On Gonzo Station, Part Seven

(T.R. Brown and his Radar Intercept Officer Frank “Personal Friend of Mine (P-FOM)” prepare for a ten second flight. Photo USN.)

It was the usual day. Up two hours before two hours before launch to prepare the first four of eight cyclic event briefings. An early chat with Strike Ops and CIC to see what external factors might impact the air plan, then scan the reams of traffic about what the Iranians were up to, where the Russians were, and what might be happening someplace beyond the steel confines of the ship.

I was off in time for late chow in the Dirty Shirt, and then with not much else on my mind, decided to get some exercise and do my zen thing in front of one of the elevators and look at where the horizon merged into the brown haze of sand.

I cruised down to the hangar bay to skip some rope. I preferred that to trying to jog around the clustered airplanes and those gigantic Sea Stallion helicopters that had mysteriously appeared one night. Obviously there was no running on deck while we were at flight quarters, so the rope made a lot of sense. It is a hopeless battle to try and stay in shape out here, but a few hundred skips might- help me sleep better, anyway. I arrived in my plush at-sea bunkroom (World Famous BK-4) to discover we had been defiled by the lickspittle running dog lackeys of the Damage Control Assistant.

They had crashed into the sanctity of our little haven and stolen our extension cord.

No much, you say? Hah!

What is a man to do, trapped on the Gonzo, with but one electrical outlet in a shoebox-sized compartment to accommodate four junior officers? I mean, Midway is an old ship and sailors back in 1945 did not have much in the way of personal electronics, so we had to have our workarounds, which made the Blackshoes of the engineering department borderline nuts.

Whoever had been in the BK had not physically sliced the cords to the typewriter or the stereo, but they may as well have.

I vented my rage in a long scream that pried the thin-non-structural aluminum bulkhead and echoed through Officer’s Country. I dialed Damage Control to make an obscene phone call to the Ensign who had carried out the vile commands of his superiors, determined at any cost to save us from electrical shock. The Ensign was not at my post, and my attempt to assuage my anger was foiled.

Maybe that is the worst of the Mary; the fact than when you live onboard, nothing is yours. Ho privacy, no silence, no territorial integrity to defend. After a couple of years it gets old, and they will never grant the monies to allow you to live elsewhere, or at least not in the non-stop adventure of the Overseas Family Residency Program.

The only way to work off my anger was to jump the stupid rope in the madness of the activity in the hangar bay. A thousand jobs were proceeding: yellow gear was torn apart, airplanes were being moved, the flow of hundreds of people in dirty working dungarees back and forth under the sharp supersonic airfoils. Tie down chains snaking everywhere, fuel dripping from the dump-masts. I found an open area in front of El-3, and began the monotonous twirling of the rope. The sun shone bright on a Kotlin-class Soviet DD, and a Knox class (in fact the Knox herself) hull down on the blue horizon, I managed to anesthetize my frustration in as little as fifteen minutes

The ship began to heel to port as we came into the wind for the next launch and recovery cycle. The blue panorama out the elevator door began to wheel, and Bainbridge came into view, I folded my rope up Into a little bundle and walked back forward to take a luke-warm shower and read for a while.

I had just smoked my first post-work-out Winston when the room began to shake and vibrate. It is a fascinating experience the first couple times you experience it. Very much more impressive than the earthquakes in Japan; things fall off desks. After a while you learn to stop writing as the thunder suddenly grows and the hold-back breaks and the airplane is accelerated from zero to 150 kts in a space of three hundred feet.

(VF-151 Phantom leaves Midway on a one-way flight. Photo USN.)

The jet is hurled off the front end, almost flying, and the catapult shuttle slams into the water-break. The vibration can be felt a thousand feet away. When you live three feet below the cats you come to an accommodation with the snarling and shaking and banging. You even learn to sleep through it. But you never learn to like it.

Three or four of the planes had launched. The roar of two J-79s indicated there was a Phantom on the cat, either one of ours or the Rock Rivers of VF-161. The hold-back separated and I heard the F-4 roar down the cat-track just a few feet away. Then the steam shuttle- the big piston- bashed the water-break, and the rattle of the retrieval commenced to bring it back in battery.

That had no more than started and I was lighting up another cigarette when a high-pitched voice yelled something over the 1-MC.

It sounded a bit like “Man Overboard,”only really excited, I couldn’t really tell over the welcome blast of the ventilator above me. We had stuffed rolled t-shirts into the line forward of us, and snaked out the ones the bunkroom upstream from us, so for the moment we had plenty of cool air. I went over and opened up the door to catch the second rendition of the announcement. The only time I have heard someone so flipped out was a year or so ago when we had the big fire at the pier in Yoko.

“Fire in the uptakes!” was the announcement that time. This did not appear to reflect imminent peril, like the sharp repetitive beeps of the collision alarm. I figured someone-might have got blown over the side by a jet exhaust. The second chorus didn’t help for clarity, so I got on the phone to the Ready Room in case it was a man overboard. I got Tracker on the line, and he sounded very cool.

“Tracker,” I said quickly, “Did we just have a man overboard?” It was a key question. We were timed in our response to the Duty Officer in a drill situation, and if it was real, they wanted a body count pronto to identify the missing.

“Nah” replied the trusty duty officer, personal representative of’ the Commanding Officer. “We got a plane in the water. T.R. and PFOM are in it.”

