11 October 2020

Author’s Note: The morning stream of messages got me agitated straight off. Not in an angry way. More a state of bemused confusion. Apparently a participant in a political rally was shot dead by a personal security guard, who naturally was carrying a loaded firearm to a big social gathering which was opposed by another group who termed the first group “Fascists” and “Racists.”

I used to be concerned that our good country was divided by deep partisan feelings, a chasm so dramatic that I had never observed it before. Then I realized the sides no longer even speak the same language. Disagreement means you are a “racist,” or a “fascist.” I remember people who claimed to one or the other, and our little neighborhood in Arlington, on the Virginia side of the Potomac, once hosted the national headquarters of something called the American Nazi Party, and a rental house that served as barracks for their “Stormtroopers.” They drove a VW microbus that flew the usual offensive flag. They were despised by just about everyone, but their right to be crazy, so long as it was not violent, seemed to be protected by the 1st Amendment.

An internal disagreement in the group led to the ambush shooting (and murder) of the local Fuhrer at a strip mall I used to drive by. Their storefront headquarters then became a progressive coffee shop (after a no-kidding exorcism), the barracks was torn down and turned into a park, and the whole issue faded into the memory hole of urban unpleasantness.

In these days, apparently simple disagreement can get you labeled as a kindred spirit with the long-ago loonies. It is a very strange thing. Even stranger, with emotions running high, a series of explosions began last Friday down near the farm. It was insistent, loud, and it went on for two days of thudding and shuddering. Grace did some investigating and discovered that a group of pyrotechnical enthusiasts, professional and amateur, was holding the event. Crackerjacks is the name of the group, and they get together to blow things up without any discernable political motivation. The COVID panic caused cancellation of the usual seasonal detonation shows, and the good news is that they feel the lessened danger from one thing is worth the moderate danger of the other thing. There was quit a stockpile of explosives left from the cancelled shows, including the 4th of July, so the event went with some vigor right through the weekend. I have never been in an actual artillery barrage, but this was what I imagine is a pretty good introductory course of what it must be like.

2020. What a year, and months to go for more excitement.

I could go on with accounts of lunacy, but there will be time for that. In COVID seclusion, I was listening to detonations and looking for something I imagined was on the copied files from an old computer. I found much more than what I was looking for. Stand by.

– Vic

FIRST AT-SEA PERIOD ON USS FORRESTAL (CV-59)

03-06 APRIL 1989

It was a drunk and stormy night….

Well, maybe not stormy. In fact, it was a lovely spring Florida
night. I left Hearth and Home behind in the little black Beetle
convertible and gunned it out of the long sloping driveway on the
road to Mayport Naval Station.

Behind I left my lovely wife and two handsome fair-haired sons.
They were watching the Disney Channel, which featured one of
those shows involving the Mouse and Uncle Walt, impossibly alive
again, providing a weird common memory stream for the two
generations under our roof. As far as the kids were concerned,
Dad was off for another in a series of business excursions of
moderate duration.

It was a little different for Mom. Her man was off a’yachting for
the first time in her married life. She was making a brave show
of it. For that matter, I was too. My last underway time lay
nearly eight years and a continent or two away from the pleasant
white house at the end of the pleasant cul de sac. My hair had
somehow turned grey in the meantime and I had acquired a mortgage
and the (previously) unimaginable appurtenances of adulthood.

One conspicuous note of rebellion was still sounded by the
raucous four banger of the 1970 convertible I drove, the sound
belching out the two rakish chrome exhaust pipes behind me. The
tires squealed as I yanked the wheel and ran up and down the
gears over to Blanding Boulevard, flying past the neon-lit tire
stores and burger palaces. I had to pick up The Moose en route the
ship.

I was happily lit up from the vodka I inhaled at the ritual “Folks
At The Railroad Track End of the Subdivision Happy Hour.” Two of
us from the street were heading out to the Forrestal that night,
so the gaiety was slightly muted by the realization that the
crushing schedule was beginning to roll over us and would soon
swamp these precious summer interludes as Cruise got closer and
closer.

Moose is one of our two Carrier Air Wing Landing Signals Officers, or “CAG
LSOs,” in our clipped parlance. He is a happy A-7 driver by trade
and a generally unhappy Administrative Officer by assignment.
Like all of us, he has at least three jobs on a good day. On a
bad day, the little jobs rise up in a tidal surge and wash over
us in a wave of screaming minutiae. Me, I’m the Air Wing
Intelligence Officer, Security Manager, Top Secret Control
Officer, ADP Officer, Naval Warfare Publications and a couple
more I can’t remember at the moment.

