Neptunus Lex

At the risk of offending the world I will share my conviction that there are essentially three kinds of pilots in TACAIR - tacticians, show-offs and engineers. Well, there are also plumbers and farmers, but my tale does not concern them.

Most of the engineers look at flying as an exceptionally complex mathematical problem. They know that if they could only control for all the decision variables and fully understand the constraints, that the linear application of force “x” will always result in desired output “y.” They get a distant, dreamy expression in their eyes when they talk about things like “mean aerodynamic chord line,” and the “Reynolds number.” Discussions on the implications of Bernoulli’s Law can send them into raptures, but they never quite understand why - despite their superior understanding of the machine and the fluid in which it operates - they so very often end up defensive in a 1v1, looking over their shoulder as their adversary closes to guns. Engineers pray at the altar of Test Pilot School.

Many showoffs live for the glamor of flying, their joy comes in the joy they give, the excitement that reflects back upon them by their acts of aerial derring-do. A showoff always needs an audience and if he does not have one, he will either create one in his own imagination - “if they could only see me now” - or he will practice for the time when he does have one: “Wait ’til they see this!” They are very often excellent aviators because they are always on stage, always performing, even if only in their own minds. Showoffs pray at the altar of “dynamic air demos” at air shows, and the very best, most motivated and most affable will end up as high priests at the temple of the Navy Flight Demonstration Squadron - the Blue Angels.

Finally we come to tacticians. A true tactician lives only to fight, he devotes himself to the art and science delivering precisely aimed ordnance - whether it be air-to-air or air-to-mud - exactly upon the point of maximum effect. Tacticians tend to be somewhat boring, fixed and even grim devotees of arcane knowledge - they bury their heads in the employment manuals, spend hundreds of hours analyzing the threats, learn how to maneuver their airplanes and those of others to optimize their lethality. They’re smart and they’re hard and they can be tricky bastards: They’ll scratch and claw for the slightest advantage, attempt to get into your head from thirty miles away just to mess with you and they’re not above cheating because they know deep in their hearts that in combat there are no points for second place, and that you will fight like you have trained. Tacticians worship at the altar of their typewing weapons schools, and their high priests are the shaolin monks who stride the prestigious halls of the original: The Navy Fighter Weapons School - TOPGUN.

There are no engineers in the showoff cohort, and damned few showoffs are actual tacticians, although some will for a time pretend to be. And while there is some cross-over between the engineer and tactical pools, I only ever knew of one man who was first a tactician - and TOPGUN instructor - before achieving the eminence of showmanship: He became a Blue Angel. His callsign was “Cato,” and I guess you could say that his flying career was blessed. He was a Marine FA-18 pilot at the school back in the early 90’s, built like an Adonis with piercing eyes and a Buzz Lightyear jawline. Women tripped over themselves to get next to him and men wanted to be his friend. He was a damned good pilot and instructor too. It almost wasn’t fair.

There was a deep undercurrent of tradition at TOPGUN, a reverence for those who had gone before, taking at least 5 enemy aircraft with them to earn the coveted title of “ace.” There was an equal opportunity pantheon of dashboard saints to which the Jedi masters and their paduan learners made obeisance: Israeli Air Force fighter pilots had equal billing with World War I German aces, and the words of each of them, and all the others, had an almost mystic power over the school’s devotees. For many years after the Phantom had gone into the night, but before the Hornet had ascended to the throne, the place was run by Tomcat pilots and RIOs, guys who could take lethal shots into bad guys at such long ranges that the bandits themselves wouldn’t even be in radar range to know that they were in trouble. But deadly as the F-14 might have been at a distance, the jet was a beast in a close-in fight, especially the vanilla F-14A model. It was awkward, underpowered, and had terrible slow speed handling qualities, a series of deficiencies only remedied when they re-engined the jet for the A+, B, and D versions. And all of them had huge visual signatures, a distinct disadvantage in a turning fight.

But fighter pilots who want to win - and there aren’t any other kind - don’t blame their gear for holding them back, they find a way to succeed despite it. And so it was that one of the more famous quotes to grace the halls of the school to somber approbation was this one by the Red Baron himself, Baron Manfred Von Richtofen:

“The quality of the box matters little. Success depends upon the man who sits in it.”

You saw it on photographs in the hallway, on lecture screens and heard it in conversation during debriefs. It was as close as you could come to dogma. The attitude behind those words explained a great deal about why good F-14 crews could be as successful as they were in training and when the opportunity arose to execute in combat. They believed in themselves because they had to - you want that spirit in your fighter pilots.

Back in the mid-90’s, when TOPGUN instructors flew as bogeys they had two choices, the powerful and shark-like F-16N or the trusty A-4F Super Fox, or “Scooter.”

Now, the Viper pretty much had it all: Thrust-to-weight, digital flight controls, reliable engine, clamshell canopy and a reliable, if relatively underpowered radar. It was a handful when flown by a competent pilot, and the TOPGUN instructors were thoroughly competent. The Super Fox on the other hand, was sneaky mean. It had a huge engine for a small airplane - it had been re-purposed from the much heavier EA-6B line - and was an exceptionally agile slow speed jet in good hands, although you had to respect the jet. It would gladly break a plumber’s neck, throw him to the curb and snarlingly spit on his corpse. But most of all, it was a pilot’s airplane: You got out of it what you put into it and there were no flight control computers to make Mongo look good.

