Punk's War Read online

  Punk removed his helmet and perched it on the forward canopy bow. He surveyed the cockpit and the area around the jet to ensure everything was in order: electrical power unit hooked up, air starter in place, fire fighters positioned, plane captain present. Although other cogs in the machine were charged with cognizance of their function within its workings, aviators knew the bottom-line responsibility of successfully getting the fighter airborne rested with them. The higher-ups would never point an accusatory finger at a tractor driver if an alert didn’t get airborne in time because the jet’s starting equipment had wandered off. The crew in the plane would be at fault; or more specifically, the pilot in the plane would be at fault.

  Satisfied things were in order, Punk assumed his standard alert posture: book out and tunes on. He rummaged through his helmet bag and found the six-disc holder that was as much a part of his alert gear as his oxygen mask or G-suit. He decided that something instrumental would be the perfect soundtrack for a dark Arabian Gulf night. He laid the player down on the cockpit’s right-hand console. He then trained his flashlight on the paperback and began splitting his attention between the novel and deciphering the movements outside his peripheral vision. Notification to launch came as often from a frantic, arm-waving flight deck chief as it did from the ship’s P.A. system.

  After a few minutes he craned around to see what Spud was doing. Spud had also assumed his standard alert posture: He was fast asleep. How the hell does he do that? Punk had found an ejection seat to be the one place on an aircraft carrier where he could not fall asleep. He figured it was the combination of the upright angle of the seat and the fact that deep down he feared it might inadvertently go off, and he wanted to be awake if that ever happened. Unlike Spud, Punk was still naive enough to believe he had control of his mortality. In Punk’s world, people didn’t just crash. They fucked things away and then crashed.

  Punk further pondered the wonder of Spud. Spud had entered the Navy as an enlisted man during the early seventies to avoid the draft. He spent two cruises in the Gulf of Tonkin aboard destroyers, mostly in the wake of aircraft carriers, and that exposure piqued his interest in naval aviation. Then, as he put it, his need for achievement eclipsed common sense and he was accepted into the Navy’s enlisted commissioning program, sent back to college, and made an ensign after receiving his bachelors degree.

  During the initial medical evaluation prior to flight training, the flight surgeons discovered his vision was worse than 20/20 and he was declared ineligible to be a pilot. He was not left without a flying option, however. At the time of his commissioning, the Navy had moved toward multi-seat fighters and multi-place airplanes in general, and the guys in seats other than the pilot’s could wear glasses as long as their vision was correctable to 20/20. So rather than return to the ship-driving force, Spud opted for the naval flight officer program and took the leap of faith that allowed him to ride along at either side of the speed of sound while someone else drove the aircraft.

  But shortly after they were introduced, Punk realized Spud’s hands-off-the-controls role in the airplane did not translate into a type-B personality. Spud was about eight years older than most lieutenant commanders by virtue of his prior enlisted experience, and he was now an old-world fighter guy. He came from the days before the ruling elite had changed everything in the names of “tolerance” and “equality,” the days when a man could act like a man, or even a caveman, and no one would think to charge him with “conduct unbecoming an officer” as a result.

  Spud often described himself to Punk as a “politically incorrect Cold Warrior,” further explaining, “We won the Cold War.” During the five deployments he’d made in his time as an officer, he’d survived a brand-new pilot’s removing the bottom half of a jet on the back end of an aircraft carrier, ejecting at 400 knots, one divorce and his current wife’s constant threat of a second one, and the back bar at the Cubi Point Officers Club.

  He’d also come to love his job. He challenged common pilot perceptions about a backseater’s second-class status in the fighter community. He often referred to Tomcat pilots as “nose gunners” and liked to point out how all the classified gear in the jet, “the important stuff,” was in the rear cockpit. “This is a two-man fighter,” Spud would pronounce. “If you don’t like it, go fly Hornets.”

