She and her daughter started across the parking lot, holding hands, toward the van where the driver waited to take them out to the LSO shack by the runway.
And then something caught her attention. The jet that was on final approach to the runway. . . wasn’t behaving like the others. . .
Its wings were wobbling. Like it was having some kind of problem.
Debbie Elmore stood transfixed. Her gaze was locked onto the jet out there on final approach. No, she thought. This isn’t happening. This can’t be real. . .
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Every experienced LSO had seen it. It went with the job. If you stood there on the platform on a carrier long enough, or out at the end of lonely runways like Whitehouse, you eventually saw it all: ramp strikes, loss-of-control accidents, successful ejections, unsuccessful ejections. Crashes of all variety.
Pearly Gates had seen most of it. But it never got easier. And nothing in his experience made moments like this one any more believable.
“WAVE OFF! WAVE OFF!” he was screaming in the microphone.
The Hornet in the groove was trying to wave off. But it wasn’t working. Pearly could see that something had very badly gone to hell with the jet. One minute he was coming right down the rails, everything locked in place, then suddenly. . . the goddamned jet went out of control!
Burner, thought Pearly. Of all the nuggets now in CQ phase, Burner had been doing the best. Pearly wished that all his students were as trouble free as this guy, the Marine who, in all likelihood, would never have to fly off a ship after he completed RAG training. He’d be going to a Marine squadron up in Beaufort, South Carolina, where’d he’d probably spend his entire career based on land.
Though Pearly refrained from expressing such sentiments around the squadron, he thought such assignments were a waste. Sharp guys like Burner ought to be in sea-going squadrons. On the boat.
Now this.
Pearly had never felt so helpless. He stood there with his thumb mashed on the wave off button. The red lights on the Fresnel lens behind him were flashing like a Las Vegas casino front.
It no longer mattered. The Hornet in the groove was a wallowing, out-of-control mass of hardware. It was hurtling toward the earth like a runaway freight train.
Pearly watched, his stomach tightening. He knew now what was going to happen. The jet was skidding and rolling to the right. It was angling toward the open meadow a hundred yards short of the runway.
“Eject! Eject! Eject!” Pearly yelled into the microphone.
The jet went into the meadow inverted. A geyser of dirt and weeds and airplane parts filled the air like a volcanic eruption.
KaaaWhoooooom!
The orange fireball rolled across the meadow. The impact made the earth shake—the result of a sixteen-and-a-half ton object striking the earth at a hundred-sixty-miles-per hour.
They felt it in the LSO shack. Pearly Gates and Nelson the writer stared in horror out the window.
They felt it in the parking lot, where Debbie Elmore and her daughter stood screaming.
They felt it in the Whitehouse control tower, where the startled controllers were already yelling on their line down to the fire and rescue shack: “Roll the trucks! Approach end of runway one-one. Roll the trucks!”
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Every phone in the Strike Fighter Wing was ringing.
“Who was it?”
“Bunsen. First lieutenant. Class 2-95.”
“What’s his condition?”
“They don’t know for sure.”
“Whaddya mean, they don’t know? Did he eject or not?”
“They don’t know. They haven’t found him yet.”
<>
This went on for several hours. In the meantime no one was willing to say. The crash and rescue team combed the woods around the approach end of runway 11, poking through the thorn bushes and vine-tangles. They walked over every square inch of the weeded approach area, sifting through the still-smoldering airplane parts, hoping to find some sign that the pilot of the crashed jet had ejected.
Not until just before dark, when the cherry picker—an eighteen-wheeler with a winch and hoist—arrived from Cecil could they determine what happened to the pilot. The cherry picker managed to lift the upside-down hulk of the fuselage.
Then they knew where the pilot had gone.
Nowhere. He was still in the cockpit. Burner had stayed with his jet.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
REFLECTION
So they weren’t immortal after all.
