Neptunus Lex

Tom shouldered the door open and walked into the Cubi Point terminal with his seabag slung up on his shoulder. Outside the main windows, a C-130 sat with one engine turning. A quick survey of the Marines gathered told Tom a lot about how the last night had gone for most of them.

Bill looked up from the floor where he sat leaned against the wall, “So, how was your last night?”

“Good, sad, I don’t know. It’s over now, anyway. Bye-bye you and away we go.”

Bill belched, then yawned, “Yup, it’s over. I think I’m relieved, I couldn’t take too much more of this. I’d have to slow down.”

Tom laughed and dropped his seabag. He sat down on it and looked out at the flightline. They weren’t scheduled to take off for an hour. He pushed the seabag into the wall and leaned back. He was asleep in minutes.

When he awoke, the rest of the rear party was there. All present and accounted for, Tom thought, that’s almost surprising.

Gunny came in from the bird and got the attention of the group, “Alright, listen up. The bird’s got electrical problems. The generator on the inboard engine on the starboard side keeps dropping out. They think they can fix it, but we are going to be here a while. Nobody leaves without checking with me. If you want to go to chow, you got time, just let me know.”

The next time Tom awoke, Bill was kicking his boots, “C’mon sleepyhead, they think it’s up. We’re boarding.”

Tom blinked and looked around. The sound of the rain hitting the building made him glance outside. It was pouring. The morning monsoon had arrived. They gathered at the door with their seabags, then dashed out one by one to the ramp of the aircraft. Water stood half a foot deep on the flightline. Big drops of cold rain soaked them instantly.

Looking out the ramp, the visibility was only a few yards. The closest hanger was an indistinct blur. The loadmaster closed the ramp, then moved down the row checking seat belts. The red webbing of the jump seats and the immediate discomfort of the aluminum rails felt like an old friend. Being cold and wet was just an added bonus.

The engines started one by one, and after a few minutes, they taxied out. The plane moved and bounced, but without windows to reference their location, it was impossible to determine anything. The sound of the engines and propellers going to full power for takeoff was followed by lurch of the brakes releasing.

Leaning into the acceleration, they were all thrown off balance when the takeoff aborted. The engines spooled down, and they obviously taxiing again. When the ramp came down, the same view of the rain and flightline reappeared. Bill leaned in and yelled, “That’s different, I’ve never had an aborted takeoff.” Tom shook his head, “Me, either. Bet it’s still that generator.”

The engines shut down and they went back into the terminal, getting soaked again.

With orders to wait around, they gathered at the windows, more interested now in the maintenance effort going on outside. A rolling ladder had been pushed up to the inboard engine and the cowling had been removed. Two people in flight suits stood on the platform, one working, and one holding an umbrella. The peanut gallery was enjoying the show. “Oh, good, they’ve got Mary Poppins on the job.” “Get a bigger hammer and whack it again.” “Hey, three of four, whadda you want?”

Tom turned to Gunny Ceisak, “You can see the report now, the pilot launched in deteriorating conditions, in a marginal aircraft, late in the day, for a flight over water that would extend past dusk, once airborne and past the point of no return, the last link in the accident chain was forged….”

Gunny smiled, “Don’t start, Harrelson. I was thinking the same thing. I don’t want to fly on that bird, not today, not in this weather.”

The Navy’s last rigid-hull airship crashed off Point Sur in February, 1935 when a sudden gust of wind tore off her vertical fin. Gas escaped from the tear hole aft, and as she started to settle by the stern, ballast was jettisoned to compensate. Too much ballast, as it turns out - tail down but with engines at cruise power, the airship rose again, now passing through the pressure height - the height at which expanding helium gas must be vented, or the hull itself will catastrophically fail. Out of control and continuing to vent gas, she settled eventually back into the waiting sea. Only two crewmen were lost, from a contingent of 76 - one who jumped from the airship precipitously (height above water being notoriously hard to judge) and another who swam back to the sinking hulk in an attempt to salvage personal gear.

