| 31 August 2006 Black Cloud Back from the road, I was crashing through the correspondence on the computer and finally gave up. Too much information to process. Black clouds from the hurricane headed this way. Controversy over the war, and black clouds on the prognosis for peace. There was acrimony about how it was going, and why it was playing out the way it was. There were echoes of other conflicts, which have had their ugliness tempered by the sepia of memory. At length I gave up on trying to finish that night, and pecked out a last note, which read, “Sometimes God looks after drunks and the United States- but rarely in the same airplane...Vic.” I knew what I was referring to, which was a time and place far away. There was a request for clarification the next morning, and I determined that the response had to be in the form of a sea story, to protect the innocent. Which is to say that this is not a fairy tale, but a real no-shitter. Black Cloud was who I was thinking of. A buccaneer of a jet pilot, he was. He had started as an RF-8 Crusader driver, assigned to super-sonic reconnaissance, who flew "unarmed and unafraid" to collect pre-and-post strike imagery. Later, when the fabulous single-seat Crusader passed out of the inventory, he transitioned to the F-4 Phantom. That is where I crossed paths with him, first in the Black Ship Bar in Yokosuka, and later in the Fleet. Cloud first became famous for his bold action over the Philippines after conducting a mission in-country at the height of the recent unpleasantness in Southeast Asia. He was tasked to fly near the Parrot's Beak to capture the status of North Vietnamese activity on the Ho Chi Minh trail. The urgency associated with the intelligence meant that the film canisters had to be returned direct to the Philippines for ground-based exploitation and dissemination to Hawaii and Washington. Cloud captured his imagery and streaked feet-wet from the beach, racing east across the blue water of the South China Sea. As he approached Subic Bay he requested a straight-in approach to the Navy field at Cubi Point. Unfortunately, some clown with combat damage was fouling the mid-field gear, which is to say that he landed hook-down to catch the wire since his undercarriage was suspect. The Crusader was the thirsty bird, and Cloud has been generous on the throttle to get his picture on a near supersonic pass over the jungle. He was low on go-juice and his cargo was precious. Even after declaring an emergency he could not get clearance form the tower to put the jet down over the head of the offending bird in the gear, so he sweetly inquired if the tower wanted to get raked by his 20mm cannon. "Permission granted,” crackled the radio after a moment. “Call the Break." The tower had no way of knowing- not with 100% certainty- that Black Cloud was an unarmed reconnaissance puke. It was the thought that counted. The importance of the pictures he carried caused the ruffled feathers of the tower geeks to be mollified. There was a war on, after all. Having grown up professionally in those lawless times, Cloud considered himself to be a rule-maker unto himself. A cruise or so later, USS Boat was conducting routine operations in the South China Sea, It was circa 1975, before the Frequent Wind evacuation of what was about to not be the Republic of South Vietnam. The NVA were no longer interested in shooting down Americans, and in fact a sort of tacit understanding had emerged in the war zone. Cloud was flying a routine Combat Air Patrol east of Nha Trang- almost within sight of the destroyed lighthouse at Phuoc Giang. It is a posh resort these days, but then it was just a place to wait, orbiting, for something to happen. In the course of the mission he got an airborne downing gripe- a hydraulic problem in this case- that prevented him from recovering aboard the ship. The powers that be could have diverted him to a field in the Republic, or they could send him back to the Philippines, where things were safe. After consultation, they permitted him to declare Bingo to Cubi Point. Upon landing, it was determined that the Phantom needed a part that was not in the inventory on the flight line, or at the Air Intermediate Maintenance detachment. Knowing that the part would have to come from Clark Air Force Base or points east, Cloud and his trusty RIO Cannonball checked themselves into the Bachelor Officers Quarters. Having risen that morning to go to war, they were unequipped for peace. All they had was their flight suits, g-corsets and survival gear. They needed some civilian clothes, since local management frowned on liberty in flight suits. There was a battered command sedan reserved for personnel on the transient flight line. Keys were in the glove compartment, and every aircrew knew. They appropriated the vehicle and drove up the hill to the Navy Exchange where they purchased shorts and some hideous shirts at a modest price. It turned out the most valuable piece of survival gear was not the