When the third jet in a row called Clara, Pearly made a decision. He picked up the handset that connected the LSO platform to the Air Operations office, up in the island. “It’s no good, Boss. The sun’s in their eyes now. We gotta change course.”
He already knew the answer. In the narrow channel between the islands, the giant ship had little room to change course. The Nimitz’s captain came on the phone: “No way, Paddles. If you can’t work ‘em this way, we’ll knock it off until night ops.”
It was as Pearly expected. This was a training exercise, qualifying new pilots, not an operational mission. Safety had to come first. “Yes, sir, we concur with that.” said Pearly.
No more day ops. They would wait for nightfall.
<>
Pearly Gates came down to the ready room, still wearing the wool cap and the vest with the Rectum Non Bustus patch. Plug Neidhold was tagging along behind him, carrying the LSO book with the grades for every pass the nuggets made at the ship today.
Pearly knew the standard LSO debriefing techniques. You were supposed to hold the grade book so the pilot can’t see it. You made eye contact with the guy you’re debriefing. You gave compliments first, criticisms last. You didn’t waffle or appear ambiguous in your critique. You didn’t invite argument about a grade and you never, never, no matter how much a guy argued, changed the grade.
Every pass made to the carrier received a grade from an LSO. Back in the early paddle-waving days of carrier aviation, some hard-nose apparently decided that too much praise was bad for pilots. So the best grade a pilot could receive was “OK.” On rare occasions, when a pilot distinguished himself by flying a perfect pass under adverse conditions, an LSO might assign an OK underlined, which amounted to an oak leaf cluster on his grade. An OK in parentheses was a “fair.” An ugly pass at the ship received a “No Grade,” a dash through the grade box meaning a below average pass. The worst grade an LSO could hand out was a “Cut,” the equivalent to an “F” in grammar school. A “Cut” grade was, by definition, reserved for “gross deviations inside the wave off window.” It meant the pilot had scared hell out of himself—and the LSO.
But with RAG students, especially nuggets, the LSO was more than just a debriefer or a grader. In the RAG environment, he was also a teacher. The nuggets were expected to make mistakes as they learned. It was the LSO’s job to coach them, nudge them along in the process of becoming competent carrier aviators.
Pearly debriefed each pilot. He had few comments for the three senior aviators, Harpo Hillan, Smoke Morgan, and Flounder Earl. For two days work on the ship, Hillan received seven okays for eight passes—a nearly perfect grade point average.
Chip Van Doren, too, received compliments. “Nice work, Chip. Good tight ball flying.” His first pass was a “fair,” number two wire, with a “little low at the ramp” comment. His next two were “OK,” three wire. Three more “fairs,” ending with two straight “OKs.” It was a strong showing for a nugget.
Angie Morales started off erratically, then found the target wire. “Your first trap, you spotted the deck on me, Rambo.”
“Yeah, sorry.”
“But then you picked it up. No more one wires, but you’re overcontrolling some.” Angie received two no-grades and two fairs—an average performance.
And then the twins. Sitting together in the second row, wearing identical flight suits, Heckle and Jeckle were once again indistinguishable, even to Pearly, who had been seeing them now for four months. “All right, which one is Russ?”
“That’s me,” said one of the grinning redheads.
“High start, over-correct, low in the middle, a little settle at the ramp, number two—fair pass. Second pass, high start, high all the way, settle at the ramp, number one wire—no grade. Third pass. . .”
And so on. Russ McCormack received two no-grades and three fairs. “Not bad, for your first day,” said Pearly. “Start working it down sooner, try to avoid the high starts. Carry a little more power close in.”
Then Pearly debriefed the second twin. It was a carbon copy of his brother’s passes. “This is weird,” said Pearly. “Can’t you guys do anything different? If one of you gets a no-grade, does it mean the other has to do the same thing?”
“I promised our mother I wouldn’t make him look bad,” said Rick.
“The hell you did,” said Russ. “You promised her you would try to be just like your smart brother.”