The USS Macon then:

And now, courtesy of Guy:

The debris field is being explored by the National Marine Sanctuary program and Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. The cross bars you see in this sonar map are actually the wing spars of two F-9C Sparrowhawks that went down with Macon. On the linked page above is a close up of their remains, and here is a photograph of one of them “landing” aboard the mothership using its sky hook.

To those of you who have been taking the time to read my words, I apologize. I have made several starts at the last evening I had with Emie. I have found that thus far it has resisted my ability to write it for Lex’s site. It was an interesting evening, and it ended on the bridge, with her riding down in a jeepney to walk with me to the gate.

The picture describes my memories well. Sepia toned and blurred by time. I remember being young, in love, and torn by the situation I found myself in. She brought me a present, wrapped to ship home, and we said goodby on the bridge. She was crying, not sobbing, but crying. We stood at the middle of the bridge and said words to one another. She handed me the box, and about that time, the sky opened up. She kissed me one last time, both of us drenched in the cold rain of the monsoon. Then she turned and left. I watched her go, looked out at the lights of MagSaySay, and then turned to go into the base.

I can pick the story up there. The events of the next couple of days are interesting and appropriate to this site.

Tom walked up to the gate and showed his ID card. The PFC at the gate looked at him, and gestured at the box he held.

“What’s in the box, Sergeant?”

” I don’t know.”

The PFC cocked his head, “What do mean you don’t know? Take that box inside and see the Staff Sergeant.”

Tom turned and went into the duty hut. He had been thinking about Emie, but this turn of events was a little alarming. All the trips he had taken in and out the gate and he had never been stopped before.

“Evening, Staff Sergeant. The PFC sent me in.”

“Yea, why?”

Tom played it straight and open, “My girl gave me a gift, I hadn’t opened it. Since I didn’t know what it was, he sent me in to you.”

The S/Sgt sighed and stood up, “How about you open it now, Christmas is a long way off.”

Tom nodded and pulled at the twine, then opened the box. Nestled in newspaper was a mahogany lion. About six inches tall, it was beautifully carved, showing a craftsmanship that had been lacking in the souvenirs he had looked at in the market. He lifted it out and set it on the counter. Laying the crumpled newspaper next to it, he found a sealed envelope in the bottom of the box. He set the box and envelope down as well, then stepped back.

The Staff Sergeant looked at the box, the lion, lifted up the newspaper and shook it. He felt the envelope and tossed it in the box. He nodded at the carving.

“That’s nice, real nice. Maybe the best I’ve seen. But you better be glad that’s all that’s in here. Could have been a real bad day for you, Marine. Go on, you can go.”

Tom realized he had been holding his breath and relaxed. He tucked the lion and the envelope back into the newspaper, closed the box, and left the guard shack. The rain continued to fall, soaking him again as he walked out to the taxi stand for a ride up to Cubi.

So the Navy launched its first Littoral Combat Ship yesterday.

Marinette - Christened with bubbly spewing from a cracked bottle of champagne, a cutting-edge, $260 million Navy warship had its first taste of water Saturday after a dramatic launch into the Menominee River.

The 377-foot ship, named Freedom, was built by Marinette Marine Corp. at a pace Navy bosses said was unmatched since the Second World War.

“Just a little more than three years ago, she was just an idea. Now Freedom stands before us,” said Adm. Mike Mullen, who leads the Navy and turned out for a ceremony that drew national and state officials plus members of at least three foreign navies.

The ship, slated to be delivered to the Navy next summer, is the first of the 55 the service wants to add to the fleet.

As a son of the south, the northern part of my North American geography has always been rather weak. Perhaps that’s why, having learned that the ship had been launched in a river feeding into Lake Michigan, I feared that someone had made a horrible mistake - how would she ever get to sea? But a quick consultation of a map proved that all would be well in time, so long as Montreal and Quebec remain in more or less friendly hands.

So that’s a relief.

Out with the old:

VIRGINIA BEACH — Today the Navy holsters the F-14 Tomcat, the top gun in its Cold War arsenal and one of the most recognizable warplanes in history.

