Punk's War

by Ward Carroll

The PAO’s tape finished with the Sidewinder coming off the Tomcat, which, with the range from the carrier by this point, appeared on the monitors as a small dot coming off a bigger blob. To his technical credit, in spite of the distance away and the speed of the missile, the cameraman tracked the weapon for the duration of its travel until it hit the water some six miles abeam of the Boat. The small splash blossomed and the view was enlarged to the camera’s full zoom capability, effecting the high art of cinematic punctuation.

  The PAO stopped the tape and removed it from the player. He slinked in front of Commander Campbell, his body noticeably tensed while within arms reach of the skipper as if he was ready to absorb a blow to the gut. The skipper could’ve sworn he saw the lieutenant bow slightly toward the admiral as he made his way back across the front of the situation table and into the standing crowd—not the traditional show of respect, but more of a smug ta-da move.

  “Put the other tape back in—the HUD tape,” the chief of staff commanded the ensign. “I want to check the range of that Sidewinder shot.” As Steven hurriedly worked to comply with the order, the skipper attempted to regain control of the floor.

  “Admiral, I’d like to—”

  “Hold it, Commander,” the chief of staff snapped. “We don’t need any damage control from you—”

  The admiral interrupted his senior staffer with another wave. “Admiral, are you still with us?” he asked into the speakerphone.

  “Yes, I am, Admiral,” the fleet commander replied. “I’ve actually been having a bit of a sidebar conversation with the secretary, who’s been on the phone the last few minutes with the National Security Council chairman.” Flag Briefing and Analysis grew silent. “The Iranian Ambassador to the U.N. has stated to the chairman that although Iran is opposed to the American presence in the Gulf, this incident is not consistent with the will of the leadership in Tehran. It appears this pilot was acting alone, although we don’t have any real details about why.”

  “So how should we proceed?” the battle group commander asked.

  “Well . . . with caution, I guess . . .” The fleet commander stopped and the sound of whispering could be heard. “Gentlemen, I think SecNav and I know what we need to know. Press on and we’ll be in touch.” The speakerphone fell silent.

  Flag Briefing and Analysis housed a hundred different conversations until the admiral silenced the room by raising both hands over his head. He looked back to the skipper.

  “Is there anything else we need to know, in your opinion, commander?”

  “Well, Admiral, just—”

  “I want to see the rest of the HUD tape,” the chief of staff interrupted. “I want to know whether to attribute the Iranian’s survival to mechanical failure . . .” He shifted his gaze toward the skipper. “Or pilot error.”

  A loud “whoosh” filled the room for several seconds and the other officers watched with morbid curiosity as the skipper grew a rubber ring around his neck and waist. In the course of the discussion, Commander Campbell had gradually developed an inadvertent death grip on the beaded rings that were pulled to inflate the bladders of his life preserver, and the chief of staff’s last comment caused him to tense up enough to unseat both waist-level handles. As the four quadrants of the survival assembly ballooned to their full capacity, giving him the appearance of a campy team mascot during a seventh inning stretch, the skipper forfeited the balance of any dignity he had left.

  Buried under the crowd’s wheeze of suppressed laughter and fighting the urge to run from the room, Commander Campbell reached into one of the pockets of his vest, located a large hunting knife, removed it, and began calmly and methodically piercing the lobes of the preserver. A rush of stale air and a hail of white powder through the wound accompanied each muted pop of the knife as it found a mark. After the fourth stabbing, Flag Briefing and Analysis began to look as if it was filling with smoke.

  “Look,” the admiral said with a cough as he patted the dust from the front of his khakis, “you two flyboy bucks can lock horns some other time.” He stood up. “We’re manning CAP stations around the clock until further notice. Concentrate on the eastern threat sector. This meeting is over.”

  The crowd disbursed, and the chief of staff, caked lightly in white dust, caught the skipper’s attention one last time and mouthed, “You fucked up,” from across the room before following the admiral into the adjoining Flag Quarters.

