“Like be a wimp?” she said.
“Like back off. Keep your eye on the ball.”
Keep your eye on the ball. Shrike hated those sports metaphors they used so much in the Navy. Like aviation was some kind of school boys’ intramural sport.
Road was right, she knew. It was just that, damn, she hadn’t come this far in her career to be talked down to by guys who thought women were some kind of sub-species. But she knew that she had to stay focused. Keep remembering what she was here for. She wanted to finish, didn’t she? To do that, she had to play their game.
“Yeah, I hear you. I’ll try. I really will.”
<>
It worked both ways. Road talked to Shrike about keeping her eye on the ball. And she talked to him about outer space.
That was something else they had in common: They both had secret aspirations.
Except that with Shrike, it wasn’t so secret. She couldn’t help letting it be known around the RAG that F/A-18 training, for her, was just a stepping stone. Sure, she would do a tour in a fleet F/A-18 squadron, but then she would, of course, be selected for test pilot school. Then NASA and space shuttle pilot training. Everyone knew that NASA wanted women candidates for the space program.
She was just, you know. . . passing through the RAG. On her way to being an astronaut.
Which was just one more thing that was making Shrike Hopkins unpopular. Most instructors thought that nuggets, male or female, ought to keep their impertinent mouths shut while learning the fundamentals of staying alive in a Hornet strike fighter. The nerve of this broad! Just “doing” the F/A-18, because it will look good on her astronaut résumé.
Road, for his part, was keeping his mouth shut. Around the ready room, good ol’ Road Ammons just flashed his Yamaha grin and joked with the guys and kept his profile low. Just the way he had been counseled. Shucks, man, I’m nothin’ special, here to learn, you know, just another Marine.
Becoming an astronaut, of course, was a long shot for any naval aviator, minority or not. You needed an exotic background: a degree, preferably a graduate degree, in aeronautical or astronautical engineering. You had to be selected for test pilot school, the pool from which almost all pilot candidates for astronaut training were chosen. And to get into test pilot school, you first had to distinguish yourself as an aviator in the fleet, preferably in a fighter squadron.
But Road and Shrike were right about one thing: It wasn’t written down anywhere, but it was undeniably true—being a minority member, whether black, brown, female —was an advantage.
Shrike had a considerable head start over Road. She already had the academic credentials. On paper, Shrike looked like a prime candidate for NASA.
Road, with his degree in computer science, was a so-so scholar. He was a football player, not an honor student. He had graduated somewhere in the upper third of his class at Tennessee State. To be a serious contender for a space suit, Road knew he would have to finagle a master’s degree in a techno-science. And he had to gain entry to test pilot school. And before any of those things happened, he had to finish the RAG. He had to become a fighter pilot.
CHAPTER TWENTY
BLUE ON BLUE
“MiGs were born to die.”
—sign on the wall in Key West fighter squadron ready room.
“It’s a dynamic environment out there. . .”
You heard that word a lot in the air-to-air phase. Dynamic. What it meant was, things happened eyeball-poppingly fast in air-to-air combat— fighters merging with closing speeds of 1600 miles an hour. It was like a knife fight in a darkened room. You never knew for sure where the enemy was coming from. Or how many you faced. But you had to get them before they got you. How many bogeys do we have? Two? Shit, there are three. . . No, four! It was a game of thrust and parry. Shoot and get the hell out.
One afternoon Shrike came back to the ready room. She looked shaken. “Jesus, that’s scary,” she said. “There were four bogeys out there. And during the whole fight, I only saw one of them.”
VIDs—visual identifications of bogeys—were tough when you were peering through the stratosphere for specks approaching you at supersonic velocities. Some bogeys were easier than others. Easiest of all were the big fighters like the F-14 Tomcat, with its variable sweep wings, which when folded back gave the Tomcat its distinctive, delta-shaped plan view. And in a head-on view, you could clearly see that the Tomcat’s two big vertical fins were parallel, unlike the F/A-18 with its angular, V-shaped pair of fins, or single-tailed like the F-16 or F-5E.
