On the second night in the pattern at Whitehouse, J. J. got another wave off—a real wave off-- with the LSO yelling on the radio and flashing the two vertical rows of red lights on either side of the Fresnel Lens.
J. J. was rattled. Still thinking about the wave off, he didn’t notice that the LSO was not answering him on the next pass.
“Three-oh-nine, Hornet ball, seven-point-six, Sniper,” he called on the radio.
No acknowledgment. The LSO was being deliberately silent. It was part of training. The LSO had to make sure his student was paying attention. One unwavering rule in carrier aviation was that when you called the ball, you must get an acknowledgment—a “Roger ball”—from the LSO. Without the acknowledgment, it meant you were not under an LSO’s control. The “contract” was not sealed. You could not continue the approach to a landing.
J. J. Quinn, in his frustrated, hypertensed state, forgot all that. He continued the approach. He flew it right down to landing— KaWhonk!—and took off again.
All without clearance.
“Three--oh-nine, did you get a ‘Roger Ball’ from Paddles?”
J. J. was surprised by the question. Aw shit! Did he? What kind of question was that? Hell, he didn’t know.
Now he was thoroughly out of touch. On the next pass he did it again. J. J. called the ball, and received no acknowledgment. And he landed anyway.
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It was an expensive mistake. For the night’s mistakes, as well as the generally unsteady ball flying, J. J. received a grade of “Unsatisfactory,” which translated to yet another SOD.
It was his third. J. J. Quinn was nudging frighteningly close to FNAEB (Fleet Naval Aviator Evaluation Board) territory. Like his classmate, Shrike, had already done, he would stand before a panel of unsmiling senior officers who would question his fitness to be a strike fighter pilot.
In fact, J. J. was already questioning his own fitness. One of J. J.’s assets, one that his instructors had always noted, was that he was receptive to criticism. Which was a good thing, because he was getting a hell of a lot of criticism lately. Much of it was from himself. J. J.’s confidence in his ability was draining away like water in a sieve.
A thought was taking root in J. J.’s mind: Maybe, just maybe, he really wasn’t cut out to be a fighter pilot. Maybe this whole idea was a colossal mistake. Maybe his wife was right. Maybe his pals back in the Marine helicopter community were right. Maybe he was too damned old, too fixed in his slow-moving, rotor-headed helicopter mindset. Maybe he should just say to hell with it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
DELIVERANCE
Burner Bunsen, who was turning out to be the best ball flyer in Class 2-95, was a Marine. And J. J. Quinn, the student having the most difficulty, was also a Marine.
That’s the way it often happened in strike fighter training. Marines were the wild cards. A Marine would be the outstanding student of a class, while another entire contingent of Marines would fill the bottom tier of a class, causing the instructors fits. Proportionally, more SODs and evaluation boards were handed out to Marine students than to the Navy nuggets.
The reason for this oddity was hazy—and controversial. Navy pilots tended to make it into strike fighter training purely on their flight training grades. The top of a graduating class traditionally got fighters. The next, in descending order, was assigned to attack, anti-submarine, and lastly to shore-based transport and patrol planes and helicopters. Sometimes, of course, a top student wanted something besides fighters, but that was the exception.
The Marine Corps was less elitist in the way they distributed talent. Top students did frequently receive assignments to jets, either AV-8 Harrier vertical-take off aircraft or F/A-18 Hornets. But not always. The Marines practiced what they called “quality spread,” meaning certain top students also were assigned, like it or not, to helicopters or transports. And lower-graded students were assigned, like it or not, to jets. It was not uncommon in the Marine Corps for a senior aviator to have experience in two or three communities—helicopters, fighters, even transports. The Marines believed in well-rounded backgrounds.
The Navy operated in a more specialized way. If you started out in fighters, you probably stayed there. If you were a helo pilot, that’s where you remained. If you spent your career snagging wires on a carrier with a tailhook, you snagged a lot of wires.