Both the Marines, J. J. Quinn and Road Ammons, had flown sporadic passes—some good, several bad, a few ugly. J. J.’s first two passes were no-grades to a one wire. Then a bolter. Bolters were usually the result of over-conservatism—flying too high over the ramp, carrying too much power, or “flinching” from the upcoming steel deck. Bolters weren’t usually unsafe, just inconvenient. And unnerving. “I’ll buy that bolter,” said Pearly. “I called you for power close in, and you gave it to me. Too much, unfortunately, and it made you bolter. It won’t count in your grade average.”
Road was even more sporadic. After his deck-spotting passes of the previous day, Road over-corrected and got two bolters. Then he settled down for a couple passes—one “OK” three wire, one “Fair” to the two wire. And then a “Cut”—the worst grade you can get.
“You spotted the deck again,” Pearly said. “Road, I want you to keep your eyes on the ball. All the way to touch down. All the way, you understand?”
Road nodded. “Sorry, I just lost my concentration. I’ll fly the ball.”
It didn’t sound like good old Road Ammons talking. He wasn’t his usual animated self, flashing the Yamaha grin, doing the aw-shucks-I’m-just-another-Marine routine.
Good old Road seemed subdued. And worried.
<>
Whaaaabooom! Ssssssssssssss. Whaaaabooom! Ssssssssssss.
J. J. Quinn lay in his bunk. The Whaaaaboooms were coming every three minutes or so, each followed by the sound of steam hissing from the catapult cylinders. Every time the catapult fired, J. J.’s bunk reverberated like a tuning fork.
Above the junior officers’ stateroom area, up there on the forward flight deck, jets were taxiing up, one after the other, onto the catapults—and were being blasted off the bow of the ship like shells from a cannon.
Fire, retract, re-tension, fire again. Like a steady artillery barrage. It went on incessantly, the non-stop Whaaaabooom and Sssssssss of the two forward catapults.
It had been J. J.’s plan to get a nap before he went back to the ready room. Tonight would be his first night landing qualification. But he hadn’t figured on those freaking catapults! The number one catapult was directly over his stateroom. It was like living inside a boiler factory. He wondered how the hell anyone got any rest on a carrier.
He gave up trying for a nap. J. J. decided to write a letter to Dorothy. He knew that in all likelihood he would arrive home before the letter, but it was something he always did. Writing to his wife was J. J.’s form of journal-keeping.
There was another reason why J. J. wrote to his wife. It was the same reason pilots had been writing letters home since the first aircraft carrier put to sea: Just in case. Of course, neither J. J. nor Dorothy believed that anything was likely to happen. But thirteen years in the Marine Corps had made them both realists. Things did sometimes happen. If anything—the worst of scenarios—actually did occur, at least this last letter would still be on its way to Dorothy. So J. J. wrote his letters. Just in case.
<>
Listening to the steady Whaabooms of the catapults, Chip Van Doren was struck by a thought. He was trying to remember. . . something that had fascinated him in a history class back at the academy.
Then it hit him. “A trebuchet!” he said.
“A what?” said Road. They were sitting in the officers’ wardroom, on the O-2 level. They were having dinner before the night launch.
“French word. Tray-boo-shay,” said Chip. “A trebuchet was a medieval catapult—a long pole mounted on a fulcrum with a sling at the end. They’d lay this
thing out on the ground, tilted over its fulcrum, then add weights to the short end of the pole. When they let go, the long end would flip through the air and fling whatever was in the sling way to hell in the air, maybe a quarter of a mile or so over the ground. When they were laying siege to a castle, they’d use this thing to sling boulders, or vats of burning oil, or dead horses or whatever. When they were really feeling nasty, they’d stick one of their prisoners in the trebuchet and catapult him up over the wall into the castle.”
It was easy to visualize. Particularly now. They sat there in their flight suits, silently chewing on the solid Navy meatloaf, thinking about catapults. Sailing through the air, over castle walls.
“Is that what we are?” asked Road Ammons. “”Prisoners being flung over a wall?”
“Yeah,” said Chip, grinning. “Comforting, isn’t it?”
<>
Carrier landings demanded the utmost concentration from the pilot. But most Navy pilots, after they’d gotten over their initial anxiety coming aboard ship, would tell you they loved making carrier landings—in the daytime. Give the average Navy pilot enough fuel, and he would stay out there all day long, bagging one trap after another.