Of course, no one had ever actually told them that they were immortal. But it didn’t matter. That’s just the way you thought if you were twenty-six years old, in possession of perfect reflexes, good looks, superb education, rocket-scientist brains, and the best job description in the world: fighter pilot.
With all that going for you, you just knew—hell, yes, man—I’m immortal! And more than that. Invincible! Indestructible! Maybe even bullet proof. A nugget fighter pilot was all those things—until something happened to alter his perception of immortality.
For the nuggets of Class of 2-95, it had happened. The best and the brightest among them, the one with the most indisputable claim to immortality, turned out to be mortal.
The effect was devastating.
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The ultimate bummer. The nuggets were wandering through the passageways at the squadron looking like they’d been poleaxed. For most, it was the first time they’d lost a friend in a flying accident. Now they didn’t know what they were supposed to feel. Grief? Sure, they were having plenty of that. But there was more. Shock. Disillusionment. Disbelief. Fear. Their emotions were running wild.
For the nuggets, now in the fifth month of their strike fighter training, it was a critical moment. Some were re-evaluating their choice of professions. Some were even questioning whether they wanted to continue with strike fighter training. Some had young families at home. The prospect of leaving them fatherless and widowed was too much to cope with.
Only a few weeks ago, Commander “Rico” Mayer had taken command of VFA-106 from Matt Moffit, who had gone to Oceana, Virginia, to take command of a carrier air wing. Mayer realized that he had to do something to preserve the morale of his young nugget fighter pilots.
What he did was order a two-day stand down of all flying in the RAG. The detachment in Key West—another class just finishing air-to-air phase—was ordered to knock it off and come on home. Every jet sat parked and quiet on the sprawling ramp at the RAG. The idea was that everybody should take a breather and get their emotions under control.
Mayer called an AOM—All Officers Meeting. Every student and instructor assigned to the RAG crammed into the big briefing room on the second deck.
“These things happen,” Mayer told his people. “This is an inherently dangerous business. But it’s not nearly as dangerous as it used to be.”
Which was true. The fighter community lost approximately a dozen F/A-18 Hornets and F-14 Tomcats each year in operational accidents. At least half the crews survived.
Twelve jets from a fleet of hundreds was a minuscule loss rate, really. It was a quantum improvement over the previous generation. Only a few years ago, a single aircraft carrier’s air group might account for that many losses.
One of the old hands in the RAG, Commander Moe Vazquez, told them how it was when he was a nugget. He and his newly winged colleagues were put in a room. A captain came in and said, “Take a look at the man on each side of you.” So they did, swiveling to either side to look at each other. “Take a good look,” said the captain, “because one of the three of you isn’t going to make it.”
One out of three. It was a terrible ratio. But that’s the way it worked out, at least in the bad old days, which included not only heavy training casualties but horrendous losses in Vietnam.
Times had certainly gotten better. Until Burner’s accident, the F/A-18 RAG had not lost a jet for more than a year, when a Marine nugget had catapulted off the ship after carrier q
ualification, and then inexplicably flown into the water.
Now the nuggets of Class 2-95 were trying to cope with their loss.
Angie Morales and Burner Bunsen had been classmates since they were students together back in Meridian, Mississippi. They had been through it all together—basic, advanced flight training, selection for Hornets. They were fellow Fine Meshers. Burner Bunsen was the first friend Angie Morales had lost.
Now her face was a mask. The diminutive pilot had never been given to outbursts of emotion. Looking at her pretty, oval-shaped face, you couldn’t read anything about what she was thinking.
Of them all, Chip Van Doren was taking it the hardest. Chip was walking around the base, ashen-faced and morose, looking like he had lost his best friend— which, in fact, he had.
Chip and Burner were the only two bachelors in the class, so they had become natural allies. While the other students were home with their young families, Chip and Burner were out there laying siege to the watering holes of Orange Park, learning the first names of all the cute barmaids at places like Hop’s and Bennigan’s, cutting a swath through the contingent of groupie girls who flocked there to meet some real fighter pilots.
