It was a critical moment. At that point, only one control input would have saved Burner’s jet: both rudders, fully applied. And one had already failed.
From that moment on, Burner Bunsen’s Hornet was doomed.
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To the nuggets, there was only one logical explanation: Shit happens.
It was chaos theory capsulized in two words. After all the facts were heard and conclusions reached, that’s what it came down to: the existentialist manifesto of the nineties. It explained everything—and nothing. For the nuggets learning to fly the F/A-18 Hornet, it was a simplistic philosophy—and the only explanation for an unthinkable event.
Nothing else made sense to them because in the modern world shit really did happen. It happened in business, in government, in computers, in relationships.
And in jet fighters.
But why did he stay with it?
That was the most troublesome question. Now that they knew why the jet crashed, they wanted to know the rest: Why didn’t Burner just grab the ejection handle and punch out?
Every ready room had in its collection of videos a compilation of horrendous carrier accidents taken from shipboard cameras—everything from cold catapult shots to ramp strikes to stall-spin accidents. In many of the scenarios you could see the airmen eject, usually with micro-seconds separating them from survival and extinction. Some made it. Some didn’t.
Some didn’t eject at all.
Back in the ready rooms the pilots would stare morbidly at the video of a doomed jets and wonder: Why didn’t he punch out? He had the chance. . . maybe a two or three second window. . . and he didn’t do it!
Why?
Did he think he could save the jet? What was he waiting for? Was he paralyzed with indecision, fear, false hope?
Every pilot who saw such a scene locked it up inside his head and took it home with him. Later, in his most secret thoughts, the fighter pilot would replay the scene. He would place himself in the cockpit of the doomed jet, and he would ask secret questions:
When his turn came, how would he handle it? Would he decide to eject while he still had time? Would he wait? Would he make the fatal choice to stay with it, thinking that he could save the jet?
The decision to eject was a highly personal thing. You had a second, maybe two, to make the most critical decision of your life: Grab the handle and eject. Or stay there and fly the beast.
Eject, and you might be abandoning a salvageable airplane. You looked like a schmuck. And you stood a good chance of getting killed anyway, because ejections were, by definition, a violent and risky way to exit an airplane. But if the jet was doomed—and you didn’t eject—you were toast. If you waited, trying to figure the thing out, then ejected too late—you were toast anyway.
When your turn came, nothing else in life mattered. You no longer had a past or a future. Nothing that had ever happened to you—or would ever happen again—had any significance. There was only now— an entire lifetime condensed into one tiny flashpoint in time.
Make the right choice, and the show went on. Extension of engagement. Make the wrong choice, and the curtain dropped. End of run.
Most fighter pilots liked to think that when their time came they would make the right decision. But still, in their secret thoughts, they kept replaying the old videos. And they kept asking themselves the same old questions:
What was that guy thinking about? Why didn’t he eject?
Would I?
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
REQUIEM
It was one of those Florida post card days: high scattered cumulus clouds, temperature in the low seventies, light east wind, morning sun sparkling through the pines like a jeweler’s lamp.
A crowd of a hundred-fifty showed up to say good bye to Burner. They came from all ranks and strata, wearing everything from jeans to starched whites. There were civilians, mostly family of the deceased. The Marine pilots from the RAG came in their “Charlies”—short sleeved khaki shirts and the ceremonial blue, red-striped trousers, topped with the white-covered uniform cap. Navy officers wore their summer whites, though a few were in khakis. Half a dozen pilots came over from the squadron, still wearing sweat-stained flight suits. Thirty or forty enlisted men and women from the air wing, sailors and Marines, came to pay their own respects.
Entering the chapel, they passed a linen-covered table on which someone had arranged a collage of objects, like icons in a museum: a pilot’s flight helmet, a pair of leather flying gloves; a Marine officer’s polished, ceremonial sword; a set of gold naval aviator’s wings.
And a framed 8X10 photograph of Burner, wearing his Marine Corps uniform and gold wings, grinning his standard lopsided Burner grin.
The young pilots’ wives all wore the same stunned expression, like they’d just been walloped with a croquet mallet. Each was staring at the front of the chapel, at the front pew where the family was sitting. On a little dais lay the triangularly folded American flag, waiting to be handed over to a family member.
On each of the young faces you could read the thought that was branded into their consciousness: That could be me sitting there in the first pew. . . listening to the eulogies of my husband. . . waiting for someone to hand me that godawful folded flag . . .
It had been a tough weekend. Some of the wives were having trouble accepting this new aspect of their husbands’ jobs. Sure, they had already been told, at least in an abstract way, that this was a dangerous profession. They understood that flying jet fighters entailed a certain amount of risk.
Until now it had all seemed so unreal. Okay, maybe bad things did happen. But not here, for Christ’s sake! Not to people we actually know! This is supposed to happen other places, to other families, in other lives . . .
Burner’s classmates were there, sitting behind the family in the first pew. Sitting with the family in the first pew was Slab Bacon, who had been designated the official “CACO,” a convoluted Navy acronym meaning “Casualty Assistance Contact Officer.” In every incident involving injury or loss of life, the Navy appointed a CACO to help the bereaved family cope with the labyrinthine maze of the military bureaucracy.