Mostly, I’m the Spy.

Moose was doing about the same things I had been doing twenty
minutes earlier when I rolled up into his driveway. His wife and
new daughter were on the couch looking askance at the pile of
flight gear piled up by the door. I demanded a cold lager as toll
for the road and with a flurry of thrown kit bags we piled into
the Beetle and were roaring down the highway to the coast. It
being Sunday there was much traffic headed east toward the
beaches. Having Moose and his gear in the car made the ride more
stable than normal as we rocked over the Buckman Bridge and flew
down J. Turner Butler Boulevard toward Mayport. We were out of
beer and good ideas long before we swept up to the sentry at the
gate to the Naval Air Station. Things were starting to look very
serious.

The guard waved us through with a minimum of fuss and we preceded
sedately down the main drag toward the carrier piers. We passed
the Destroyers and Cruisers rafted out in the basin to our right
and the silent rows of helicopters on the ramp to our left. The
Big Boats are parked all the way at the back of the base, past
the runways and adjacent to the main shipping channel of the St.
John’s river.

Forrestal was going to sea to accomplish a few pieces of basic
airplane business and would not be accompanied by the usual
carnival that goes along with a full-blown Battle Group
deployment. The Small Boys would rest in port this week, and I
imagined all the midwatches settling into the night, scribbling
in green logbooks, reading old fuck books and letting the babble
of the TV mask the low mechanical breathing of cold-iron ships.
On Forrestal, they would be climbing down into the boilers to
light then off in an hour or so to have pressure up to sail on
the morning tide.

My oversized pipes burbled as we rounded the turn onto the
Carrier Pier and Forrestal loomed before us. I was always impressed
every time I see a Carrier up close. They are ugly and massive
and bristle with radar arrays, masts, antennas and mysterious
lights. They are huge and ominous and sometimes they are even
Home.

Tonight I was going to move in the big grey house where I would
spend the bulk of the next nine months.

We had to pass two more ID checks to get close and the last guard
was kind enough to let me drive right up to the foot of the brow
that lead to the Quarterdeck. There are two means of access to a
Carrier in port; the Quarterdeck is where the Officer of the Deck
(OOD) stands his watch and where the officers come and go. The
Enlisted Brow consists of two massive ramps that lead up to
Elevator Three and there is an endless ant-like stream of
Dungaree-clad troops humping supplies and duffel bags up into the
Hangar Bay.

Moose manhandled the bags out of the back seat and I got lucky
and found a parking space in the second row back from the
security zone. Since we were going on our little jaunt without
our Carrier Group Staff and some of the Wing there was actually a
place to park on the pier while we were gone. I hated to leave
the car out in the salt breeze but there wasn’t a real good
alternative. I walked back to the foot of the brow, picked up my
bags, took a deep breath and started up the ladder.

Moose was already at the Quarterdeck and saluting the OOD when I
got there. I fumbled around with my duffel bag on my shoulder and
found my ID card, showed it to him and managed a salute without
quite dropping the bag on his feet.

“Sir!” I said crisply “I report my return aboard!”

He waved us through with a smirk. He had seen dozens of us show
up in about the same condition that night and realized a certain
accommodation to the usual standards of good order would have to
be tolerated. Twelve steps and a watertight hatch later and we
stood in Hangar Bay One. To my left the great empty cavern
stretched nearly eight hundred feet. We would not get our
airplanes until the fly-on tomorrow and the great void dwarfed
the dungaree-clad humans who wandered back and forth.

The great elevator door was closed to my left. Upon it was a huge
brass plaque which held the names of the 137 men who died in the
Flight Deck inferno on that awful day in the Gulf of Tonkin. They
still show the platform videotape of that horror in Shipboard
Fire Fighting School. The sequence begins with a flight deck
filled with aircraft fully armed for the morning Alpha Strike
over the North. Suddenly, a Zuni missile slung on a waiting
airplane accidentally fires into the densely packed mass of
machinery. Seconds pass as a single Chief Petty Officer races
alone toward the mounting conflagration and then the sudden
detonation of 500LB bombs that blossom like awful flowers on the
black deck. Pieces of airplanes (and worse) emerge periodically
from the conflagration.

