Neptunus Lex

So, my roommate was ashore in Oman, living with Brit expats for a time back in the days that were when we were off shore doing some of that good old fashioned training. They had some lovely bombing ranges in Oman, places you could fly low, pop up and deliver high drag ordnance that would leave an actual mark when it was all said and done. Live MK82 Snakeyes, if it do ya fine. Twenty millimeter high explosive cannon fire, too. Made a lovely little scintillation on the turf.

Good clean fun.

The Brits who lived there were something between advisers and mercenaries for the sultanate. They flew with the local crews in Hunters and Jags, and got right down in the weeds, by God. I mean low. Thinking it was safe down there from the missiles we carried. Mostly we smiled and nodded. Politely. Knowing we were looking at dead men, if push came to shove.

Nice knowing you.

My roomie went with one of their forward air controllers to the range for to control the USN attack jets coming to deliver their heavies. On day one I led a two-ship into the target and we took it kinda gentle, like. Feeling our way along. Because when it comes to live ordnance it’s not a bad idea to be careful at first. Make sure you’ve figured it out. Don’t kill anyone that doesn’t deserve it.

That sort of thing.

Our sister squadron came in bringing the heat, running in low and fast and veering and jinking all over the place. Being tactical. My roomie critiqued us a bit going off target. Said that Brand X was making us look bad in the face of the Old Empire types. Letting the side down.

Something of a disgrace.

The next day, having familiarized ourselves with the local flora and fauna, we ramped our game up a bit. We ran in low and hot, veered and jinked, chaff and flares. Bombs off on target, on time. But so did Brand X. So much so that a junior wingman got a bit carried away and - skipping the mandatory clearance from the FAC prior to delivering his ordnance - laid a stick of high drag bombs pretty much on top of the FAC position.

Funny thing about high drag ordnance. You get a really good look at the delivery platform. You get to see the bomb come off the rails. If you’ve got sharp eyes, you even get to see the retard fins deploy. At that point if the bombs are coming your way? You’ve got about five seconds to live.

Unless, of course, you’re a British mercenary more or less used to people flinging bombs at you all regardless. In that case, you turn to my roommate and say, “Good luck, mate,” before jumping into the fighting hole specifically dug for the purpose.

Roomie got lucky that day because Brand X dropped the bomb out of parameters and it dudded, landing about 40 feet in front of him. That’s pretty damned close for a five hundred pound bomb. It can make a man pondersome.

After that?

Roomie didn’t much give us a hard time anymore about crawling before we walked, walking before we ran.

Clever man, that roomie.

Trainable.

Relationships between the sexes have always been issues of some interest in the Navy. The first class to integrate females into the Brigade of Midshipmen at the Naval Academy was only two years senior to my own, and there was a fair amount of discussion throughout the school whether it even made sense to accept women, since they were not at that time eligible to serve in combatant warships or aircraft. Members of the Brigade opposed to the notion apparently believed that the school had been designed to forge wartime leaders in a monastic crucible, and didn’t see as how the fairer sex quite fit in.

Not all of that discussion was particularly enlightened - after all (and no offense to the occasional O-1 commenter) the only thing more chilling than hearing an ensign offer his professional opinion on a matter is hearing it from a guy who hasn’t made ensign yet. For his own part, your correspondent was himself philosophical on the subject of gender integration at federal institutes of higher learning: Properly constituted authority had made a decision within the defined boundaries of their purview - all else was commentary.

The first thing you learn to do is salute.

Plus, it will not have escaped the attention of a casual reader that your humble scribe kinda likes girls. Sure, there might have been an added element of sexual tension added to the pressure cooker that was Bancroft Hall that had been absent theretofore, but from my own perspective it was a small price to pay for the privilege of, you know: Having girls around.

Not quite ten years after I graduated I was in the audience at a professional symposium in Las Vegas when an acquaintance challenged (I believe) the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Air Warfare on a subject which had been rumbling throughout the fleet: A congressional proposal to take gender integration yet another step further by opening up combat billets to females in squadrons and ships of the line. The general sense of the room, full as it was of recently returned veterans of the 1991 Gulf War, was that such an innovation was a bad idea. 

It might well be that some of those who had been in the room soberly contending that gender integration was deleterious to notions of good order, discipline and combat effectiveness ended the weekend by drunkenly pawing, groping and otherwise assaulting women at random and one female officer in particular on the third floor of the Hilton Hotel. The ensuing scandal and the witch hunt which followed plagued naval aviation for a generation, drove a wedge of mistrust between the junior officer corps and their flag leadership and permanently damaged the careers of many promising officers. Doing all of these things while simultaneously advancing the cause of gender integrated combat units by leaps and bounds was a non-trivial accomplishment, and probably not the result intended by the kind of goons who grope passersby.

It also resulted in me flying an approach to land in the worst weather I’d ever seen in order to be someplace I really didn’t want to be, but that’s another story.

So it was that two years later, as I was re-training in the FA-18 - having spent three years flying F-16s, F-5s and A-4s in an adversary squadron -  en route to a department head job overseas, I was joined in my refresher class by two female Hornet pilots heading to the fleet as the first beneficiaries of Tailhook-inspired changes to the combat exclusion law.

Being rather more on the feminine end of the femininity spectrum rather than the Amazon end, neither of them was very large compared to the average knuckle dragging, beetle-browed strike fighter pilot, and in fact the smaller of the two was no bigger than a minute. The latter was also an outspoken left/liberal in her political views - a characteristic which was not so very usual in fighter aviation, although not unheard of by any means - as well as being pretty damned smart.