“Holy shit! ” I replied cleverly. “No wonder the guy on the bridge sounded so uptight!” I began to throw on parts of my uniform and headed for the door. I broke for the port catwalk, and ran stumbling over the coiled fuel hoses. A flight deck PO was waving everyone back down below, I knew that clutter was the last thing they needed and slipped back down the hatch and raced for the hangar bay. I ducked through a hatch and went out on the forward BPDMS platform.

I could see the helo in a hover about a quarter of a mile away. They seemed to be taking an awful long time at what they were doing, It was impossible to tell what was going on, except that the CIWS BPDMS crew was really excited. “Really cool, Man,” said one of them “I never thought I would get to see one of those.”

I decided to head-on up to the ready room and find out what they knew, All I could gather out on the sponson was that one of the guys nearly plowed into the side of the ship, and may have gotten sucked under. I thought about T.R., of the ironic hazel eyes and quick wit. His “Doctrine of Invisibility” had become gospel for all fighter drunks.

According to T.R., one could gauge just how one was doing at a party by the stages of the skin’s permeability to light. Naturally one started out opaque, gradually transitioning to a certain translucent quality, and finally arriving at total invisibility. Once achieved, the invisible person could do no wrong, because after all, he was invisible, wasn’t he?

A classic example may assist the reader. One late and drunken evening we were smashing the giant ice sculpture from the change-of-command ceremony on the patio of the Atsugi Officer’s club. I asked T.R. what he and his wife Paula were going to do later. T.R. looked at me with those innocent eyes and replied that they were going to go home and fuck. Paula appeared ready to slug him, since such a declaration, even at at fighter brawl, could have provoked embarrassment.

Thankfully, T.R was doctrinally completely invisible at the time, and no one could possibly take offense at a remark from someone who wasn’t, strictly speaking,

even there.

It would have been a useful aspect to apply to the mishap, but this was visible in the extreme.

As we reconstructed the event later- from the plat monitor and a beautiful still photo sequence- it was indeed remarkable. The airplane shot down the cat and lumbered into the air. The stabilator refused to program from leading edge down, and the Phantom jerked straight up into the air. A heartbeat later, the rear canopy flew off, and PFOM (“Personal Friend of Mine,” which is another story) shot out into the air.

By this time the airplane was almost in level flight, but it may have been because it was completely stalled. In about four tenths of a second the front canopy went away and another body blew out of the cockpit, arcing up and away because of the strange starboard settle to the airframe. Three or four seconds later the Phantom, engines roaring but out of airspeed, impacted the blue with a tremendous waterspout, the center-line tank and stores following along behind.

T.R. had been working the emergency procedures till the moment the command eject initiated by PFOM took him away from his job.

It was about ten seconds of excitement, start to finish.

They say that the worst part of any ejection (so long as the seat goes up the rail on its little rocket motor and the chute blossoms- the Martin-Baker ejection system is supposed to enable users to punch out and live even while on the deck) is what happens after you get your feet wet. The Naval Safety Center calls any ejection successful if you separate from the host aircraft successfully.

If you do not detach from the seat pan after water impact, or stay attached to the chute, the shourd lines are waiting to snake around your boots and carry you down, down down.

Splash Nash got his call-sign from just such an event, and was the local authority on the matter. When he hit the water the shrouds grabbed him, and even his fully inflated LPA (Mae West) could barely keep his helmeted head above water. His advise was to get rid of the chute as soon as possible, and everyone took his advise to heart.

Splash was lucky to survive. So many things to go wrong, and so little time to think.

Tracker said that PFOM had blown down the side of the ship. On his way, he passed bout ten feet of the bow, and actually bounced off the forward side of the massive gray hull. PFOM had actually listened during the All-Officers Meeting (AOM) when Splash gave his picture on the treacherous shroud lines, and had internalized the message. To avoid the possibility of getting fouled in the lines of his chute, he reached up to hit the Koch quick release fittings on his harness just as he was descending past the level of the flight deck. He plunged the last thirty feet into the water. As Midway’s massive stern passed by, the turbulence generated by the four huge brass screws sucked him under.

No one could tell for a while if he had been turned to mincemeat for several seconds until the LPA did its thing and his helmet popped up in the wake astern.

By the time the ejection sequence got to T.R., the aircraft had pitched forward and to starboard. The ejection thrust him nearly a quarter mile from the boat. He did not hit the Koch fittings early. The horizon is a tricky was to try to judge descent, and he preferred to hit the water rather than plunging a hundred or more feet down into the drink. People have died that way.

Early release or late, both methods have their proponents, and in this case, both worked. T.R. and PFOM were each able to expound on the matter at some length later, since they may have been wet but both were alive and in the helo by the time I got to the Ready Room.

You could hear the gust of wind as dozens of lungs exhaled at the news, and we could see on the plat monitor both guys climb down out of the SH-3 and head for the mandatory medical exam.

Thank God. Then it was time for the paperwork. In the end, the Accident Investigation Board decided it was something like a flashlight left in the tail of the jet that had jammed the controls right after T.R. had swept the stick in preparation for the cat-shot. Recommendations for tool security and accountability were made.

Sometimes things go so well and so smoothly for so long that you begin to forget how horribly unforgiving the whole adventure really is. Ground-pounders like me are essentially office workers, even this far from shore. We work under the florescent lights and have time to quibble over earth-shattering issues like extension cords and battles with the ship’s Damage Control Assistant. Then, sometimes reality jumps on you with both boots and you are looking out under the blazing sun to see if there are going to snare your friends, or whether the unthinkable has just occurred.

Poor Kitty Hawk. Eight dead so far. And we aren’t near out of this thing yet.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com