One day Cato was out flying red air against some students in the class, and, having completed the first hack, the bandits were marshalling for the second push. He didn’t show up at the rendezvous, and neither the flight lead nor the bandit range control officer could contact him on the radio - they assumed that the A-4’s somewhat brittle radios had crapped out forcing Cato to work his way clear of the fight and back to Yuma for a comm-out approach and landing. It wasn’t until they’d finished the second hack and were heading back to get set up for the third that one of the bandit sections saw the oily smoke and ground fire characteristic of an jet airplane crash.

The lead bent his jet around and slowed it down, looking around the wreckage, looking for some sign of life. On his second pass of the crash site, he saw Cato standing like an oak tree a couple hundred yards away from the fire with his legs spread and his helmet tucked under his arm, not a hair out of place. A sheriff’s truck was barreling down a dirt road to pick him up. He was OK.

It turned out that as he was clearing the first merge, he’d turned hard to engage a Tomcat that hadn’t even seen him. His jet had recently come out of maintenance for an engine replacement, and somehow the mechanics had contrived to re-assemble the jet improperly. It broke in two under his g-application, right at the fuselage joint. One moment he was crossing a Tomcat’s tail with an advantage, the next moment he’d left his wings and engine behind and was tumbling through the air, encased only in a suddenly uncomfortable cockpit. Ejection made good sense, and fortunately he wasn’t much barked up by the experience. The sheriff even took a picture of him standing in front of the still-burning wreckage, a smile tickling the corners of his mouth.

That photo also graces the halls of the prestigious Navy Fighter Weapons School to this day, unless I am much mistaken. On the matte is this quote:

“The quality of the box matters little. But it does matter.”

True.

Tedium my friends, is the end of human decency, and there was a fair bit of tedium to be found on the line during the Cold War. We’d sail around the world, ever ready for any contingency but quite unwilling to offend anyone, tip-toeing around off shore, always careful not to kick the can over on that whole global, thermonuclear war thing. Because of the nuclear winter that was in it.

What joy there was for a strike fighter pilot in the late 80’s consisted of deeds of epic personal heroism in port during all-too-rare quality of life visits - the kind of things you didn’t write home about - and the very unlikely chance that your battle group might be called up for one of those very occasional, but classically Navy, drive-by shootings.

Bones was a lieutenant junior grade on my second such deployment, and the only nugget to join the squadron in the year-long turnaround between two cruises. Most new guys in the fleet have the common sense to lay low for a bit and let their flying do the talking, but Bones - so called because apart from skin, a prominent Adam’s apple and a yet more prominent pair of protruding eyes, there wasn’t much else to him - decided that the only thing to do upon joining our august ranks was to attempt to announce his presence with authoritay, chiefly on the basis of a whole lot of Cessna time he had gotten in high school.

Cessna time or no, being a brand new guy in the only flying business that actually counted, this didn’t go over so very well with the in-house mafia known in carrier squadrons as the Junior Officer Protective Association, or JOPA. Which continual moral pounding by his peers ought to have been bad enough, but he also contrived, being assigned the duties of squadron schedules officer, to place himself one day on a solo IR - Instrument Route - over the lush valleys of northern coastal California.

There were two kinds of navigation routes we flew, the IR and the VR, or visual route. Of the two the IR was much the more sedate, as it occurred in relatively medium altitude blocks at relatively low speeds - say 5000-8000 feet and 350 knots. The IR was designed such that it could be flown even in inclement weather, without fear of hitting something immovable, like the granite face of a canyon wall, just for example. The altitude blocks were “hard,” which is to say that if you exited from either the top or the bottom of the airspace, well, then you were no longer on an approved route. I guess the point of them was to navigate by visual and radar checkpoints, but having little application in a tactical environment they weren’t much more than medium altitude sight-seeing trips.

The VR route was what we called a true “low level,” and the minimum altitudes were usually restricted - over uninhabited terrain - to 200 feet above ground level (AGL), while airspeed was only limited to subsonic. These were a whole lot more fun of course, chiefly because of the very real possibility that you could die, and that right quick - zorching down low at high speed and high g, navigating by the nap of the earth, flipping her around mountain tops, etc. But they were also only flown when the weather was pretty damn near perfect, because otherwise you stood a better than even chance of tying the low altitude record, and who needed that kind of stress?

So anyway, off Bones went on his solo IR route, and half way through it he decided that it wasn’t nearly as much fun as a VR route, which in any case he would never have been allowed to fly solo as a new guy because those of us left behind wouldn’t know where to start our search for the wreckage. The weather being fine, he took it upon himself to cancel his instrument clearance and fly the rest of the route at 500 feet AGL and 400 knots, that being thought - by Bones - to be a good compromise. Now, being clever readers, you are probably thinking that such a notion sounds too good to be true.

As indeed it was.

Were the wine country denizens, accustomed as they were to a life of serene privilege, astonished to find an FA-18 ripping over their heads at 500 feet and 400 knots, where never one had been seen before? They were.