Came to pass one night on a detachment to Naval Air Facility El Centro that the students and instructor pilots sought dinner at a local restaurant, and enjoyed a fine steak with the trimmings followed by rather too many bottles of a passable red wine. Whether or not there was any “veritas” in that vino I suppose will depend upon your point of view, but what is not debatable is that tongues were loosened past normal boundaries of both good taste and discretion - always the better part of valor - to the degree that the discussion became at one point “frank and open” as they say in diplomatic circles when people are shouting past each other.

The ladies held up their end quite creditably on the topics of women in combat in particular and politics in general. While I watched with a certain bemused detachment, their efforts only seemed to agitate one of the instructors, a gent we’ll call “Tutor” since that was his theoretical role. Even as we left the restaurant for the drive back to base he transitioned from being something of a bother to becoming a frightful bore in his attempts to win a point, any point at all, thinking perhaps that his arguments might improve with repetition. That unlikely possibility was further diminished by the sad mismatch of rhetorical and intellectuals skills he had brought to the campaign, even before those skills  - such as they were - had been soddened by the application of too much California red. 

We reached the parking lot at last and went our several ways, your correspondent to the bachelor officer quarters lobby to check the flight schedule for the following day. Upon leaving the BOQ I was surprised to see Tutor lying on the ground, rolling around in pain.

“What happened to you?” I asked, looking around and seeing one of the ladies storming away.

“She hit me,” he groaned, pointing after the pilot, ”knocked me to the ground.”

“Why on earth would she have done that?” I cried, helping him up and dusting him off while thinking to myself that there was no good that could come from a transition pilot and an officer striking a fellow officer who was also an instructor pilot.

“Well,” he said, snuffling a bit - “I might have called her the ‘c-word.’ I’m going after her!”

Had it coming to you my son, said I to myself, for if those aren’t fighting words then Bob’s your uncle, adding aloud, “No you’re not. I’m putting you to bed.”

Soon the deed was done and yer man was snoring away, but I was still concerned. It’s never good to have that kind of thing festering in a squadron, with different circles supporting differing agendas and even - perhaps - different versions of the truth. The instructor wasn’t a bad guy at heart, although he had behaved boorishly under the influence. But there would be a natural suspicion if things between them went south professionally, a rebuttable presumption that he might be acting on a grudge. That eventuality, however unlikely, could cause an already rather charged situation to boil over in unpredictable ways. The only thing to do was make a public sport of it and let out all the potentially toxic air - no need to fear a private grudge, and no need to call a harassment hotline once it was all exposed to light, I thought.

So it was that your correspondent was the first man to the ready room the next day, sharing the tale as one of great hilarity and recommending a call sign change for all the major players in the drama. The Junior Officer Protection Association - that dread court of public opinion whose decisions were beyond appeal - were enthusiastic participants once the blood was scented in the water, to the end that after a brief but spirited competition Tutor became temporarily known as “AKBAC,” an acronym for “a** kicked by a chick,” while herself became known as “KiTA” for “kicked Tutor’s a**”. Tutor wasn’t particularly happy at first, but realized after a bit of ribbing that you never let ‘em see you sweat and that there was nothing to do but laugh while KiTA seemed if anything embarrassed about all the attention.

The whole of it, the argument and standing up for herself against a larger man, the fact that the other instructors sensibly realized what had to be done and the grace and humor with which every side let it go in time was good to see.

That’s when I knew that it might just work.

One of the thorns in the side of any stateside carrier operating close to home is the “distinguished visitor” program. “DV’s” can be just about anybody with an interest in visiting an aircraft carrier at sea and who might plausibly be relied upon to share their - undoubtedly favorable - experiences back home. We get movie stars and professional athletes, captains of industry and Rotarians.

Today I had school teachers.

They come through our headquarters on the way out to the ship for their 24-hour stay, and if the Big Boss is too busy to brief them (he usually is) the needle comes to rest on one of his sixth-rank spear carriers of the seventh cohort. This time it came to rest on me.

The DV’s can be pains in the neck at times. Flight times are kept low to minimize the chow re-visit factor, constraining the ship’s maneuvering to a 100 nautical mile feasibility arc until the COD arrives. Once aboard they are nearly hopeless, the poor dears. Mere landsmen and no sailors, they are forever stumbling across power cords and across foul lines, climbing ladders so painfully that it seems like they’re only half way through a high colonic, blocking the passageway while staring blankly at compartment diagrams in the vain hope of figuring out where in hell they are, and how to get to the wardroom. Come chow time they will be sitting around a table thirty minutes after having dined, oblivious to the aircrew standing around the margins, holding their plates in hand and hoping to finish before heading up to the roof to provide the evening’s entertainment. After a few cups of coffee they’ll talk themselves into hanging stern end out of the freezer while digging up all the good ice cream. Because it’s free.

But in another way, in a very real way, they are a blessing. Not only are these the tax payers in person, and the reason for all of it - our infrastructure, ships, aircraft, weapons systems and yes, paychecks - but they are infallibly  and gratifyingly amazed at what they see out there. The complexity of a system of 5000 people and high tech machinery communally wedded to accomplishing an exceedingly difficult thing exceptionally well. The noise of a fighter screaming on the catapult in afterburner before shooting down the track wreathed in steam - a sound that hits you not so much in your ears or even in your head so much as body slams you in your rib cage. The collossal war of forces counterposed in trembling opposition as a jet touches down in the landing area, hook thumping the deck and then the arresting wire paying out to restrain it like a beast trapped in a snare, the engines shrieking for release. Feeding 5000 people in an hour’s time, four times a day.

