Punk's War Page 5

  They stood for several seconds after the captain disappeared, stunned by the unorthodox intrusion and wondering whether the captain had noticed their ample and very illegal at-sea caches of oral hygienic supplies. Punk finally broke the silence.

  “I can’t believe the captain didn’t recognize the White Album. I mean, we’re not talking about some obscure band here. We’re talking about the Beatles.”

  “Face it,” Biff replied, only a few weeks older in the squadron than Punk, but already permanently labeled nonetheless, “the man has scaled the ladder. He knows punk rock when he hears it.” He trained a finger on his roommate. “And he knows a punk rocker when he sees one.”

  “Hey, I may be a lot of things,” Punk replied, “but I am definitely not a punk.” He was quickly schooled on the folly of self-serving declarative statements in informal settings around the squadron when the rest of the seven in the room formed a circle around him and began chanting, “Punk! Punk! Punk!” At that moment, Rick died; Punk was born.

  That had been almost two years and one ship’s captain ago, and he’d worn Punk ever since. “Rick” actually sounded foreign in the unlikely event someone in the business used it to address him; it became a name reserved for parents, a girlfriend, and normal people.

  And Spud? Those who felt John Wayne’s roles accurately illustrated the military experience might assume that the lieutenant commander hailed from Idaho. Naval history buffs, on the other hand, might connect Spud’s ramp strike with the fact that the back of an aircraft carrier was traditionally called the spud locker because produce was stored in that general area during World War II.

  Actually, Spud earned the call sign in the Philippines. Although he never told the story himself, accounts said he was “forced” to attend a live sex show at a club in the town just outside of the old naval station at Subic Bay. At one point during the evening’s entertainment, the drill was for audience members to throw things at the stage. The nude actress would hide these items in one of two places inside her body before shooting them back at the crowd in an amazing display of pelvic-area muscle control. This was not a new act and fleet veterans came armed with baseballs, taped stacks of coins, and even military-issue flashlights.

  Spud had not been pre-briefed on the program and began to feel a bit left out. Just then, he sensed something against his foot. He looked down at the dirty cement floor and saw a large potato, presumably a refugee from the kitchen a few feet away. Without a second thought, he chucked the tuber over the seven rows in front of him and onto the stage.

  The actress caught sight of it and waggled her finger in the direction from which it had arrived, a gesture that seemed to say, “You . . . bad . . . boys.” But she accepted the challenge nonetheless. She chose Option B and the potato was made to disappear for a time. She moved to the front of the stage, right in the center, and turned her back to the crowd, kicking her hips to the beat of the accompanying loud rock music. She extended her arms over her head, like a swan stretching its wings, then brought them to her side, inhaled deeply and bore down while bending quickly at the waist. The front row was treated to the potato at considerable velocity and more—too much more.

  Ringside delight turned to horror and waste-soiled sailors scattered. The chief in the most direct line of fire immediately began to vomit. The sound of a turntable needle being dragged across vinyl announced the abrupt end of the act, and the actress shrugged and ambled off the stage. Those out of the frag pattern rose in an ovation that, under similar circumstances, only a group of true connoisseurs would have been able to muster.

  And the fighter aviators said it was good. They knew of a Turd in another squadron, so they hailed the new RIO as Spud.

  Still lamenting the stolen flight, Punk opened the door to his stateroom and was greeted by a pornographic video on the twenty-five-inch monitor across from him. The stateroom was completely dark, save the tube’s glow, which highlighted one of his seven roommates sitting immediately in front of the screen where no fleshy detail could escape. The roommate, Trash, was wearing nothing but a towel draped across his lap, and Punk quickly noted that both of his hands were in plain view. The starlet’s moans were barely audible, as the ever-considerate Trash had no desire to disturb those asleep at the early hour. He turned his head toward Punk as the door shut and quietly said, “Money shot coming up. You’ve gotta love it,” before redirecting his attention to the feature.