Maintenance costs for the F-14 have soared, and its replacement, the F/A-18 Super Hornet, is more versatile and cheaper to maintain.

In with the new:

Boeing’s [BA] EA-18G Growler Monday flew for the first time with its external fuel tanks and Northrop Grumman’s [NOC] ALQ-99 electronic attack pods, prior to being ferried to Patuxent River Navy Air Station, Md., for chamber and flight tests, according to a Boeing official.The Growler, dubbed EA-1 flew for two hours over St. Louis, Mo., to check out the aircraft’s instrumentation, Mike Gibbons, EA-18G program manager for Boeing, told Defense Daily.

This (apart from the music - I never did like that music) is what I miss about sea duty.

In port we were, between one nameless at sea period and the next, with five beautiful days to spend in sunny Sandy Eggo - a real treat for the high desert warriors of Naval Air Station Lemoore, California.

Lemoore was a wonderful place to learn the trade of flying strike fighters for there were bombing targets and fighting ranges and wide open countryside that a man and his wingman might rage around at, very down low, with never a living soul to complain, or if there was he didn’t have the telephone number of the complaint hot line. As wonderful as it was for learning the Art and Skill of breaking other peoples’ gear and flaming their jets, the better to let the sojers do their thing, it was very far from heaven from the perspective of Other Stuff to Do, once the flying thing was over.

Sandy Eggo though held many and sundry treasures for the earnest seeker, and of the sorts of things there were to do and see, Shakespeare in the Park, the museums at Balboa and the Christian Science Reading Room were by no means the ne plus ultra, although I’m certain they had their admirers. It was perhaps a measure of the times that not least among the local delights was the officers’ club at the Naval Air Station Miramar, California, Fightertown as it was then y-clept, or Hummertown as the Hornet guys might call it, fair being fair and the E-2 bubbas having at least an equal claim.

Wednesday night on this particular in port it was impressed into our noggins that we couldn’t go very far astray by at least starting out at the club before strapping on the night vision goggles and heading into town. It was “happy hour,” and although the days of Tom Cruise singing “You never close your eyes, anymore, when I kiss your lips” to that blonde woman who really should have taken better care of herself afterwards were over (if they ever had truly existed) it was nevertheless true that an otherwise average man with an umistakeably smelly flight suit could, once the feast was at its best, nevertheless be certain of the kind of spirited adventure that might one day be remembered in song.

Being married at the time, your humble narrator’s interest was purely of the academic nature, and so it was that he found himself on the back porch of the club, where there was an enormous fire pit, gas fueled and maybe four feet wide and twenty feet long. The brick walls enclosing the seat of the heat was maybe up to mid-thigh on your basic fighter jock, and the flames lapped happily at the recessed grill atop, the two of them serving to chase off the chill night air.

Your correspondent was in a serious discussion with an enormous and poetically gifted F-14 RIO who went by the the moniker of “Mean Jim,” on account of the fact that, even amongst a crowd of people who enjoyed surgical blood-letting as a kind of competitive sport, he was rather a hard sun of a beach. Only funny, which made it OK.

Our conversation was of the very highest quality, given the environment and the lateness of the hour, meaning it had by then devolved into a spirited discussion of who sucked worse, Tomcat guys or Hornet jocks. Testable propositions were blurrily exchanged and shoutingly refuted, and there was many a wagging finger in the air. Push had not yet come to shove, nor yet drool to chin, but it was a close-run thing.

Mugger arrived, bringing nothing new to a discussion that had already barrelled over the precipice of absurd antipathy but a surfeit of self-confidence and a tongue he could not sufficiently master to form comprehensible syllables, the building blocks of rational speech and along with opposable thumbs, the pride of our race. Mugger, it must be pointed out, was widely believed to have A Problem, when it came to demon rum.

Understanding the rest of his contemporaries lends context to that observation.