  Much to the delight of the more junior radar intercept officers in the squadron, Spud’s assertion was that it was, in fact, harder to be a good RIO than a good pilot because the RIO had to be even farther ahead of the airplane in terms of decision-making. RIOs, Spud claimed, were in the business of predicting pilot moves and preventing pilot errors. While those sentiments were tough for headstrong pilots to swallow, those who had ever flown with him knew he possessed the talent of which he spoke. Punk had lost count of how many times Spud had saved the day with a timely input from the backseat.

  In spite of his advanced age, Spud had still been born about twenty years too late. Although the act of taking airplanes on deployment and flying them on and off of aircraft carriers was inherently rife with challenges and danger, Spud’s time in the barrel had not been characterized by shots fired in anger, so he was measured by a different yardstick than those tested during protracted conflicts. And historically he’d been a little sloppy with the administrative side of an officer’s duties—the kiss of death in the peacetime Navy. “Airmanship” was only one small block on an officer’s fitness report. Spud’s chances of getting his own squadron or even attaining the rank of commander were very slim, which gave him an attitudinal peace-of-mind that ironically made him one of the Arrowslingers’ more influential lieutenant commanders. He realized this tour in Fighter Squadron 104 would be his last flying job and he wanted to finish on the same tenor that had sustained him throughout his career. No hidden agendas. No need for ready room politics. No traits that might ally the squadron’s junior officers against him.

  Punk shifted his gaze through the bulletproof glass in front of him and worked his eyes down the catapult track. He savored this spot on the flight deck. It made him feel like he truly was in a launch-in-five-minutes status. They’d also be airborne before the alert Hornet, which was always good in the world of bragging rights and competition at every level over every little thing. He had stood Alert 5s parked in ridiculous positions: pointed the wrong way behind the carrier’s island and, in one instance, below the flight deck on the hangar bay. The aviators joked that on the Boat Alert 5 didn’t mean launch in five minutes, but rather five jets had to be moved out of the way to get to the alert bird.

  And why were they standing the alert? Satellites provided twenty-four-hour cable news coverage to the ship’s crew, but that medium didn’t give them any real understanding of their present situation. The heavies at the Pentagon called it being “on the tip of the spear,” but the average aviator knew more about NFL team standings than any immediate impact the carrier’s presence was having on the Middle Eastern dynamic. There hadn’t been any media coverage of the area since the last cruise missile had knifed over the Tigris months ago. The place was dead. Punk could just hear the admiral saying, “It’s dead because we’re here.”

  Okay, he imagined his reply. But that’s lame and boring and it sucks.

  A few crews had intercepted some Iranian P-3s when the Boat had first arrived in the Gulf, but no one had seen anything but commercial airliners since. They could also forget about Iraq. The daily enforcement of the no-fly zone south of the thirty-third parallel was now about as exciting as an instrument round robin over the east coast of the United States. A crew would have to troll over downtown Baghdad at fifty feet to get any response out of those guys.

  The Boat’s mere presence drove the hostility and mandated the spool-up, so there he sat, a prisoner of bhoomp, bhoomp, bhoomp . . .

  Time passed with Punk in the company of only his thoughts. His mind wandered back to his girlfriend. Five A.M. in the Gulf, nine P.M. on the East Coast—what was she doing now? That would depend on the day of th
e week. What day of the week was it? He honestly didn’t know. He fished for some event that might give him a clue, but came up empty. One day pretty much resembled another on the Boat, except Tuesday was laundry day and Friday was pizza dinner day. He couldn’t remember sticking his laundry bag out and they hadn’t had pizza for dinner. It was time for an experiment. He pulled the disc player headset off and yelled down to his plane captain. “Sanders! Sanders, are you down there?”

  “Yessir,” the grease-covered airman returned as he scrambled out from under the jet. “Is something wrong?”

  “What day of the week is it?”

  The youngster scratched the matted black hair under his protective helmet and replied, “You know, sir, I don’t have any idea. I’ll go ask the chief.” Before Punk could object, the airman bounded off to find the flight deck coordinator. Punk grimaced. His subject had escaped from the castle and now the angry villagers would certainly be returning with torches lit.

