“The board unanimously recommends that Lieutenant Hopkins’s flight status be terminated.”
It was the worst possible verdict. Terminated. De-winged. It meant the end of a career. The end of a dream. It was the most devastating event of Shrike Hopkins’s life.
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The pains were getting worse. For several weeks now Shrike had been ignoring them, sure that they must be in her head. She had read all about such ailments. Psychosomatic disorders were a common affliction of people under severe stress.
Stress. That sure as hell described her situation just now. If having what seemed to be the entire male contingent of the U. S. Navy on your heels like a pack of jackals could be considered stressful, then, yes, she was learning more than she ever wanted to know about stress.
The pain was in her abdomen. She had been feeling it ever since the fighter weapons detachment in Key West. Although she knew she couldn’t blame her erratic performance on the stomach pains, she knew it was going to look that way. She could already hear them talking about it in the ready room: Shrike was inventing some physical ailment to negate the report of the FNAEB. Just like a woman: She had an excuse for everything.
Then it got worse. The pain came in waves, seeming to swell and intensify each day as the FNAEB lurched toward its dismal and damning conclusion.
Now this. Now her stomach felt like a vat of molten lava. She didn’t care anymore whether the pain was psychosomatic or a voodoo curse, and she most certainly didn’t give a flying flatus what they were saying about her in the ready room. It hurt like hell, and she couldn’t ignore it any longer. She turned herself in to the naval hospital for tests.
It wasn’t in her head at all. The pain she had been feeling was in her abdomen—and it was real. In a two-hour surgery, a grapefruit-sized tumor was removed from her right ovary.
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The board’s report worked its way up the chain of command. A FNAEB’s decision was a recommendation, not a final disposition. It would be reviewed by the commanding officer of the RAG, then the commodore of the strike fighter wing, going all the way up to CNAL—Commander, Naval Air Forces, Atlantic—who was a three-star admiral.
Endorsing the FNAEB’s report on Shrike Hopkins would be one of Captain Matt Moffit’s last tasks as commanding officer of the RAG. Moffit was on his way to a grander assignment—command of a carrier air wing, the ultimate flying job in naval aviation. It was the last rung before promotion to the rank of admiral. The last thing Matt Moffit needed was The Gender Thing running amok in his command.
He disagreed with the FNAEB’s recommendation—but only a little. He thought that “undesignating” her—removing her wings of gold—was unwarranted. Moffit recommended that Shrike change “communities,” meaning that she go fly something else—transports, anti-submarine airplanes, helicopters. Anything but strike fighters.
And so it went, up the chain of command. The commodore of the strike fighter wing, Captain Fleming, dittoed Captain Moffit’s recommendation: Let her keep her wings, but send her somewhere else. Anywhere but strike fighters.
From there the report landed on the desk of Admiral “Sweepea” Allen, who commanded all the naval air forces in the Atlantic fleet. Allen had the final say. With a thumbs up or down he could decide the fate of officers like Lieutenant Hopkins. And before he decided, he wanted to have a talk with her.
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Shrike had never felt so alone in her life. Even before the acrimony of the board hearings, she had sensed a chasm widening between her and the other nuggets. Each time she clashed with the instructors in the RAG, her fellow students scuttled for cover. Shrike was a lightning rod, they had decided, and anyone who knew what was good for them was staying out of range.
Not everyone stayed away. A handful of instructors, notably Barney Barnes, came by to see how she was doing. Barney told her he hoped she would be back in the cockpit soon. He said he looked forward to seeing her someday in the fleet.
Her classmates in 2-95 had all checked in by telephone. Each made the same polite inquiries: How’re ya doing. . . What’s the prognosis. . . Keep your chin up. . . Hope you get back on your feet soon. . . See you around. . . Well, gotta run now. . .
And that was it.
So much for class camaraderie and the brotherhood of pilots. So much, for that matter, for the sisterhood of pilots. She sure wasn’t hearing much in the way of support from the other women aviators out there. It was as though they were relieved that Shrike Hopkins wouldn’t be attracting any more unfavorable attention to women in naval aviation. Even Angie Morales, the only other woman in strike fighter training, was keeping a safe distance.