Having blearily observed Mugger through narrowed eyes for a moment or two, Mean Jim and your correspondent agreed by tacit and mutual consent that he was contributing nothing to the conversation we had not already disposed of, several beers ago. We turned our attentions back to each other, the better for to goad and gall, best practices and all that.

A few moment passed before we realized that Mugger had ceased his slurry contributions to the verbal brawl, an absence that was as palpable in his case as a presence might be in other, lesser men. We cast our eyes back to his last known posit, and seeing nothing there - but unsure how, in those crowded spaces, he might have slipped past us, we looked down at last to find Mugger in the fire.

You have heard of cognitive dissonance, gentle reader? The inability to reconcile what you are sensing within the boundaries of what you previously thought was possible? It is passing strange, to see a man in the fire. You do not expect it. It can be hard to take in, all at once.

A man can hesitate.

Tic turned to toc and back to tic again, while your correspondent and Mean Jim took in the scope and grandeur of Mugger there in the fire, rolling around. It came to us in time: Perhaps Mugger had not meant to throw himself in the fire, we considered. Perhaps he had only stumbled and tripped, and was now trying fruitlessly to lever himself out, shins thrashing against the upper parapets, but no matter how uncomfortable, still as yet unwilling to place his tender hands - the which were required to fly fighters - against the burning grill, the better for to push up and out.

The moment stretched and then snapped. Our argument forgotten (for the moment) we reached manfully in and hauled him out.

Oh, for the virtues of nomex flight suits. Burned were his forearms, and crisped his eybrows, but the rest of him was merely reddened, like. Our newest flight surgeon, a young man fresh out of medical school who, far from projecting that satisfying aura those of us of a certain age associate with Marcus Welby, MD, appeared instead to be around 15 years of age. Sadly, his demeanor in port made him seem younger. He rushed weavingly out to the back porch to beerily declare that everything was all right! He could fix Mugger! Make him better than before! It had all to do with training, see? And experience!

It was only then that Mugger panicked.

Fortunately, some sober medical professionals showed up soon thereafter and escorted Mugger to the hospital, where his arms were treated and bandaged. Being the kind of man he was, he showed back up at the club an hour or so later, bandages oozing, but not yet entirely sober, the better for to share in the telling of the tale, already being rapidly augmented by those of us who had missed the event itself, but would not miss the telling of it. The rest of it fades, the curtain comes down.

A year or so later I asked one of his squadron mates what had ever become of Mugger.

“Oh, he went to admiral’s mast,” he replied casually. Like it was going to the grocer’s.

“Admiral’s mast?” I cried. “Whatever for?”

“Well, he got pulled over DWI on base one night. The enlisted security guys looked at his ID, and, realizing that he was an officer whose career would be ruined by an arrest, gave him a break and told him to call the squadron duty officer to come and pick him up. He could get his car tomorrow.”

“Lucky man,” said I. “And what was his response?”

“He started laughing,” my interlocutor said. “Which was, as you can imagine, rather off-putting to the security team. ‘Sir, this is serious,’ they said. ‘Why don’t you just call your SDO?’ ”

“Because,” Mugger replied, “I am the SDO.”

Which , speaking of cognitive dissonance, clearly exceeded the security team’s collective ability to grok. Not only was our hero drunk, but he was drunk on watch. It was off to the pokey for Lieutenant Mugger, SDO or no.

The admiral made short work of our hero, and sent him on his merry. He flies for a major airline today, I believe. One of those handful who, if I hear his name on the announcing system before pushback, might lead me to reconsider my travel plans.

Mugger was his name, or his callsign anyway - or very nearly, names having been minimally altered to prevent being placed on somebody’s “People to Kill” list, just in case. He was a drag-knuckle F-14 fighter pilot of the ould mould, flight suit zipped down to his navel, chest thrust pugnaciously out, boots unshined and often even untied, their tongues poking out like labrador puppies from under his pants legs and himself generally displaying but a faint relationship to what was commonly conceived to be a proper and military kind of personal appearance. (I think he was an AOCS graduate.) Never to fret though, for Mugger was thoroughly convinced of his own excellence, implacably certain of himself from tip to top and from long established custom needing little more than a mirror and a little privacy to break down his gruff exterior and have him making soft, cooing noises of appreciation.

