Neptunus Lex

As I mentioned recently, the Ronald Reagan strike group is surge deploying in the very near future - heading out to cover what would have been the Stennis CSG’s Western Pacific commitment while that strike group joins Eisenhower’s in the roiling waters of Arabia. I got to see a number of old friends last week brief my boss on the ship and airwing’s readiness to get underway - to “surge” deploy, having returned from a previous deployment last summer.

They were publicly upbeat and even enthusiastic about what must have been for at least some of them bitterly unwelcome news just a few weeks ago - this is the nature of things, orders being orders after all, and misery being optional. If they were privately feeling sorry for themselves - their disrupted home lives, discarded plans, any uncertainty about the scope and scale of the task before them - you could not tell it from the faces of their leadership. It will be important for those leaders to convey that same enthusiasm and purpose to the younger people who have not yet fully embraced the third element of the sea service’s core value set: Commitment. Important, but routine - this is what leaders do. There is a war on, after all, and although their job in WESTPAC will not take them to the combat zone, it will help to stabilize a critical policy flank even as additional combat power joins the kinetic fray. We take these things for granted, but no other nation in the world can commit three carrier strike groups half-way around the world and leave so very much capacity in reserve - friends take notice and are reassured, as do those who weigh the calculus of enmity. There is honor in such service.

In a strange way, I rather envy them, the sailors aboard Reagan.

Oh, I know this is an easy thing to say: We all tend to idealize past hardships. In our middle age we tend look back with nostalgically upon the days of our carefree youth, recalling a kind of happy innocence but not remembering the burning need to be free of parental constraint, the agonies of adolescent relationships, the toxically combining uncertainties of self-identification, worth and potential. I have spent many, many days at sea in the course of my service and many times promised myself to remember the bad along with the good, to write a letter to myself about the pains of separation from those you love for months on end, the austerity of day-to-day existence, the grinding burden of doing a very great number of exceptionally difficult things to a routinely uncompromising standard of excellence.

But the same “boundedness” that a life at sea entails and which so sharply constrains the sailor’s freedom of movement can also embrace him in its clarity of vision. In both the literal and metaphorical senses it is true that you can see further at sea than you can ashore. The details of life spring out more vividly once free of men and their cities, machines, dirt and pollution.

Each deployment has a beginning and an end, and every day that passes is one day less until you stand re-united with those you love best. Each day brings with it a focus and unity of effort - different for each person, but nevertheless sharply defined. Some will cook and clean, some must run the plant, some will navigate and some will steer, some will develop plans and others will execute them. Some will even get to fly fighters from a carrier flight deck.

And in the midst of all of the noise and confusion and the great moving limbs of impersonal, powerful machinery there is the constant need to remain aware and awake so that one may remain alive: There are many ways to be killed or maimed on a warship at sea, it is no place for the unwise or the unwary and these things too tend to focus the imagination. Much of what is done at sea requires courage, both moral and physical and there is something quietly joyous in knowing that one has been both tested and is therefore trusted, and a quiet joy too in being surrounded by others who have overcome their own fears. It does not always feel that way ashore.

Very soon now the last mooring line will come over aboard USS Ronald Reagan, the bosun’s mate of the watch will sound one prolonged blast of the ship’s whistle and sailors fore and aft will shift colors, lowering the jack forward and the national ensign aft, only to raise the latter again on the main mast. Tugs will flail and thrash alongside, turning her into the channel where, once pointed towards safe waters she will make her own purposeful way out to sea, chasing the setting sun.

On the tip of the bow as the ship gains way, her prow brusquely shouldering aside the waves, a man will be standing alone with his thoughts as he stares into a suddenly revealed horizon. The sea breeze will be in his face, the wind will flap at his trousers and tussle his hair as he contemplates the enormity of God’s creation in that endlessly retreating line. This will also give him the time to reflect upon the infinitely small piece of that creation which he himself represents - a useful exercise in humility.

He will know exactly who he is, up there on the bow, where he fits into the grand scheme and what it is that he ought to be doing. And even as the day fades he knows that this thing he is embarked upon will have a beginning, a middle and an end. Uncertainties will fall away even as the land falls behind. And eventually, having seen what he came to see, he will go below - there will be much work for him to do.

I have been that man before, had his clarity and sense of purpose. There are times when I miss it.