Shrike felt like a lost child. But she could understand their attitude. From her time in the Naval Academy and then in flight training, she knew about casualties. She knew that once you’ve stumbled and fallen behind the pack, your colleagues didn’t come running Samaritan-like to your aid. Whatever it was you had, they didn’t want to catch it. It was nothing personal, just a matter of winners and losers. That was the way it worked in the Fine Mesh.
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Shrike Hopkins was continuing her string of abominably bad luck. She had been home from the hospital for a week. She was still weak and unsteady on her feet. One night she was on her way to the kitchen for a glass of milk, and something happened—she didn’t remember what. She lost her equilibrium and fell, knocking herself senseless and opening a large gash in her head. Her neighbor found her on the floor, dazed and bleeding. Back to the hospital Shrike went for more stitching and more tests.
Two days later, her surgical incision split open. She was back on the table, undergoing yet another medical procedure.
Shrike was beginning to feel like a one-woman medical experiment. She was spending more time in the hospital these days than anywhere else. The medical technicians had even presented her with a new name tag. Instead of Shrike, they had a more appropriate call sign: Lab Rat.
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Shrike had changed. She had lost weight, probably due as much to the stress of the FNAEB as to her medical condition. She looked not only slimmer but, to everyone’s surprise, softer, as though the medical ordeal had excised some of her legendary contentiousness. To whomever she met when she visited the squadron, even the instructors, she managed a cheerful smile.
Still recovering from the latest round of stitching and re-stitching, Shrike packed her bag and journeyed northward to the naval base in Norfolk, Virginia, to make her pitch to the admiral. It would be her last chance to save her sinking career as a fighter pilot.
Admiral Richard Allen was a bespectacled naval flight officer who had survived each of the Navy’s upheavals—the Cold War, Vietnam, Tailhook—since beginning his career in 1959 as a naval aviation cadet. He seemed sympathetic. Allen listened to Shrike’s version of the events that led to the FNAEB. He asked questions about her relations with the instructors in the RAG. He seemed particularly interested in the problem of integrating women into the Atlantic Fleet combat squadrons.
This was Allen’s last tour of duty before he retired. The Navy had already taken flak from the media in recent months over The Gender Thing. They’d had the Hultgreen crash, the post-Tailhook witch hunts, a spate of sexual harassment charges. Allen wanted to head off another firefight over the Gender Thing here on his doorstep.
When he finished with his questions, Admiral Allen reached a decision: Lieutenant Hopkins could keep her wings. She could keep everything. He was throwing out the FNAEB recommendation. In the admiral’s opinion, her case involved too many extenuating circumstances, and the board had overstepped its purview. It had gotten personalities mixed up with performance.
Shrike would be reinstated in the F/A-18 strike fighter training pipeline and resume training.
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The admiral’s decision hit Cecil Field and the RAG like an incoming Scud. The instructors who had clashed with Shrike during her training were outraged.
Whaaaaat? Why the hell do they bother to appoint evalu
ation boards if they’re gonna throw out any decision they don’t like? It means you can’t fail—if you’re a female!
It was impossible for anyone to be neutral about the matter. To the outraged instructors, it was a clear signal that political correctness had become the order of the day. Excellence, integrity, quality of product—all had been thrown to the hogs. The Fine Mesh had been replaced with a gender-based quota system.
To women like Shrike it meant something else. It was a signal, at least for the moment, that justice would be served. A woman pilot had finally received fair treatment. It wasn’t a man’s Navy any longer; there really was a place for women like Shrike Hopkins.
Shrike had won a victory—against her male opponents. But before she could ever fly Hornets again, she had to win yet another battle: She had to regain her physical qualification to fly. And that was beginning to look like an even tougher fight than the Gender Thing.
She had a growing list of maladies—the after effects of the tumor, the blow to her head, a pituitary gland problem—that threatened to keep her off flight status indefinitely. She felt like she was earning the new call sign: Lab Rat.