Unpredictable he was too, whether that’d be behind the boat, accustomed as he was to throwing slippery madness at the LSO platform in the fond (and often vain) hope that we’d take him aboard regardless, with none of your “eat a joes” lights a-flashing in his beady little eyes for to send him round for another go.

Not entirely ungifted as a fighter pilot though: Distinctly do I recollect that one fine day south of Sunni Pakistan, a place where the ship I had the honor to serve aboard was about to spend four days sampling the very modest, not to say uncertain, pleasures of Karachi liberty two days on:

Consulting their whimsy more perhaps than their geography, Mugger and his wingman shot off, cleaned up, and pooted up to the hazy north, in the general direction of our incipient port visit, of which the less we say perhaps the better. The mission they were fragged for had them run at each other in slow-motion like, a-hanging on the blades at max conserve airspeed over the course of a 1+30 cycle. Mostly they were saving gas for the end, the better for to hack and claw at one another in full grunt for that lovely, crowded moment before it was time once again to tip it the timely and head back to Mother, that sour-faced harridan, always looking at her watch and tapping her feet impatiently should ever you lose track of the moment, occupied in your own devices or the pleasures of the instant and coming home a moment late, God forbid and she’d have your head for it.

East and west they’d split once fairly north of the old battle ax herself, and a couple of leisurely, langorous runs they’d had of it too, their RIOs busily doing that RIO-shit in the back, while the pilots themselves tried to stay awake by humming paeans to their own perfection, as was the F-14 pilots’ favorite sport in moments of distraction and ennui.

Not content with merely being gifted, Mugger was also widely recognized - celebrated even, among his peers - as a cheating bastard, upon whom it was always wise to keep an eye. Out. For. So it didn’t much surprise the wingie on his hot turn for the next run when his RO picked up a contact twenty degrees right of the nose, which nothing wrong with that but at ten miles rather than the prescribed forty or so. “Aha,” said LT Perspicacious to himself, “That cork-sticking gasper is trying to sneak up behind me and trail me to the merge, so he is, but watch what I do next.”

Turning into the uncoming Mugger, the wingman sought to take out all of the lateral separation, a task made difficult by the speed with which his contact dodged again to the north. “Wasting all of his have-fun gas,” the wingie’s RIO said on the intercom, not without a bit of relief, for Mugger was, as I said, a credible stick and it was hard work, being the gun-ee and having to crane around to look between the tails while the pilot up front picked boogers out of his mask for all the good that it was doing them.

But as the contact broke their radar limits to the right and resolved into a visual contact sweeping towards their six o’clock, it turned out that the truth was something rather other than a squadron mate named Mugger. There they suddenly perceived, to their deep and sudden consternation, not one but two armed Pakistani Mirage III’s (or V’s maybe, no one could ever tell me the difference) coming around hard to six. Fortunately for our heroes, on account of the F-14’s unbelievably slow speed at max conserve, the Mirages - who after all were only launched on alert and patrolling their national airspace after the uncommunicative Tomcats had blundered into it - went scrabbling past the control zone like dogs turning the corner on a waxed linoleum floor.

Now normally, even a pair of Mirage III’s (or V’s) were not a very great deal to worry about for the well-trained Tomcat crew, but our lads had been caught with their pants fairly down around their ankles, so in those precious moments while the Mirages worked their way back up and aft, our heroes put the spurs to their mount and bravely shrieked (in what was later described with great gusto as a “girlish” voice, not that there’s anything wrong with that), “Knock it off, we’re defensive with two MiGs!”

Which, as you now know, was only partly true.