Was the control tower at Santa Rosa airport, in Sonoma county, accustomed to the positive control of aircraft within its airspace, surprised to see an FA-18 with whom they had not spoken squawking a VFR code and flying across their runways at an angle - those runways then being occupied with conforming traffic - at 500 feet and 400 knots? Oh yes, very.

Were each set of observers so absorbed by this phenomenon so as to make probing inquiries of the only Navy FA-18 base in the local area? Yes, and in fact those queries soon found their way into our very own ready room, where it was determined that we indeed had an FA-18 in the general vicinity of Santa Rosa, but that there must be some sort of mistake - the floor on the IR-201 over Santa Rosa was 5000 feet. Perhaps that was what they had seen?

No - it could not have been, and by the time Bones returned from his flight, stowed his gear and walked jauntily up to the ready room to report on his adventure, we already had a pretty good idea what had happened. And in this case, the term “we” had been so enlarged as to include the squadron CO - we had to tell him, he would have found out in any case - and who was very excited to speak with Bones on the topic of his flight. Practically dancing.

It was a brief but fascinating conversation, so long as your definition of “conversation” is expansive enough to include an apoplectic 40-year old commander shouting spittle-flecked imprecations at an astonished and speechless 24-year old lieutenant junior grade in front of an odd assortment of other lieutenants and lieutenant commanders, all of them listening in with carefully averted eyes and evident schadenfreude, fully aware that the fourth law of thermodynamics had been invoked for the foreseeable future and that, so long as we left the CO’s actual daughters alone, we were pretty much off the hook for everything.

The only reason that Bones didn’t join the Excellent and Venerable League of Former Navy Fliers at this point was because he was in fact so very new that malice could not be positively determined.

You: But what has this to do with tedium and being on the line during the Cold War?

Me: Which I was just getting to that.

How very like a god is man perhaps, because even FA-18 pilots could get bored of floating in the middle of the great nothingness for months on end, doing nothing in particular except for bombing maritime smoke flares with 25-pound practice bombs and 1v1 air intercepts at max conserve airspeed. Bones had toughened up a bit and learned a lot on cruise, but he was still the new kid and lacked a certain degree of deference to his betters. We often sought out innovative ways to get our message through to him, like the time the ship was locked down in a Security Alert.

In the old days we used to sail with a company of Marines on board the carrier, big, brawny men with rifles in their arms, sneers on their lips and an ever-present case of dyspepsia as they cursed their fate of being surrounded by squids. It didn’t matter if you were a lieutenant junior grade or the air wing commander himself, for if you were found out and about the ship’s passageways during a Security Alert, it would be: Get your face on the deck, spread your arms and legs and a rifle placed at your back and there was nothing much to be done for it until Someone in Authority could be found to vouch for you. The only authority figures those guys recognized were the ship’s captain, whose life they guarded, and the Marine captain who commanded their company, neither of whom could be reliably counted upon to materialize in your moment of necessity and save your bacon - the Marines didn’t play.

Their berthing was cheek-by-jowl to our ready room, and when the Security Alert was sounded on the 1MC, you only had a moment or two before there was shouting in the passageway, the sound of combat boots hitting the deck and burly men with rifles everywhere. It was the responsibility of the Duty Officer to hurl himself at our ready room door and lock the thing as soon as possible once the alert sounded, for if he did not the likelihood of having a group of armed Marines burst in and put us all face-down upon the deck was non-trivial.

Bones was the SDO one day while the rest of us sat around reading our Victoria’s Secret catalogues when the Security Alert sounded. He had been distracted by something on the ship’s TV and did not instantly leap to his duty, for which failure he was loudly and roundly remonstrated by the rest of the assembled JOPA. With the sound of approaching boots and shouts building next door, he chose that moment to grow a pair, telling us all that if we wanted the door locked so much, well then, we could go ahead and lock it ourselves.

This latest bit of impertinence could not, of course, be borne and we replied to Bones that he might very well tell it to the Marines, only this time we meant it. Bodily we bundled him up, physically we moved him to the door, and even as the cries and commotion increased in the passageway, joyfully did we hurl him out into the maelstrom, quickly locking the door behind him and bracing it with our shoulders.

Shouting and barking and “GET ON YOUR FACE, GET ON YOUR FACE!!!” did we hear and there was much eye-rolling and knee-slapping and antic gestures for a time until we heard a new voice of quiet authority in the passageway, that of the captain of Marines as it turned out. One of his Marines replied to his query, saying to him, “Sir, his own guys threw him out to us,” and hearing it put that way we momentarily felt a little remorseful. At having been caught.

Then there came a knock on the ready room door, and just like the three little pigs we spoke into the door jamb, asking, “Who is it?”

“Captain McDonough of the Marine Detachment,” came the reply, and “open the hatch.”

“We will not,” said we and braced our shoulders yet more firmly against the door, “for if we do, you will hurl us all to the deck and put rifles in our backs and we thank you sir, but we need none.”

“Open the hatch and let your man in, for we have work to do and my Marines will not molest you,” said he.

“On your honor,” we asked, “as an officer of Marines?”

“Yes, for God’s sake, open the hatch,” he replied, clearly growing exasperated.

And so we, seeing nothing more to be gained by further delay, opened the hatch and they left us alone and returned to us the person of one Bones, junior FA-18 pilot extraordinaire, only very slightly worse for the wear. So little the worse for wear in fact, that his impudence tended rather to increase than otherwise.