The flight surgeon gave her the bad news: She might be grounded for a year. Maybe longer. Maybe forever.
Part Three
DAS BOAT
Why is America lucky enough to have such men? They leave this tiny ship and fly against the enemy. Then they must seek the ship, lost somewhere on the sea. And when they find it, they have to land upon its pitching deck. Where did we get such men?
—JAMES A. MICHENER: The Bridges at Toko-Ri
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
WHITEHOUSE
It was an old air strip, one of those military auxiliary fields that you found scattered all over Florida. Most had been constructed back in the war years when the Navy was taking advantage of the superb Florida flying weather to train thousands of aviators. These days almost all the old fields were abandoned, reverting back to pine thickets, or they had been turned over to nearby towns to serve as municipal airports.
This was one was still active. They called the place Whitehouse Outlying Field. It was stuck up in the piney woods five miles north of Cecil. For nearly half a century now, Navy fighter pilots had been going up to Whitehouse for FCLPs - field carrier landing practice.
There wasn’t much there—a single eight thousand foot strip of concrete, a ramshackle control tower that was only manned when they were conducting FCLPs, and a crash and rescue shack that housed a couple of fire trucks and crews. The crash and rescue crews, like most such units, didn’t have much to do out there at Whitehouse. Only about once a year.
Whitehouse was a spooky place. Some would even tell you it was haunted. Over the years, going all the way back to before the Korean War, thousands of naval aviators had come out to Whitehouse to learn the craft of landing on an aircraft carrier. Almost all had lived through the experience. A few had not.
They all came here to practice: the A-4 Skyhawks, the F-4 Phantoms, the F-8 Crusaders—every jet in the Navy’s inventory had been represented out there at Whitehouse. At least one example of each had crashed here.
The north Florida landscape is a wonderfully resilient eco-structure. It repaired itself like a quick-healing wound. In only a matter of weeks you no longer saw the blackened cavity in the earth, the unnaturally cleared spot out there in the trees that looked like a meteor had struck. Or the long trench gouged through the runway approach path, like an archeological dig.
That’s the way it was in Florida: The rains came and washed away the soot and detritus. Vines and weeds and wildflowers covered up the scarred earth. The grass grew back almost before your eyes. Pine trees took root and filled in the clearings.
And soon there would be no trace of what happened out there. It was only when you stood alone, just before dark, listening to the wind sifting through the pines. woods. Then you could hear them: the ghosts out there at Whitehouse.
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Lieutenant “Pearly” Gates walked back out of the LSO shack and stood in the weeds gazing up at the empty Florida sky. Pearly was alone out there, except for his writer, a new kid named Nelson who was a stash waiting for a slot in a new Hornet class. Nelson was fiddling around inside the shack, getting the radio set up for the FCLP period.
Pearly glanced again at his watch. Four-twenty. Where the hell were they? His nuggets were due overhead five minutes ago. “The ship doesn’t wait for you,” Pearly always told his students in carrier qualification. “You wait for the ship.” Now everyone was waiting for them, the pissants. He scribbled a note to himself to rip a strip off their collective asses at the debriefing.
Pearly busied himself adjusting the Fresnel lens, making sure the glide path angle was exactly three degrees, not a smidgen more or less. He checked that the lights were the right intensity. He test-flashed the red wave off lights to make sure they worked.
He tried his radio: “Whitehouse tower, this is Paddles. Radio check.”
“You’re loud and clear, Paddles. How me?”
“Loud and clear also. Thanks.”
Everyone called the LSO “Paddles.” It was an anachronism dating back to before the optical landing system came into use in the mid-fifties, back when the landing signal officer actually waved a pair of signaling devices that looked like huge ping pong paddles. In those days he wore a set of coveralls with luminescent ribbons on the arms and legs. From the cockpit, the pilot would see this stick figure standing at the stern of the carrier, “mimicking” the airplane’s attitude, flapping the paddles and using a kind of body English to signal how he was doing. They called it “waving,” and even though LSOs long ago stopped waving real paddles, being equipped instead with radio, telephone, and a trigger for the wave off lights, the Navy still clung to its obsolete terminology. “Paddles” still “waved” pilots aboard the boat.