  Paul followed directly behind the skipper as they made their way out of Flag Briefing and Analysis and aft to the ready room, happy he hadn’t been made to testify and not knowing what to make of the beating his boss had just taken.

  “Let that be a lesson to you, if you manage to survive this little incident,” Commander Campbell said over his shoulder festooned with flaccid black rubber while they continued down the starboard side of the ship. “Don’t ever piss off people above you, ever. The Navy isn’t as big as you might think it is.”

  Paul didn’t know what the skipper expected in response, if anything, so he simply let out an upbeat hum of concurrence.

  “That goddam chief of staff wanted to be CO of the Blue Angels when I was Opposing Solo on the team,” the skipper continued, “and he didn’t get it. He was convinced that I’d personally torpedoed his rush effort.”

  Again Paul responded with a nonspecific noise that politely signaled the skipper to continue with his story.

  “I was a lieutenant, like I had any power. Plus, everybody hated the guy.” As Paul tried to figure out if the last statement had been an admission of guilt, the skipper stopped and looked him squarely in the eye. “There are a lot of assholes in this business. Get used to it.”

  The officers in the ready room had grown tired of waiting for the skipper, so when Commander Campbell finally walked in through the back door, they were caught off guard. The coffee and e-mail lines quickly unformed and all idle conversation stopped as officers scurried back to their chairs like cockroaches scrambling for cover after the lights are switched on.

  After dropping his spent and assaulted life preserver and torso harness to the floor immediately inside the door, the skipper walked the center aisle—Moses through a Red Sea of complete silence. Once at the front of the room, he looked to the duty officer for a muster report.

  “Everybody’s here, sir,” Chum passed from behind the desk on a slightly elevated platform in the front corner of the space, “except for the alert crew topside.”

  The skipper nodded stoically in response while he reached toward his left biceps and the zipped pocket beneath the pencil holder on the sleeve of his flight suit. He pulled out a sheet of perforated computer paper and held it over his head like a tennis player might display a trophy for photographers following a tournament.

  “Does everyone know what I’m holding?” he asked. The answer to the question seemed ridiculously obvious, so nobody spoke. The skipper panned the room and took in the silence. “Let me try again,” he said, voice louder and sterner in tone. “Does everyone know what I’m holding?”

  The response the second time was many nods and a few halfhearted chimings of “Yes sir.”

  The skipper shifted his focus from the group at large to the individual. “Punk, what am I holding?” Punk stammered for a few seconds before the skipper interrupted him. “He doesn’t even know.” The commander redirected his attention toward one of the department heads. “How ’bout you, maintenance officer?”

  “It’s a Maintenance Action Form,” Smoke replied directly.

  “No shit,” the skipper shot back. “What’s it used for?”

  “To document airplane problems so the maintenance effort can fix them,” Smoke said matter-of-factly, confused by the elementary line of questioning. He ran close to Spud in terms of popularity with the junior officers. Both more apt to walk the walk, it was no coincidence that Smoke and Spud were roommates. Few pilots knew the Tomcat as well as Smoke did, and none were able to describe the jet’s complicated systems in poets’ terms as he could.

/>   Smoke and the skipper had never enjoyed any chemistry since the moment Smoke arrived at VF-104 from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. Commander Campbell didn’t think much of pilots who acted like eggheads instead of aviators. Why would a fighter pilot waste time trying for a master’s degree in aerospace engineering when he could be building flight hours in a shore-based squadron? More than once Soup had jabbed Smoke with, “I may not know how to build a watch, but I can tell time.”

  But if the two pilots’ flight time differed by five hundred hours, it was no matter to those who might end up as their wingmen. Smoke was the flight lead of choice—always calm, always ahead, always right. He cut the classic figure of the naval aviator: tall, lean, and mustachioed. His gaunt, chiseled face looked like a coconut nearly sliced in two when he smiled his big-toothed overbite of a smile, an expression that could warm the entire ready room.

  Commander Campbell responded to Smoke’s answer to the original query. “Let me let you guys in on a little something: Our mission is the defense of this ship, and ultimately, our nation. That is why we’re here, gentlemen. Everything we do is to support that mission.” For the second time within the hour, Paul watched the skipper’s face make a sanguine metamorphosis before a crowd, only this time the commander was in control of the situation.

  Punk glanced casually to either side, wondering if he was the only guy in the room with no idea of where the skipper was headed with his diatribe. Obviously he hadn’t downed the Iranian or this meeting would’ve had a more festive slant—a cake with “Way to go, Soup!” frosting and a ship’s photographer to document the jubilation for the annals of naval history, at the very least. Punk caught Biff’s eye, and the big man subtly shrugged his shoulders in a sign of “don’t ask me.”

  The skipper reached for a large black binder labeled 102, perched on the one corner of the podium next to him, opened it, and began to rummage through the MAFs inside. Each of the ten F-14s in the squadron was represented by such a binder. The aircraft data book (ADB) was full of loose-leaf computer printouts that documented problems normally discovered by aircrew and solved by maintainers. The MAFs were placed to the left or the right of the binder, depending on whether they were completed jobs or unfinished work, respectively. Before each flight, aviators reviewed the ADB for the jet they were assigned as a way of anticipating how the machine might act up.

  The skipper maniacally flipped through 102’s ADB sheets until he stopped and dramatically ripped one from the binder. He held the sheet aloft and fired off another question.

  “Gucci, do you recognize this?”

  For all his fashion sense and each perfect brown hair on his head, Gucci was nearly blind, even by RIO standards. From the back row of chairs, he was unable to make out any detail of the item in the skipper’s possession, so he answered, “Ah, no sir.”

  “This is the gripe you wrote after your flight last night,” the skipper said. “Let me refresh your memory.” Commander Campbell’s sarcastic tone intensified with the increased volume of his voice. “On this particular gripe you write: ‘Radar won’t lock contacts in the pulse mode outside of twenty miles.’ And then you indicate the jet is still in an ‘up’ status.” Each MAF had two opposing arrows at the bottom of the form that forced the originator of the gripe to identify whether or not the jet could be assigned by maintenance control for follow-on flights before the corrective maintenance was completed. “So what you’re telling me here with this MAF,” the commander continued, “is that an F-14 doesn’t need a radar outside of twenty miles? Is that it?”

  “Ah, no sir . . .” Gucci replied as he pushed the thin tortoiseshell frames of his eyeglasses up the bridge of his sharp-lined nose.

  “Well? What’s the story then?” the skipper asked. “Why would you possibly make this an ‘up’ gripe?”

  Gucci paused, wondering if the skipper really wanted him to answer. After a few seconds of awkward silence it became obvious he did.

  “Maintenance control said one-zero-two was the only jet we had for the alert,” Gucci said with confidence, convinced he could clear up the skipper’s misconception. “The radar worked well in all the other modes so I figured . . .”

  Like a cop directing traffic, the skipper signaled Gucci to stop speaking. He jabbed his finger toward the back of the room and addressed all but the target.

  “You see? This is exactly what I’m talking about,” the skipper said. “This is the attitude that will kill us.” The skipper stopped pointing at Gucci and took the ADB in both hands, studying the binder for a few seconds. He then slammed the book shut and threw it to the linoleum floor directly in front of him. The startling smack of the tiles when the ADB hit caused many to jump in their seats, even after watching the skipper go through the motions of throwing it.

  “You call the shots, not maintenance,” the skipper railed, upping the decibel level another few notches as he continued. “There’s a reason we sit in here on our privileged asses, goddam it. Sometimes we have to make the hard calls. If you don’t have the guts to stare down the master chief and tell him you think a jet needs some work before it goes flying, then maybe you ought to turn in your wings.”

  It was a valid point, although unfair in the context of Gucci’s situation. No reasonable flyer would have split hairs over a relatively minor radar issue, not when one-zero-two was the last jet available to stand the alert. If a junior officer wanted to see the skipper really go high order, he’d tell him the admiral was just briefed that VF-104 was unable to muster up a single jet for the alert.