That fire went on for a day. There were many heroes and long
rows of the canvas-shrouded dead on the hangar bay. These were
sobering images and not ones I wanted to entertain at the
moment. Moose was already trundling off forward to the tunnel
that leads through Air Intermediate Maintenance. I hurried and
caught up to him at the portside ladder that snakes up to the 02
level where the Air Wing staterooms are located. Lugging my bags
up the narrow ladder brought back memories of the USS Midway and
the humid seasonal weather of the Japanese summer when I carried a
hundred cases of soda from the pier to the ready room to slake
the thirst of a fighter squadron about to deploy to the North
Arabian Sea.

The memories were intensified by the smell. Maybe the most
pervasive of the senses when you think about it. The odors of the
carrier rise like a wave around you. Hot Oil. Old cleaning
solution. Liquid wax. Decaying insulation. Ozone from the zillion
miles of cable in the races that hang like ganglia from the
overhead of every passageway. Through it all, underlying and
unifying is the ever-present kerosine perfume of Jet Propulsion
Fuel Number Five, or Jay Pee Five5 we put in our airplanes, and,
through the maze of interconnected pipes and holding tanks, we
shower in it and drink it with our coffee.

These ships are dimensions unto themselves. Steel islands of
America. Small town-sized with bakeries, gas stations, hospitals,
video games and a TV station. No portholes; nearly all of us live
like moles in the endless miles of tunnels. We get to the top of
the ladder and I follow Moose down one of them to a little
converted bunkroom called the Stateroom Assignments Office.

The place was in cheerful disarray. In accordance with venerable
tradition the furniture was clearly scrounged from other offices
and some past budget year. The paint has been through several not
altogether harmonious iterations and the coffee pot is cooking
some particularly vile black substance that might originally have
been coffee. The service counter is battered aluminum. The sailor
on watch is disheveled and in wrinkled dungarees. He has been
dealing with the arriving throng of happy campers and produces a
grimy variant of the universal Navy green log-book, this one
marked with the words “Key Log” on the front.

I identify myself and gain the key to compartment 02-33-1L.
Happily, this means I am already almost home. My stateroom is the
next one down the passageway on the starboard side. I kick my
duffel down the tiled passageway and trace my finger over the
blue plastic plaque that identifies the place as the residence of
the CAG Spy. I insert the key and the door swings open to
darkness. I hit the light switch and the compartment is
illuminated by the pale florescent glow.

Chop- short for the traditional ‘Porkchop’ sobriquet which
identifies all Naval Supply Officers- peers owlishly from the
upper rack. He fumbles for his glasses and says “Spy! Welcome
Home!”

I drop my bags on the deck. “I suppose it’s too late to expect
bar service in this place?”

I crashed around for about an hour, ensuring that Chop’s sleep
was destroyed, opening drawers and generally marvelling at the
size of the compartment. When last I had ventured over the
bounding waves, I was a LTJG and entitled to a rack in a four man
stateroom, one drawer, half a hanging locker and shared use of a
desk. There I passed an interesting though somewhat
claustrophobic twenty-four months. Now, with my exalted rank I
was entitled to a plush two-man room. I regarded the ancient
carpet remnant with satisfaction and periodically bounced on the
coffin-sized lower bunk, to which my seniority entitled me. I had
an entire hanging locker to myself and no less than four complete
drawers. I banged my head on the medicine cabinet door and played
with the TV set.

It was two in the morning before I got my eyes closed and let the
sounds of the living ship lull me to sleep. The 1MC, or Voice of
God, cut in at 0600 sharp.

“Reveille, Reveille! All hands turn to and trice up!” I hear
boots moving along the passageway outside and the red glow of the
night lighting which filters through the air vent changes to
white. Light leaks around the oval outline of the door. I have a
small hangover and the wool blanket which swaddles me is
enormously comforting. I’m not ready for this. I resolve to skip
breakfast and roll over and get another twenty minutes sleep
before the insistent reminder of a full bladder forces the issue.
I find my khaki pants and venture out in search of the head. The
passageway outside the door turns out to be the mustering place
for the S-5 division. A dozen sailors line the bulkheads, some
cutting up and some sprawled unconscious on the tile. I put on my
grim and purposeful face and push my way through, going
thwartships like I know what I am doing.

I get lucky. There is an Officer’s head only thirty feet down the
passage. It smells like they all do; a combination of urine,
disinfectant, saltwater flush and ancient corruption. It works,
though, and is as clean as you can expect a thirty-six year old
steel men’s room to be.

I am already a big winner. I have found nearly fifty percent of
everything I will really need on this ship: my bed and the head.
Once I find the wardroom and my General Quarters station there
are really no further requirements. In fact, some of the Junior
Officers on my first tour maintained GQ in their beds and had
reduced their needs to only the first three locations.

