Punk's War

by Ward Carroll

  The phone rang but was never picked up on the other end. “He’s got the damned ringer turned off again,” Smoke muttered to himself. He hung up and dialed the ready room.

  “VF-104 ready room, Lieutenant j.g. Francis.”

  “Einstein, this is Smoke down in air ops. I need to talk to the skipper, but he’s got the ringer to the phone in his stateroom turned off. Is the XO back in the ready room yet?”

  “No, I think he’s still turning the jet with Beads while maintenance troubleshoots the fuel leak.”

  “Okay, I need you to go down and bang on the skipper’s door and tell him to come down here immediately.”

  “Roger.” Einstein hung up the phone and raced out of the room without a word to the crew briefing for the 0400 go.

  Fuzzy knew he needed some help. He also knew he probably wasn’t going to get all the help he needed from his RIO. Turtle was a lieutenant commander and currently VF-104’s administrative officer, but this was his first tour in Tomcats, having served previously as a bombardier/navigator flying the now-decommissioned A-6 Intruder. He was a reticent sort with nondescript features and distinguished himself only in the phlegmatic way with which he carried out the business of life.

  Fuzzy asked Turtle to switch from Approach to Departure to talk to their rep in air ops, and then keyed his radio to talk to Punk on the squadron’s common frequency.

  “Punk, where are you?”

  “I’m hanging out by the marshal stack, trying to pretend like I’m headed for the CAP station.”

  “I’ve got a question for you: Have you ever had a wheel come off when you touched down?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Because I just did. Do you think you could sneak overhead the ship and look me over?”

  “I’m on my way.”

  Einstein was in the middle of his third series of raps on the skipper’s door before the skipper yanked it open and stood in the opening, clad only in his boxers, half-asleep and fully miffed.

  “Excuse me, sir,” Einstein dutifully started. “I’m sorry to wake you. Smoke has requested your presence in air ops. We have an emergency in progress.”

  “Do you think leadership just happens?”

  “What’s that, sir?”

  Commander Campbell straightened himself up, and raised his hands to drive his point home in synch with the meter of his speech. “Leadership takes endurance. Endurance requires sleep. Sleep requires—” He was interrupted by the ringing of the phone on the night stand next to the head of his rack. The skipper shut the door, leaving Einstein standing in the passageway and unsure of what to do.

  Didn’t Smoke say the skipper had the ringer turned off? the young RIO wondered. He must’ve clicked it back on before he answered the door to cover his ass. His head slowly moved toward the closed door as he strained to hear the skipper’s side of the conversation, and eventually he had his ear against the sheet metal hatch. The moment he touched the door, one of the Boat’s crack two-man security teams came wandering around the corner in the middle of their normal rounds. Einstein had his back to them and didn’t hear their approach.

  The question, “Can we help you, sir?” asked by the taller and leaner of the two, startled Einstein and caused him to jump back from the door. The two stood shoulder-to-shoulder, doing their best to appear intimidating. They were each dressed in dungarees and a ship’s ball cap, and the taller one sported a radio on one hip and a holster on the other.

  “Jeez, you guys scared me.”

  “Why don’t you try knocking, sir?”

  “I already did. I’m waiting for my CO to get off the phone.”

  “Does he know you’re out here?”

  “What?”

  “Does your CO know you’re out here, in front of his stateroom?”

  “Yes, he does.”

  “Why did he leave you out in the middle of the passageway if he knows you’re out here? Why didn’t he invite you in?”

  “I don’t know,” Einstein replied, becoming a bit perturbed with the line of questioning from what appeared to him to be nothing more than two nosy enlisted men.

  “I know,” the other one said, running his thumbs along the inside of his belt line. “The fact is your CO doesn’t know you’re out here.”

  “Look, he does know I’m out here.”

  The door cracked open. “Are you still out here?” the skipper asked angrily. “I’ve got a meeting with the admiral now. Go back to the ready room.” The door slammed shut.

  As Einstein turned to head back to the ready room, the tall petty officer grabbed him by the shoulder. “It’s not good to get caught in a lie, is it?”

  “What? You heard him. He knew I was out here.”

  “It sounded to me like he didn’t know you were out here.” The tall one glanced at his teammate and chuckled. “Look, I can see you’re just a jay gee, and you’re probably new to this business of being at sea, so I’m going to give you a break.” He jiggled his badge and his teammate’s badge. “You see these? Carte blanche.” His hand moved from his badge to his holster. “We’re authorized to use deadly force if required to ensure the security of this ship.”

  Einstein shrugged and hurried back toward the ready room. He made it across one kneeknocker when the security team leader called after him, “Don’t forget, sir. Deadly force.”

  “You’re the senior man available right now from VF-104,” CAG said to Smoke. “Come with me to the admiral’s cabin.”

  “Sir, I just got off the phone with the skipper,” Smoke protested. “He’ll be down here in the control center in a second.”