They will routinely be astonished at the average age of responsible young people on the flight deck - some of whom they may have taught in school only a year or so ago. Some of whom they might have shaken their heads over in academic despair. Seeing them tall and strong and professionally responsible for the lives of their shipmates, for the life of the young lieutenant there in the cockpit, for the safety of a multi-million dollar machine. Heroes working long hours in arduous conditions for very little pay. As the sun goes down they will look out upon an apparently endless sea and know for perhaps the first time what it is to be alone in a throng, to be a small thing in a very large world. To sink the land behind them, the world of people, of buildings, dust and grime.

Being, if for only 24 hours, a part of it. There is wonder in it.

Which is good for us, because people can and do get used to just about anything after a while. You can get used to long lines for chow, old movies, hard work, boredom in the face of danger, even exhaustion. Just as you can get used to the idea of a huge ship moving purposefully through the sea, casting airplanes into the sky and recovering them again. When the DVs see these things, when their eyes go round in amazement, when they blurt out almost disbelieving questions, we see it through their eyes. We see their wonder and yes - we see their pride. We see ourselves, however briefly, as they see us. It is a kind of blessing.

Today it was school teachers and administrators. Tomorrow?

Tomorrow it’s the offensive line from the San Diego Chargers.

Should be fun.

The forward deployed naval forces are those ships and squadrons permanently detached to the Western Pacific, and home ported, for the most part at Naval Station Yokuska and Naval Air Station Atsugi, Japan.

The op-tempo tends to be higher out west, and the training facilities more austere - there were no simulators in my day, and few accessible target ranges - so one of the things that naval aviation attempts to do is send the cream of the aviator production crop out west to serve on the tip of the spear.

Now, the distribution of talent at that level is skewed pretty far to the right side of the curve anyway, but even at that level there are distinctions to be drawn over time. Some folks learn faster and some just do better - those guys tend to be labeled “Pri A’s” - “must pumps,” first priority.

In a standard stateside squadron a CO might anticipate getting a “normal distribution” of raw talent throughout the year, with the higher performing candidates typically arriving only as deployment drew near since the opportunity to train the nugget aviator diminishes with each milestone event in the wake. If the CO begs and pleads for a really talented horse for the stable, he might be offered a “package deal” - a high quality nugget that is offset by an accompanying under-performer. It sounds like a tempting idea, but I always turned it down - sometimes the truly talented guy came with heavy ego baggage, while even the low performing guys tend to be great people that you might end up having to scrape off. Sometimes guys in the lowest performing group suddenly catch fire, but just as often they end up not quite hacking. It’s better to let them go and save their lives, maybe some other lives too and very likely one of the multi-million dollar machines that have been entrusted to your care. But doing so, even though it’s the right thing, can rip a squadron apart, especially after the guy had been inculcated into squadron life, become a part of the team and probably had their buddies pulling for them while they were struggling. For the most part I preferred to take the above average bubba to the superstar - it was always better to have a guy who could play team ball and was willing to learn.

FDNF squadrons didn’t have to make those choices. Things move fast on the tip, and the Navy does a good job of ensuring that fast movers fill the ranks.

A good thing too. When the ship gets underway from Yokuska and the airwing flies aboard for carrier quals later that day, there isn’t much time for fooling around. Unlike the SoCal op areas, wherein the ship - apart from actual deployment - is doing CQ in the same operating areas that it will be training in once quals are complete, the FDNF ship is nearly always going somewhere when it gets to sea. Somewhere the air wing can train, somewhere the ships can maneuver, somewhere the battle group will fight.

So one bright day in the late fall of 1995 I think it was, I flew out to the ship leading a four-ship for day CQ. The ocean canvas below us was torn from its usual deep and rolling swells into a piece of modern art, constantly shifting flecks of blue, gray and white as nearly gale-force winds snatched at wave tops. When we checked in with Tower, we heard the LSO’s on deck calling to a group already in the pattern, “99 bubbas, 45 knots of wind.”

I’d landed in higher winds, but not much higher - I once saw 50+ knots on a NORPAC deployment - and never in CQ. Twenty to twenty-five knots of wind straight down the angle was standard for flight operations. Forty-five was “varsity.”

If you look at the representation below, you can see that an aircraft on glideslope is approaching the ship at the proper three degree angle - the Fresnel lens, or glideslope reference is actually set at 3.5 degrees for normal operations, but the combined effects of the landing area moving away from you even as the wind “holds you back” is to flatten the “real” glideslope to an “apparent” glideslope.

When the winds get higher, the effect is to “push” the aircraft backwards off the glideslope, to send it low in effect. This can be compensated for with a higher throttle setting of course, but the power required to get back up on glideslope is much higher than pilots are typically accustomed to and power reductions have much a more pronounced negative impact than usual as well, meaning it is very easy to go back below glideslope again on a re-correction (”Rhythms” readers will remember that power corrections always come in groups of three).

I was department head, a mid-grade officer with probably about 3000 hours and four or five hundred traps - fairly experienced in other words - and I found it quite a challenge that day.

In the overhead pattern it is customary to turn from downwind to final when abeam the LSO platform, which was nearly as far aft as possible on the ship’s port side. But a turn at that point in 45 knots of wind would have placed me too long on final, well outside the 15-17 seconds the LSO’s were looking for - I would have been waved off. Over a couple of approaches I determined that the proper turn point was abeam the bow on downwind - at a thousand feet or so upwind of the normal turn point this was a sight picture that almost made me ill, it seemed impossible - on a normal approach it would have set me up to land amidships, far beyond the wires. But the ship’s forward speed through the waves and all that wind made it all work out somehow, even if the visuals at the 90 degree position seemed like something out of a circus ride - the sensation was one of somehow being pushed sideways over the tearing wave tops a few hundred feet below.

Once on final the work wasn’t done. Normally the FA-18 was a “fingertip” airplane, you flew it by caress, but that day it felt as though I was wrestling with a wild animal that had its own ideas of what it ought to do. Power control was rough, much rougher than usual as well as I fought to stay on glideslope with everything I had.

It was an unsettling experience, and I was glad when it was over - not that I was frightened per se - it was daytime after all - so much as fully concentrated, fully engaged and when complete, fully wrung out, exhausted.

On deck for the final time I was taxied to the “six pack” area where I was chained down and directed to shut the left engine down in anticipation of a “hot seat” - another pilot would jump into my still turning aircraft, close the canopy, start the left motor and jump back into the pattern.

It was always better to fly out to the ship rather than hot seat in. Flying aboard gave you time to get your stuff together, get caught up with the jet inside the jet, think about what it was you were getting ready to do. You could mentally prepare on deck - you had to in fact, if you were hot seating in - but you could never quite get comfortable. The pressure would always be on to get that jet back in the air, get it moving, get it done, and the first cat shot - not having had the benefit of “comfort time” airborne - could reliably be counted upon to scramble your eggs for a few minutes. I was very happy not to have had to hot seat in those conditions.

Nor was I particularly pleased to see the squadron’s newest nugget standing down by the ladder with an shining, expectant look on his face. I had ten times his flight time, ten times his landing experience and twelve years of being in the game on him. And I had just had my hands full. Now it was his turn.

For my own part, I had some misgivings. I don’t know that if I’d been in the CO’s shoes, I’d have sent a brand new guy out in that environment - it was varsity. But that decision had already been made and my only job was to turn the jet over to him and hope for the best. I got out, he got in, and I climbed back up after him, sitting on the lex and giving him a quick brief on what he’d find in the pattern in just a few moments. How different it would look. He sat there wide-eyed, innocent, completely trusting. I gave him a thumbs up, patted him on the back and gave him my most confident smile, all the while hoping I would see him again afterwards.

It all worked out, the LSO’s were on the ball, the kid did a fine job and met every expectation of a “must pump” even if he did come back even more wide-eyed when he was done than he had been when he left. Went on to be the lead solo for the Blue Angels a few years later, and I believe he’s on his way to squadron command now, if he isn’t there already.

It’s just that sometimes? Sometimes you just don’t know.

I used to know the back story on this pic - I was a VFA-25 “Fistie” after all, and all of us knew that it was a VA-25 Fistie pilot flying a Spad who claimed the second MiG kill of the Vietnam war in 1965, to the never-ending shame of the Midway-based Phantom jocks. But the story of this particular exercise in biological warfare has gone down the memory hole.

Anybody as can fill us in?

(And a H/T from DJVC for the pic!)

Well, I think I’ve strung you along for long enough. I told you what we dream of, a day cat shot loaded for bear, a shack hit on a defended target, a MiG kill on the way home and an OK-3 wire (day) landing with maybe a bacon cheeseburger at midrats to help lull you to sleep. The bombing and the landing would almost be a matter of routine after a while, but the opportunity of a MiG would be something else indeed - no one ever comes out to play anymore. Put them all together, and that’d be a pretty good day.

You could write a book about a day like that.

But you already know how the story ends - and that I didn’t get my MiG. Trust me, if I had, you’d have heard about it long ago - I would have found a way to work it subtly in to every other post or so. Like, “Did I ever tell you about the time I flamed that Flogger? I did? Do you want to hear it again?”

But there was full disclosure all along, right there in the title of the post. And I wanted you to understand, to feel it. I wanted you to remember the environment we operated in: Never at war, never at peace and a madman whose fondest dream it was to shoot one of us down and parade us through the streets of his capital, or else hurl us in to some dark and secret place where evil men could work their worst - hell holes beyond the glare of public view, in places where neither the ACLU nor the Red Cross had the slightest degree of influence. There are things worse than dying as we very well knew, and there was a reason that I learned to count the rounds from my pistol as they left the barrel in training: Having saved the final bullet there would always be at least one alternative to imprisonment.

I wanted to tell you what wisdom we had received from the brave men who’d gone before us, men who set the standard for another generation of wingmen, men who would sturdily bind their fates to our own in the skies above an unremittingly hostile land.

And finally I wanted to try to share with you how very rare the opportunity is to find yourself in an armed fighter, carrying heat when the E-2 controller says, “Bandit airborne out of al Taqqadum, track south.” I wanted you to understand how electrifying those words could be.

But I’m getting a little ahead of myself.

Most box hops were boring - long hours spent tooling around trying not to get complacent and almost hoping that something exciting would happen. Not too exciting though. A man can only take so much excitement.

Knob and I had gotten airborne in good time, gotten our gas and were waiting for the rest of the gaggle to go through the tanker when the word came on the net that, once again, one of the good guys had been shot at and - thankfully - once again the ground gunner had missed. The right number of provocations having finally been accumulated, this would serve as a “trigger” event for a response. It was our lucky day, we were a “go,” before we even got feet dry. I remember that my mouth suddenly went a little dry, and my heart rate increased  - I mumbled the obligatory prayer, “God, please don’t let me mess this up,” as we headed north, completing our combat checklists, each of us thinking our private thoughts in the background, but trying to focus on the task at hand. Trying not to think too much.

It was our job to suppress a SAM battery near the target with our JSOWs, so we pushed out well in front of the rest of the package, just the two of us. There was very little chatter - we’d briefed thoroughly, and Knob, as I have said, was a very good wingman. Most of the hard work in JSOW employment is done in mission planning - weapons delivery itself couldn’t be simpler, it is almost an anti-climax. Once in range we hit our weapons release “pickles,” the weapons fell away from our wings with a mechanical “THWOK!”, spreads their wings and started looking for home. For a moment there were four of us there, where before there had only been two - all flying formation. Pigs away.

We turned a bit out of the way, since it makes no sense to follow a “stand-off” weapon into a hostile missile engagement zone. We did slave our forward-looking infrared pods to the impact zone though, since it was considered good form to have video evidence of weapon effects. Some of the pilots that had brought back video of SAMs cooking off on the ground after a JSOW attack, skipping madly across the terrain as their rocket motors ignited. Our effects were more subdued, but gratifying nonetheless - where once there had been a SAM battery, now a series of fires raged.

The strikers were not far behind us, and we watched their work with professional interest even as we almost automatically switched our weapons system back to an air-to-air mode to scan for airborne threats - unlikely of course, but such is the force of deeply ingrained habit. Having completed our primary mission, we flexed to our secondary role of providing a barrier CAP between the strikers and anything flushing out of the north. The strikers had completed their tasking - “tasking”: funny, these little antiseptics that we use to insulate ourselves from thinking about what it would mean to be on the other end of our work - and turned southbound. We lagged on station for a couple of minutes before sauntering after them at a leisurely pace, closing the door behind as it were.

We were about half-way back to Kuwait when the E-2 told us about that MiG coming south. He was much too far behind us to present any kind of threat, and although he was making good time in a demonstration of eager hostility, I more t han suspected that he’d snap back to the north as soon as we turned to confront him.

Still, it was worth a try to find out. How many chances do you get?

(Have you noticed that when we talk about targets on the ground, we talk about “it”, but when we talk of enemy fighters the language switches to “him”? The first is a kind of duty. The second is more personal. Almost intimate.)

Silently, knowing that Knob would support whatever plan I developed, I worked the math in my head. If I could slow us down a bit - show a little thigh as it were, just a little - he might be tempted across the line far enough that we could turn the tables on him. If he was receiving poor ground control or hesitated even a moment we might trap him across the line and bring him down in flaming little pieces south of the 32nd parallel.

It was considered important that the wreckage land on “our” side of the line.

I did a quick fuel state check with Knob - we didn’t have a lot. Certainly enough to get us to the tanker orbiting overhead the ship if we went there straight away, but not enough for a full blown aerial engagement and a recovery at sea. We’d have to land in Kuwait, get gas there and then scamper back to the ship. A MiG kill might ease the sting of being late for the recovery. With a MiG kill, we might even be forgiven.

When I judged the time was right I called the E-2 and requested a commit to the north. “Stand by,” was the controller’s initial reply before he finally concluded, “Bossman says RTB”

Bossman wasn’t the E-2, he was a very senior officer on deck. By the sound of his voice, my controller was sympathetic - but higher authority had issued the order for us to RTB - return to base. I was shocked and angry, disbelieving. Here we were ostensibly policing the “no fly zone” and there to the north was an Iraqi fighter brazenly violating UN sanctions.

“Say again?”

“Bossman says we’ve had a pretty good day, RTB” came the controllers reluctant reply.

A lot of thoughts go through your head at a moment like that, not all of them printable in a family blog, and not all of them creditable. I knew that if I told Knob to shut down his IFF, he would have done so unquestioningly. I knew that if I threw him a wingflash, he’d follow me to the north, supporting the plan even as we found our target on radar, prepared to employ weapons, execute the briefed game plan. I knew that without the IFF to highlight our position it would be several crucial moments before either Bossman or the E-2 could put it all together. I knew that by the time they did it would be too late - we would have been committed to the engagement with no possibility of safe withdrawal and command would have been forced to throw the full weight of their support behind us. I thought that with a MiG pelt hanging from our harness to go with the SAM battery we’d bashed and the OK-3 wire to come, few hard questions would be asked of us in the debrief.

It would have been a very good day indeed - I had never in 17 years of flying been so close, nor ever (God help me) wanted anything more.

I gripped the stick with my hand tightly, thinking hard, leg muscles already bunching up in anticipation of the g-forces induced by a hard turn back to the north. Took a look over at Knob, flying there in perfect formation - I could sense his equal readiness to fight or flee, the fascinated anticipation with which he in turn regarded my machine.

My thumb tightened on the throttle-mounted UHF switch and even as I keyed it I was not entirely sure what I would say.

“Roger, RTB,” is what I said.

Some people get to do what they want - others do what they must. There would be other days, I thought. Other MiGs.

I was half right.

When the no-fly zones were first instituted following Saddam’s brutal suppression of the Shia in the south, Navy and Air Force fighters filled the counter-air lanes more or less continuously - a needlessly wearing pace of operations, especially after 1992 when the Iraqi Air Force stopped tempting fate by trolling around below the 32nd parallel. By the late 90’s, operations had become routinized, almost to a fault, with large force packages of anywhere between 8 and 20 aircraft assembling for fixed lengths known and “vul windows” and then returning either to airbases in Saudi or back to the aircraft carrier(s) at sea in the Arabian Gulf.

At first we used to have two dedicated lanes of defensive counter-air (DCA), plus a strike package of four to eight jets milling about in the middle supported by at least one EA-6B Prowler for electronic warfare support. To that Prowler would also typically be attached a two-ship of FA-18’s in close escort, while an E-2 patrolled just south of the Iraqi border to provide long range radar search and command and control. Bucket brigades of S-3’s came off mission searching the northern gulf for oil smugglers long enough to bring gas to thirsty mid-cycle fighters in Kuwait, while lumbering USAF tankers filled air refueling tracks in the gulf and KSA as well. In time we dispensed with the dedicated DCA almost entirely, since - apart from the closely protected Prowler - all of the TACAIR in country had a robust self-defense capability.