  God, this place is a shithole, Punk thought as he picked his way the few feet from the door to his desk. Flight suits, running shorts, and T-shirts hung from any device that would support them, giving the impression that the room was constructed of nomex and cotton. Boots and sneakers were strewn about the floor, none in immediate pairs, and damp towels decorated the backs of chairs. The room was always warm because it was located directly below the midway point of the steam-powered waist catapults, and it had a smell just short of offensive—the kind of smell that could’ve easily gone totally south with a missed laundry day. Spud had once asked, “What are you guys doing, making cheese in there?” and the eight residents had fondly referred to their at-sea home as the Cheesequarters from that moment on.

  Punk’s concerns about the mess did nothing to stop him from adding to the entropy of the space. He stripped down to his skivvies and made ready for the rack, setting off his own little uniform bomb while undressing in the area he’d come to regard as his: the near corner of the stateroom along the wall with the room’s only phone hanging on it.

  The lines of demarcation weren’t drawn into the design of the place; they were understood and honored. Each man had a desk that folded down from the middle of a metal wall unit that included a cabinet above, a full-length closet beside, and two drawers below. The units were in two opposing rows of three, and the other two were at the end of the room toward the sleeping area. The racks, arranged in four groups of bunk beds, made up the back half of the stateroom, and a cloth curtain separated the two areas.

  To make the room more livable, the junior officers had covered the floor with five unmatched carpet remnants joined with generous chunks of duct tape and applied self-adhering wood grain-patterned shelf liner to the outer surfaces of their wall units so that the lockers might appear to be made of oak instead of metal. The effect of both efforts to make the space seem less like a ship and more like a den or finished basement had been mitigated over the months by the stains on the carpet, the weakness of the duct tape, and the tears in the contact paper. All that the accouterments did now, despite their creation in a mood of optimism toward the adventure ahead, was add to the Cheesequarters’s clutter.

  Punk padded back to the sleep chamber and vaulted into his rack, the one above Scooter, careful not to trod upon the Most Handsome Man in Naval Aviation during the studied move up to the top bunk: the step, thrust, and twist. He flopped on his back and looking up at the labyrinth of pipes and wires that lined the ceiling waited for sleep to come.

  He heard the catapult shuttle retract again, the same noise he’d heard in the wardroom fifteen minutes before. The Boat was launching more jets. Punk jumped down from his bed and hurried back around to the desk area of the stateroom where Trash remained engrossed in the video. Punk pushed by him and switched the monitor to the PLAT channel.

  “Hey, man! What the hell?” Trash asked indignantly.

  “Chill. I’ve got to check something out.” Punk looked at the screen and saw that a Hornet was about to go flying. He looked back at his seminude roommate. “Aren’t you at all curious about why we’re conducting flight ops right now, Trash?”

  Trash was unmoved by the professional challenge and replied, “Boats launch jets,” as he adjusted the towel covering him. “Jets launch; jets land. So what?” He held his right index finger aloft—Patrick Henry at the Second Virginia Convention—“Porn endures.”

  Punk just shook his head as he reset the media center to Trash’s specifications. Another launch? he wondered as he walked back to his rack. There must be somethi
ng going on up there. I guess the Pats did have the gouge.

  Again he performed the step, thrust, and twist, and again he contemplated the array of cabling and machinery above his head. He glanced at the Breitling: six-thirty here, ten-thirty there. Jordan lived in a world so far away. Did she think of him as much as he did of her?

  They had met three summers ago at a chamber of commerce reception on the resort strip of Virginia Beach. Punk had been invited to the get-together by a neighbor from his condo complex after a poolside conversation about the rut into which his love life had fallen. Jordan was working for a telecommunications firm based in nearby Norfolk, and her boss had ruled attendance at the weekly business mixer mandatory for the company’s marketing and sales forces. The guy who had invited Punk in the first place—a guy, he discovered later, who’d been shot down several times by Jordan in his attempts to get something going with her—introduced them.