  “We don’t have a second,” CAG returned. “The admiral has summoned me, and I imagine he wants to talk about your jets, and he may want details that I can’t provide, not having a Tomcat background. Let’s go now.”

  On his way out of the room, Smoke threw a tidbit of advice at the air ops officer: “You’d better think about stripping the wires and rigging the barricade.”

  The mention of the word “barricade” sent shots of adrenaline through every aviator within earshot. The barricade was the answer to the question of how to make a night carrier landing even more dangerous. Instead of catching an arresting wire, airplanes flew into a net-like device jury-rigged across the landing area, a one-time proposition that didn’t allow the luxury of a bolter.

  Four thousand feet over the Boat, Punk joined on Fuzzy and pulled up as tight as he could under Slinger 114’s damaged right side. Spud shined his flashlight on the area of the main strut.

  “Yep, your wheel is definitely gone,” Punk said over the squadron’s common freq. “And your brake lines are dangling. What are your hydraulic gauges reading?”

  As Fuzzy turned his head to look at the hydraulic gauge, the master-caution light flashed as if on Punk’s cue, sending blinks of yellow light dancing off of every surface that would host them.

  Turtle took notice of the light show from the front cockpit, and asked, “Whaddaya got, Fuzz?”

  “Damned if I know. Hold on a sec.” Fuzzy looked down at the enunciator panel on his right console for a clue about what had triggered the light and noticed an amber “hyd press” indication. He twisted his head back the other way and looked just beyond his left knee, trying with uncooperative and bloodshot eyes to focus on the twin hydraulic gauges, each no bigger than a quarter. Normally, the two indicator needles would form a straight line displaying that both hydraulic systems were fully charged at three thousand psi. As he studied the gauges now, his heart went to his throat. The left needle was drooping to six o’clock; one of his hydraulic systems, in this case the more important one, which controlled the normal operation of the flight controls, the tail hook, the landing gear, and the wheel brakes, was reading zero psi. The system had lost all of its hydraulic fluid through the busted brake lines.

  Like a patient who feels intensified symptoms after the diagnosis is rendered, Fuzzy sensed that the stick was beginning to feel mushy. “Okay, Turtle,” he passed over the intercom
in a calm voice he hoped would belie the growing intensity of his heartbeat, the noise of which was pounding in his inner ears, “break the pocket checklist out and give me the steps for ‘combined hydraulic failure.’”

  “I’ve got you covered, partner,” Turtle responded with an excessively chipper tweet, trying his best to sound upbeat and optimistic but lacking the people skills to pull it off. He was the kind of guy who could accurately repeat a funny joke but drain the life out of it with his presentation. In this case he missed the mark of calming the pilot and actually left Fuzzy momentarily wondering whether his RIO fully understood how dire their situation was. “I’ve been looking at the stub main mount procedures, but I’ll turn to the hydraulics section.” He slowly flipped through the PCL, and added another lump of coal to Fuzzy’s stocking by saying, “Oh, before I forget, if I read the procedure right, it looks like we’re going to have to take the barricade.”

  With that bit of news, Fuzzy promptly placed the contents of his bowels into the seat of his flight suit.

  The admiral struggled to grasp the complexities of the situation. His intelligence officer and surface ops officer were telling him to fight the war, his chief of staff and a lieutenant commander squadron rep were telling him to land the jets, the captain was on the speakerphone saying from the bridge that his deck crew might have to rig the barricade, whatever that was, and the air wing commander stood apparently deep in thought, but without counsel.

  “Are you telling me one of our jets left station without permission?” the surface ops officer indignantly asked Smoke.

  “Commander, with all due respect, did you hear me when I said we’ve got an airborne emergency to deal with? That should trump the threat of an Iranian attack.” Smoke turned toward the intelligence officer and asked, “When was the last time we saw them fly at night?”

  “When was the last time they flew overhead an aircraft carrier and shot a missile at one of our jets?” the intelligence officer replied. Smoke looked at him like a surgeon who’d located an inoperable cancer, with feelings of both relief at the discovery and frustration with the inability to do anything about it. It was now obvious who was fanning the flames of imminent conflict, but from the admiral’s slight nod in response to the commander’s retort, it was also obvious that the battle group commander found the hawkish stance sage to the degree it was not readily dismissed.

  “We can’t have pilots deciding for themselves when to leave station,” said the admiral, his back now turned to the small gathering as he blankly stared at the god’s-eye view tactical data link display perched on the corner of his desk. He’d set the range scale to cover the top half of the Gulf region, cutting Qatar in half at the bottom left and barely squeezing in Baghdad proper at the top. The only things moving on the display were a few symbols close to the north and east of the ship’s symbol. Moving or not, all the symbols presently displayed in the link were blue, indicating they were all friendly.

  The chief of staff knew the admiral’s sentiments were horrifically foreign to the fighter pilot, who was not young but still unlearned in the realities of staff work, and as Smoke leaned forward to respond, the captain paternally placed his hand across Smoke’s chest and began to speak.