In the weeks and months immediately following Operation Desert Fox, above and beyond emplacing surface-to-air missile batteries in the southern No-Fly zone, Saddam had taken to randomly launching a fighter or two at the end of each vul window. They would trail the exiting force packages out of “the box” in order to give Saddam the propaganda victory of claiming that his invincible air force had once again chased away the “cowardly ravens” of the coalition. Much thought and no small amount of jet gas was spent pondering ways to catch these bandits in their poaching across the line, but to no avail - the MiG launches were not frequent enough to justify a level of effort operation, and having no real tactical or strategic impact were ignored by the heavies.

But not by us, we few, we happy few, we band of box hoppers. We avidly devoured the after action reports of these sorties with glittering eyes, imagining. Visualizing the tactics that would put us in position to shoot. Seeing the kill.

The things that follow you may find off-putting - peaceful souls will recoil from the bloodlust, and there will be many who disagree with the merits of my argument. I will draw distinctions, always an unpopular course - and I will speak around the notion of an elite.

We do not often talk of these things in the service. Indeed, the national spirit rebels against soi disant “elites,” but the sentiments are nevertheless authentic. Even those who disagree my conclusions will have to concede that - accurate or not - these are the perspectives of those inside the fighter community.

It is not my intent to antagonize, offend, nor even to persuade. My wish is simply to inform. This is, in fact, how many of us feel.

No one finds himself in a fighter by accident - for those who fly them, they are the pinnacle of professional achievement and the very top of a dramatically narrowing pyramid. It’s no mean feat to get commissioned, physically, morally or academically - there were 10,000 applicants for my class at USNA, 3500 or so were “qualified” for admission, the top 2,000 or so were offered positions, 1300 showed up to swear the oath, and just over a thousand of us graduated. The competition is just as fierce in the other commissioning routes.

Once you hit the fleet, getting into flight school is competitive, based on performance and physical qualification, with many ways to fall off the tracks along the way. Of my entering academy class, over half wanted to fly. By the time we’d graduated about 300 still wanted to and were physically qualified - there were 200 billets available. The others did something else.

Leaving primary flight school, perhaps a third of each cohort selects for the jet pipeline, sometimes less. The rest go the maritime route (props) or select to helicopters. There were about 35 students in my primary class - on the first day of class, when asked, “Who wants jet?” all but one of us put his hand up. Six months later only half did, and just eight of us were selected for the jet pipeline.

Once in jets, the competition and winnowing steepens - you’re young, you’re hard charging, aggressive - you want it all. So does everyone else. When everybody wants something - whether it’s a juicy set of orders to a great job or location, or whether it’s a seat in high tech fighter, the Navy has a simple way of deciding who to choose: Performance. I was up against 25 other guys when the time came for seat selection, all of us were “selectively retained graduates” - in the top third of our jet pipeline class when winged, and kept back as instructors for students who were in some cases only a few months behind us in the pipeline. Of those 25 who had finished in the top one-third of their jet class, eight of us got fighters and 5 of us got Hornets. Two of those eight were dead within a year.

Others in the naval service claim that fighter pilots have a reputation for arrogance. Fighter pilots generally concede the point, arguing that even if that reputation was true, that at least it was honestly earned. I don’t want to overstate the point: It’s safe to say that not everybody wants to serve, and of those that serve not everyone wants to fly, and not everyone who wants to fly wants to fly jets, and not everyone who flies jets wants to fly fighters. But even given all that, it’s also safe to say that everybody that flies fighters wants to be there. And I think I’m safe in saying that everyone who has ever flown a fighter wants an aerial kill.

Few, I think, have ever wanted one as much as I. I can scarcely believe that anyone might ever have wanted one more.

(To be continued…)

The Good Wingman

When I was a plebe midshipman at the Severn River Trade School, CAPT Dick Stratton came to speak to us one fine day in the fall. We were always tired in those days, always harassed and always getting “motivational” speeches from officers so senior to us that there was no real frame of reference to their experiences. We often dozed off.

Captains were, after all, unspeakably old men. Ancient.

But Stratton was different, we knew of him. We’d seen him over the summer during leadership courses, in grainy video clips and photos, wearing the gray and black, vertically striped sack that was issued to guests of the Hanoi Hilton prison system.

He’d gotten bagged - or, to use his own words “shot himself down” - on an H&I mission over a northern canal system in January, 1967. He’d unloaded a salvo of 2.75″ FFAR - folding fin rockets - on a hostile convoy of barges bringing supplies to the Viet Cong down country. Some of the rocket fins didn’t open, they interfered with each other and the next thing he knew he’d taken debris down the intake of his single-motor A-4E Skyhawk. It ran rough for a bit even as he turned for the coast, but he punched out when the motor quit. He was treated roughly after capture and more roughly still over the next 6+ years of his captivity. As a POW, he courageously endured the worst forms of physical and mental torture imaginable and survived - like almost every one of them - with his honor intact.

There are no heroes in lost wars, we are not permitted them, not at least for many years afterwards. But the POWs were the next best thing to heroes that we were allowed from what was still a suppurating wound of national disgrace in the fall of 1978 - it had only been three years since the fall of Saigon, and the bad memories, shame and blame-casting were still fresh.

We stayed awake for Dick Stratton. We listened to him.

There was a point in his speech to us when Stratton talked about the qualities he wanted in a “good wingman” - I forget exactly those he enumerated, because he summarized them thus: “If I ever find myself coming out of the weather and about to run into a mountain, the last thing I want to see as I blow up is my wingman augering in right beside me.”

