposed to be very realistic, the red star-marked adversary fighters, the unknown number of the opposition, the tactics they employed. The adversary pilots, with the different types of fighters in their inventory, mimicked the performance of specific enemy fighters. They could accurately imitate a MiG 21, or MiG 25, or the powerful MiG 29, and their tactics even matched the kill parameters of the various Russian-built air-to-air missiles. The adversaries were schooled in the tactics favored by fighter pilots of Libya, Iraq, Iran, Serbia—all the hostile air forces the Navy pilots might someday encounter.
The adversary pilots loved their jobs. They had so gotten into their roles that they even talked like pseudo-bogeys on the radio:
“Akhmed, we have enemy Hornets twelve o’clock!”
“Rahjah that, Abdul. I have a lock.”
The adversaries didn’t always win. Since their job was to provide realistic opposition—and targets—for the fledgling Hornet pilots, they were frequently “shot down.”
“Akhmed, we are lit up. The Yankee swine are launching missiles.”
“Yeah, too bad about that, Abdul. Today we visit Allah.”
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L
ike the other nuggets, Road Ammons loved this phase of the syllabus. Air-to-air was turning out to be his strongest subject. He loved the one-on-one, best-jock-wins gamesmanship of the contest. It reminded him of college sports, going up against an opponent and trying to beat his socks off.
Until he got to Key West, Road Ammons had believed he was untouchable. He had gotten this far in his flying career without any major mishap. No SODs. No life-threatening screw-ups. He had done well in fam phase, gotten better than average scores in strike phase. In fighter weapons phase, out here in the empty blue spaces over the Florida Keys, going one-on-one with the other nuggets and up against the adversary squadron guys—well, hell, man, he was kicking ass!
Sure, he had gotten schwacked a couple of times, getting too aggressive against a bogey and letting the guy’s wingman sneak in a shot at him. That sort of thing—getting schwacked—was to be expected if you were trying out new tactics, learning what worked and what didn’t. But in plain BFM—Basic Fighter Maneuvering—good ol’ Road Ammons was turning out to be one ass-kicking, mean-eyed, hard ball fighter pilot.
Until this afternoon. This was the afternoon he fell out of the sky like a manhole cover.
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Road’s eyes looked like halogen lamps. “Shit, man, I thought we were gonna punch out!” he said in the Key West ready room. Gone for the moment was the trademark Yamaha grin and the aw-shucks shuffle. “That was the scaredest I’ve ever been in an airplane.”
Road ripped the pop-top off a coke can and downed it in two long swallows. He had been on the ground for an hour and a half now and he was still sweating.
It had been a one-vee-one , meaning one fighter versus one fighter. The exercise was called Basic Fighter Maneuvering, and it was the essence of air combat. High noon in the sky. Dueling Hornets, one on one. —
Road had been flying with an instructor, Barney Barnes, in the back seat. The mission was to go one on one out there in the operating area against another student, who also had an instructor in his back seat. The instructors were there not just to instruct but to extricate their nuggets from imminent calamity. Things happened fast in air-to-air. Once in a while a nugget got in over his head.
Bogeys and Bandits Page 18