Service .38 in the vest, but a couple twenties tucked into the leg-pocket of a green Nomex zoom-bag. It is amazing how critical some folding cash can be as part of a survival package. Suitably equipped, The Boys established a Base Camp with Romy at the casual bar of the Cubi BOQ, munching on the marvelous tube-steaks on a bun known as Cubi Dogs and enjoying cold San Miguel beer. Several of them. Perhaps several dozen of them. hey, there is war on, right? It is not disorganization on the part of the USS Boat Air Ops, nor inattention on the part of the Beach Detachment Duty Officer. Perhaps the word on the overhead times had been passed, or perhaps it was the lack of the alarm clock in the Spartan cinder-block BOQ of those days. Aircraft mishaps, or mis-chances, as it happens, are the combination of several small events, innocuous enough alone, that combine, linearly, to create A Situation. It cannot be that The Boys went out the gate that night, crossing Shit River and carousing their way up Magsaysay Boulevard to the statue of the water buffalo and back. That would have been wrong, just as it would have been a few years earlier for the Command Duty Officer of the USS Oriskany to be enjoying a cold beer at the Cubi Club as his ship slowly settled into the ooze at the Carrier Pier. Suffice it to say that word was not passed about the miraculous appearance of the critical part, nor the unexpected energy of the night-check supervisor, or the return of the muscular Phantom jet to flying status. Nor was Cloud, sleeping the sound sleep of the just, included on distribution for the Air Plan which featured that jet in the second recovery cycle on the Boat not long after the first few frosty brown bottles had been downed at lunch at the BOQ Bar. The rules are clear. No drinking within seventy-five feet of the aircraft. No smoking within twenty-four hours. Or was that the other way around? Time is an elastic thing. One moment it was as slow as the ceiling fan, gravely stirring the rich humid air in the dark bar. Then things seemed to happen all at once; the phone ringing, Romy gravely handing the squat black phone on its cord over the bar, the curt words "Where the F**k are you guys?" crackling over the line, and the glance at the large fighter-pilot watch on the wrist that indicated there were exactly thirty minutes to be crossing the round-down on the stern of the Boat at landing speed on the carrier. There was no time to retrieve the zoom-bags from the room. No time to check out. There was only time to head directly from the bar to the battered admin sedan that waited, parked cross-wise, in the parking spot reserved for "Any Commanding Officer." The Ford sedan choked to life in a puff of gray smoke, and performed admirably as it hurtled down the hill toward the flight line. Then it was straight from the sedan, doors left open, straight through the hangar, past the duty deck. There was no time to don the g-suit corsets, and no time for a full pre-flight. Helmet, harness and aloha shirt, flip-flops up the ladder and into the cockpit, the effects of hangover jolted by pure adrenalin. The sailors in their Mickey Mouse helmets watched impassively as Cloud and Cannonball scrambled into the jet, and phlegmatically started the huffer to blow compressed air over the jet turbines to bring the engine up to starting speed. Sometimes a Functional Check Flight could result directly in an arrested landing at sea. After all, there was a war on. Cloud waved from the cockpit as the canopy came down, the chocks were pulled, and the jet lurched off the line and toward the taxi-way. Minutes later the sleek Phantom was granted permission to take the active (and only) runway. Cloud jammed the throttle through the detents for full military power and into afterburner. The jet was gone in the twinkling of a barmaid's eye. It is purely anti-climactic that Cloud joined the top of the stack only a few seconds after his estimated time, and hit the break with his usual élan. He passed abeam the carrier's great gray flank, and rolled into the groove astern. He intersected the glide slope, picked up the meatball, and flew a perfect pass to what the LSO graded as an "OK Three." It was not until he had been directed by the yellow-shirts to a parking place that things began to get interesting as the canopy opened and The Boys un-strapped. The Mini-Boss elbowed the Boss in the Tower to take a look at the flight gear emerging from Phantom 103. Before the first words from 5mc flight deck PA system could issue, the aloha shirts were down the ladder and into the catwalk, where they disappeared into the warren of airwing Junior Officer berthing on the 02 level forward to find a couple zoom bags and the back-up flight boots. But a glimpse of the shirts was really all anyone needed. Legend was born that day in the South China Sea. Drunk or sober, no one in WestPac would dare say that Black Cloud could not Fly the Ball. Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra |