Punk's War

by Ward Carroll

  Naval Institute Press

  291 Wood Road

  Annapolis, MD 21402

  © 2001 by Ward Carroll

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  First Naval Institute Press paperback edition published in 2014.

  ISBN: 978-1-61251-553-3 (eBook)

  The Library of congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Carroll, Ward, 1959–

  Punk’s war: a novel / by Ward Carroll.

  p. cm.

  1. United States—History, Naval—20th century—Fiction. 2. United States Navy—Fiction. 3. Aircraft carriers—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3553.A7656 P86 2001

  813’.6—dc21

  00-051967

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48-1992

  (Permanence of Paper).

  222120191817161514987654321

  First printing

  For those on the Boat right now. Never forget what motivated you to walk through the front door of naval aviation, and never allow your squadronmates to forget either.

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks are in order for the following people who answered the call for thoughtful feedback or whatever else I asked for: Vice Adm. A. A. Less, USN (Ret.); Capt. James A. Barber, USN (Ret.), Ph.D.; Stephen Coonts; Derek Nelson; H. Gelfand; Tim O’Brien, Ph.D.; Brad Johnson, Ph.D.; Shannon French, Ph.D.; Cdr. C. C. Felker, USN; Lt. Col. Bryan Riegel, USMC; Lt. Cdr. “Ice” Gamberg, USN; and Lt. “Nose” Dickerson, USNR.

  Special thanks to Tom Cutler of the Naval Institute Press for his help throughout the process of writing and publishing this book, and thanks to Chris Findlay for his copyediting. Thanks to Giles Roblyer, associate editor of Proceedings magazine, for taking a great deal of time to slug it out and for sharing a literary vision with me. Thanks to Fred Rainbow, editor in chief of Proceedings magazine, for his friendship and support. And thanks to Ron Chambers, Naval Institute Press director, for hearing me out and for making the experience around producing this novel entirely enjoyable and rewarding.

  My sincere gratitude goes to Lt. “Indy” Culler, USN, fighter pilot, for her sanity checking from the front lines of this effort.

  Many thanks to my agent, Ethan Ellenberg, for listening to me for the last decade, for his hard work, and for keeping my dignity intact.

  Special thanks and love to Col. Ned Carroll, USMC (Ret.), for his sage input, to my wife, Carrie, who spent countless hours providing constructive criticism, and to my boys, Hunton and Reid, for patience and wisdom well beyond their years.

  ONE

  “Punk, wake up, goddam it!”

  No. Not now. He wasn’t up for the hostility right now. In spite of the noise of the phone constantly ringing at the duty desk and the maintainers doing full-power engine runs above his head and the incessant switching between red and white lighting and the blaring soundtrack and flash of the movie on the screen just feet in front of him and the angle of his ready room chair, he’d slipped into the most desirable of all worlds: Not here.

  His body mustered a strong resistance toward the transition back to here. He attempted to counter the hostility with some fleet-savvy witticism, but all he could think to mutter through his pasty dream-world mouth was, “Help me, Mr. Wizard. I don’t want to be on the Boat any more.”

  The Boat, the three-billion-dollar instrument of American foreign policy, was inseparable from its hostility—not the hostility that might be unleashed by a flurry of bomb-laden jets following failed diplomatic efforts, but the hostility resident inside the hull, the hostility of wake-ups punctuated by “goddam it.” Though the majestic pace of the huge ship on the dark, calm seas of the Northern Arabian Gulf may have projected a certain tranquility to the dhows and freighters that passed in the distance, all was not quiet aboard the aircraft carrier. In fact, all was never quiet aboard the carrier. Somewhere between the ambitious goal of protecting the rights of the free world and simple job preservation was the buzz of the Boat—that hostility. Regardless of the time of day or the carrier’s location, there was always some load being sweated, inane or legit, and some commander running around frying a circuit about the latest tasker from any of the seven numbered fleet staffs, or railing with a handset to each ear because of the admiral’s “concerns.”

  “Punk, get up, you lazy, pampered nose gunner.”

  He thought of Duty, the pie-in-the-sky higher calling admirals and statesmen claimed would make the hostility tolerable at times like this. They said a sense of Duty would put the whole thing in perspective. And while he was busy buying the program, he might just arc around the Naval Academy grounds and carve a few monuments and get all teary-eyed. Duty, honor, country; honor, courage, commitment—boilerplate, designed to motivate him from place to place all day long. The actual words weren’t important, just their rhythmic cadence: bhoomp, bhoomp, bhoomp.

  “C’mon, Punk. We have to get on the roof and relieve the Alert 5 crew.”

  Sensing the battle lost, he allowed himself the luxury of another quick mental excursion: It had been so damn long since he’d felt the warm, softness of the inside of Jordan’s upper thigh, or brushed his nose across her.

  “Yo, Punky . . . wake up, sleepy time . . .”

  What else really mattered? Nothing. Not a thing. And the great thinkers definitely didn’t develop their theories on cruise because if they’d tried they would have come up with only one finding: Sex is the only thing that matters. Life flashes at the point of imminent demise? He wanted his highlight reel to be a collection of women he’d known caught on their backs in the beautiful act of arching up and hauling their panties down across their gorgeous rumps.

  “I see you smiling, Punk. I know you can hear me. You’d better wake up, asshole, or I’m going to go oops upside your head with my helmet.”

  The lieutenant finally gave a reaction to the hostility with a full stretch of his lanky six-foot-one-inch frame, and then he brought his long arms down from above his head and grabbed the scuffed toes of his flight boots. “Then who would you get to fly your ass around the beautiful Arabian Gulf, Spud?” he asked. He sensed he was perhaps semi-aroused after his brief but enjoyable repose so he chose to wait out the situation in the sitting position for a few moments. “Punk” was demeaning enough; he didn’t need his call sign modified to “Woody,” or the less-subtle but oft-assigned “Boner.” And his backseater’s caustic tone made it that much harder to relieve himself of the relative warmth of his faux-leather ready room chair.

  Actually, the chair he’d fallen asleep in wasn’t his; it belonged to the squadron’s executive officer, the second in command. As Punk was only a lowly first-tour lieutenant, his chair was located more in the middle of the thirty-seven identical chairs in the ready room, but when you stood the 0200–0400 Alert 15, there weren’t too many people around to care which chair you occupied. The XO’s chair was in the front row and came complete with a leg-stretching ottoman fashioned from an old hydraulic fluid can covered in red naugahyde, the material the parachute riggers used to cover everything.

  He ran his hand through his sandy blond hair, too long for anyone claiming the modern standard for military bearing, and glanced at the lineup on the
white dry-erase board behind the duty officer. Who were they swapping with? Oh yeah, Bill Thompson and Biff. Punk figured he’d better get himself up to the flight deck in short order. He could see Biff checking his watch every few seconds and impatiently craning around in the ejection seat to see if his relief had made it to the airplane yet. Biff, the Big Fat Fighter guy, was basically a good man, one of his seven roommates, but he was not a stoic. And Punk didn’t feel like receiving the business end of a whine right now. It was too early, or late, or whatever the hell it was.

  He finally rose and felt the price for dozing in the sitting position. He winced, bent over to stretch out his lower back and glanced at his everything-proof watch: Big hand on seven after, little hand on four. A saying popped into his head, something admirals used when counseling groups of sailors about their conduct on liberty: Nothing good happens after midnight and before breakfast.

  The crew grabbed their helmets along with nav bags full of charts and kneeboard cards and headed out of the ready room, but not before Spud paused to verify the film’s best boy and gaffer line-up during the credit roll. “Those two are the best team in the business,” he announced to no one in particular.

  They continued outboard, down the passageway toward the ladder that led to the flight deck. The two aviators walked with the grace of football players coming out of the stadium tunnel before a game: cool, but encumbered. The narrow space they traveled darkened from red lit to completely black as they reached the final bulkhead. Punk extended his hand to work the hatch that opened to the outside, but he felt nothing. The hatch was already open. The blackness outside was merged with the blackness of the unlit passageway. God, it’s dark, Punk thought. If we have to launch let’s at least wait until the sun comes up, please.