The toughest of all to spot, everyone agreed, were the F-5Es, which were the adversary squadron “bogeys” in the Key West operations. The Northrop-built F-5Es were souped up fighter versions of the slick little T-38 trainer used by the U. S. Air Force. The F-5Es were the no-seeums of the fighter community—tiny, slim-lined, fast and agile. Trying to VID an F-5E from twenty miles out was like spotting gnats. Once your eyes locked on to one, you didn’t dare look away.
That happened a lot in air-to-air. Air-to-air was a different game than air-to-ground. Every nugget said the same thing: Strike phase—air-to-ground—was the most difficult to plan, but the easiest to execute. During strike training out at Fallon they had spent hours of every evening poring over low altitude charts, planning missions, studying techniques, working out weapons loads. When it finally came time to execute the mission, it seemed easy, they thought. You just followed your plan, and it usually worked out.
Air-to-air was the opposite. There wasn’t much planning involved. You briefed the tactics that would be employed that day, then you went out there to see what happened. But what happened was always different from what you briefed. The air-to-air “furball” (so called because the flight paths of the engaged fighters, when traced on a plotting chart, looked like a tangle of hair) invariably evolved into something unexpected—a fast-paced, problem-solving environment, with a thousand opportunities for making mistakes. Everyone made them, but the pilots who made the fewest had the edge. They were the winners—those who possessed what the fighter community was now calling situational awareness.
It was a term that entered aviation lexicon back in the eighties. In its original context, Situational Awareness—SA—translated roughly to the “Big Picture,” and was coined to describe a fighter pilot’s perception of his three-dimensional environment. Pilots with high SA could enter a swirling multi-plane furball and maintain a mental picture of their own position, the whereabouts of the involved aircraft both friendly and hostile, and of their changing relationships. Pilots with high SA knew where they were—and where their enemy was. Conversely, pilots with low SA became disoriented and confused in the dynamic, vertical-horizontal environment. They had lost the Big Picture.
The term found its way into other disciplines of aviation. You heard it in civilian flight schools, in flight simulators, in air traffic control centers. If an airline pilot became disoriented in a holding pattern or deviated from a glide slope or committed some sort of cognitive error, an evaluator would render the inevitable verdict: “. . .subject airman suffered loss of situational awareness. . .”
SA was an aptitude that fighter pilots acquired, if they were lucky, with experience. A few pilots seemed to come by it naturally, and thus excelled in air-to-air combat. In others it was an inert substance. They found themselves always on the losing end of air combat maneuvering.
Or worse. Sometimes they even shot down the wrong airplane.
<>
Getting shot down by his own wingman—or wingperson, in this instance—was getting damned tiresome, thought Slab Bacon.
True, it was only training, and students were expected to make mistakes. But not the same mistake twice in a row. For the second consecutive exercise, Slab and his wingman had engaged the bogeys in the Op Area, sorted them out on radar, maneuvered into firing position, and then taken their simulated missile shots. Slab, as the instructor and section lead, had taken a shot at his bogey. And his wingman, the student and dash
two member of the two-plane section stationed out there in a combat formation off his right wing, had also taken a shot. But not at the bogey fighter. At him!
It was a classic screw up: a BOB—Blue on Blue—engagement. “Blue” designated the good guys. The home team. “Red” was the enemy. The bogeys. The way the game was supposed to be played, Blue fighters opposed Red, and the acronym was “BOR” —“Blue on Red.” It was like shirts and skins in a pick-up basketball game, a clear delineation of sides. In the real world, which was to say the unsimulated hardball world of friendly fighters versus hostiles, a BOB had the consequence of death by friendly fire. Shooting your comrades in arms was the ultimate screw up.
Which was why the instructors were beginning to say that Shrike Hopkins might be a little short in the Situational Awareness department. She was having trouble sorting out good guys from bad guys. Recognizing who was on first. With Shrike flying on your wing, you were as likely to get hosed as the enemy.