  Chief Wixler showed up at the side of the jet a few minutes later with Airman Sanders in tow. “Lieutenant,” he said up to the cockpit with his thick Louisiana drawl, “I understand you’ve got a question for Airman Sanders here?”

  “No, not really, Chief,” Punk replied sheepishly. Chief Wixler was not going to let him off the hook that easily. They’d had words a few weeks before when the chief downed Punk’s jet on the cat just prior to launch for tire pressure. Tire pressure. Punk prided himself on being ever mindful of the role of the maintainers in the mission, but that particular call had seemed a bit self-important. Moreover, it had caused him to miss the best Saudi Arabian low-level hop to date. He hadn’t stayed up half the night planning the damned thing to get pulled for tire pressure. The wheels were basically round . . .

  “Sir,” Chief Wixler began with the studied inflection of a senior enlisted man capable of meting out criticism under the blanket of respect, “I can’t have an officer tasking an airman to hunt down a trivial fact when that airman should be vigilantly standing his post by the jet. What if the alert got called away? You wouldn’t want the squadron to look bad, now would you?”

  Punk winced. “Of course not, Chief, but . . .” He thought about putting the situation in perspective, about explaining the context of his simple question—a lark—but he knew that would probably just cause an argument, and he definitely didn’t feel like getting into another argument with Chief Wixler. The flight deck chief was a man to have on your side, not gunning for you. “I apologize, Chief,” Punk finished with a let’s-all-relax chuckle as he rendered an informal salute.

  “You should get yourself a good watch, lieutenant,” the chief said.

  “Actually, I’ve got a Breitling,” Punk replied, displaying to the chief the monster on his left wrist. In the darkness, the chief could tell the pilot had his arm raised, but couldn’t see the detail of Punk’s reference. And he wasn’t about to buy into any rich-boy brand name bullshit.

  “A what?”

  “A Breitling. It’s a very good watch.”

  “Does it do days of the week?”

  Punk looked at the face of his watch as if he wasn’t quite sure of its features. “Well . . . no.”

  “Then how good could it be?” the chief cracked as he slapped Airman Sanders on the back as if to say, “That’s how you handle these young officers, shipmate.” With that the chief returned into the darkness from which he’d emerged seconds before.

  Punk lamely called after him with, “It is very accurate,” but there was no response. Punk imagined Chief Wixler would go to some dark corner of the flight deck and have a good laugh over his radio’s in-house frequency with the rest of the union labor on night check down in VF-104’s maintenance control.

  The lines were not as well drawn as Punk had come to believe they were during his years at the Naval Academy. Back then the world of military theory and leadership class was straightforward: the rank above you was to you what you were to the rank below you. Sure, they’d had discussions about informal chains of command and respecting subject matter expertise as a way to supervise and avoid micro management, but no one had captured the extremes of informal power in the fleet. No one had looked him in the eye and said, “You wanna go flying, officer boy? Well, the Chief Wixlers of the Navy are going to own your ass.”

  No, as he thought about it now, the irony of his “development” at the exalted United States Naval Academy was that it had done very little to prepare him for life in the United States Navy. He had walked into the Yard on Induction Day one hot July morning armed with above average SAT scores and without any better ideas, and he’d left four years later with a bachelors degree, ensign’s bars, and some really funny stories. Surviving the Naval Academy taught you about one thing: surviving the Naval Academy. For the average eighteen-to-twenty-year-old midshipman, the Academy was not about character and core values and professional military acumen infused into the marrow; it was about making the noise stop. What was the minimum effort required not to lose the privilege of getting away for a few hours on a weekend? A 2.0 grade point average, something even the worst crisis managers could manage. The conduct and honor systems? Hey, you rated what you got away with and only the stupid got caught. And how did you know you’d really arrived your senior year? You were sometimes allowed to wear civilian clothes and drive a car!

