“Welcome!”
My bed was filled with a dozen red and yellow balloons. A mint rested on my pillow. The guys started to laugh. Stoli explained.
“I know it seems gay, but we just wanted to make you welcome.”
I was touched, but a part of me thought they were screwing with me. These were combat naval aviators, could they also be sensitive metrosexuals? The other thing was, they’d been at sea for six months and they were beyond bored. The arrival of a new guy—any new guy—was like three six-year-old boys with chicken pox getting new Legos. It gave the guys something new to talk about, someone new to prank. We spent the next few weeks hiding the deflating balloons in each other’s lockers and shaving kits.
I quickly got their backstories. Stoli was a sharp new pilot from suburban Chicago. He was getting married in September and it was hard to tell whom he loved more, his fiancée, Jodi, or Bears linebacker Brian Urlacher. The Wolf was an academy grad and probably had twenty IQ points on most of the rest of the guys in the squadron, not always an advantage as a junior officer. His wife was a helo pilot flying in Afghanistan; they’d spent three months together since getting married two years earlier.
And then there was Lil Chris. He’d completed the Black Ravens’ last cruise, but while everyone else was enjoying time back on Whidbey he’d been shipped out to Iraq for one of the dreaded IAs. He made it back to Whidbey last July, got two months at home, and rejoined the Black Ravens in October, just in time to be in the backseat for Beav’s emergency landing in Oman.
The Nimitz was fifteen stories deep, a block wide, and over a thousand feet long. It was as unknowable to a newcomer as Manhattan to an immigrant. But like a great city it was broken down into a series of self-sustaining neighborhoods, ones where the locals all spoke the same language. A Black Raven could go weeks without leaving the block except to go up top to fly and down below to get a shitty haircut in the barbershop. The wardroom was spacious, but the squadron tended to eat together at one round table, cramming in extras as they arrived, the middle of the table becoming a compost of plates bearing half-eaten chicken fingers and a poor man’s imitation of lettuce.
I first saw Tupper at dinner. His cheeks had gone concave and he was fifteen pounds lighter than last summer. The next day, he stopped by my room with something green tucked under his arm.
“If you’re going to hang with us, you have to dress like us.”
He handed me a flight suit and flight boots. I told him that men had worked years for the honor of wearing a Navy flight suit and I hadn’t earned it. I tried to hand it back, but Tupper refused.
“Believe me, you’ve earned this more than a lot of us. Put it on.”
Tupper left and I closed the door. My roommates were all out briefing flights or flying. I slipped off my khakis and shirt, stepped into the flight suit, and zipped it up.
It took me to another time. I’m eight or nine. I’ve just struck out to end a Little League game. My parents are not there. I’m pissed off and wondering how I’m going to get home. Then a hand falls on my shoulder. It is Dad in his flight suit. He is both kind and impatient.
“Don’t worry. Everyone strikes out. Even Ted Williams. We’ll work on it. But don’t be a crybaby.”
Stoli then burst through the door. I blushed, embarrassed, feeling like he caught me playing dress up at fantasy camp.
“It looks good. The thing is, they are so damn comfortable. They’re like pajamas. By the time you leave, you’re never going to want to take it off.”
He was right. The flight suit had one giant zipper running from crotch to neck, much like the jammies I wore as a kid watching Mom and Dad play bridge. It was odd how one item of clothing could make me feel like a man and a child at the same time.
I wandered into the ready room after dinner one night early in my stay. The guys had finally grown tired of watching Beerfest and Vinnie was trying to rally them into watching an early season of The Sopranos. He was the XO, so no one was really going to say no, but the images of violence and intrigue didn’t attract much of a crowd. I plopped down into a seat next to Lieutenant Commander Scott “Sherm” Oliver, a Black Raven I hadn’t really met yet. Sherm had blue eyes and gray-blond hair, and one of the officers’ wives had nicknamed him McSteamy after a stud doctor on Grey’s Anatomy. He was discreetly spitting tobacco into a cup and staring right through Christopher and Paulie trying to escape the Pine Barrens.