The Chip-and-Burner hunting team disbanded after Burner met Greta. Burner, the hunter-killer scourge of the Orange Park hard-body bars, had been disarmed.
But the friendship endured. Burner and Chip still managed to get together a couple of times a week, usually rendezvousing at the O’ Club, to put away a few beers and talk about the usual subjects: Women. Airplanes. Neat cars. The essential fighter pilot subjects.
They were numbers one and two in the class ranking, Burner managing to stay ahead of Chip Van Doren by just a few hundredths of a grade point. But his lead was never secure.
The two were as different as goats and geese. According to the Navy’s aviation aptitude criteria, Burner, the liberal arts, philosophizing, belly-crawling Marine, shouldn’t even have been there. He wasn’t a techno-geek, lacking as he did a background and a passion for things mechanical and electronic. Burner was an abstract thinker. Burner didn’t fit the rocket-scientist profile of the modern naval aviator.
But Burner, of course, surprised the hell out of everyone. He was one of those rare aviators, like a musician with perfect pitch. Flying was just something that came to him naturally.
Van Doren, the techno-geek, had never been struck by an abstract thought in his life. People accused him of liking computers so much he was even thinking like a damned computer. Chip Van Doren addressed every problem, airborne or earthbound, in binary terms. One or zero. Yes or no. Go or no go. Win or lose. Kill or be killed.
Chip and Burner were opposites, both in temperament and background. They should have been repelled by each other like opposing ends of a magnet. Instead, they were the closest of all the 2-95 nuggets except, of course, for Heckle and Jeckle.
<>
The McCormack twins had already lost a classmate. They had a buddy, Steve Begeher, with whom they had pinned on their Naval Aviator’s wings after flight training. Begeher was a Marine. Instead of F/A-18 Hornets, like the twins, he had been assigned to AV-8 Harrier training at the Marine Corps air station at Cherry Point, North Carolina.
The Harrier was the “jump jet,” the Marines’ vertical-take-off and landing attack jet. The Harrier was a hybrid animal, performing both like a jet fighter and a helicopter. The problem with the Harrier was that sometimes it confused its role, behaving like neither. It was considered a tricky beast, subject to fits of misbehavior and bizarre crashes. It was not usually the first choice of nugget aviators. Since its introduction to naval aviation, the Harrier had killed more than a score of Marine pilots.
Steve Begeher one of them. Only two weeks ago, the McCormacks had gotten the news: Begeher crashed at Cherry Point. The details were skimpy: a landing accident, a problem with the jet’s vertically-deflected thrusters, a loss of control.
Now Burner. Two friends in less than a month. The McCormacks weren’t doing much of their Heckle and Jeckle routine these days. In the old days, back when they were sailors, and then midshipmen at the academy, the twins had always been able to count on each other, with their data-linked brains, for morale reinforcement.
Times had changed. They still had each other. But they had families. Now it was their morale they had to worry about.
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The least affected by the accident was J. J. Quinn. One of the few advantages to being senior and experienced was that he had been through all this. You didn’t spend thirteen years in Marine Corps aviation, even in helos, without seeing a fair amount of violent death. And losing a few buddies.
Sure, you mourned the loss of a friend. And sure, you shared the grief of his family. And for sure, you tried to learn something from it. But then you put it away. You went back to business.
J. J. was also lucky: He had backing at home. For all Dorothy Quinn’s skepticism about his choice to be a fighter pilot, she happened to be an experienced Marine wife. She knew that now was definitely not the time to get hysterical about the hazards of the fighter business. Even if every fiber in her body was screaming at her to do just exactly that.
So she didn’t. Dorothy was too good a team player. Instead, she did the most difficult thing a Marine Corps wife could do: She bit her lip and shut up.
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Shrike Hopkins, released from the hospital and still recovering from her surgery, was stunned by the news about Burner. Like J. J., she had been around naval aviation long enough to have lost friends. When she was still in flight training, two of her classmates perished in a mid-air collision. Another friend ejected from a T-2 and was gored when he came down in a tree. “He lived, but he was a mess,” she remembered. And then during carrier qualification in the T-2, another friend had crashed and died on the deck of the Lexington. And then, last November, she had lost Kara Hultgreen.