It was enough to bring Mugger back around in a hurry though, for he was nothing if not a good wingman and anyways there were only a very few chances to smoke MiG’s in those days, so you took them where you got them. He joined the newly formed and clearly rattled three-ship a few moments later, easily doing Mach 1+, and turning hard across the gaggles’ collective tail into the vertical. This was not long after a couple of Libyan MiG’s had been shot down in the Gulf of Sidra by F-14 crews, and for the rattled Pakistanis this was clearly gotten more than they had bargained for on a routine air defense zone alert launch. They blew their drop tanks off and headed home as fast as ever their delta-winged platforms would take them, which was plenty fast indeed.

Mugger followed for a bit before his beetled brow furrowed even more, wondering at how such a short-range fighter could find itself so far to sea. Too, there was the nagging voice on the guard radio, some controller on the ship beseeching, imploring them to turn the hell around for God’s sake, and didn’t they know where they were?

They did not, but it was figured out for them once properly back aboard the ship, in a debrief that had any number of powerful and important people, all of whom wanted to have personal insight into how such a thing could happen? At all?
The US Embassy sent along a rather curt note, asking of us to stay the frack out of Pakistani airspace, if that wasn’t too much to ask, and did we have any idea how hard their job was?

We didn’t, and frankly, being young and stupid but knowing that we’d never die, neither did we care, particularly.

Two days later we were treated to the sights, sounds and yes, gentle reader, smells of Karachi, but that’s another tale.

I’ve more on Mugger though. Tomorrow perhaps. Maybe the next day.

Diego’s dad. Dropped a note of thanks in the comments box that I thought you might like to read:

BROTHERS AND SISTERS
I want to thank you for your wonderful comments. I would like to say that reading this blog makes me proud of the large family I have in you, Our Nations Armed Forces(active or retired). As the father of such an incredible child. i must say that you the military were the sole inspiration in my son’s heart any time he saw a jet,tank,ship or grunt pounding the pavement,he smile that angelic smile of his. I thank you all for bringing happiness to his heart even in his days of pain. God speed….

Thank you, Chief. Thanks for reminding us all what’s really important. You’re still in our prayers, you and Diego and Cookie and all the rest.

We’re so very sorry for your troubles.

Tom wandered slowly up MagSaySay. The carrier and her escorts had been gone for two days. The squadron was gone. The rain and cold had driven everyone off the street. It felt like walking up the midway after the carnival had closed. He moved slowly, taking some of the pictures he had been meaning to catch for weeks.

The Piso exchange, a t-shirt display, the barbeque vendor, one last chance to try to catch and capture the moments on film. A girl stepped out of a doorway, slipped up along side and walked at his pace, hopping the puddles and ducking under the awnings as she followed him up the street.

“Marine, you got a girlfriend?”

“I’m married.”

“You got a P.I. girl?”

“Why?”

“Come with me, Marine, I show you good time.”

“I can’t, my girl would know.”

“She not know, we go short time.”

Tom stopped and looked the girl. Young, with her hair cut short, she looked pretty, but somehow desperate. Her clothes were American, blue jean shorts, and a revealing top. The high heels looked out of place.

“Do you have your paper?”

She shrugged, “What paper?”

Tom started walking again, “The paper that says you passed your med check this week. The one you have to have to work.”

“I don’t know about this paper.”

Tom dug into his front pocket and came up with a handful of small Piso notes and change, “Look, I know you can’t work this week. I’ve got enough here for you to eat on for days. Do you want it?”

She stamped her foot, “Damn Marine, damn station-dito Marine!”

With that, she turned and pranced back up the sidewalk toward the main gate. Tom smiled, feeling complemented to be mistaken for base personnel. He put the money back in his pocket and walked on.

The man selling balut spoke no English. Tom struggled to explain what he wanted, finally resorting to pantomime. The seller was an older man, and when he finally understood, he grinned, displaying a mouthful of broken and missing teeth. He laughed and nodded, taking Tom’s Pisos and cracking the shell of one of the baluts in his basket.

Tom focused, held his breath and took a picture of the embryo. The seller slurped out the liquid, then bit the balut, crunching the partially formed beak and feet as he chewed. The sulfurous smell of rotten eggs filled the air. Backing up, Tom bowed slightly and waved, then continued up the street.