We didn’t say anything for a half hour. But then we started to talk. It was one of those Navy conversations that once it got rolling went straight to the pain. He told me that he grew up outside Atlanta and his father was a writer too, a speechwriter for Coca-Cola who had just retired. He started asking me how I do what I do and I told him my job was much like his: 15 percent cool, 85 percent drudgery. We laughed about that. He told me he’d gone to the Citadel in South Carolina. His call sign came from William Tecumseh Sherman because of his Southern roots.
“I acted like I hated it, so it stuck,” said Sherm. “That’s the secret. Act like you hate it. But I actually think it’s pretty cool.”
He asked me if I was married. I told him I was divorced. He perked up and gave a sad smile.
“My wife just left me. She’s moving out of our house this week.”
He unspooled the details. He had met her at the Citadel his senior year. She worked at the college and came from a military family. Her father was an Army paratrooper who was killed when she was a teenager; his chute didn’t open on a training mission.
They fell in love and got engaged. Sherm couldn’t believe his good fortune in meeting someone who already understood the hardship of being a military wife. They got married in 2001 and eventually did tours of duty in Whidbey and Pensacola. In 2006, they thought an instructor tour in Pensacola was a good time to start a family, but when she was five months pregnant Sherm was sent to Iraq on an IA to do anti-IED work. He learned he had a son, Grayson, via satellite phone while he was camped near Baghdad. Another son, Trent, was born in 2008 while he was doing a staff tour at Oceana Naval Air Station in Virginia Beach. He was home for that one.
Sherm then made department head, which meant they had to head back to Whidbey. But his wife hated it there, hated the damp, and hated being so far away from her friends in South Carolina. Sherm fell back on the old military trope that it wasn’t forever. She knew differently. They’d be there for three years and then another three if Sherm made command.
Her husband tried to turn her around, finding a beautiful house in the hills above Anacortes. He tried to make it a home in the three months before he had to meet the Black Ravens midcruise, but he could feel things falling apart.
Sherm went to see his mentor, Captain Tom Slais, his first Prowler skipper. Slais had moved up the ranks and was now commodore of NAS Whidbey, overseeing all the Whidbey Prowler squadrons. Sherm told him his domestic situation. Slais wanted to help. The commodore called Tupper on the Nimitz and asked if he could spare Sherm and have him join the Black Ravens back in Whidbey after their deployment. But their conversation was classic militarese, both speaking in a code the other didn’t understand. Slais didn’t tell Tupper why he wanted to keep Sherm home and Tupper didn’t ask. Instead, Tupper told Slais that if Sherm didn’t make part of the deployment he’d have a hard time bonding with the guys once they made it back to Whidbey. He wouldn’t have shared experiences with them, either in the air or in the ready room. Slais said he understood.
Sherm shipped o
ut to the Nimitz in February, meeting the Black Ravens in Hong Kong. His wife left him a month later. When Tupper found out, he felt unwittingly responsible. He would have left Sherm at home if he had known.
“She told me ‘I still love you, but I just don’t want to be married to you anymore,’ ” Sherm told me. “What does that mean?”
I told Sherm I didn’t know and that I was really sorry. My own feelings were confused. I tried to sympathize with his wife—I knew losing a father at such a vulnerable age can cause incalculable damage—but ditching a husband on deployment and moving his kids 3,000 miles away made me equally furious. I asked him, dumbly, how he was doing.
“I’m fine.”
The ready room had filled with a few more officers grab-assing and waiting for “midrats,” a fourth meal served on a carrier around midnight. He pointed at the other men dressed in the same green flight suits.
“These guys are my family.”
Sherm had known most of them for less than a month.