Chaplain James Wetzel, who had already officiated at many such events, delivered his standard invocation. “God gives, and God takes away,” intoned the chaplain. He told the assemblage that they “could draw comfort from the knowledge that Lieutenant Bunsen was a man who believed in God and in his country. Now he’s gone to a better place.”
The chaplain’s invocation was followed by a short soliloquy from Captain Fleming, commanding officer of the Strike Fighter Wing, who talked about the “sacrifices that were made in the defense of our country.” And then came eulogies from two officers of the Marine Aviation Training Group, who talked about how Burner had “kept faith with the Corps.” He had loved his country, done his duty to the end.
And so on.
During it all you could hear scattered snuffling, a few stifled sobs. But no one seemed in danger of losing it. Most of the heavy weeping had taken place over the weekend. Now the community of naval aviators was doing its damnedest to stay dry-eyed.
Trying the hardest were the wives. Some of the instructors’ wives, of course, had been around awhile and had seen enough memorial services. Now they boycotted them altogether. Others were sitting there with their husbands, looking stonefaced.
To everyone’s amazement, one wife who was not flipping out was Debbie Elmore. Of all the nuggets’ spouses there at Cecil, Elmore’s wife was the one they thought for sure they’d have to haul away in the looney wagon. After all, the poor woman had been there. . . standing in the parking lot at Whitehouse. . . watching the crash. . . absorbing one of the rarest and most in-your-face exposures to a flying calamity anyone could have without actually sitting in the cockpit. She hadn’t even known whether it was her husband or not! Debbie Elmore, everyone figured, should be a certifiable nut case.
Just the opposite. The experience seemed to have transformed her. When the acciden
t investigating team asked her, in their most delicate manner, for a statement about what happened out there, she gave it to them. In a dispassionate, matter-of-fact voice, she described what she had seen during those critical five seconds prior to the crash. She did it with a dry eye and a clear memory. And then she even put it in writing for them.
It was most remarkable. Debbie Elmore was not only not traumatized by the accident, she seemed to have gained a grip on reality. Gone was her anxiety and hysteria about unthinkable disasters. It was as though she didn’t need to imagine the worst anymore. She had already seen it.
It was time to recite the most-recited lyrics in aviation. A young Marine captain took the podium and read “High Flight,” the classic poem by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered
wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling
mirth
Of sunspit clouds—and done a hundred
things. . .
Tear were now flowing in abundance. Even some of the older, battle-hardened wives were cracking up.
The poem concluded:
. . .And while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of
God.
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That did it. You could hear it now—sobs, snuffles, snorts. The handkerchiefs came out, dabbing at the rivers of salt water.
But the real gut-wrencher, the guaranteed wringer of tear ducts, was the finale—the ritual that ended every military memorial service. The audience of mourners was asked to rise. From a wing of the chapel, somewhere out of view, a bugler played.
The melancholy sound of Taps filled the chapel. Each long note swelled, reverberating like syllables from the grave.
The effect was stupefying. No one could move. No one could speak.
When the bugle was finally silent, so was the chapel.
But that wasn’t the end of it. The ushers nudged the assemblage toward the door of the chapel, out into the bright sunshine on the front steps.
Someone pointed to the south and said, “I see them. Here they come.”
Four specks, swelling in size, approached from over the trees, beyond the runways at the south of the field. The Hornets were in a tight diamond formation, aimed right at the chapel and the hundred-fifty people outside.
They were coming in low, going like hell, something well over four hundred knots. As they crossed the perimeter of the field, the thunder of eight jet engines swelled in a crescendo.
And then, directly over the assembled crowd, the right wingman pulled up from the formation—Barrooom!—lighting the afterburners of the Hornet’s engines. Trailing plumes of flame, the fighter pointed its nose up. . . up. . . up toward a great puffy cumulus cloud that had somehow appeared at precisely the right place over the field. . .
The jet vanished in the cloud.
The three remaining Hornets streaked on to the north. The right wingman’s position was now empty.
It was a perfect performance—the missing man formation. The classic farewell to a fighter pilot.
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For a while the nuggets hung around. Each paid his condolences to the parents. Burner’s father, who had been so opposed to his son’s becoming a fighter pilot, no longer wore the prideful look of the successful executive. Even in his impeccably tailored dark blue suit, he looked subdued and old. He nodded grimly, shaking the hand of each young aviator.
And each nugget tried to pay his respects to Greta, the pretty, blonde-haired girl from Gainesville to whom Burner had been engaged for not quite two weeks. Greta had held up well—until the missing man formation. That was when she lost it. Now she was sobbing uncontrollably. No one knew what to say, or how to console her. The young woman was crying, mopping at her eyes, trying to acknowledge the well-wishers. Under her arm was the folded American flag that the squadron had presented to her. She was clutching it under her arm like a security blanket.
By now everyone was drained. The nuggets wanted to get the hell away from the chapel. Chip Van Doren caught the McCormacks and Road Ammons on their way to the parking lot. “What do you think Burner would expect us to do now?”