Just as my own well of sea stories runs dry comes this tale, courtesy of ENS Tim. It’s an anecdote from an aviation physiologist teaching ENS Tim’s flight school class - the hero of the tale is a certain ENS X:

“In all of aviation, one of the most common causes of spatial disorientation, loss of consciousness, loss of vision (blackout/greyout), or loss of voluntary muscle control is acceleration placed on the body due to high G-load maneuvering.  When a pilot executes a high G turn, there is a higher load factor placed on the body due to centripetal acceleration, causing blood to flow away from the eyes, brain, and core, eventually pooling in the outer and lower extremities, especially the thighs, calves, and feet.  Since a human’s eyes are the most susceptible to oxygen deprivation of all the flight-essential organs, they are the first real sign of a syndrome known as G-LOC (Gravity induced Loss Of Consciousness).  The vision begins to fade and narrow into a tunnel-like field of view, eventually disappearing, immediately followed by unconsciousness.  There are measures to combat GLOC, such as a “G-suit” that relies on air filled bladders strapped to your legs and torso that help force blood back towards your head, as well as proper strength training, diet, and hydration regimen, however; the most effective means for combating a high G situation is known as the Anti-G Straining Maneuver.

The AGSM is a process by which the pilot can use isometric muscle contractions in his lower body and torso combined with a highly specialized breathing pattern known as the “Hick” maneuver to literally force blood back towards his brain by force of his own muscles. During the fifth week of training in the initial stage of flight school known as Aviation Preflight Indoctrination, this AGSM technique is taught to all prospective aviators and flight surgeons, since its use is essential for even basic day to day aviation once the students begin the flying portion of their training.  Sitting at amphitheater style desks mounted to the floor in a large classroom, the students are shown the proper combination of breathing (Hick maneuver) and muscle flexing used to increase pressure on their diaphragm and push the pooled blood out of their lower limbs to feed their brain and eyes.  In small groups of 5-10 at a time, the students practice the maneuver under the supervision of an Aviation Physiologist so that they can receive critique and special help learning the fundamentals of this so that they are prepared for their first flight.  The order of operations for the AGSM is “Legs….Breath….Pull”  meaning that the student first braces his or her legs against the ground and flexes the gluteus, calf, and hamstring muscles while firmly tightening the abdomen, then breathes in deeply saying the first two letters of the word “Hick.”  The effect is a closing of the glottis, the membrane that separates the windpipe from alimentary canal.  The student then counts to three, at which time they exhale while saying the last two letters of the word “Hick” and quickly re-inhaling another breath and starting the sequence over again.  All of this makes the student look they’re saying “hi……ck hi…….ck hi…..ck hi……ck.”  In a normal combat situation, after considerable experience of course, most tactical fighter pilots can withstand up to 9 g’s of acceleration without experiencing GLOC.

Well, approximately six months ago, Ensign X was in the class learning about the Hick maneuver and the complexities of the AGSM.  Overestimating the amount of effort required to execute this maneuver under normal gravitational conditions (i.e. not in a turning aircraft) the student decided that in order to impress the instructor, he would perform the maneuver to a degree comparable to actual combat maneuvering standards.  As the teacher prepared Ensign X’s group, the command “Legs!” was given.  Ensign X braced his feet against the rails of the seat in front of him, tightening his buttocks muscles, his calves, and his stomach.  The command “Breathe!” was given, and Ensign X inhaled deeply through both his nose and his mouth, ensuring a good fill of his lungs to help compress his diaphragm and chest cavity.  The command “Pull!” was given by the instructor, at which point Ensign X used all the strength in his stomach and buttocks muscles to bear down on his lungs and midsection, forcing the blood from his legs back to his “simulated” oxygen starved eyes and brains.  Three seconds passed, at which point the instructor chanted “Hick!” echoed by the sound of the 7 other fellow students exhaling, pressing out their air with the muscles in their stomachs and legs, followed almost instantly by a quick, punctuated breath inwards to refill their lungs and reapply pressure to their diaphragm. Herein lay the failure in Ensign X’s calculations, for when he reapplied pressure to his diaphragm, stomach, and buttocks, he felt a warmth spreading underneath him reminiscent of the sensation one experiences when reclining into a relaxing bath.  Almost immediately the students around him sensed the macabre turn the days events had taken and began to laugh and stare aghast as Ensign X struggled in utter futility to disguise his embarrassment.  As the smell punctuated the mood of the room, Ensign X decided, in true aviator fashion, that the mission was to be scrapped and decided to “punch out.”  As he retired awkwardly to the men’s room down the hall, the class burst out in laughter and amazement at what had just happened.

Several weeks later, Ensign X, callsign “Sh!tter,” reported to his follow on squadron.

Thus is a callsign born.

What a great business.

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.