Sherm took me up on deck for afternoon recoveries the next day. We stood at the front of the boat with the landing signal officers as they talked to the pilots approaching the Nimitz. There was a rhythm to the chaos. A sailor shouted “foul deck, foul deck” in a singsong voice until the previous jet was cleared off the landing strip and then sang “clear deck, clear deck.” I could catch snippets of the one-way conversations between the LSOs and the pilots. If the LSO was soothing it meant the pilot was on track; an urgent repeat of “power, power” at escalating volume meant hit the throttle hard so you don’t strike the ramp and die. We stood maybe thirty feet away as Tupper brought his Prowler in on a smooth break and caught the number two wire. Sherm tapped me on the shoulder.
“You’ve got a pretty damn big smile on your face.”
He was right. I was ecstatic, bouncing up on the toes of my flight boots looking for the next plane to emerge out of the clouds. For the next hour, I watched as planes emerged out of the darkness and, somehow, returned home to a tiny speck of America in the Pacific Ocean.
But then I went to a dark place. The idea that I never had and never would have a conversation with Dad about what it’s like to land a jet on a carrier was unbearable. I thought back to how close I came to spending a week at sea with him. A week on board as a thirteen-year-old and maybe I would have followed in his flight boots, somehow triumphing over my lack of coordination. Would that have made him proud?
After the last plane landed, Sherm and I made our way back down to the Ravens’ ready room. I told him I had a headache from the noise, but that was a lie. I went back to my room and slid into my bunk and closed my eyes. Mom always said after the accident that Dad was about to be rotated off flying to a staff position within a year. “God took him doing something he loved,” she said. “Maybe God knew he wouldn’t be able to live without it.”
I always thought that was bullshit. Now I wasn’t so sure.
I was playing backgammon in the ready room when Tupper told me he had a surprise for me.
“We’re going to get you up in a flight. I want you to see what it’s like to come in off the break and catch a wire.”
I thought he was joking, but he wasn’t. VIPs flew all the time, he said. General Petraeus got up in a Hornet just a couple of months ago. There was just one problem: I wasn’t the most powerful general in the United States. We were somewhere between Okinawa and Midway Island with no divert fields. I’d be ejecting straight into the Pacific Ocean if things went badly. This could be a slight impediment since I had no parachute experience, zero water survival information, and negative motor skills. It was typical Tupper—push the idea and don’t sweat the reality.
“Don’t worry. I can make this happen.”
I did the math and calculated ten careers—from Tupper to the secretary of the Navy—that would be ended by a Navy Times headline reading “Son of Dead Prowler Pilot Dead in Prowler Mishap.” But it wasn’t my call. Tupper was persistent and pushed the paperwork. Before long, I was down in the Nimitz’s hospital undergoing a physical. Blood was drawn, hearing was tested, and three chest X-rays were administered because the corpsman kept loading the film in backward.
Everything checked out. Tupper told me he was just waiting for CAG to sign off on the request. Finally, I believed him. That night, there was a nervous tingle in my stomach not completely attributable to my consumption of a vat of tater tots at dinner. I lay in bed thinking of a catapult shot and the water rushing below me. What would it mean to me? What would I now understand?
But the next morning, Tupper took me aside. He put his hand on my shoulder.
“It’s not going to happen. The boss said no.”
“No big deal. It was always a long shot.”
“We’ll get you up from Whidbey, I promise.”
“Sure.”
I smiled and walked away, heading back to my room. My roommates were either flying or briefing. I climbed into my rack, pulled the flimsy curtain shut, and cursed into my pillow.
Chapter Twenty-One
I decided to get out of politics when I was twenty-five and take a job mirroring the uncertainty of my childhood. I can’t say I woke up one morning and decided I wanted a career where I was always the new kid, but that’s exactly what happened.
I was in grad school at Loyola for political science and wrote a paper on Greece’s entry into the Common Market. I was a little short on scholarly research, so I riffed a bit, throwing in a joke or five. My professor wrote, “The Chicago Tribune will pay you good money to write like this.” It was the first time I thought about writing for a living. I began freelancing for an alternative weekly in Chicago. On a whim, I applied for a $200-a-week internship as a researcher at the New Republic in Washington. Somehow, I got it. I moved to D.C. a few weeks later.