Until night time. Night time was a bitch. Darkness over the ocean was as bleak and void as the bottom of a mineshaft. Even the most crinkly-eyed, battle-toughened, steel-nerved Navy fighter pilot would, in a private moment, confess a lonely secret: Night carrier landings scare the shit out of me.
Nonetheless, they did it. They did it in all conditions—good weather or bad, smooth seas or pitching, roiling, heaving oceanscapes. Daylight or darkness. If they wanted to stay alive, they became very proficient at it.
<>
Pearly was wearing his trademark wool jersey and fatigue pants. He stood in front of the grease board, hands on his hips, looking at his nuggets like a coach at a pep rally. It was time again for the Vince Lombardi act.
“Let me tell you something,” he started out in his coach’s voice. “You people are among the most elite pilots in the world. You know why? Because you are qualified to do something that only a handful of aviators on the entire planet can do: land on an aircraft carrier.
“You have had the best training that any aviator has ever received. Since your first day in the Navy, you’ve passed every test they could throw at you. You are the best of the best, and let me say, ladies and gentlemen, I am proud to have been able to work with you.”
All this was ingratiating balderdash, of course, but it had a purpose. It was part of Pearly’s Lombardi pump-up technique.
The nuggets weren’t just hyped for the coming event. They were wired—more so than for any other phase of the Hornet training program. They fidgeted in their lounge seats. Rambo Morales had passed around a bag of chewing gum, and now each was gnawing a wad of gum the size of a softball.
The nervousness crackled through the ready room like a brooding storm. Everyone was talking too loud, cackling like hyenas over some nonsensical joke, fidgeting with their flight gear.
Each had his own nervous fetish. Road Ammons emptied out his entire survival vest, and then re-stowed each item, one by one. Just to make sure. Sure of what, he didn’t know, but it didn’t matter. It kept him busy.
Angie Morales had the ability to drop into a Zen-like meditative state, closing her eyes while sitting upright and looking dead as a mummy. So that’s what she did, slipping into her trance right there in her ready room chair.
Chip Van Doren had mapped out a jogging route around the perimeter of the hangar deck. While the others fidgeted in the ready room, he changed into sneakers and running shorts and did laps around the hangar deck, jumping over airplane tie-down chains and dodging tug tractors. About an hour later he came sweating back to the ready room. “Twenty laps,” he said, poking at his calculator-wrist watch. “That makes, ah, let’s see, six-point-eight-one-eight miles.”
“You smell like a goat,” said Angie Morales, emerging from her trance. “Are you gonna go flying like that?”
“Of course not. What do you think I am, an animal? I’m gonna change socks.”
Meanwhile, Rick McCormack was running his mouth. His classmates had bestowed a call sign on him: “Yappy.” Being half the Heckle-Jeckle duo, he was already the undisputed talkiest nugget of the class. Whenever Yappy McCormack was hyped about something—anything—an air-to-air adventure, a hairy low-altitude training flight over the high desert, or his first night quals on the carrier, his mouth ran like an endless tape. He was a one-man talk show.
Now no one could shut him up. Yappy was running his mouth about everything from the weather to the movie on the tube to the lousy cheeseburgers in the ward room to how dark it was going to be outside. His mouth seemed to be wired to his adrenal gland. The closer it came to launch time, the more he yapped. His classmates, even his brother, were talking about sealing his mouth with duct tape.
<>
The nuggets were becoming aware of another peculiarity: They had to pee a lot. Every ten minutes or, it was the same thing—a gushing, urgent need to go dribble yet a few more drops. No one had ever explained it, but it was a historical fact: Before a night carrier launch the average naval aviator would need to void his bladder at least ten times. Maybe more.
<>
Road Ammons poked his head out onto the catwalk adjoining the flight deck. It was like peering into an ink bottle. Beyond the rail of the catwalk, out there over the Pacific, he could see only blackness. A cloud layer obscured the stars. There were occasional pinpoints of light— ships, airplanes, but no horizon. No up, no down. Just the horizonless freaking ocean and the sky, all melded together in a bleak void.