  The two aviators obediently followed the cones of light emanating from their flashlights as they climbed the short way to the flight deck. They moved slowly and deliberately so they wouldn’t get nailed by the nocturnal predators on the Boat: open deck hatches, ankle-high fuel hoses, razor-sharp edged composite wings at eyebrow level, decks without railing, and hanging fins that were just as effective at slicing through skin as they were at guiding missiles toward enemy fighters. Punk’s last flight instructor in Meridian liked to tell of the brand-new pilot in a Vietnam-era fighter squadron who’d disappeared into oblivion by walking over the edge of the carrier one night while engaged in the seemingly innocuous act of preflighting his jet.

  The F-14 they were about to strap themselves into was spotted on catapult three, located about the middle of the ship toward the port side, which made the jet easy to find. Punk caught sight of their airplane once through the tangle of aircraft and support tractors around the edge of the deck and noted, that as the jet stood framed in the yellow tint of limited floodlighting from the carrier’s island, it looked appropriately like a lone animal watching out for the rest of the sleeping herd.

  In spite of his fatigue, he allowed himself to reflect on and be moved by the lines of the Tomcat, evidence of a fighter pilot’s learned narcissistic sense as much as anything else. Where did gloved hands end and sticks and throttles begin? The question was moot.

  Christ, boy, how cliché. The thing Punk feared as much as a dual-engine flameout right after takeoff was becoming one of them, the twerps who showed up at the front door of flight school with a blank slate of a personality and slowly allowed the business of naval aviation to define every facet of their existence—guys who constantly used expressions like “the wife must’ve rolled in hot on you over that one” and “check six.” He chided himself for his entry into the arena of the dorks. Who did fighter pilots impress? Boy Scouts and other fighter pilots.

  Punk remembered that first squadron party, where Jordan had demonstrated her disgust with the self-centered, one-dimensional aspect of it all, amidst the Wings of Gold needlepoint and aviation line art that seemed to dominate career fighter pilots’ homes. She spent the night asking all the wives wearing miniature Wings of Gold pins how they had performed during flight school, and whether they found flying jets to be a challenge. There was no scene. None of the handful of well groomed, if not attractive, wives had demonstrated the sense to be offended by his girlfriend’s get-a-life jab. Punk saw the women differently after that. Only Jordan had a way of reorienting Punk, at times changing his long-held opinions with a simple statement or a gesture. She would dismiss his favorite song as bubble gum or sneer her distaste for a movie and everything would change in his head. And where the wives had originally seemed full of charm and grace, they came to reek of need and servitude.

  And maybe that’s what career fighter pilots wanted out of their mates. As the crews had worked to solve the world’s problems during a deployment’s worth of meal conversations, the topic had once landed on “the most desirable trait in a wife.” While the junior officers had idealistically agreed upon “garners respect” (which barely topped “decent ass”) as their platform from which to launch a lifetime of companionship, the lieutenant commanders and commanders across the table snickered and countered with “loyalty,” which Punk found sadly curious, but congruous.

  He was different, or at least he wanted to be different. Loyalty was a trait one sought in a dog, not a wife. Not that he would be at peace with his wife running around on him, but why would she? He was going to be the most tolerant, understanding husband ever. And she would be married to him, the catch formerly known as world’s most eligible bachelor.

  After knowing Jordan, Punk felt he could never be attracted to a woman who didn’t try to stake her own claim. She had her own goals and aspirations, her own career, her own circle of friends. She was cocky like he was cocky—cocky in a good way. She was capable of changing his opinions, for crying out loud.

  He needed just two days with her now. Two hours. Two minutes.