I hadn’t met more than two or three Ivy Leaguers in my entire life and now they surrounded me. There were weekly editorial meetings where English philosopher Michael Oakeshott was casually quoted and the predilections of Israeli politicians were debated. The people doing the talking were folks I’d seen on The McLaughlin Group and the meetings were presided over by Andrew Sullivan, who was also a model for the Gap. I had no idea what the hell they were talking about half the time. It wasn’t until years later that I realized they didn’t know either.
Eventually, the nausea about saying the wrong thing went away. I was lucky. No one expected much from me. The other interns were drowning under the weight of their expectations. There was an odd woman who was obsessed by my button nose. She remarked, “Every time I look at you, your nose gets smaller and smaller.” She disappeared after a plagiarism scandal. The guy next to me had a terrible secret: he went to Penn for a year before transferring to Harvard. (I didn’t learn this until a decade later.) And then there was the preppy fellow who was nicknamed Masthead Man for his photographic memory of the staff of every magazine this side of Redbook. Compared to them I was well adjusted.
These kids were all used to doors opening for them. I didn’t even know there were doors. The staff didn’t discourage their delusions of grandeur. The writer Michael Lewis was there at the time and took me to lunch toward the end of my internship. “I’m not sure why we can’t pick up the phone and get you a job at GQ. Let me look into it.”
I never heard back from him. But that was okay. A friend house-sat for Lewis and we threw a party where we built a shrine out of the eleven different language versions of Liar’s Poker he had stacked in his living room.
Sometimes, I had to walk home because I was too broke for the Metro. The only lodging I could afford was the handyman’s apartment off the
trash room in a three-story building on a sketchy Capitol Hill street. I woke every morning to the landlord’s mutt taking a squirt on the small, scarred windows above my bed that provided the only natural light to the place.
I learned other things, particularly the power of Dad’s story. I wrote a column about visiting his marker at Arlington National Cemetery. It was well received by the magazine’s mercurial editor in chief, Martin Peretz. My reward was holding cellist Yo-Yo Ma’s coat while he played tunes for Al Gore at a posh New Republic party shortly before the 1993 presidential inauguration. This seemed like a fair trade.
By June, my internship was up and I was down to my last $300. I was about to move back to Chicago when a friend told me of a job opening at Boston Magazine, a city monthly specializing in political profiles and clam chowder recommendations. I was flown up for the interview and put up in a posh hotel by a newish editor in chief just in from Cleveland. He was impressed by my New Republic experience and didn’t seem to care that my job description largely centered on faxing an in-the-tank journalist’s campaign articles to Hillary Clinton days before publication. He hired me over a third glass of white wine.
I wasn’t being paid much, but it was enough to afford a one-bedroom apartment in a nice section of Boston’s South End. Or so I thought. My first Sunday, there was a front-page Globe story about an unsolved gang-related murder from a year earlier. The photograph above the fold looked out from where the shots had been fired. It looked vaguely familiar. I then realized it was shot from my front stoop.
One night, I heard a rustling noise and saw a shadow in my apartment. I threw the light on. There was no thief, but something worse, a watermelon-sized rat. I shrieked like a Brownie at her first sleepaway camp.
The landlord came over the next morning and stuffed chicken wire into a hole between the refrigerator and the dishwasher where he thought the rats were coming in. He declared the problem solved. Not quite. I came home that night to a rat on my kitchen counter, forcing its way into my Jif peanut butter jar with just its fangs. I flung a can of SpaghettiOs at it; the rat skittered away to God knows where. I restuffed the hole with some old Graham Greene paperbacks. I came home the next night to find Greene’s The Quiet American and a loaf of bread half-digested on the kitchen floor. I messengered my landlord the paperback with a note reading, “Thought you might enjoy this one. The rats obviously did.”
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