<>
It was a two-vee-one, meaning two friendly fighters versus one adversary. Slab and Shrike, as a two-plane section, were intercepting a single bogey. Slab had maneuvered the section so that he was merging nearly head on with the incoming bogey. Shrike, stationed high on the right side, then had an angular, nearly broadside shot at the fighter. It was an ideal firing situation. She was supposed to “lock up” up the target with her own radar and take the shot with the AMRAAM missile.
The AMRAAM (a convoluted acronym meaning Advanced Medium Range Anti Aircraft Missile) was a radar-guided weapon. A nasty peculiarity of the AMRAAM was that once it was launched it could “lock” onto any target that happened to be in front of it. When you thought you had a bogey “locked up” (acquired by the missile’s target seeker), you had to be sure there were no other unintended targets also in the firing zone. Like your flight leader.
The AMRAAM was an undiscriminating attacker. It might home in on anything it saw, friend or foe, that was unlucky enough to be in its sights. The missile was like a chained Rottweiler. You didn’t want to be in the same yard when someone turned the thing loose.
She took her shot. She had the bogey identified in her HUD. “Fox Three!” she called, signaling that she had pulled the trigger and simulated firing a radar-guided missile.
The bogey should have been dead.
Someone was dead, but it wasn’t the bogey. Back in the debriefing room, Slab and Shrike watched the cockpit video tape of her shot on the bogey. In slow, agonizing detail, you could see what happened.
In the video replay of Shrike’s HUD view, you could see the bogey fighter in the middle of the display. But in the bottom of the display was another, closer object. Another fighter.
Shrike wasn’t noticing. She was fixated on the bogey fighter. She “fired” the AMRAAM (not a real missile, but a training device fixed to the airplane) and the omnivorous Rottweiler missile went for the closest, most convenient hunk of meat.
Which turned out to be Slab Bacon. Her flight leader.
“Aw, damn!” groaned Slab when he saw the shot on the video. “Why’d you do that?”
“It wasn’t my fault,” she said.
“Really? Whose fault do you think it is when you take a shot on your own wingman?”
“I didn’t know you were there.”
“It’s your job to know.” He reversed the video back to the point just before the shot. “Look. There I am, in the bottom of your HUD. The AMRAAM switched locks from the bogey to me. That’s what it does. That’s why you never take an AMRAAM shot with a friendly in your HUD view.”
“Well, that wasn’t emphasized in our briefing, that business about the missile switching locks. Anyway, I didn’t see any other fighter way down in the bottom of the HUD.”
Slab’s exasperation level was peaking out. “Listen, Lieutenant, this is not an argument. It’s not even a discussion. This is a debriefing, so please pay attention and try to be receptive to—“
“I am being receptive. I just think that you should understand that I didn’t see the other fighter in the HUD. I didn’t notice it, so how could I have known the missile would lock on to another target?”
So went the debriefing.
Slab Bacon was known as a cool, even-tempered instructor. Few people had ever heard him even raise his voice. Like most instructors in the RAG, Slab prided himself on maintaining a professional detachment from his students. You tried to keep emotions out of the training process. It just went with the job: You never let a problem student push your crazy button.
Now Slab’s face was the color of erupted lava. He was struggling with the urge to choke the living shit out of this disputatious, meatheaded, hamfisted nugget. Shrike Hopkins had found his crazy button.
<>
It wasn’t her last Blue on Blue during the Key West detachment. It happened again. And once again the unintended target was. . . who else? Slab Bacon. It was making Slab wonder: What was it about him? Why was Shrike taking shots at him?
After Shrike’s second BOB, someone tried to assign her a new call sign. One morning when the pilots came into the ready room for the first briefings of the day, they noticed a change on the big wall-mounted schedule board. Each pilot’s call sign was there, with checked spaces for each completed item in the curriculum. Someone had erased the call sign “Shrike.” In its place they had written “BOB.”
<>
For Shrike, the air-to-air training at Key West was turning into the phase from hell. The harder she tried, the more mistakes she made.