Returning to my stateroom I had a powerful desire to return to my
rack and stay right there where it was safe. Regrettably, the
first order of business was to find at least three different ways
to get out of the compartment to fresh air and learn them well
enough that I had a fighting chance to find them in smokey
darkness if that was required. Nothing for it but to do it. I
shot the shit with Chop and half listened to Connie Chung on the
CBS Morning News. I did forty pushups before I donned my wash
khakis (cotton burns but does not melt) and put on my brown
leather shoes (ditto). Attired in the at-sea uniform of the day
I completed my ensemble with an Air Wing ballcap, since we were
still in port and you have to be covered on the flight deck and
in the hangar bay. I couldn’t stall any longer. It was time to go
to work.

For someone who so desperately hates starting new jobs I have
found a career that makes a semi-annual practice of it.

There is an awful feeling of disorientation when you first
arrive in the rabbit’s warren that is the Carrier. Nothing makes
sense; ladders go up and down at random. Decades of ship
modifications have created passageways that end sometimes in
blank welds. All turns appear the same and claustrophobia builds
as you wander in the looking glass world.

Having been lost on six of these beasts, I had a working
knowledge on how to crack the code. I can read compartment
numbers and there is a general method to the madness. I knew the
Carrier Intelligence Center (CVIC) was located vaguely amidships
on the 03 level. Clutching my briefcase I wandered aft till I
found a ladder and clambered up. I peered around and discovered I
was well forward, up by frame 20, so I knew I had to work my way
aft to about frame 199. I followed the passageway in that
direction, stepping carefully over a knee-knocker rib every
twenty feet. Walking past a fire-fighting station I saw an arrow
that pointed to the left saying: “Flight Deck”.

Last chance to forestall the inevitable. I followed the arrow and
stepped over some aviation fuel hoses and poked my head out of a
water-tight door into the Florida dawn. I found myself in the
starboard catwalk looking down at the pier. Two Yard Tugs were
visible far below straining mightily to push our Leviathan away
from the land. The Carrier didn’t seem to want to go, but the
impressive persistence of the tugs seemed to be winning the
issue. I could see by the widening gap between the hull and the
mooring camel that there was no longer a link to the shore, save
by air.

It was starting to look real goddamn serious indeed.

I turned around and looked across the black non-skid coated
flight deck. The catapults were energized for the Carrier
Qualifications that would be starting that morning out in the
Warning Area east of Jacksonville. Hellish looking wisps of oily
white steam drifted from the cat tracks. I noticed every handrail
on the ship was coated with a thin film of oil. Fifty feet from
my room my hands already were grimy and sticky. My khaki pants
were already getting the tell-tale black rings around the
pockets.

I watched the land move away another few grudging feet and bowed
to the inevitable. I retraced my steps to the main passageway
and continued my journey aft. I began to see familiar names on
the hatches: Captain’s Country, Flag Country, Combat direction
Center, Strike Operations. Sure enough, the OZ division (known
from this abbreviation as the Land of OZ, where nothing makes
sense) presently appeared on my right. I knew I should have found
the Wardroom first, but it was too late. I turned the knob,
stepped over the kneeknocker and pressed the buzzer on the cipher
lock to the inner security door….

To enter the demented land where there is no time but the eternal
Now. There is no Time in the work spaces of a carrier; or perhaps
put better there is nothing îbutï Time. It comes in little and big
chunks, not synchronous, non-linear. It spurts and sputters with
no regard to the gentle rhythms of the tide and the dusk and the
sweet rays of dawn. The Navy has reorganized the universe into
peculiar elliptic constellations all its own. In the Carrier
galaxy, the great grey ships hurtle in long orbits termed the
Work Up and Deployment cycle. Within this space-time continuum
there are eccentric periods in which the Carrier is non-contiguous with the steady atomic clock of the earthly universe.

In these periods, shipboard time is plastic and subject to
infinite revision. It can be molded into queer bits termed
“cycles” and “events” which have no particular relationship to
biologic cycles of beings optimized to hunt and gather in a
diurnal world. There are no natural rhythms there, only the
roaring of great machines and lunatic chronometers that measure
the passing of the day at Greenwich observatory, in the savage
time zone known as Zulu.