Shrike was still on a medical grounding. These days, especially after the rancor of her FNAEB, she didn’t hang out with the squadron pilots. And, anyway, it was painful for her to see her former classmates now in the last phase of training. After carrier qualification they would be going to their fleet squadrons.
But, still, she felt badly for all of them now. It was tough, real tough, coping with the loss of a classmate. But Shrike was a fatalist: “If you’re gonna go,” she liked to say, “it might as well be in an airplane.”
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It was hard to tell how the crash was affecting Road Ammons. He showed up at the bar to down a few beers with his classmates, but good ol’ Road wasn’t saying much. The grin was gone from his round face, and in its place he wore a stoic, impassive expression.
Of all the nuggets, Road had been the most focused. He always seemed to be on a programmed track, guided by his invisible mentors. Now his friends wondered: Had he been coached about how to handle trauma and the loss of a buddy? Had Road somehow steeled himself against letting such an event affect his own performance? Or was he reverting to football training, treating the crash like the loss of a player on his football team? A tough break, you know, but the game had to go on.
Or did Road still thing he was immortal?
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Lieutenant Commander “Zoomie” Baker looked at the long faces gathered around him at the table in the O’ Club. The faces all belonged to nuggets, most of them students from Class 2-95. Zoomie couldn’t remember seeing so much grimness in a Navy O’ Club since the time Congresswoman Pat Schroeder came to visit.
Zoomie filled every glass at the table from his pitcher of beer. “Look,” he said, “For most of you, this is the first friend you’ve lost in naval aviation. It won’t be the last. I know, because I’ve lost several. I’m sorry, and I’ll miss him too.
“But let’s do what Burner would expect us to do if he were there: Drink.” Zoomie raised his glass. “Here’s to Burner. And here’s to blue skies.”
Solemnly, one by one, the nuggets around the table raised their glasses. “To Burner,” each mumbled
. “Here’s to Burner.”
They downed the pitcher of beer. Then they ordered several more and downed them all. Someone proposed another toast to Burner. Then they ordered more pitchers of beer, and made some more toasts. They toasted good ol’ Burner again, and blue skies again. They toasted each other. Then they ordered more beer.
This went on for several hours. During the course of the evening they toasted the Navy, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, Pat Schroeder, Saddam Hussein, and Fidel Castro. The toasts continued until closing time. Before they left, someone even had the presence of mind to toast good ol’ Zoomie for getting them so royally shitfaced.
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Most accidents involved more than one factor. It was a sequence of events, some of them seemingly innocuous. But the combination, like a mix of chemicals, became lethal.
So it was with Burner’s accident. There was no doubt that he did experience a flight control malfunction. One of the rudders on his jet clearly did fail and freeze in the streamlined position.
But therein was the mystery. Why did he crash? It just didn’t make sense that a rudder failure, all by itself, would make the jet uncontrollable. After all, Burner himself had experienced a similar failure—a Rudder Off problem—only a couple of weeks before the accident. And the jet had been controllable. In repeated tests, both in the simulator and in a real Hornet, the jet was manageable with a single rudder failure.
Something else must have failed.
Gradually, as the investigators sifted through the wreckage of Burner’s Hornet, the missing parts of the mystery began to fall in place, like pieces of an intricate jigsaw puzzle.
Something else did fail.
The right engine of Burner’s jet had lost power. And it had lost power in the most insidious way: without warning. It had “spun down” slowly, giving no audible alert, while Burner was preoccupied flying the ball and coping with the flight control failure. When he “waved off”—applying full throttle to the jet—only one engine, the left one, kicked in with full power. The asymmetric thrust caused by one good engine versus one bad one caused the jet to yaw and roll toward the side of the failed engine.
Bogeys and Bandits Page 27