On a training flight against “bogeys” from the adversary squadron, Shrike was assigned as the “shooter.” She was the one designated to “kill” the intercepted enemy jets. She was supposed to fly the wingman’s slot, to the right of the leader in what was called a “combat spread,” close enough to maneuver with him when the formation intercepted the enemy fighter. As they closed on the incoming enemy fighter, her job was to turn into the bogey and take a forward quarter shot at him with her radar-guided missile.
But Shrike was having troubles maintaining her position as wingman in the combat formation. She was flying her jet high and wide of the formation, getting “acute” in relation to the other friendly fighters, meaning she was high and too far forward of her assigned place. When the leader turned to intercept the incoming bogey fighter, Shrike—the designated missile “shooter”—was floundering out there high and wide, out of firing position. She couldn’t launch her missile.
The mission instructor was a lieutenant named “Coop” Cooper. On the next intercept Coop tried coaching her on the radio: “Don’t get acute, Shrike. Move it in.”
She moved it in. But not enough.
“Idle power and speedbrake! Start your pull. Start your pull.”
She started the pull toward the bogey. She was too far out, too late for the shot. Again the bogey escaped.
“Shrike, you gotta keep it in closer. Don’t get acute, okay?”
“Roger.”
They broke off and flew back to the CAP (Combat Air Patrol) station to start another run. Again they flew an intercept course toward the incoming bogey fighter.
It was the same story: Too wide. Too acute.
“Roll ninety degrees, Shrike! Roll NOW! Roll left and pull. Pull, pull—aw, damn!”
She missed the shot. Again.
This went on for four separate intercept exercises. Shrike missed three of her four shots on the bogey. Back in the ready room, Coop, the frustrated flight leader and instructor, put a check on her student grade sheet in the “Unsatisfactory” column. That meant SOD.
Another SOD. That made three for Shrike since she began F/A-18 training. Three SODs were usually a limit. Any more unsatisfactory grades and a student could expect a FNAEB.
Shrike was still only about two-thirds through the Hornet syllabus, and she had used up all her allowable SODs. She still had to get through fighter weapons phase. And the most demanding stage of all, carrier qualification, still lay ahead.
Lately Shri
ke was getting this feeling of being a tightrope walker. She could see the end of the rope, but she still had a long way to go. And she was aware of all the ghouls out there watching, waiting, wondering whether she would make it. Sometimes she felt like just saying to hell with it and stepping off.
<>
Chip Van Doren had a hangover. The pain he suffered on this Sunday morning was particularly excruciating because Chip was a lousy drinker. Booze had never suited him, and hangovers were as rare for him as toe fungus. At Happy Hour over at the BOQ bar, where nuggets were expected to belly up to the bar like two-fisted drinkers and slam down beers with their squadron mates, Chip would fake it, nursing his Miller Lites like they were cod liver oil.
“Chip, that’s embarrassing,” Burner told him. “I mean, hell, man, you gotta learn to drink like a fighter pilot!”
They were in Key West, after all. And in Key West, on a Saturday night midway through fighter weapons training, you were supposed to rip a swath down Duval Street. For nuggets in the strike fighter RAG, it was practically a sacred obligation.
Chip didn’t have the only hangover. Most of the nuggets of Class 2-95 were nursing headaches of varying magnitudes. Only the women were relatively clear-headed. Shrike had excused herself early, complaining of a stomach ache. Rambo Morales attended the opening ceremonies at the BOQ bar, but dropped out before the party got wild.
It turned out to be one of those rolling bashes, with no particular itinerary or motive. They warmed up at the BOQ bar, playing Crud (a two-ball team game on the pool table) and rolling dice for rounds of beers. From there they progressed downtown to observe the sunset from one of the westward-facing pier bars. Then to Fat Tuesday’s where they turned on to Koolaid Slushes, a brain-mangling concoction made mostly of grain alcohol. Onward to Sloppy Joe’s, for Rum Goodies. It was there that Road Ammons, almost as unaccomplished a drinker as Chip Van Doren, disgraced himself by puking in a potted plant.
Bogeys and Bandits Page 20