But this only enlightened our dreary and monastic lives for a matter of weeks, and soon the tedium set in again. Fortuitously the month of Bones’ flight physical was soon upon us, and the flight surgeon himself was recruited to play a critical role in our diabolical plot to make this birthday one to remember for our own dear JG.

Now you have read in these pages, gentle reader, the sore tribulations that can attend to an annual flight physical, especially when it is perpetrated by a man-hating ogre who will not even deign to give you wipies when she’s done. The difference between that and what you are about to read was intent, because while she was working her way through some issues that bedeviled the nether regions of her unilluminated psyche, we were just having a bit of fun while doing the necessary.

So it came to pass that when Bones was stretched out with his elbows on the table and his trou upon the deck, the jellied glove having been snapped in place out of his view and put to its intended purpose. At this point, the flight surgeon - a good man, though flawed perhaps in retrospect - placed his left hand upon Bones’ left shoulder. And at that moment of intense moral disadvantage, the assisting hospital corpsman, whose presence in the room Bones did not suspect, having heretofore hidden himself behind the examination curtain, reached through the curtain to place his right hand upon Bones’ other shoulder.

Now Bones’ was not a humble man as we have shown, nor was he much given over to the sin of introspection. He was nobody’s fool however, and could count with the best of them: He quickly realized that between the hands on either shoulder and the unaccustomed - dare I say, unwelcome? - intrusion abaft the beam that something was very much amiss.

He spun around so quickly, the flight surgeon later reported to us - we had asked for video, but had been told that would be a violation of client/patient privilege - that he had nearly broken the doctor’s wrist. He had been a good sport about the whole thing afterwards however, even allowing the examination to be completed. Which I suppose is making a virtue of necessity if you want to stay on flight status, but anyways.

Tedium, as I said at the beginning: It is quite the end of human decency.

And as for Bones? I cannot say that he ever quite grew out of his own self-regard, but he came at last to grow into it.

A foc’s’l follies vid from the Super Sh!t Hot, World Famous Golden Dragons.

Peek inside. 

Well, no, not really. It’s actually a pretty cool series of articles in the Reno Journal Gazette, tracking a carrier air wing and the carrier itself towards deployment. Well worth a read for those who are fans of the bidness:

Next year’s Stennis fliers are now training in Fallon

Before boarding their ship, pilots preparing for next year’s Pacific Ocean cruise on the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis rehearsed combat above the Northern Nevada desert.

“It’s awesome flying out there,” Lt. j.g. Joe Berta said of last summer’s month-long practice at Fallon Naval Air Station…

Fallon is perhaps most famous as home of the (ed. prestgious) Navy Fighter Weapons School, better known as Top Gun (ed. actually, that’s TOPGUN. One word, all caps), where elite pilots learn to teach the latest combat lessons. But the biggest job at Fallon is air wing training. During a year, about four wings come to Fallon, each for its month of pre-deployment rehearsal.

Air wing squadron a close-knit team

Joking. Teasing. Trusting. Trying to be the best.

“I love it,” Tennille said of flying an F/A-18F Hornet with the rest of the pilots in his squadron aboard the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis. “It’s kind of like being on a sports team. You have kind of a special relationship.”

Tennille, who graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy with a degree in mathematics (ed. Geek.), hasn’t played for the Lynx since 1997. He flies for the Black Knights of VFA-154, one of eight squadrons that form Carrier Air Wing Nine aboard the Stennis.

The squadron is the air wing’s basic unit. The Black Knights are Tennille’s team.

“You see these guys every day,” said Tennille, who’s been with the Knights nine months. “You fly together. You eat with your squadron. You sit with your squadron.”

We get it.

Landing at night in the middle of the ocean: It’s not only surreal, it’s a little scary

When a supersonic jet approaches the back of an aircraft carrier to land at night, the plane appears headed for a spot right between your eyes…

The flight deck of an aircraft carrier moving on the Pacific Ocean at night is a dark and forbidding place…

A carrier isn’t brightly illuminated like a cruise ship. There are few lights and they’re dim. Airplanes parked on the deck are shadows. Members of the deck crew appear as silhouettes in the moonlight.

The whole scene is surreal and a little scary.

He needs to get on board with the talking points. It’s more than a little scary. It’s terrifying. You know, for ordinary people. It’s just that we’re so dern brave.

But anyway.

By land and by sea

Leaving family behind is probably the hardest part of going to sea.

“That gets tough,” said Gilliam, the father of 8-year-old twins, a boy and a girl. “As you get older, the time flies a lot faster. Six months used to be an eternity. Now, it’s the blink of an eye.”

Gilliam and his pilots have been away from home much of this year, getting ready for the cruise.

At Fallon, they learned the latest combat tactics. The path Carrier Air Wing Nine followed from the Northern Nevada desert to the Pacific Ocean is typical. Each of the Navy’s 12 air wings trains at Fallon before joining a carrier.

The Stennis is large, almost 24 stories high, with a 4-and-one-half acre flight deck. But it gets small when an air wing such as Gilliam’s, with about 2,500 men and women who fly and maintain the planes, joins the Stennis and its regular crew of more than 3,000 that maintains and operates the ship.