I have to admit that as a young man, it seemed a bizarre image. Wouldn’t it have been better I thought, if maybe the last thing would have been the wingman hollering, “Pull up!”?

I didn’t understand - there was still so much for me to learn.

Although our language would always be different, in time I came to appreciate what the good captain was saying about a good wingman - and it seems such faint praise to label someone a “good wingman,” doesn’t it? To the uninitiated it seems almost a left-hand compliment, as though being a good wingman meant that one was personally incapable of leading.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

A man who flies the jet well may be known as a “good stick,” but this will be thought little more than the grace that God has given him. He may be a called a “good ball flyer” for his skill landing aboard ship, but that is a merely technical skill, admirable enough in its own way, but not particularly special - as at any skill, some will always be better and others worse. To be known as a “good wingman” however is another thing entirely.

A good wingman is a pearl beyond price.

A good wingman is intelligent and disciplined, in the air and on the ground. He knows his machine and the mission he’s fragged for because he’s prepared himself - he doesn’t need to be spoon fed. He knows that it is the lead’s responsibility to develop the plan, and the wingman’s responsibility to support it, so he listens carefully in the brief, and he visualizes the lead’s guidance - he can see it all coming together. If there’s a part he doesn’t get, he’ll ask right there and then, knowing that once he’s in the air, with bandits airborne, the target approaching, the radar warning receiver warbling in his headset, the blood singing in his veins and smoke trails reaching out and weaving through the cobalt blue skies, the time for questions is irretrievably past.

He knows that once he walks out of the ready room and stepped towards the flight deck he has officially passed the GICOT - the “good idea cut-off time.” From that point on he will fly the brief as it was delivered - he will be predictable, for his lead will have much to concern himself with and cannot afford for his wingman to be part of those concerns.

If events unfold in such a way that the brief is proved to be in some way insufficient, he’ll listen up for the lead to call audibles and only then offer suggestions if none are forthcoming. If the lead doesn’t respond or isn’t capable, the wingman will fly wing satisfied, if not entirely content, in the knowledge that perhaps it was a good day to die. Which is what I think CAPT Stratton was saying, back in the fall of 1978.

But these are only pre-requisites - necessary, but not sufficient.

To be a truly good wingman, one cannot merely be a good follower - one must place oneself inside the lead’s cockpit. Understand what he understands, know what it is he’s thinking, predict what he will do even before he asks it. Because a good wingman will, like a computer that plays chess, analyze every possible move, rank and order them according to probability and - knowing the mission, knowing the brief, knowing the lead - anticipate his desires. When the order does comes - whenever and whatever it is, briefed or unbriefed - a good wingman will execute as quickly and indeed joyfully as though the lead had done it for him.

It is very hard to be a good wingman, and an honor to be known as one.

A little more than 20 years after Dick Stratton’s speech in that lecture hall at Annapolis, flying half way around the world at 27,000 feet over a dismal and broken tan terrain, spotted here and there with filthy settlements that looked like nothing so much as rotted teeth I had the honor and great fortune to have a good wingman in company with me on a day of lost opportunities.

“Knob” was his call sign.

(To be continued…)

Every strike fighter pilot worth his salt has a dream, a very simple one: In this dream he will launch from the deck of an aircraft carrier at sea loaded for bear. Having marshalled the forces at his disposal - the dream is scaleable by experience and qualification: The forces at a wingman’s disposal are himself, his jet and the weapons he is carrying, while a strike lead may have 18-20 other aircraft attuned to his every whim - he will navigate his craft towards a target, acquire the target successfully and deliver his ordnance precisely. He will capture the moment of the target’s destruction on video tape in his cockpit, a kind of scalp-taking for the digital age - call it: Proof of death. Having successfully cleared the defenses around the target - if it was worth attacking, it was worth defending - he will regain situational awareness to his team members, reset the formation and head back to the ship, making good time.

And then it will happen: Having transitioned out of air-to-ground mode and back to air-to-air, he will dig something out of the ground on the margins of his radar, something that doesn’t make sense, not one of us, moving fast, climbing - heading our way. Or else the watchful eyes of an E-2 NFO will report a pop-up contact between his group and the ship, altitude low, identity unknown. Or maybe even something at six o’clock, moving fast. Moving very fast. Closing.

The strike fighter pilot will ask terse questions of the E-2, his wingman, do the math quickly in his head, compare it to his pre-briefed commit criteria. Here we are, that is where we are going - he is over there, this is his reported speed, those are the intercept angles. Having done the calculations, his eyes momentarily unseeing even as the airspeed builds on the jet, he will decide: Commit, or run away.

It may sound easy, but it’s not: An off target commit is necessarily defensive in nature - although you’d prepared for every contingency, the mission had been to strike targets that day, not bag MiGs, and for the last several minutes you had been wholly obsessed with the former.

A commit means turning to find the threat on radar, evaluating his composition - one bandit or two? Assessing his position, airspeed, altitude and target angle - am I being led into a trap? Employing weapons successfully and then separating from the wreckage - do I have enough fuel remaining? What if I get in a brawl? All these things sound simple in theory.

But in practice they are strenuously cramped and crowded moments, with the outcome ever in doubt and your very life on the line. It should be simple to find the threat, but sometimes you do not, or there may be others in company you did not find. It should be simple to execute the weapons employment, but sometimes weapons fail, leaving you up close with an agitated foe in a visual engagement, a kind of aerial “Thunderdome” where the rules are simple:  ”Two men enter, one man leaves.” And yes, my love - those are the only choices. 

