Someone declared that they had to eat something or the booze might go to their heads. So they stopped at the Pizza Hut to put away several large sized pizza supremes. Then they proceeded down the street to the Hog’s Breath Saloon, the most popular watering hole for Key West based fighter jocks.
And that was where Chip Van Doren was nearly killed.
He was leaning at the bar, carrying on a rambling conversation with a bearded, tattooed biker. The biker wore an earring and a pony tail. He stood, by various estimates, at least six-and-a-half feet tall.
In mid-sentence, Chip lost it. Baaarrrrroooouuugh! Beer, Koolaid, rum, pizza—all in one amorphous wet projectile. It happened so suddenly. The biker couldn’t believe it. He looked down in shock at his black, studded, knee-length leather boots. They were glistening in a dark red slime of tomato paste, mushrooms, pepperoni, olives, globs of undigested sausage.
And then the biker started to go crazy. He rose to his full height, red-faced and pop-eyed, looking like a tyrannosaurus about to rip the guts out of a platypus. He was pissed! He wanted to kill this fuzz-nutted yuppie sumbitch who had just hurled on his goddamn two-hunnerd-fuckin’-dollar boots!
And that’s when Chip Van Doren would have been killed. Except that in the next instant the bar erupted in cheers, whistles, applause. A dozen grinning pilots from visiting Navy and Marine Corps squadrons were in the joint, taking their own libations. They’d seen the whole thing.
“Bravo!”
“Awesome!”
“A power barf!”
“Hey, do you Hornet guys fly like you drink?”
The biker caught himself. He glanced around the place, making a quick head count. He was outnumbered by twenty to one.
Despite his tattoos and immense size, the biker was a pragmatist at heart. If there was ever an occasion for non-violence, this was surely it. The biker looked again at his puke-covered boots and shrugged. “Hell of a shot, buddy. I think you owe me a beer.”
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The rift between Shrike Hopkins and the instructor pilots was becoming as wide as the Gulf Stream.
One of the things that rankled them was Shrike’s attitude: She just wasn’t showing enough humility. They figured she ought to be showing a certain level of chagrin about the Blue-on-Blue missile shots. She could at least have looked remorseful and apologetic and gone through some requisite groveling. But it was becoming apparent to everyone that that wasn’t Shrike’s style. Instead of being remorseful, she actually seemed to think it was. . . funny! She laughed about it, acting like she had been caught doing nothing more consequential than parking in a handicapped space.
It was making the instructors furious. Here was a nugget, mind you, who seemed to think shooting down your wingman was a goddamn joke.
“You’re lucky,” growled Marine captain Roller Rink. “They’ve changed the grading criteria. It used to be, a Blue-on-Blue was an automatic SOD.”
“That’s history,” she responded. “Why don’t you guys lighten up? This is supposed to be training, isn’t it? It isn’t life and death stuff. Aren’t we supposed to have fun?”
Another thing that rankled the instructors was the way Shrike persisted in calling everyone by their first names. In ready room protocol, nuggets were never supposed to call seniors, particularly instructors, by anything but their rank and last name, or by their radio call signs. Shrike affected an easy familiarity with seniors, calling lieutenant commanders and commanders “Mike” and “Joe,” chatting with instructors like they were her kid brothers. It rasped on their nerves like fingernails on a blackboard.
And then there was the matter of the diary. One day during the Key West detachment someone noticed Shrike sitting in a corner of the ready room pounding away on a laptop computer. “What’re you writing?” he asked. “A book?”
“Maybe,” she said. “I’m keeping a diary. Making notes about everything that happens here. So you guys better be careful what you say. It’s all in here.”
Then she laughed, just to let them know it was a joke. Nothing serious, you know. It was supposed to be funny.
They didn’t laugh. They went crazy. Notes! A freaking diary. . . she’s writing down everything we’re saying. . . we’re gonna be quoted in some kind of goddamn feminist manifesto!
When she realized she had once again pushed some crazy buttons, she tried to reassure everybody that, hey, back off guys, it’s just a diary! She had been keeping a diary since she was nine years old. The fact that people now wrote this stuff on laptop computers that they hauled around with them didn’t make them reporters from Sixty Minutes. Jeez! It was harmless.
It didn’t matter. By now the paranoia had reached a level to make the instructors distrust anything they saw Shrike Hopkins doing. And Shrike, no stranger to paranoia, was more than ever convinced of a sexist conspiracy to have her de-winged and evicted from the strike fighter community.
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Oddly, the instructor pilot who got along best with Shrike was Barney Barnes. Barney had no problem with Shrike’s attitude. He didn’t care about attitudes, just results. Shrike’s problems he took as a personal challenge.
Shrike understood this and respected Barney for it. She liked the fact that he never talked down to her, and he couldn’t be bothered by all those gender-correct distinctions in his briefings. Everyone got the same treatment from Barney, which suited Shrike just fine.
“We’re gonna try something different on those assholes today,” Barney said in a briefing. He went to the chalkboard and drew lines indicating the directions he and Shrike would fly versus the bogey fighters. “Those bogeys are so cocky,” he said, “they’re expecting us to do the same canned set-up time after time. But this time we’re gonna fake ‘em.”
He and Shrike would begin the engagement with the bogeys, as usual, from about forty miles out. As they converged, each side would be “sorting” out the other on their respective radars, determining the opponents’ speed, altitude, aspect angle, trying to set up a missile firing solution.
But what Barney had in mind was different. As the two groups of fighters, friendly and adversary, converged, Barney would abruptly pull his nose straight down, diving his fighter several thousand feet below the developing dogfight. Shrike, his wingman, would continue toward the approaching bogeys, looking on their radars like a sitting duck. But as they turned into her, setting up their own firing situation, they would be suddenly ambushed from far below. In full afterburner, roaring straight upward toward their bellies would come Barney—locked on and shooting.
Shrike was looking at the chalk lines on the board. “I think I get the picture now,” she said thoughtfully. “You’re using me as bait. You’re gonna use a woman as bait.”
“Of course,” said Barney, unloading a glob of dip. “The suckers always fall for it.”
So off they went, flying the mission just like Barney briefed. They encountered the bogeys in the op area, right on schedule. As they converged, she continued alone while Barney dove toward the ocean. Then he came roaring back up in a vertical climb at better than 600 knots. As the bogeys were still maneuvering to take their shots at Shrike, Barney called “Fox Two.” It was the signal that he had launched a simulated AIM-9 “Sidewinder” heat-seeking missile. “Fox Two,” he called again.
Two shots. Two dead bogeys. The suckers fell for it.
Back in the debriefing room, Shrike was on a high. Now, here was something that was seriously good fun. She and Barney slapped hands in a high five. “Wow! It really worked.”
“Sure it worked. What did I tell ya?”
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By the second week of the Key West detachment, two more students had committed BOBs—taking shots at their leader.
They were disgusted with themselves. Lieutenant Commander Doug Conkey, who was an experienced fighter pilot going through Hornet transition training, kept saying, “What a stupid trick. I knew better. What a stupid trick.”
Another was Burner, who had been having great success in air-to
-air, winning most of his engagements. He was mortified. “Shit. I thought I had the guy locked up. . .and then I blew it.”
They wanted to put the matter behind them. Swallow their medicine and get on with the program. But Shrike wouldn’t let them. She loved the fact that she wasn’t the only one who screwed up. See? The guys did it too!
She wouldn’t shut up. Conkey and Burner wanted nothing so much as to throttle her and make the whole sordid mess go away.
The next morning someone had written on the wallboard next to Shrike’s name, “Misery loves company.”
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Shrike almost made it through fighter weapons phase. She flew most of the remaining training flights without any serious problems.