Good stuff, and more at the main RJG site if you’re still interested.

I saw the best pilots of my generation destroyed by
Bacardi, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the Cubi streets at dawn,
looking for the way back-sheep…

So Cubi Point it was, in the Philippines that was, on one or another cruise from here to there and back again in the service of the Greater Good and racking up shipboard arrested landings, just for the bragging rights that were in it. ‘Twas a “working inport,” which meant of course that the blackshoes professional surface warfare officers had to busy themselves about the rust stains adhering to the hull of our warship, herself half-way returned from the uttermost parts of the world, with the signs of the sea showing plain. Well, that and ordnance offloads and re-tiling of the mess decks, a task that seemed an almost monastic devotion aboard certain ships, the one aboard which I had the honor to serve being not least among them.

As for us, we few, we happy few, we band of pilots, our “work” consisted mostly of sleeping on both ears until maybe 1000 or so, making a high speed pass through the ready room in wash khakis for 10 minutes or so to check for mail and then standing around Looking Professionally Concerned About Stuff before remarking, as though to no one in particular, that we’d be heading off the ship at 1100 for to get some chow if anyone cared to join us.

Anyone often did.

The Naval Station Subic Bay/Naval Air Station Cubi Point was a charming remnant of the old empire, a little bit of home carved out of the e’er encroaching jungle and to put it plainly, something of a social wasteland once the carrier pulled in. You see, all the cleverer Navy nurses withdrew themselves into the shadows even as the superannuated captains locked their teenaged daughters in the basement once we came ashore in all our epic grandeur, escorted as we were by 5000 or so of our closest friends, looking for whatever adventure might come. We pretty much had the run of the place as the permanent party peeked out at us from behind their Venetian blinds, while the local labor force bore up under the weight of our injunctions, each of them wondering when it would be that we’d pull out again, surely soon for the love of God?

Chow ashore for the noonday meal very often consisted of Cubi Dogs and ice cubes, both served at the Cubi Point O’Club, the former being nobbut a hot dog served Philippino style, in no way dissimilar to its American counterpart, while the latter were found at the bottom of a Cubi Special glass. In order to balance our diets by getting at the ice cubes - and do so without making a mess of one’s shirt - it was necessary to drain the Cubi Special of its liquid contents, however. Those contents consisted of a particularly potent combination of Bacardi 151 rum combined with divers fruit juices, the latter considered salubrious in that equatorial clime, while the former served as a kind of preservative. Thus fortified by our endeavors, afternoons often consisted of stertorously snoring by the poolside, baking our jailhouse pallors in the tropical sun.

These our well-earned rests were often interrupted by the Tomcat guys, who, when they weren’t weepily engaged in telling one another how much they loved each other (and, by proxy, themselves) were locked in grim and as it were, nearly mortal, combat over the Ancient and Honorable game of Animal Ball - a wetter version of the sport known and loved by NBA fans across the world crossed with rugby. If in fact it’s possible to drown at rugby.

Awakened, refreshed and more nearly approximating our perfect selves, we’d stop by the exchange to look at all the things we couldn’t afford but decided to buy anyway, prices being less than back at home and look at all the money we’d saved! After which the real business of the night would commence, the part that put the word “work” into the term “working inport” for the aviators, as we’d sortie out in force into the badlands beyond the gate, crossing Sh!t River and heading out into Alongapo or even The Barrio itself, saints preserve us and I hope you brought protection if you plan on drinking that mojo because I’m washing my hands of you, the way that you get.

Oh, we’d go out in martial force gentle reader and it would have made your heart glad to see us arrayed in our splendour as we passed the ramparts with our pennants proudly fluttering in the breeze and our chins held high. But it was a damned hard service there on the empire’s outer rim, our foe was experienced and crafty and not all of us who went out beyond the wire would make it back again, selah. So yes, we took our losses out in town, and if I might be permitted to tell the truth at this late juncture, even of those who made it back in safety - often severely wounded by the experience and some even crawling across the threshold supported by their friends - there were few who were not much reduced by the experience, not to say shattered. I wear the scars to this day.

An alternative to that experience, not to be pooh-poohed in a long inport after several consecutive nights of Alongo-slaughter, was to take a safety day and remain within the comforting encasement of the Cubi O’Club itself. There, having taken your afternoon ease by the pool, you could start your evening playing shuffleboard at the upstairs bar, looking at all the cruise plaques bearing the names of Those Who Went Before Us in between turns - the place has been faithfully replicated by the way (apart from the beer stains on the carpet) at the naval aviation museum in Pensacola, Florida.

You might also stroll by the dining room, where the local residents would sneak out when they thought the coast was clear to eat actual food while being serenaded by one or another of the exceptionally talented cover bands, most of whom were legally obligated at some point to sing, “Peelings, nothing more than peelings, trying to porget my, peelings of love!” an experience that somehow left the listener both mildly amused and maudlinly homesick.