In years past, it would have been unlikely that Burner or Sniper or Road Ammons, being Marines, would have seen carrier duty after finishing initial training. But times had changed. Now the strike fighter community—Navy and Marine—was becoming increasingly integrated. They flew the same airplanes, had the same procedures, manuals, check lists, and underwent the same training. And it was a normal situation now for seagoing carrier Air Wings to have at least one Marine squadron on board.
Burner Bunsen was one of those gifted aviators for whom such things came easy. Just as he had led the class in the strike and fighter phases, he was now the top dog in the ball-flying department.
J. J. Quinn, for whom things had never come easy, was having his usual slow start. His passes continued to be erratic. The harder he concentrated, it seemed, the more elusive the ball became for him.
It was maddening. J. J. Quinn wanted to be the best in the class. He was the senior pilot of the bunch, about to become a major, and by far the oldest. Hell, he was supposed to do better than these kids. Instead, J. J. was plodding along, trying to keep up.
In every new phase of the F/A-18 program, J. J. had gotten off to a slow start. It seemed to take him longer than most students to get the hang of new techniques—dive bombing, strafing, air-to-air. But he did always catch on, and once he’d gotten the picture, J. J. had shown that he could do as well as any of them.
Until now. J. J. wasn’t getting the picture. Flying the ball out there in the pattern at Whitehouse was becoming an exercise made in hell. Now J. J. was furious with himself for having gone out there, two periods in a row, making the same damn clumsy mistakes. The more furious he became with himself he became, the worse it got. Worst of all, it was doing a number on J. J.’s self-confidence.
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The nuggets ran into their old classmate, Shrike Hopkins, from time to time. She sometimes showed up at the officers’ club bar for the Thursday afternoon beer sessions. She asked how everyone was doing. How was FCLP going? She updated them on her medical condition. She was still grounded, she told them. How much longer? She didn’t know. No one knew. What was she doing? Administrative jobs. Bullshit work. But, no, she hadn’t given up. She was still hoping to get back in the cockpit.
Shrike looked good. Even though she was wearing Navy khakis, they could see that she had slimmed down. Her blue eyes sparkled, and she seemed to paying more attention to mundane items like make up and hair styling.
At such beer sessions there was, of course, a glacial coolness between Shrike and some of the instructors. She didn’t seem intimidated. Shrike smiled at them like a cat teasing Rottweilers. Which, everyone figured, was the real reason Shrike came to the club: to maintain a presence among the old adversaries who had wanted to take her wings and ground her forever. It was her way of letting them know that she was very much alive and ready to come back. They hadn’t seen the last of Shrike Hopkins.
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With a load of self-doubt riding on his shoulders, J. J. Quinn returned to Whitehouse to do battle with the slippery ball.
It was a night just like the previous night. J. J. watched the yellow ball slide up and down on the lens. He struggled to fly his jet down an exact glide path, feeling his confidence wane a little more with each pass.
And then on one pass, while he was still a hundred feet over the blackened scrub brush approaching the runway, he let the ball go very low. So low, it turned red, dropping off the bottom of the lens.
“Wave off! Wave off!” yelled the LSO, flashing the red lights. “Burner! Burner!”
A wave off for being low in the groove was bad enough, but when the LSO
called “Burner,” which meant he wanted you to light the two afterburners on the jet engines—an effect like igniting two rockets behind you—you were really in trouble. J. J.’s Hornet roared back into the night sky, trailing two twenty-foot columns of blue flame behind the afterburners.
Twice this happened, J. J. making burner wave offs after settling dangerously low in the groove.
And then, thoroughly demoralized, J. J. delivered the coupe de grace to himself: He repeated the same unpardonable sin of the night before. On his last pass he called the ball and, missing the fact that he had received no acknowledgment from the LSO, landed anyway.
That did it. SOD number four. J. J. Quinn had used up all his slack.
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The debriefing was in Bennigan’s, a popular watering hole in BlueOrange Park. J. J. looked like a man on his way to a firing squad. His morale had hit rock bottom. He sat there at the table, his face drained and expressionless, listening to the recapitulation of his night at Whitehouse.