  But the Academy had defined him, and he knew he’d be foolish to deny it. Plus, he had loved his simple existence then, full of friends, girls, and pageantry. Hell, every day was a dress parade; every weekend was a gala ball. He even signed autographs for tourists on the way to class. America loved them because they were better than other college students, or so the Academy’s leadership told them, although nobody ever really questioned what better meant. They had to be better, right? The broad-brush application of better was the only thing that grounded the frustration and angst of post-adolescent rites of passage squandered in the name of bhoomp, bhoomp, bhoomp. That and the fact that midshipmen were paid to go to college and had a guaranteed job after graduation. Who wouldn’t put up with a little bullshit for that? Social retardation be damned!

  Punk scanned the horizon off the port side of the ship. The fire in the distance from an oil platform’s burn-off stack had faded as the friendly orange hue of sunrise grew to the east and gradually defined the end of sea and the beginning of sky.

  The weather didn’t give the aviators anything to complain about. Winters in the Gulf were generally mild: daytime highs often crept into the seventies and the sea was like glass most of the time, which meant no pitching decks for pilots to contend with while trying to land on the Boat.

  Punk’s first deployment had been a storm-tossed Mediterranean Sea event. The Med in winter was a place of good liberty ports, yes, but cold, swollen seas and ice-laden skies also. The air wing had lost four aviators that cruise, not to hostile fire over the former Yugoslavia, but to Mother Nature’s effects on visibility and her sometimes-unannounced burden on an airplane’s flying qualities.

  Punk noticed movement off to his right. Although the ambient light was still limited in the early morning, the purposeful stride and gold-tinted visor perched on the helmet could only belong to one man on the Boat: Commander “Soup” Campbell, VF-104’s commanding officer. Soup Campbell, former Topgun instructor, former Blue Angel, current pain in everybody’s ass. What the hell? They weren’t supposed to be relieved for another thirty minutes, and Punk didn’t remember seeing the skipper’s name on the schedule. Were they in trouble? Was he in trouble? Where was Chief Wixler?

  “What’s up, skipper?” he asked once the CO got close enough to the right side of the Tomcat to hear conversational tones.

  “Oh, I couldn’t sleep so I figured I’d be nice and spell you guys,” the skipper said back up as he patted the nose of the jet. “Why don’t you two head down to the wardroom and grab some breakfast and then get some more sleep?”

  Unbelievable. This man—who defined “rank has its privileges” with his old-money scion, private
high school, University of Virginia pedigree, his Lexus with FTR PLT vanity plates, and his greasy she’s-with-you-only-because-I-don’t-want-her aura—was now here sucking up a bad deal?

  The gold visor said it all to Punk: the guy was about form over function. Commander Campbell was the only aviator in the air wing—probably the whole seagoing fleet—with a gold visor, and he never even wore it down over his eyes. It didn’t function as a visor; it functioned as a crown. He was a Fighter Pilot, capital F, capital P, and he was the commanding officer now. His time had come. Prince Soup had become King Soup. He was going to pick the nightly movie in the ready room. He was going to decide on the topic of conversation in informal settings, and that conversation would always be about flying fighters so he could use his two trump cards at will: his Topgun experience (“Well, when I was at The School . . .”) and his Blue Angel experience (“Well, when I was on The Team . . .”).

  Most importantly to the career-minded, he alone was going to decide for the Navy who was in and who was out among his charges, and he was quick to lord that power over all with the veiled threat: “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.” The skipper had plenty of staff duty experience up his sleeve and had served on enough promotions boards to know how to write a fitness report that could make or break an officer’s record. And unlike the other two commanding officers Punk had served under, Soup never asked for lieutenant commander input when writing fitness reports on junior officers.

  Commander Campbell was not without redeeming qualities. If you caught him in his coveting phase he was downright enchanting. He could be fascinating with his cocksure swagger and worldly, crowd-dominating, name-dropping anecdotes (“So Senator Glenn says to his aides, ‘We’re not getting on this airplane until Soup gets here!”’), coupled with his gun-metal-blue eyes, thick, gray-flecked mass of hair, and permanent tan. At first, Jordan was even taken with him . . . before she was put off by his need to kiss the squadron wives and girlfriends on the lips at every chance meeting and parting.