The last flight of the Key West syllabus was the Class Strike. This was supposed to be a classic furball, a multi-aircraft engagement in which every friendly fighter, eight F/A-18s all together, flew against an unknown number of adversaries, which would be a mix of red-starred F/A-18s and F-5Es pretending to be East-bloc MiGs. Shrike was assigned as the dash three fighter in a four-plane formation. As dash three, she was the leader of a two-plane section, and was responsible for dash four, flying as her wingman. Her job would be to keep her two-plane section in combat formation with the lead two-plane section.
The elements of the friendly force were supposed to be “stacked” in holding patterns, vertically separated by two thousand feet each, while they assembled. When all the elements of the strike force had rendezvoused at the holding point, then the “strikers” would commence the ingress into the enemy air space.
Things started going to hell early.
Shrike saw her lead section up ahead, waiting for her in the holding pattern at thirty-two-thousand feet. Below, at thirty-thousand, was another section of friendlies. And another at twenty-eight thousand, all going round the holding pattern waiting to begin the strike.
With her wingman close aboard her own jet, Shrike was closing fast on the lead section. Up ahead she could see the two tiny dots of the leader and his wingman, waiting for her in the left-handed holding pattern. She slid slightly to the left, to rendezvous on them from the inside of the turn.
The two little dots were swelling rapidly in her windscreen. They were no longer dots. Now they were getting big. Real, identifiable, full-sized Hornet fighters. . . Holy shit!. . . getting very big very quickly.
Shrike was closing fast. Too damn fast. She had seventy knots too much closure speed. Suddenly she realized she was about to overrun the lead section.
She extended her speedbrakes and yanked the jet hard to the right.
Which was where her wingman, dash four, happened to be.
“Yeeeoowww, watch it!” she heard on the radio, and she got a glimpse of her terrified wingman yanking his own jet up and over her to keep from being rammed. She kept her eyes on him, trying not to lose sight of the maneuvering jet, which was wobbling its wings like a confused gooney bird. He was above her now, his belly down so that she was no longer visible to him.
She swung her eyes back to the lead section, on whom she had been joining. They were gone.
Oh, shit! Where were they? High, low, where? In the space of two seconds, while she was observing the oscillations of her escaping wingman, she had lost sight of the other section.
Now things really were going to hell. There she was, overrunning a join-up, with her wingman flopping around just above her canopy, and her lead section somewhere in the same airspace, no longer in sight. It was a scenario for disaster. Four Hornet fighters were about to become one with each other. It would be spectacular.
Cool, laconic fighter pilot talk gave way to radio bedlam:
“Dash Three, where are you?”
“Four, is that you? Where are you four?”
“Hey, who just flew across my nose?”
“Look out! Look out! Dash Three, Dash Four, whoever the hell you are, look out, you’re descending through the TARCAP [Target Combat Air Patrol] altitude!”
Then an instructor’s voice cut through the bedlam: “Shrike, listen up. Level your wings, and maintain thirty-one-five.” He was telling Shrike to level off at thirty-one-thousand-five-hundred feet, between the layers of other fighters.
They missed each other. Somehow none of the sightless fighters collided. They had scattered like a flock of shotgunned crows, and it took ten minutes for the mission commander to get them back together and resume the exercise.
Meanwhile, the adversary pilots, hearing the melee on the radio, were cracking up. They loved it! Waiting out there in their red-starred pseudo-MiGs, listening to this gaggle of amateurs trying to get their shit together, they could already taste the free rounds of beer they were going to collect that night. It was easy to sort out the individual pilots’ voices in the radio babble, and it wasn’t hard to tell who among them had made such an ungodly mess out of a simple rendezvous.
After all, it was a voice that by now they all knew. It was female.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
FNAEB
That was it. Shrike had used up all her slack.
There was no arguing with the “Unsatisfactory” that she was assigned for the Class Strike mission. It was unsatisfactory, and it had nothing to do with esoteric skills like radar intercepts or weapon employment or sorting out who you were going to shoot with your missile. She had demonstrated an unsafe tendency in basic formation flying—the essence of all fighter tactics.
