16 July 2007

Pressure Point



They are closing AOCS, the Navy's Aviation Officer Candidate School. It has been located at Pensacola, FL, anchoring the Redneck Riviera of the Gulf Coast since after World War Two. Under the provisions of the latest Base Reallocation and Closure round, the schoolhouse will be consolidated in Newport, Rhode Island, where the non-aviation officer pipeline has been located for years.

Class 22-07 is the end of the line, a last gift from former Secretary Rumsfeld, an old Naval Aviator himself, and it is bittersweet.

You may recall the movie “An Officer and a Gentleman,” starring Richard Geer before he was a Buddhist, or a star, and Lewis Gossett, Jr. as the stern Marine drill instructor won an academy award for his performance, and the lovely Debra Winger as the romantic interest became a household word..

The story of a young man's struggle to become an officer under the extreme pressure of Aviation Officer Candidate School had some aspects that the prim leadership of the Service did not condone, though of course it did not match the sordid reality, which I will tell you about sometime over an adult beverage or two.

John Travolta should have never turned down the role of Zack but he did. Debra Winger was apparently uneasy about doing that love scene with Geer, since she hated him. Word is that she thought he played the part so well because he was playing himself and she could never get through to him.

Plus, I think there was a suicide, a graphic hanging if I recall, since the candidate could not handle the pressure, and Navy would not let them film the story on the base, the legendary Cradle of Naval Aviation.

Port Townsend, Washington, stood in for Pensacola, and the old costal artillery base at Fort Warden played the Air Station, and you could feel that it was cool and about to rain throughout the film, which was about as far away from the real thing as you could possibly get.

But as with some lies, it told a greater truth. I could tell that, since had already been through the real experience in Class 11-77 and had spent some time marching and lifting an inert rifle endlessly, sweat dripping under uniform cap, khakis soaked, while watching the thunderheads pile up on the pastel horizon, bringing the daily summer afternoon deluge.

I hit the obstacle course on the beach almost two years to the day after Saigon fell to the communists. In a round about fashion, that was precisely why I was there. I had been living in my Chevy at a campground just off the base in preparation. They said not to report too soon, since it was going to be unpleasant, and they were right.

The Lieutenant who swore me in made me watch a short film about what was going to happen to me if I reported. It was a requirement, and only fair. I entered a closet at the Recruiting Station and he ran the feature on a projector set up close to the wall. There were images of sharply-creased Marines in the famous Smokey Bear hats shouting at groups of confused and terrified young men with bulging eyes and buzz-cut hair.

As best I could determine, the point was to be as unpleasant as possible to the civilians who wanted to fly Navy jets, on the working assumption that if the candidate could not handle a Marine Drill Instructor screaming in his face, it was a good bet that he could not handle an airplane in an emergency.

Better to get them to quit before all the training dollars were wasted. I was not headed for pilot training any more than the Aviation Maintenance officers, but the Navy lumped us all together with the pilots for reasons of efficiency.

The short training film may still exist somewhere, and it was called “Pressure Point.” It should have been a trailer for the Hollywood Feature, and perhaps will someday be included as an extra feature on the deluxe anniversary edition of the DVD.

The last class of officer candidates to be trained at the Air Station checked in on the first of July, and they will be done with The Grinder, the vast concrete pads adjoining the ancient seaplane ramps in September.

I visited there two years ago in January. We had my pal Snidely's ashes in the rented Cadillac, and I participated in an unauthorized spreading of his earthly remains right there, near the Water Survival Training Facility.

He had marched there, on his way to being an officer, and my father had been turned upside down in the Dilbert Dunker water torture device right there near the ramp.

It was sad that day, though lovely, and for more than the parting with an old friend. The base had taken a severe pummeling in Hurricane Ivan, and dozens of the historic building were in the process of being razed.

The sound of bulldozers was in the background, not at all like the startling controlled chaos of the Blue Angels roaring inland low over your marching formation.

They say that Newport will include some of the tradition of Pensacola, and the base there goes back to the Revolution. Narragansett Bay is a lovely body of water, but there is something about doing pushups on concrete in the Florida summer that really can't be done anywhere else.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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