When the LSO had finished with his critique, J. J. just shook his head and said, “I should have known better.”
“You should have known better than what?” said Pearly.
“I should have known better than to try this. I’ll never be a fighter pilot. I don’t have what it takes. I shouldn’t have tried.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” the LSO said. “Try to lighten up a little.”
“I can’t. I’m getting worse instead of better. I should just quit.”
No one knew what to say. It was a painful thing, seeing a pilot lose it. J. J. had crawled into a black hole, and no one could coax him out of it. All the worry and uncertainty and residual fear of his decision to be a strike fighter pilot had come sliding down on him like snow from a roof.
Now J. J. was talking about quitting. And no one was talking him out of it.
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It was J. J.’s turn in the Room of Pain, the same chamber where his classmate, Shrike Hopkins, had gone through her trial. And the board’s recommendation in Shrike’s case—De-winging—was now very much on J. J.’s mind.
Because J. J. was a senior captain, each of the three officers on the board were senior officers: a senior Marine captain, a Navy lieutenant commander, and the senior board member, a Marine lieutenant colonel. The fourth member, as usual, was the Navy doctor who served as air wing flight surgeon.
The board members already knew about J. J.’s problems. They had also heard all about his self-flagellating. The word was going around that J. J. would probably spare them all the trouble of deciding his fate. Everyone figured that the poor demoralized guy would probably just quit.
They figured wrong.
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People had been figuring wrong about J. J. Quinn all his life. J. J. always surprised them. He wasn’t a super star, one of those guys who began a race like a sprinter off the starting blocks. J. J. was a plodder, at least in the first stages of every new endeavor. He had a learning curve like a gooney bird. He floundered, stumbled, tripped over himself before he finally took off. But then, to everyone’s astonishment, he always did take off.
J. J. spent that weekend in May holed up at home. He talked the matter over with Dorothy, but he didn’t consult any of his classmates or peers in the Marine Corps. After a weekend of much soul-searching he had reached some hard conclusions. He was playing several roles—career Marine officer, family man, naval aviator, potential fighter pilot—but there was there was one role he would not play: quitter.
J. J. became a man with a purpose. And a goal. He climbed out of his black hole. He charged out, teeth bared, guns firing. Gone was the melancholy, down-on-himself hangdog student of three nights ago.
On a Monday morning, he showed up in the Room of Pain, wearing his dress green Marine Corps uniform. His shoes were spit shined. The creases in his trousers and tunic looked sharp enough to slice apples. The burnished naval aviator’s wings glinted like Spanish gold above his left breast pocket. J. J. looked like a man on a mission.
“Captain Quinn, I understand you have a statement you would like to submit to the board?”
“Yes, sir, I do.”
J. J. gave them the sales pitch of his life. He wanted the board to understand that he was motivated, in the most urgent way, to complete F/A-18 strike fighter training. Further, he respectfully requested that the board review his entire naval aviation record, which would show that he had succeeded in every phase of training he had ever undertaken. Just as he knew he could succeed with this one.
J. J. told them that he realized he was having difficulty at this moment. Yes, he was proceeding at a slower pace than expected. But the situation, he felt certain, was transient. He had already proved that even when he got off to a slow start, he always rose to a level of excellence.
In other words, he had the ability to succeed as a strike fighter pilot. He would accomplish the objective—if this board saw fit to give him an additional shot at it.
The four board members looked at each other. This was a surprise. They had heard that this guy Quinn was probably going to make it easy for them, that he would come in here and drop his wings on the table. Now they had to do some serious considering.
They listened to the flight surgeon’s report. Based on his interviews with J. J., the flight surgeon thought that the Marine was simply being too hard on himself. Because he was older and more senior than the hotshot young nuggets in his class, J. J. felt that he should be leading the pack. He ought to be turning in the best performance. And since it wasn’t working out that way, it was causing J. J. a case of the fits. He felt like he was letting everyone down—classmates, himself, the Marine Corps.