There is no sun below the decks of the carrier, only a crazy
quilt of bright and dimmed lights which have no particular
relationship to whether work is in progress or not. For example,
an earthly twenty-four hour day might be sliced into a period
called a half-day/half-night cycle. This is intended to allow
pilots to land in the day to gain the requisite feel for the deck
and then transition through the dusk into the awesome feat of a
controlled crash into a tiny area of a pitching black deck
positioned in the vertiginous black velvet of a black-ass
moonless night. In order to ready themselves for this mission,
briefings are conducted two hours prior to each launch event.
Two hours before the brief the Air Intelligence Officer (“AI”)
and Meteorologist (“Weather Guesser”) begin to screen the
messages and gather the material to ensure the information is
current and accurate. For a launch event scheduled at noon, preparations begin at 0800.
For a a dawn launch, we rise at 0200.

The carrier world operates on the principle of “Cyclic
Operations.” In view of the number of aircraft aboard and the
difficulty in moving them up and down from the hangar bay to the
flight deck, there are normally airplanes parked in the landing
zone. In order to launch and recover, the Air Boss directs the
Handler to move them to an area of the deck which is not
currently in use. The elegant way to achieve this is to shoot
them off the front end and thus empty the landing zone for others
to return. The day begins with airplanes massed aft in a pack and
after a number of launch events, ends with the bow stacked. It
sounds easy, but it is an intricate ballet which pits the Boss
and the Handler against the Admiral’s daily list of requirements.
CAG is somewhere in the middle, trying to fly the airplanes
safely, qualify the aircrews, and manage flight hours so that the
fiscal books balance at the end of the quarter. Sometimes even
aend the jets roaring across the beach to deliver high explosives
in anger, though not today.

The average fuel on board the aircraft of a traditional Air Wing
such as ours permits a launch and recovery cycle of about an hour
and forty-five minutes of flight time. This varies, naturally,
as the virile F-14 Tomcats launch and immediately look for more
airborne fuel and the E-2 Hawkeye can drone through the skies
unassisted for four or five hours. Within this arbitrary schedule
we scramble around to update, plan and prepare for the next
event. Nothing is ever for certain on the carrier, there being
so many variables; weather, broken machines, changed plans. A
schedule is nothing more than a point from which reality
diverges. But the starting point is the daily Air Plan and the
Air Plan makes the dawn.

When the Plan is published by Strike Ops in the wee hours of the
morning we can get to work. Special briefings are laid on.
Critical liaison is made and a flurry of phone calls between the
Decision-making modules begins. Important Face-to-Face
discussions are held. Emerging New Requirements are confronted
resolutely and the consequences of unforeseen events dealt with by
savage recriminations. Reclamas and mea culpas are made for sins
done or acts undone. The beauty of the this self-contained
universe is that you are always at work and no one is ever more
than a thousand feet away from his desk. Each hour brings the
opportunity for Bold New Initiatives (BNI’s), frantic revised
planning, action items revisited and the oh-shit-what-abouts.
These are known as “helmet fires” in the trade.

The astonishing thing is that all this is carried out with an
indefinable aplomb and air of nonchalance that makes it appear
easy. Flexibility is the key and the correct answer to virtually
any conundrum is “Well, sure, we can do that.”

So one may find oneself stoked out on powerful caffeine at a
theoretical 0200; tired but still wired. The last of the fires of
the day before have been put out but the plastic time has brought
the new day to you beginning at 0300. You might try to catch a
nap, or toss for a stolen hour before returning to the blue
linoleum of Mission Planning. Or you can simply resign yourself
to the inevitable and pour another cup of coffee and shoot the
shit with some other unfortunate about some other cruise or a
loco CO, or say “That reminds me of the time that…..”

Which is how you can tell the difference between a fairy tale and
a sea story. A fairy tale begins with “Once upon a time” and the
sea story begins with “Now this really happened, its a no-shitter…”

As a consequence, our little five-day business trip off the
Florida coast has no objective relationship to a normal sixty-hour working week. The very first day commences with the standard
round of briefings for General Intelligence Information; there is
an All-source brief restricted to the senior officers of which
group I am startled to find myself. That drones on for about a
half hour, locating the various Soviets and Cubans in our
vicinity and hitting the key geopolitical issues of the day.
Once complete, I set out to find the Air Wing Administrative
Office (“CAG Admin”) which is the heartbeat of our little band.

It is a little broom closet-sized compartment located portside on
the 03©level about frame 115. I enter and walk into several
helmet fires of varying intensity. One is raging about the
impending Change of Command and the organization of the formal
military ceremony, the guest list, gifts and farewell dinners.
Scooter, the Operations Officer, is attempting to finalize
arrangements for our desert deployment to Naval Air Station
Fallon, Nevada, in two weeks. This is a good trick because we now
can communicate with the shore only through the arcane method of
the Navy Message. People are screaming for information to
determine the number of people, bombs, parts and planes to move.
This fire has been smoldering for a month or more, but since it
is still at least ten days in the future and a half-continent
away there is a certain air of unreality to it all.