  Jordan had not been exposed to the military during her high school and college years in Champaign, Illinois. Punk’s fighter pilot status was the spark that extended the conversation beyond “are you from around here?” and won the first date, but because Jordan was not a fighter pilot or a Boy Scout, his professional standing alone was not going to carry the day—a new one for Punk in the world of girlfriends. His class ring had been the magnet of attraction for the girls he’d been with at the Academy, and his Wings of Gold had served the same function in recent years. With those ornaments as companions he’d always called the shots, sometimes obnoxiously so, and the first midnight request for company one of them had honored had been followed by many more. The boomerang girls, who hung out at the officers club Friday night after Friday night, were a sad joke because of their habit of returning to the spot they’d been thrown from the week before, but when the months wore on and he knew only them, he feared the joke might be on him.

  That fueled his attraction to Jordan, and as the relationship slowly progressed, Punk also began to fear a grand conspiracy by the spurned boomerang girls to create Jordan and turn him into the boomerang boy. He wanted things to happen quickly; she kept a cool head and controlled their pairing on her terms. But Punk’s hard fought battle made the occasional victories worth it all. But that footage was getting old now. The yearning welled up inside of him again.

  Punk thought about what impact the cruise might have on their future. Had the e-mails cooled over the months at sea, or had the innuendoes simply become subtler? Had she finally thrown her hands up in frustration with the abnormality of Navy separations and vowed to keep her life more predictable? He sighed to himself about how the one thing he wanted to control most in his life, a life characterized by his hands on the reins of it, was completely out of his control. The glee the boomerang girls must’ve derived out of this sort of payback—the same boomerang girls condemned to their own reputations and lives of the pathetic chase to become a Navy wife, a chase that normally had no end for them. Weren’t they all laughing at him now?

  The phone rang—never a good sign on the Boat. In the real world, the sound of the telephone ringing was most often associated with optimism. Mom and dad called to say hello. Buddies called to pass on a late-breaking party opportunity. A girlfriend called to say her plans had changed and she was free after all.

  On the Boat, however, a phone call meant one thing: senior officers looking for junior officers.

  “Is somebody going to answer that damned thing?” Punk asked as the phone rang for the sixth time. “Trash, how, ’bout it?”

  “I’m not getting it,” Trash replied. “I’m busy.”

  Suddenly, six variations on “answer it, goddam it,” issued in terse tones by lieutenants who had either been asleep or been near sleep moments before, convinced Trash to get out of his chair and answer the phone.

  As Trash lifted the receiver off the hook following the ninth ring, Punk longed for the sleep he’d hoped to get, and the answering machine they’d once had. A few of the roommates had smugly wired the device with the idea that the phone would never ring, and that they could check messages from time-to-time at their leisure. That didn’t fly. The first time Beads, the squadron’s operations officer, had been unsuccessful in an attempt to speak with one of the officers in the eight-man stateroom, he’d marched down to the Cheesequarters and summarily yanked the machine off its mount and thrown it over the side of the carrier.

  Following his clipped blatting of a pained “dammit,” the symbolic way of shooting the messenger, Trash hung up and walked back to the racks.

  “Reveille, reveille,” he called, banging on each metal bed frame as he passed down the line. “Wake up, gentlemen. Emergency all officers meeting in the ready room, right now.”

  “What?” Biff asked, as the upper half of his ample and unclothed pink body pushed out from behind his rack curtains. His head featured what appeared to be two small tumbleweeds of hair headed in opposite directions. “Why?”

  “The duty officer didn’t say, and I didn’t ask,” Trash answered as he dropped his towel and went in search of some clean boxer shorts.

  The room slowly came to life. Officers grumbled and climbed out of their racks. In short time, stretches and yawns gave way to the buzzing of electric razors and the running of water.

  There were two sinks located side by side, immediately to the left upon entry into the stateroom, but just now only the right one was in use. The sink on the left was commonly known as the “general quarters sink” because it was employed as a urinal during simulated battle stations, and therefore it had ceased to function as a device for human cleansing. Aviators had no official station during general quarters drills; in theory, they would be airborne fighting off the aggressors if the ship was under attack. So, the enterprising aircrew unofficially used the hours of general quarters drills to get some additional rest. But even the sleepiest of rack hounds reached a point where matters of nature could no longer be ignored.