Road stood there for a minute, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. Up on the flight deck the yellow shirts were towing jets around, positioning them for the launch. Road switched on his goose-necked Boy Scout flashlight. Then he stepped up on the flight deck and headed for his jet.
306. That was the side number of Road’s jet. The beam of his flashlight shone on the jet’s number, painted on the long tapered nose of the Hornet. It was a “B” model, a two-seater Hornet, which meant he had to pre-flight the empty back seat also, insuring that the straps and switches and ejection seat were all safetied.
Road finished his walk-around, poking his flashlight beam into the engine inlets, into every orifice and fixture of the jet’s exterior. The plane captain, an enlisted kid named Miller, followed Road around the darkened jet like a watchdog, talking the whole time. He helped him into the cockpit, handing him the straps and radio cords.
“This your first night landing, Captain?”
“It’s Lieutenant, not captain.”
“Yes, sir, Lieutenant. This your first time at night?”
“Yeah. My first on a carrier.” And it’s gonna be my last, I hope. Road wished the kid would shut up.
“Looks pretty dark out there to me, sir.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty dark out there.” Darker than a coal miner’s bung hole. Where did they get these talky kids?
“I mean it’s, like, really dark. You wouldn’t catch me out there in no—”
“Yeah, well, I guess I’m strapped in now. Thanks for the help. See ya later.”
“Good luck, Captain. You sure wouldn’t get me to go out there --“
Clunk. Road closed the canopy. It was quiet inside the closed cockpit. The silence was wonderful.
<>
That was the hard part—the waiting. Road’s jet was spotted in front of the island superstructure. He was number six in the sequence to be launched, so he had to sit there and wait his turn to start engines.
From his position in the cockpit, he had a view of the two bow catapults. A pair of F-14 Tomcats was going first, also doing night quals. The big fighters were taxiing forward, into position on the catapults.
Road watched the fighter on the port catapult—the number one cat. The catapult officer was giving him the wind-up signal. The pilot responded by pushing his throttles to full power
.
The roar of the Tomcat’s engines flooded the deck.
“Suspend number one catapult!” said a voice on the radio. The pilot? The Air Boss? The catapult officer?
It didn’t matter. Up in Pri-Fly, the Air Boss had a mushroom-shaped plunger he could push that suspended all four catapults at once. Nothing would fire if he punched the suspend button.
The “suspend” command was given whenever anything—an airplane problem, a traffic problem, a catapult problem—made it necessary to not fire the catapult.
The catapult was suspended—the equivalent of unloading a cannon. The Tomcat’s engines were still roaring at full power. The cat officer waggled his lighted wand to the pilot in the cockpit, signaling him to pull the power back on the Tomcat fighter. It was okay to throttle down. The catapult was safe.
It was the pilot’s first night catapult shot. Now he was confused. Something was wrong and he didn’t know what. What the hell were they telling him? Here he was powered up. . . ready to be hurtled down the catapult track. . . and now they were giving him some kind of signal. . .
And then an awful thought struck the Tomcat pilot: They’re going to fire this fucking catapult!
He did what came naturally: He jammed the throttles hard against the stops—Kaboom!—lighting both afterburners. If he was going off the catapult, it would be with all the thrust his engines could deliver.
Two fifteen-foot torches of flame erupted from the tailpipes of the big fighter. The glow of the roaring afterburners illuminated the entire forward flight deck. The Tomcat was sitting there with its engines roaring at full power, belching flame like a space shuttle on the pad.
“Power back! Power back on Cat One!” bellowed the Air Boss on the radio. “What the hell do you think you’re doing down there?” He was yelling at the Tomcat pilot. “The catapult is suspended. Get the power off that jet before you hurt someone!”
Actually, he already had hurt someone. A deck crewman working by the jet blast deflector—the grated blast shield that raised up out of the deck behind the catapult to deflect the exhaust from the jets—had been caught out in the open by the sudden application of the Tomcat’s afterburners. The heat and flame from the tailpipes flipped him end over end like a bowling pin.
Bogeys and Bandits Page 31