Everyone wants to paint a MiG planform on his jet, but no one wants to die, or - what might be worse - spend an indeterminate time as the imprisoned guest of a brutal and tyrannical regime. Fortune may favor the bold, but sometimes discretion truly is the better part of valor. And after all, you have by now done what you were asked to do, the target is destroyed - he who fights and runs away lives to fight another day.

But running away is no sure thing, not when a bad guy has angles on you, and perhaps a speed advantage as well. There comes a point when it is too late to commit and your only remaining choice is to strain around in your seat and check between your tails, to wait for the sight of missile smoke at six o’clock, and pray that you can defeat the threat, for when a bandit has closed nearly to weapons release range any turn you might make will only help him solve his problem.

Some times you cannot run away. Some things are best dealt with while they are merely hard, rather than waiting until they are nearly impossible. Nothing is certain in life but death and taxes, and when facing these kinds of binary choices, it is always comforting to have at your side a good wingman.

(to be continued…)

It was late January or early February almost ten years ago when my wingman and I rattled down the cats, each of us carrying one of the then brand-new Joint Stand-Off Weapons (JSOW). In the best traditions of the strike fighter service, we were also carrying an AIM-120 AMRAAM mounted on a cheek station, with a forward looking infrared (FLIR) pod on its opposite. Each of us also had a pair of AIM-9M Sidewinders on our wingtips and of course a full drum of 20mm in the nose. We were ready to strut down main street.

Or we would have been that is, if mainstreet hadn’t got so darn crowded. In the fall of 1998, right when a number of interesting revelations were hitting the airwaves back home - summat to do with White House interns and cigars, if I properly recollect - the national command authority watched Saddam kick a bunch of UN weapons inspectors unceremoniously to the door and decided: This shall not stand, and so forth.

The Big E was already in the Gulf when word turned to deed, with the ship I had the honor to serve on racing to join the fray. We got there in time for the final spasm of a four-day campaign of airstrikes and Tomahawk launches intended by President Clinton to “degrade” Iraq’s capability to manufacture weapons of mass destruction.

I know: Jolly St. Bill thought there were WMD there too. Sometimes it’s hard to get your head around.

Anyway, we got there just as Ramadan was kicking off and having launched one alpha strike in celebration of the holiday spirit, we summarily took a break from further bombing for a lunar month. For his part, Saddam took a break from kite flying competitions and running political opponents through the plastic shredder to pack the UN-sanctioned southern no-fly zone with enough anti-aircraft artillery and surface-to-air missile systems to make walking the airspace over the south easier than flying through it.

Now the southern no-fly zone had become a kind of home away from home for Naval Aviation, at least since 1991. Enraged by his ejection from Kuwait and fearful of a Shi’a rebellion in the unstable south and the ever-restive Kurds in the north, Saddam put tens of thousands of his own citizens to the gun. Bad form, said we, and don’t you use no airplanes to do it with or we shall shoot them down, and so it went for many a desultory year.

We’d become accustomed to sharing the defensive counter-air (DCA) ”lanes” south of the 32nd parallel with USAF F-15’s and F-16’s, and mostly nothing much happened, although one day in 1992 a Viper did bag a MiG-25  who got caught playing the fool on the wrong side of the line, to the communal shame of Ego jocks around the world, who thought that MiG killing was very  much more in their line of work.

When we weren’t running our DCA lanes - nothing duller in the world when no one comes out to play, by the way - the strike fighters among us (as opposed to those simple fighters who hadn’t gotten their cool on quite yet) were doing target “fams,” familiarizing ourselves with potential targets, just for the practice that was in it. We didn’t drop anything of course, and he never much shot at us, so it was pretty good training so long as you didn’t pooch it by clacking into one another at night or suffering some class of catastrophic malfunction that might begin with a Martin-Baker penetration and end with you on deck with dirty boots on the wrong side of the line. Everyone  conceded that of all possible suck scenarios, that would have been pretty much the suckiest.

History, I think, has borne out the truth of that conviction.

But everything was changed, changed utterly after Ramadan in 1998 - a terrible beauty was born. The wide lanes of safety we’d been used to strolling through had become narrow, winding and constricted alleyways, with fixed SAM sites encroaching on the left and right. There were mobile SAMS scattered about too - tracked buggers that could have been almost anywhere, and you had to always honor the threat.

Arty tubes too, as I have already mentioned, and while we were ever-prepared to cram an anti-radiation missile down the throat of anyone who dared to light us up and usually flew well above the effective range of even the large caliber AAA, it was possible to shoot both SAMS and AAA in an unguided mode, and eventually even a poor gunner will get lucky - especially with the airspace so full of aluminum. The “Golden BB” we used to call it, knowing that even at lottery odds, it was only a matter of time.

So anyway, he started to shoot at us rather petulantly, and petulantly we shot back, with him almost always missing and us usually hitting and that was more or less the state of affairs until the 20th of March 2003. Five years of going flying knowing that there was a million dollar reward on your head does great things for your focus in the air, and I can tell you from personal experience that a man can get a lot of job satisfaction from secondary explosions off his hits, so long as he doesn’t think too hard on it.

So there we were, my wingie and I - and a damned good man he was too, intelligent, perceptive and attentive to his wingmanlike duties - and on that particular day the bad guy had done a bad thing, so we were fairly confident that the Boss Man would cry a little havoc and let the dogs of war slip a bit, that having been the general trend over the course of the last several, even as it added a bit to our breathing space.

Prepared for just such an eventuality, we were fragged, briefed and loaded to thump a couple of SAM sites with our JSOWs before setting up a barrier CAP north of the target while a second four-ship of strike fighters - which, by this time included the “venerable” Tomcat - did the laser guided bomb thing on another predetermined target in close proximity to our own.

(to be continued…)