Shrike’s problems came down to the old catch-all: situational awareness. If you couldn’t effect a simple join-up with the other fighters in your flight, you were considered to be short in the SA department.
Back at Cecil Field, the commanding officer ordered a FNAEB to be convened for Lieutenant Sallly Hopkins.
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They called it the Room of Pain. It was a conference room on the second deck of the VFA-106 hangar. In it was a long table. On one side sat the four members of the board, and on the other, the aviator whose career was now on the line.
FNAEBs were yet another layer of the eternal Fine Mesh, the weeding-out of naval aviators on their way up the ziggurat. A FNAEB was a ritual, everyone figured, that had its origins in the Spanish Inquisition. Or possibly the Salem witch trials. It all the merry frivolity of third-degree interrogation, flogging, walking the plank, and tar-and-feathering.
FNAEBs were conducted with dismal regularity at RAGs like VFA-106, where untested young naval aviators often stumbled on the way to becoming fleet-qualified strike fighter pilots. In more than half such evaluation boards, the student would be found worthy of retention and returned to the training pipeline. The student would receive a few extra periods of training, and in most cases would graduate and leave the whole nasty experience behind.
But not always. In certain instances, when a nugget had shown himself—or herself—to be an airborne hazard to most forms of human life, including their own, the board would recommend that training be terminated.
The board would choose one of several dispositions: The aviator might be transferred to another “community” of naval aviation, say transports, or patrol planes, or helicopters. Or grounded altogether, removed from flying duty. The gold wings on the breast would become purely honorific, like a medal from a forgotten war. In the most unredeemable of cases, the aviator would not only be removed from flying status but would be “undesignated”—stripped of the precious wings of gold.
De-winged. For an aviator, it amounted to the ultimate humiliation.
Because Shrike Hopkins was a senior lieutenant, two lieutenant commanders were assigned as members of her FNAEB. A third, the head of the board, was a Navy commander from the staff of the Atlantic Fleet Strike Fighter Wing.
From the beginning everyone knew this was not going to be an ordinary, open-and-shut evaluation board. Shrike let it be known she was going to play the gender card. But she had also been keeping a secret: She was having pains—real pains—in her abdomen. And lately they had been getting worse.
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br /> One by one, the instructor pilots were called before the board and asked to make written statements. They were supposed to recount incidents they remembered about Shrike’s training flights. And they were asked for opinions about her aptitude for duty as a strike fighter pilot.
It was an outpouring of anger. Shrike’s troubled relations with the instructor pilots came tumbling down like a spring avalanche. Most of the opinions were derogatory:
“I would not want to serve with her in my command because. . .”
“She is putting excessive pressure on herself because she is a female aviator in a male community. . .”
“She is too defensive and adversarial. . .”
“She is not humble enough.”
“She takes the slightest criticism poorly and is very resentful. . .”
The commander with whom Shrike had gotten into the “verbal assault” scrap at Fallon was asked to make a statement. Would he want her in his squadron? “No,” he answered. And why? “Because she’s more trouble than she’s worth.”
Not all the statements were so damning. A few instructors did think Shrike had the potential to do well as a fighter pilot. One was Barney Barnes. Would Barney be willing to serve in a fleet squadron with her? “Yes,” he answered without hesitation.
She also provided copies of fitness reports written by her previous commanding officers. Her performance, said one of the skippers, “was exemplary. She is an officer of the highest caliber, and will be a strong achiever in her future career.”
Shrike had to laugh when she read that part. Future career. Some future career, she thought. Her future career was being decided by people who hated her guts. People who thought she was “more trouble than she was worth!”
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The board deliberated for nearly two weeks. On a Monday morning the senior officer of the FNAEB delivered the board’s findings—one-and-one-half inches thick—to the commanding officer of the RAG. Shrike’s recommended fate was contained in the last sentence of the cover letter:
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