The board also noted something else about J. J. Quinn: He was candid. Unlike many aviators with problems, J. J. wasn’t making any excuses. Yes, he had screwed up. Yes, he knew he was performing below the acceptable standard. And yes, he could do a hell of a lot better.
To an evaluation board, candidness counted for a lot. It was an accepted fact that the most dangerous aviators in fighters were those who refused to acknowledge their shortcomings. To make mistakes was natural. To deny them was an express ticket to a casketless funeral.
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Some FNAEBs were open and shut proceedings. An easy call. By an aviator’s woeful training record, the board members could see exactly what lay ahead in his fighter-flying career: a classic, debris-filled, smoking hole in the earth, probably greased with the aviator’s own incinerated carcass.
In such cases, the board’s duty was clear. They saved the aviator from his own grisly fate. They yanked his gold wings and ordered a transfer to another duty assignment, usually several light years removed from the strike fighter community. All for his own good, of course.
But most FNAEBs were not so clear cut. Just the fact that the subject aviator had gotten that far in naval aviation—all the way through flight training to the cockpit of an F/A-18 Hornet fighter—was strong evidence that he wasn’t a total klutz. So the board would scratch its collective head and wonder: Why was this guy having difficulty now?
They would sort through the aviator’s past record, looking for those overlooked but repetitive little clues in his flying history that this guy just might always have been headed for the bottom of the great smoking hole.
Or maybe not. Maybe he was just going through a rough patch, like a ball player having a bad season. Was he having family troubles? A discontented spouse? Was he going through a confidence crisis, shaken by some aerial occurrence?
Like bull fighters and race car drivers, fighter pilots lived on self-confidence. It was an elixir, the substance that made them invincible. With it, they were kings of the earth and the sky. When it slipped away, they became fragile, fearful, hollow-eyed mortals, haunted by the specter of the smoking hole.
The trick, of course, was to get the aviator to face up to it. There was a huge amount of pride involved. Rare was the fighter pilot who would say, “You know, flying these things just scares the
living shit out of me. I think I’ll quit before I get killed.”
Instead the troubled pilot wrestled with his demons in private, praying that he might somehow live through the whole experience, stay out of the smoking black hole, survive until his time was up and he could get on with a sensible earthbound life. For such an airman, a FNAEB was a merciful exit. It spared him the gut-wrenching—and humiliating—exercise of clipping his own wings. The board did it for him, usually over his own manly protests.
And then everyone was happy. The Navy was finished with its problem aviator. And the aviator was finished with his problem, which was the morbid certainty of his own imminent demise. The aviator would be reassigned either to another community, like transports or patrol planes, or quit flying altogether and perform a ground-based job.
It was hard, of course, for the board not to remember other FNAEBs. The Ricochet affair, of course, was still on everyone’s mind. In retrospect, everyone wished Ricochet’s first FNAEB, the one he received while still in the RAG, had yanked his wings. Ricochet was one of those guys who never got better, just more dangerous.
And then there had been Shrike Hopkins. The Hopkins FNAEB had turned into a political melee. Every subsequent board now had to deal with the fact that even if they did decide to remove an aviator from training, the decision was likely to fly back at them like a boomerang. The Shrike Hopkins reversed-FNAEB was a still-simmering issue in the strike fighter wing.
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The board sifted through four-and-a-half pounds of J. J. Quinn’s military records. There were no surprises. J. J. had been an average student during his initial flight training thirteen years before, a credential that had helped get him assigned to helicopters. He had gone on to distinguish himself both as a pilot and an officer in the helicopter community. For two years he served as a flight instructor in fixed-wing T-34 trainers. When he made the fateful choice to transfer to fighters, he went through the Navy’s advanced training unit out in Kingsville, Texas. He qualified in the T-2C basic jet trainer, then advanced to the TA-4J Skyhawk. J. J. completed the course with a ranking of third out of twenty-two students in his class.
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