The Deputy Carrier Air Group Commander (“DCAG”) has identified a
major cranial conflagration. In order to get ready for the Change
of Command, which we must do before we go to the desert, we must
complete a total revision of the Air Wing Tactical Notes. These
are about thirty documents of tremendous detail which provide the
basic guidance for all things integral to our mission; staying
alive around the Boat, aerial refueling, precision bombing,
search and rescue and the correct procedure for emanation of J-band electrons. Scooter and I look at each other across the desk
as Moose and Wee Wee, the CAG LSO’s conduct a ninety-decibel
discussion of the landing tendencies of an unfortunate squadron
pilot. Next to them Gunner is trying to talk to the Maintenance
Officer (“CAGMO”) about the parts onload and problems with the
Air Intermediate Maintenance Depot (“AIMD”) on the ship. The
yeoman is feeding the XEROX machine next to me with copies of the
flight schedule and the Flight Surgeon (“Quack”) is asking
everyone to pipe down so he can find the missing Physiologist.
Above, on deck, a helicopter is turning up. The 1MC suddenly
crackles to life with a Man Overboard Drill, people start to run
out of the room and brownshirts on deck drag lengths of tie™down chains across our heads. Forward, the Boss has directed the
Catapult Officer (“Shooter”) to test fire number one and two
cats. The ship booms and shudders as the shuttle strikes the
water brake.

“There is no way we can get the TacNotes published out here” I
comment helpfully over the din.

“Yeah, but we gotta get it done” responds Scooter. Time is
flexible and will expand to suit the requirement. “I’ll get some
of the bubbas together that know what the fuck they are talking
about and we’ll start meeting right away. Get one of your guys to
XEROX nine copies of everything and we’ll get going.”

“Well, sure, we can do that” I respond. It is nice to know how we
will be spending the next hundred hours or so.

The airplanes start landing about twenty minutes later and the
fun meter began to approach the peg at the high end of the
scale. Sound comes in waves and crashes. Tomcats crash into the
landing zone, go to burner and either catch a wire or drag the
hook down the deck and roar away. If they have recovered safely
they taxi forward onto the cats, go into tension and bang off the
front end again to repeat the cycle as quickly as possible. The
Navy insists that all pilots accomplish a set number of daytime
arrested landings (“traps”) before they can attempt it at night.
On the 03 level below the Sound is:

CRASH! Then ROAR! as the jet goes into afterburner, accompanied
by WHINE! as the arresting gear engines play out cable. THUMP! as
the tailhook drops the wire to the deck; more ROAR! as the jet
taxis out of the gear and SLITHER! as the wire is dragged back to
re-set. BANG! as cat two hurtles 54,000 pounds of airplane to
flying speed off the pointy end swiftly followed by THUD! as the
shuttle hits the water brake. Repeat Sounds day and night as
necessary to qualify a hundred pilots.

That night I sneak away from the XEROX and the word processor and
join Moose on the LSO platform. There is no moon tonight and the
lights of the jets are strung like pearls up the glide slope on
the straight-in approach to the ship. The LSO’s are peering into‹f
the gloom and making calls on the radio to the pilots. “Power”
says Moose, then “Power!” and finally “POWER!!!” His finger is
twitching toward the pickle to light the wave-off lights when the
navigation lights on the descending jet rise and suddenly out of
the blackness, not flying but falling impossibly fast, comes a
grey thundering shape that impacts the deck with a visceral
thump, tailhook showering the landing zone with a rooster tail of
sparks and a blast of jet exhaust that threatens to rip off my
float coat. Moose is already focused again on the next airplane,
fifty seconds out.

When the last plane is recovered we find the dirty shirt Wardroom
and eat hot dogs. There are hours more to work; first overhead
time tomorrow isn’t until 1000. We talk about the schedule for
the rest of the summer. Back home on Friday; Fallon, Nevada, the week after
next, back to the ship for REFTRA, then Advanced Phase and
FLEETEX in August. A month stand-down and then the six month
deployment to the Med in September. We are going to be munching a
lot of hot dogs for the next year. I reach across the table for
the mustard. In a perverse sort of way, it is great to be home
again.

Copyright 1989 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com