Finally there was the downstairs bar, where the air wing would rock the house so late as to become early again, far away from the Disapproving Eye of the grown-ups upstairs, and whose L-shaped bar had, at its apex, the actual cockpit of a DC-3, facing out into Subic Bay. This was obviously a temptation of the most irresistible sort for any true aviator, and the attraction was not reduced but rather augmented gentle reader by the fact that between the two cockpit seats was a logbook, itself bearing the marks of many a famous aviator who over the years who had dared to jump the bar for to sign himself in. This simple act assured him an eternal place in the pantheon of naval aviation godhood, not least because going behind the bar while it was open - and only a scrub would sneak back while it was not - was a thing done under the threat of Significant Financial Consequence.

You see, there are any number of ways to end up buying a round of drinks for all your friends in the naval service: Ringing the bell for example without cause, wearing of headgear within the confines of the bar or bearing arms while not actually on watch, rolling five aces or losing a die over the side during a game of chance and of a surety, going behind the bar. These are all offenses grievously sufficient to the punishment of buying drinks for your friends. I do not, for now, mention the Dead Bug.

Surrounded by over a hundred rowdy aviators in various stages of moral decay, getting caught behind the bar could cost you a very great deal of money indeed because even in the PI buying a hundred bottles of beer wasn’t as who should say “cheap,” not to mention the certainty that at least some of those who were first served by your forced generosity would make their way to the end of the line for a second helping before the bill could be paid, the thieving bastards.

So it came to pass one night, far after the usual GICOT* had passed that your correspondent and a colleague of his close acquaintance whom we shall call “Lenny” (since that was, in fact, his name) settled on a seemingly infallible plan: We would, with a number of our other brothers of different mothers, contrive to simulate a brawl sufficient to draw the attention of the assembled throng away from our persons. With lumpen masses thus entranced by the on-going rumpus, we would steal behind the bar, make our way into the cockpit and sign ourselves into eternity.

The idea was flawless, perfect, complete to the last detail. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, I’ll tell you gentle reader, and this one is for free: You can never truly go wrong by over-estimating the depravity of the human spirit, the venality of naval aviators when it comes to the article of booze, or the envy of your fellow man. We were no sooner behind the bar and past the point of no return than some our erstwhile comrades flipped sides, breaking their troth with us and halting the rumble - which had started to grow admirably, by the way - just long enough to dime us out in front of the whole multitude there assembled. You could have heard a pin drop, or at least you could until Sammy the bartender started avidly a-ringing on his bell, signaling to all and sundry (no few of whom had been up until this moment at the upstairs bar and whom, like New Jersey whiplash claimants jumping on a city bus after an in-town fender bender, scurried down the stairs at this Pavlovian signal of fiscal blood in the water) that the next round was on Lex and Lenny.

Ah, well - it was a small enough price to pay for immortality.

I wonder whatever became of that logbook.

*Good idea cut-off time

My father was 25 years old on the 7^th of December, 1941. He was a midshipman at the US Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, NY. He’d been in the US Army’s field coastal artillery school at Fort Monroe, Virginia two years before. All of his classmates from Fort Monroe ended up going to Bataan after graduation, and if he hadn’t ended up at Kings Point, I mightn’t be here writing to you today because it was no picnic after Bataan, gentle reader. They didn’t call it a “death march” for nothing.

After December the 7^th his studies were cut short - men were needed to sail ships, move equipment, food and people to the fight. So my father closed his textbooks and went to sea after Pearl Harbor - the Murmansk run from New York, carrying tanks and ammunition for the Soviet war effort against Nazi Germany. It wasn’t a milk run. He had classmates from that school that didn’t come back either. He saw some of them die in front of him. A country half our population, with 400,000 dead in three and one half years? Everyone knew someone who didn’t come back. Those were hard times. You had to pull together.

There was a time when I was at the Boat School, plebe year that I was feeling rather sorry for myself that I hadn’t gone to Virginia or Duke - I wasn’t a particularly good plebe, and the upperclassmen were especially fond of pointing that fact out to me. We spoke on the phone, my father and I, and troubled by my evident unhappiness he wrote a letter to me afterwards. Remember getting letters?

I remember this one: He told of a time in the North Sea, the convoy harrassed by dive bombers in the daylight hours and threatened by U-Boats around the clock. He told me the story of an ammunition ship getting hit at night alongside him, the way she went up in a column of fire, the strange fact that years later, he couldn’t remember having heard a sound. He told me of another Liberty ship alongside of his, her bow blown off at 15 knots, the way she steamed right under the sea until at last her fantail lifted in the air, the propellor still thrashing. It was a really good letter. He’s been gone for 24 years, but sometimes when I’m feeling low, I pull it out and read it again. It puts things into perspective.

When I was a kid he told me about coming up on deck during the war, the General Quarters alarm sounding, to man his AA gun when his ship was under air attack and seeing a Stuka dive bomber framed in the hatchway at the top of the ladder, growing larger, screaming as it came, the bomb coming loose, falling towards the ship, towards my father.

“Were you scared, dad?” I asked, maybe 10 years old.

“Scared?” he said with a grunt. “I was terrified.”

You never think of your father being terrified when you’re ten years old. It makes him human in a way he’d never been before. In a way you didn’t really want him to be. In a way he had to be eventually, so that you too could become a man.

It seemed so long ago, the stories he told of that day. For everyone of their generation it was the equivalent of Kennedy in Dallas and Columbia combined. Everyone could tell you exactly where they were that day. What they were wearing. Who they were with. The ones who didn’t make it back, after all was said and done.