It was a hell of a job. Sometimes Pearly wondered why he did it. Why did anyone do it? Being an LSO was supposed to be a volunteer assignment. It was, something you signed were selected up for when you were a nugget new in a squadron, and it became your job for the next several years, until you were a lieutenant commander or commander. and they recruited you for this kind of duty. For a junior officer, it entailed enormous responsibility, more than any other squadron nugget-assignment, which was why it attracted people like Pearly Gates.
During difficult carrier flight operations, the LSO was the guy in the vortex of the action, standing out there with everyone’s eyes on him, from the captain on the bridge to the poor sweating shit-scared pilot out there in his jet trying to land aboard the carrier.
At times like that, everything rode on the coolness and the judgment of the LSO. It was a heady moment for a young lieutenant. He could be the biggest hero on the ship. Or he could blow it big time.
Which was precisely why Pearly Gates did it. He was an LSO because he wanted to be out there under the gun. Pearly was a young man who liked having the responsibility.
What he didn’t like was this: standing out in the weeds at the end of some miserable, wind-scoured, sun-bleached runway, waiting for a gaggle of screeching jets to show up so they could come pounding down, one at a time, on the concrete thirty feet away from you, hammering your ear drums like piledrivers from hell. It was now nearly five o’clock, the hour at which most of his buds would be converging on the Rocket to tell stories and slam down a few beers. Everyone would be there. Everyone but the LSO.
It would get worse. Tomorrow night, when the rest of the world was knocking back their toddies, catching the news, sitting down to a proper dinner, Pearly would be just going to work. Tomorrow night his students started night FCLPs and Pearly Gates, LSO, would be standing in this same miserable weed patch, out here in the blackassed Florida night, hoping some cottonmouth or rattlesnake wasn’t slithering his way, watching the eerie gray shapes of Hornet fighters materialize out of the black goo to come pounding down on this same slab of concrete. Pulverizing his ear drums.
That’s the way it would be every night for the next two weeks, until his nuggets were ready for Das Boat. After that, of course, he wouldn’t be standing in this forlorn, wind-scoured place. He’d be standing in another forlorn, wind-scoured place—out on the LSO platform of the U. S. S. Nimitz. The real Das Boat. Day and night. Getting his ear drums pulverized.
It was a bitch of a job. Pearly often thought of quitting, saying to hell with it, just being a normal, everyday fighter pilot.
And he would have quit too—except for one compelling reason: He couldn’t. Pearly Gates loved this job.
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Hook to steel. It was written up there on the wall board for them all to see.
“That’s what separates us from the Air Force,” LSO Chip “Plug” Neidhold told his class of nuggets. He said it again, liking the hard, mean-sounding ring to it: “Hook to steel. That’s what it’s all about. That’s what separates you from all the other fighter pilots in the world. You’re gonna plant your tailhooks on the steel deck of a aircraft carrier at sea.”
It was the first day of their last phase of strike fighter training: CQ (Carrier Qualification). It began, like every training activity began in the Navy, with a lecture. This one, according to the F/A-18 Pilot Training Syllabus, was ACQL 001: CQ (Carrier Qualification) Introduction.
Pearly Gates and Plug Neidhold were the LSOs who would be qualifying Class 2-95 aboard the carrier. They were a team. Pearly, who was senior and would be the “controlling” LSO, was a muscular young man, about five-ten and a trim hundred-sixty-five pounds. His brown hair was cropped in the ubiquitous crew cut that made him indistinguishable from the hundreds of young men in flight suits that populated naval air stations.
Of the two, Pearly was the more serious. Knowing the value of a little levity in the CQ briefing, Pearly usually let Plug get the students loosened up with a couple of jokes before he hit them with the life-and-death stuff.
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