“I dunno. What?”
“What do you think? Get your drinking clothes on. I’ll meet you at the club.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
NIMITZ
Pearly Gates sucked in a lung full of the clean-smelling ocean air and gazed at the white wake of the ship. For half a mile behind the carrier, the wake gurgled like a white highway in the brilliant sunshine. In the distance, Pearly could still make out Point Loma and the skyline of San Diego.
The Nimitz was making, he figured, nearly thirty knots. They were steaming in a straight line for the operating area between San Clemente and Santa Catalina islands. In half an hour’s time, when they had reached the area, the carrier would reverse course and turn into the wind. Then the action would begin.
His nuggets would show up, roaring overhead the ship in what he hoped would be a spiffy-looking echelon formation, ready to land aboard.
Sometimes Pearly had to marvel at the way the Navy made everything so complicated. California, for instance. Why the hell did they have to come all the way to the Pacific freaking ocean for this?
It wasn’t as though they didn’t have a perfectly good ocean right there at home, a mere twenty or so miles east of Cecil Field. Off the shoreline of Florida they had plenty of open sea in which to perform the carrier qualification ritual.
But that wasn’t the way the Navy worked. Each of the half dozen or so carriers assigned to the Atlantic fleet were busy with missions deemed more urgent than playing nursemaid to a gaggle of shave-tailed nugget fighter pilots. Three carriers were already committed to the Mediterranean where, should the order be given, they would commence the pulverization of the Bosnian Serb army. The other three were variously pre-occupied with fleet chores, either standing down or working up from some other readiness exercise.
So California it was. The U. S. S. Nimitz was operating in the friendly waters off southern California—and had an open deck.
The logistics of such an operation looked like the supply route for the D-Day invasion. Six F/A-18s had to be ferried to Miramar naval air station in San Diego, which would be the staging base for the fly-out to the ship. A thirty-person maintenance crew had to be hauled by a C-9 military airlifter to North Island naval air station, also in San Diego, three days in advance so they could walk aboard the Nimitz with all their tools, spare parts, and support equipment. Another contingent—LSOs, administrative personnel, and several squadron officers—would be flown out to the ship aboard a twin-engined C-2 COD (Carrier On-board Delivery) aircraft.
All of this so a handful of kids with expensive educations could land their airplanes on a ship.
It was chilly out there, standing in the wind that swept over the flight deck. Pearly was wearing his LSO costume, the same old outfit he always dug out of his locker when he went out to sea for carrier qualification periods. The costume was his talisman. So far, it had brought him—and his students—good luck.
Not that Navy LSOs were superstitious. But they were steeped in ritual and tradition, and one time-honored tradition was that LSOs, alone among the starched and pressed sea-going Navy, were expected to affect bizarre costumes.
So Pearly was wearing his special, old turtleneck jersey, the same one he had worn for two cruises on the Saratoga and for a dozen or more CQ detachments with the RAG. Over the jersey he wore the survival vest that everyone who worked on a carrier deck was required to put on when they went topside. The vest contained a flare pencil and had inflatable bladders that were supposed to keep you afloat in case you were swept off the deck, into the ocean below.
Every deck hand’s vest had a label, identifying the wearer. Pearly’s vest had stenciled on the back: VFA-106 L
SO. On the front he wore the special LSO embroidered patch—a view of the back of a carrier with the pseudo-Latin motto: RECTUM NON BUSTUS.
Pearly looked like a panhandler, walking around the ship in his fatigue pants, jersey and vest, his old black wool watch cap pulled down to his ears. Some LSOs took the weirdness license to extremes. They showed up on the platform with ski masks, babushkas, red fezzes, Russian fur hats, capes, gorilla face masks, and in one instance on the carrier, Lincoln, a stuffed Seeing Eye dog.
Pearly busied himself setting up shop on the platform. The LSO platform was an eight-by-eight foot wooden grid jutting out the port side of the flight deck, hanging out over the water eighty feet below. The platform was just aft of the first of the four arresting wires stretched across the flight deck. Beneath the platform, hanging out over the water, was the safety net. The net was there to catch anyone who fell off the platform and to provide an escape for the LSOs if a jet in the groove veered toward them.
The LSO platform faced aft, toward the aircraft approach path to the flight deck. Directly behind it was stretched a piece of canvas which served as a windbreak and a deflector from the jet blast up on the forward flight deck. At the forward edge of the platform was a console containing the communication equipment, a television monitor showing the image shot from a deck-mounted video camera, and displays indicating the approaching aircraft’s type, speed, and distance from the ship. Also displayed were read-outs of the ship’s speed, the wind direction and velocity, and the magnitude of the deck’s pitching.
On the platform with Pearly was a petty officer wearing a sound-powered headset. His job was to stay in constant communication with Pri-Fly, the glass-enclosed nerve center up on the sixth level of the ship’s superstructure, and with Air Ops, the carrier’s air traffic control center down in the bowels of the carrier. The petty officer would relay to the LSO any urgent information about the deck or the airplanes in the traffic pattern.
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