It was their 9/11 but no one told them that they had it coming, no one dared. You could get punched in the nose for even suggesting it. It was their war on fascism, and the people whose job it was to share the news with the citizenry felt like they had a stake in winning it too, like it mattered who won. They looked at setbacks - and there were so many, so very, very many - as reasons for concern, rather than reasons for exultation. It was a different time.

Everyone alive that day remembered where they were and what they were doing the moment that a faraway world jumped in through the window and importuned itself upon a country still clawing its way out of the Great Depression. A country inwardly focused, callused by hardship. A country suddenly, comprehensively at war.

When I was a child though, Pearl Harbor was just a name to me, as remote as Gettysburg or Shiloh. But on my first cruise, coming home from the Arabian Sea in the autumn of 1987, the USS Constellation pulled in there to pick up “Tigers” - family members who would sail with us from Hawaii to San Diego. On a whim I joined my roomates and went up to the flight deck in my summer whites to “man the rail” as we entered port. We were young and happy and ready for anything, laughing as we came on deck.

It’s a beautiful port entry, the water absurdly blue and green and white all at once, a warm breeze snapping at your trousers, happy thoughts of future entertainments never far from the forefront of your mind. You see the family housing of Hickham Air Force Base pass close along the starboard side - close! So close you could almost toss a biscuit ashore. And then you see Ford Island loom up to port, and you become thoughtful, remembering your lessons, remembering your parents’ conversations, remembering “battleship row.” Remembering because it had been passed down to you as an admonition, as a warning, as a duty: Remember.

Never forget.

And then you see her on the port quarter, what little there is to see of her above the water from an acute angle: The number 3 barbette of the USS Arizona, the watery graveyard of 1100 men and a mute testament both to perfidy and unpreparedness. Sixty-odd years after she went down, little rainbow pools of oil still bubble to the surface from within trapped spaces and voids, footless passageways embracing the mouldering bones of sailors whose names are known but to God. The old salts say that these are her tears of rage and anguish, her tears of loss and bereavement. They say that she is weeping. They say that she is weeping still.

These melancholy thoughts are interrupted by the trilling sound of a bosun’s whistle on the 5MC, two short blasts - “Attention to port!” The flight deck snaps to attention. One short blast follows - “Hand salute!” A long moment passes in the heat, the sweat suddenly liberated, trickling down your back as your arm goes up and holds, holds. A silent and expectant moment as one great ship glides softly past another, a thousand crewman rendering honors to another thousand from a far different time, from a far different land. The moment stretches, breaks, and at last is over: Two short blasts - “Ready, two!” And finally, three blasts - “Carry on.”

According to immutable naval custom, the junior ship initiates the rendering of passing honors, while the senior ship returns it. But senior though she may be, there will never again be a salute returned from onboard Arizona. No bosun’s pipe echoes across the water. No one mans her rails. My brothers and I took one long look back at the memorial receding behind us, exchanged silent glances between ourselves, saying with our eyes the things we could never allow ourselves to say out loud. Pursed our lips and went below in quiet introspection. It wouldn’t last forever - we were after all, young and careless. But we wouldn’t forget that moment, not ever.

We would remember.

Oh, man. Here’s a pic to warm the cockles of any WESTPAC sailor’s heart.

Fenwick Pier, adventure’s in the air and the first round’s on me. Mikimoto pearls and the White Star Ferry. Victoria Peak and Admiralty. Tailor-made suits. Tsim Sha Shui. Hong Kong side or Kowloon side? High tea at the Peninsula. The American Club. Mad Dog’s pub (”Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the summer sun”) for fish and chips and maybe a Guinness (for strength!) and Dusk To Dawn to see if it lives up to its moniker (and yes, it does). “Shentral” and oh my God, Wan Chai and if your head don’t hurt tomorrow then you’ll have to try again. Safety day on day three: Let’s play golf at Discovery Bay. Last night ashore, and how could I forget Joe Bananas? (Hint: Maybe because it was always off-limits.) Important safety tips: (1) Ask what it costs before you buy. (2) Pay in cash.

Ah, memories.

Here’s an interesting story - with a personal hook - about the USS Wahoo, the famed World War II submarine whose final patrol lasted 63 years:

The Wahoo became one of the most-celebrated submarines of World War II. In a year and a half, Morton’s crew sank at least 19 Japanese ships — more than any other submarine of the time.

Shortly after Wahoo left for her seventh patrol, a brother of one of the crew members came home to find his mother crying -

“I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ And she showed me the newspaper. It said USS Wahoo was overdue and presumed lost.” Overdue and presumed lost. The phrase was accurate as far as it went; all the Navy knew was that the Wahoo had not returned to base.

Logue kept looking for his lost sibling:

(He) pored through naval records, made contact with Japanese researchers, traveled to Japan in search of the lost submarine, and helped erect a peace monument there.

And then, an extraordinary thing happened. War records showed that on Oct. 11, 1943, at 9:20 in the morning, an American submarine had been fired upon in the La Perouse Strait.

A Russian expedition came to the strait in August 2006. And there, in 200 feet of water, they found the wreck of a submarine.

Three weeks ago, the U.S. Navy confirmed it is most likely that of the USS Wahoo. 

They’re still on patrol, the crew of the Wahoo. They’re just not lost anymore.