  After twenty-seven days on the line, all nine of the squadrons in the wing were having trouble making ends meet maintenance-wise. The supply chain was overtaxed and the sailors were overworked. At some point during operational cycles, idealistic standards and theories of full mission readiness take the fork in the road away from reality, and getting sorties completed becomes an exercise in priorities. The maintenance master chief had looked at young Gucci last night, and in a state of total exasperation asked, “You want a pulse lock outside of twenty miles, or do you want a transmitter? You can’t have both, sir, and without the transmitter you won’t have a radar at all.”

  Commander Campbell let Gucci up off the mat as he turned his attention toward one of the young pilots. “Biff, you flew one-oh-two last night, right?” he asked.

  Biff’s head defensively jerked back a little when the skipper addressed him unexpectedly. “Yes, skipper. I flew one-oh-two on the last event last night,” he replied after a second of mustering his composure.

  “Did you gripe the electrical short in the weapons select toggle on the stick?”

  Biff made the same face of confusion he’d made thirty minutes ago when Punk had told him the skipper was airborne. “I didn’t have any indication of a short on the stick,” Biff said.

  “Did you check?”

  “We ran the normal series—”

  “See?” the skipper interrupted. “Once again, that’s exactly what I’m talking about here.” He tossed his right thumb over his left shoulder and continued. “These jets are only going to be as good as we make them, not them out there in maintenance control.” He swept the room with both hands. “Us in here, we’re the ones who set the standard.”

  The skipper was really starting to feel his oats, and the rush of adrenaline was cathartic after the trouncing he’d endured in Flag Briefing and Analysis. The AOM was just what the doctor ordered: go somewhere and be adamant about something—angry and adamant.

  He shifted the topic. “If I may,” he mused, strolling across the front of the room, stroking his chin in an exaggerated fashion while using his other hand to move part of his thick hair back up off his forehead, “I’d like to know how many guys debrief with the E-2 controllers following a hop?”

  No hands were raised, nor did any of the officers scan the room to see the results of the poll. They all continued to stare holes in the chairs in front of them, afraid that eye contact with the skipper would result in a run
through the humiliation grinder. Besides, he had a point to make; there was no use diluting it with facts now.

  “Look at this,” the skipper said. “Not one guy has given any feedback to the Hawkeyes. No wonder they’re clueless.” The CO stopped and slowly shook his head from side to side. He started to speak again but checked himself with an exaggerated cleansing breath—a dramatic and contrived show of self-control. He reached down, picked the ADB off the floor in front of him and placed it back on the podium.

  He finished the meeting with a final decree: “The next twenty-four to forty-eight hours are varsity time. Ops, I only want those crews with more than five hundred hours in the Tomcat to be on the flight schedule. New guys can suck up the administrative workload and stand the duty.” After one more pass of his regal scan across the frozen faces of the crews, the skipper walked back down the center aisle, stepping over his own flight gear pile before disappearing through the back door.

  The metallic click of the latch as it shut was the starting gun for a bunkhouse rumble of conversations, and as they went along it became apparent that if the skipper had intended to induce a level of confusion associated with the situation, he’d succeeded.

  “What the hell was that?” Punk asked as he rose from his chair and stretched.

  “I have no clue,” Biff replied with a shrug. “I guess an explanation would’ve been too much to ask for.”

  The executive officer, second in command of VF-104, stood and motioned for everyone to be quiet. The skipper had left the raw goods of subject matter scattered at the door of the rumor mill, and now it was the XO’s job to oversee the quality assurance of the production run that would surely follow.

  In the junior officers’ minds, Beamer was a good XO in the clinical sense; he didn’t seem to assert any influence counter to the commanding officer’s. While lieutenants realized they weren’t privy to all discussions between the skipper and the XO, they found it hard to relate to the concept that dissension didn’t involve some level of showmanship. What good was an argument if it didn’t take place in front of other people?