  During GQ it was a bad idea for bed-scarred officers to roam the passageways searching for an opportunity to relieve themselves, as sailors lugged fire hoses and puffed under gas masks while fighting mock disasters. That sort of officer presence would not go unnoticed and certainly would not help to build esprit de corps between the troops and the aviators. There existed an unspoken agreement between the captain and CAG, the air wing commander, that the wing’s junior officers would simply “seek deep shelter” once GQ was called away, and also that any violation of that agreement would lead to an aviator’s detailed understanding of halon and nozzles, the prospect of which was more frightening than the lieutenants’ most traumatic nightmares.

  Compliance was easily obtained. The junior officers’ code implied the avoidance of activities that could impact on sleep opportunities. The rule: “Don’t leave the stateroom during GQ; piss in the left sink if required—just run about forty parts water to one part urine during the process.” That was probably why naval architects put two sinks in the room in the first place.

  Little by little, the shrapnel from the last sets of uniform bombs was gathered and the temporary nomex and cotton structures were brought down as the roommates dressed for the unscheduled meeting. Biff was the first one ready, mostly by virtue of the fact that each of his flight boots, although laced, had rugged, custom-installed zippers up the inner side that allowed him to quickly slip them on and make them snug without going through the lengthy process of lacing them.

  As Biff waited for his bunkies to go through the old-fashioned process of unimaginatively tightening their boots using black nylon shoestrings, he did a head count to ensure nobody was left asleep.

  Seven. Somebody was missing.

  “Where’s Paul?” Biff asked.

  “He answered the phone about an hour ago, put his bag on and then left,” Trash said.

  “Geez, Trash,” Punk returned, “how long have you been up watching porn?”

  Trash smiled demurely and said, “Time holds no meaning for me in the company of my muse.”

  Punk
shifted his attention to Biff’s question and replied, “He’s airborne with the skipper.”

  “Airborne with the skipper?” Biff repeated with an animated look of great confusion. He was the squadron’s schedules officer and few things upset him as much as deviations from the plan, and since the plan was seldom adhered to on the Boat, Biff always had plenty to get upset about. He looked at a sheet taped to the side of his desk. “The flight schedule doesn’t start until 1300 today.”

  “He launched on the alert,” Punk explained.

  Biff referenced the schedule again. “The skipper wasn’t supposed to have the alert.”

  “He jumped in behind me,” Punk said. “Look, I’ll bet this is what the AOM is about. We’d better get going or we’ll be even later than we already are.” He queued himself in the doorway and waited for the well-groomed-but-ever-sluggish Scooter to finish his last double knot. “I’m sure all things will be cleared up once we get to the ready room.”

  “He wasn’t scheduled for the alert,” Biff muttered as he fell in behind Punk.

  Passing through the door to the Cheesequarters like paratroopers bailing out of a transport, the seven junior officers formed into a tight column once in the passageway and began to negotiate the obstacle course that was the 0-3 level. The passageway was divided about every twenty feet by hatch-like openings formed by the frames of the ship, known as kneeknockers because of the damage potential they posed to the human leg. Clearing kneeknockers required a deliberate, semi-athletic effort to pass over them, and during a trip along the length of the carrier, the average male gait took the meter of stride, stride, stride, step; stride, stride, stride, step.

  The VF-104 ready room was the aft-most of the nine ready rooms on the 0-3 level and, like all of them, was oriented across the ship with the front of the room toward the port side. It was a relatively large space, running nearly the entire beam of the carrier. The room featured a red and black checkerboard linoleum floor, an acoustic tile drop ceiling, and a single metal door at each end. The walls were thick with plaques, trophies, and historical command photographs. Across the top of the front of the room was a huge gold-painted arrow mounted in a velour-lined box and above that was a wooden sign with the word Arrowslinger carved into it.