  Spud didn’t make it out of the catwalk as cleanly as Punk had. The backseater tripped on a tie-down chain several steps after his arrival on the non-skid; the unmistakable sound and expletive that followed caused Punk to chuckle and yell sarcastically back, “Watch out for those chains, Spud.” Punk looked around and saw that Spud’s flashlight had spun in his hand as he fell and was now illuminating his bald pate. Spud continued to curse as he picked himself up off the flight deck and, once fully upright, he used his flashlight to illuminate his left hand and gestured an “Okay,” which slowly morphed into the bird.

  Punk made it to the catapult track, stepping gingerly on its greasy surface. He crossed under the jet and stood at the base of the ladder on the left side of the nose. “Hey, fat boy!” he shouted up to the pilot seated in the front cockpit of the fighter. “Time for the first-string team to come in.” In response the pilot in the jet redirected his flashlight from the paperback he was reading toward Punk’s face. “Christ, Biff, so much for night vision.”

  “You’re late.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Yes, you are. My watch is set to GPS time and it shows you’re exactly nine minutes and thirty-eight seconds late . . . and counting.” Biff threw his meaty hands above his head. “I’m still sitting in this jet, aren’t I?”

  “Well, you can blame Spud,” Punk shot back as he ascended the ladder. “He woke me up late. I think he lost track of time watching Cheers for Reggie.”

  “Spud’s flick addictions do not relieve you of your military duties, Punk,” Biff said as he strained to undo the Koch fittings near each shoulder. He was a big fellow, somewhere between fat and husky (a word Punk’s mom had always been fond of). Punk watched Biff deftly torque himself out of the jet and noted that the big pilot was actually kind of nimble. Biff was very self-conscious about his genetic plight and waged a constant battle with the Navy’s weight standards. His peers rode him hard on the issue, but that battle ultimately earned him respect in the squadron’s otherwise insensitive world. He ate like a rabbit and worked out like a professional athlete, never scoring less than “outstanding” on the semiannual physical readiness test. Neverthele
ss, he remained the Big Fat Fighter guy.

  As they passed while making the switch into the front cockpit, Punk caught how Biff’s face squished out of the front of his helmet. In fact, he stared a beat too long at the visage before him. Biff sensed the judgment and said, “Screw you, Punk.”

  “What?”

  “I love this. Show up late and give me shit. I’ve lost twenty pounds already this cruise. It’s not easy, you know.”

  “Biff, Biff, relax.” Punk patted him on the right shoulder. “Spud and I were just talking about how good you look.”

  “I’ll bet you were. Speaking of Spud, where is that old fart? My man Bill back there is as eager to get into the rack as I am.”

  “Now that I seriously doubt,” Punk answered as he worked himself into the ejection seat. “Nobody has logged as much rack time as you this cruise.” He fished near his left hip for the connection to his oxygen mask, and once the two halves were mated, he tested the system for good airflow. He then synched down his considerably loosened lap belts and asked, “How’s this jet?”

  “The oil pressure gauge was inop when we turned the jet about two hours ago so I had the ATs stick in a new—aaahh.” Spud made his presence known by smacking the back of Biff’s helmet as he passed on his way toward the backseat. “You’re funny as shit, asshole. Glad you found us. What does that make? Four hundred-plus viewings of Cheers for Reggie?”

  “No, Biff. You’re confused with the four hundred-plus times I’ve had to kick your ass since you joined the squadron,” Spud said with an exaggerated flex of his runner’s-frame forearm. “And I hope you’re not complaining to my pilot about our being slightly, and I emphasize slightly, tardy.”

  “You guys are late, and the day your skinny bag of bones has the ability to kick my ass is the same day that Punk beats me in a dogfight.”

  “Well,” Punk said, “that day was yesterday.” Biff remained crouched down for a second on the front step and pondered Punk’s words. Recent aviation history clicked in, and he shook his head in disgust and dismounted the airplane without another word. In turn, Spud climbed into the rear cockpit and reviewed the jet’s backseat status with Bill Thompson. After a short time, lanky Bill followed husky Biff back down below to attempt whatever sleep he might be afforded before the daily grind kicked in again.