So said Captain James Lawrence, the mortally wounded CO of the USS Chesapeake as he was being carried below. Our infant Navy had grown a bit impetuous perhaps after USS Constitution under Isaac Hull battered HMS Guerriere to bits and after her next CO, William Bainbridge sent whatever bits of HMS Java hadn’t burnt down to the bottom of the deep blue sea not much later.

Chesapeake was another of the American heavy frigates that had given Britania such a case of the hives during the War of 1812, and under Lawrence met the Royal Navy’s Captain Philip Broke of the HMS Shannon shortly after getting underway with a fresh and unworked crew from Boston harbor in the summer of 1813. Lawrence declined the advantages obtaining to the weather gage - including passing up an opportunity to rake her with a broadside from stern to stem - the better to shorten sail and duke it out with Shannon at close quarters, broadside to broadside. No doubt he thought to make short work of the somewhat smaller British frigate.

Broke, however, was a fighting captain as well as a wealthy one, having many times dipped into his own pocket to keep his gun crews plying at their trade more often than the Admiralty would have authorized all on their own. The net result of his largesse was that the gun crews aboard Shannon gave a fair bit better than they got in what ended up being a brutally short action. Broke believed in winning too, none of your gentleman’s duels and doffed caps: He directed his gun crews and marksmen to focus their efforts on the American ship’s quarterdeck, sweeping it clear of officers again and again until the fight had gone out of USS Chesapeake, her officers dead or wounded and her helm shot away. He could well afford to tip it the generous after Chesapeake had struck her colors.

For all of his “don’t give up the ship” rhetoric, Lawrence’s crew couldn’t fight longer than they could be led, nor could they run away to fight another day with a helm that wouldn’t answer. Not long after he was sent below, Shannon’s boarders made short work of what was left on the weather deck of the USS Chesapeake. Lawrence died an honored prisoner a few short days later.

Which all reminds me of a time I was leading a two-ship element of strikers against the Bravo 17 airfield complex at NAS Fallon, Nevada. Must’ve been sometime in the summer of ‘88 or so. The terrain is mountainous in the vicinity of Fallon, which is a strike fighter pilot’s dream because it allows him to run in at low altitude behind the dirt with a bag of knots and a bad attitude, a-hiding of himself from any surface-to-air-missile systems that might seek to shove a warhead into his forehead on the way to the target.

If there’s anything more fun that can be done fully dressed than running around with a wingman at 540 knots carrying hell and death (or 25-pound practice bombs, anyway) a couple of hundred feet above the deck, secure in the knowledge that you are invisible to radar, I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.

The problem is that while you can spring upon a target pretty much unawares by using the terrain to your advantage, popping over the last ridge with maybe 45 seconds to go to the target, it can be damned hard to find your precise aimpoint flying that low. It has to do on the one hand with a natural desire to avoid tying the low altitude record and all of the attention span that takes, and on the other hand about the lack of visually significant vertical development on airfield-type targets. A characteristic that - especially when you’re hauling the mail - makes it hard to just lay down a string of bombs willy-nilly and nevertheless find the correct impact point, not to mention the reduced delivery accuracy that comes with not having any dive angle on the jet.

So what is a motivated strike fighter pilot to do? He’ll perform a pop-up maneuver, gentle reader, like he’s been taught. Haul back on the stick at the prescribed distance before reaching a reversal point and, having reached an apex altitude whilst upside down and hopefully acquiring the target visually by looking over his shoulder, pull the nose back down below the horizon at a prescribed g and defined dive angle, putting the target in his sights and moving the jet around in three dimensions, like. With chaff and flares if it do ya. On account of the dreadful vulnerability that’s in it.

You see, once you break the horizon on a pop attack, any properly motivated gomer in your flight path with the presence of mind could lie down on his back with his AK-47, shoot straight up in the air and maybe do you a profound dis-service if his ammunition lasts and you take a 7.62mm round in the wrong spot. Which while we’re on that topic, there aren’t any right spots, but anyways. And all that’s before you get to the MANPADS threat: Man portable air-defense systems - hand-held infrared guided missles like the Stinger or the various Eastern Bloc equivalents. Any one of which, take it in the tookas, could result in a prolonged stay at a Glorious People’s Re-education Center for Yankee Air Pirates, complete with a steady diet of fish heads and pumpkin soup. Which I’m reliably informed, Atkins or no, gets rather tedious after a bit.

So what do you do? Well, having dutifully gone on government time for the duration of the bomb run and coming off target making good time, you keep her moving a bit until you’re out of range. Make it hard on the bad guys. Stay unpredictable until you’re clear.

Which is exactly what I did, beating hell out of myself in the cockpit what with all of my jinking and jiving and running for the deck, the better to hide myself again mere coward that I was, not wanting to be bagged even if it was only a training flight in Fallon, Nevada in the summer of 1988.

Safely clear of the target I eased g and looked around with casual curiousity, wondering how we’d done. Which is the exact point that the Stinger operator on the target centroid got me in his sights and pulled the trigger because it turned out that I wasn’t actually clear, not quite yet. Capturing the whole thing on video tape for my later edification in the debrief. The bastard.

But I learned about flying from that. As I was reminded that we don’t give up the plane ship.