  “Admiral, this is a safety of flight issue,” the chief of staff said pedagogically, hoping a few buzzwords would break through the haze and elicit a proper reaction. He’d endured with the admiral a pre-deployment training track designed to familiarize the future battle group commander with his command’s capabilities and his responsibility for their employment, and he knew that the admiral had been trained that the phrase “safety of flight” was a fire alarm best not ignored. “We need to land one-zero-three and then take one-fourteen in the barricade.” He moved to the data link screen and scribed an arc around the eastern side of the carrier’s symbol. “We’ve still got two Hornets and a Tomcat up there, not to mention the cruiser under them. That’s plenty of firepower to fight the intelligence officer’s war.” The chief of staff shot a quick look toward Smoke to ensure that the younger aviator had noted that the old eagle still had some fighter pilot left in him.

  The admiral worked “safety of flight” through the midterm storage areas of his mind and repeated the three words several times aloud. Naval aviation had seemed so automatic during his days on destroyers and frigates. If you needed a jet for ship’s services, you requested one via message and it showed up. He suddenly was overwhelmed by a paralyzing sense that he was out of his element. How could they be five months into the deployment and never have been forced into this sort of situation before? Had they just been lucky or was he in the middle of a once-in-a-career night?

  These aviators were such enigmas to a surface warrior. They might demonstrate immense talent and professionalism one minute and extreme self-servitude or recklessness the next. Only naval aviators could squander the public trust courageously earned during Desert Storm with a three-day drunken binge six months later at a convention in Las Vegas complete with seventy-some cases of sexual battery. The reverberations of shame and controversy spread beyond the flyboys and hit the entire Navy, and resentment from other warfare communities was still strongly felt years later. But regardless of the assortment of combatant ships that comprised it, a carrier battle group was about carriers, and carriers were about airplanes, and airplanes needed aviators. Aviators were the power behind the Navy’s strike warfare capability, like egotistical high-profile quarterbacks nobody cares for off the field but everybody turns to when the big games need to be won.

  The admiral was reminded of leadership’s lonely burden, of how, in spite of being surrounded by years of expertise, only he could make the decision. He thought of the frigate Stark getting hit with an Iraqi air-to-surface missile and the cruiser Vincennes inadvertently shooting down an Iranian airliner and reflected on the infamy their commanding officers were bridled with. He felt ill prepared at that moment to be in command and wondered if there could ever be a better time. In a queer juxtaposition that demonstrated to him the irrepressibility and independence of the mind, he reflected, not on the teachings of Sun Tzu or Clausewitz, but of his mother telling him, “There’s never a good time to buy a puppy. You just get one and start taking care of it.”

  He turned from the screen and passed his eyes across each officer’s face before him, as if tallying an unspoken vote. He stopped at Smoke and engaged the fighter pilot in a ten-second, resolve-testing staring contest before asking, “If I allow both Tomcats to land, how soon will I have two F-14s back on station?”

  “As soon as the next event launches, sir,” Smoke answered while simultaneously performing a mental inventory of VF-104’s available aircraft to ensure what he’d said was true. One-fourteen was out of the hunt, obviously. The XO’s leaky jet, one-oh-six, could probably go either way. That left one-oh-three to be turned around to join the squadron truck, one-oh-five, for the 0400 launch. Then Biff and Bill Thompson would land in one-twelve and they could use that jet with the repaired one-oh-six for the event after that. And those pairings would have to last for the rest of the flight schedule: one-oh-three and one-oh-five relieving one-twelve and one-oh-six relieving one-oh-three and one-oh-five, and so on.

  Twenty-seven days without a break was about as long as ten Tomcats went these days. Five of the Arrowslingers stable were crowded below in the hangar bay, including Slinger 102, the shot in the squadron’s collective foot courtesy of the skipper’s insistence the jet was hard down for the phantom electrical short, in spite of the maintainers’ assertions to the contrary. The other four awaited parts or technical assistance from civilian experts who would be arriving once the ship pulled into Bahrain in six days.

  Bahrain. What would this little crisis do to their port visit? Would it be canceled? Smoke fought the urge to ask the Admiral if they were still on track for some liberty as he picked up the nearest phone and dialed VF-104’s maintenance control for an update on the health of their air force.

  “Tower, one-fourteen i
s declaring an emergency,” Fuzzy passed on the Approach frequency.

  “Yeah, I know, one-fourteen,” the air boss replied. “Your wheel is gone. I told you, remember?”

  “Well, yessir, but we’ve also experienced a combined hydraulic failure.”

  After slamming his fist into the Plexiglas in front of him, the air boss looked over to the mini with disbelief and asked, “Did I hear what I thought I heard? He said ‘hydraulic failure,’ right?” The mini boss nodded in response.

  “Tower copies, one-fourteen. Stand by.”

  The air boss reached for the tactical circuit phone and pressed two digits.

  “Captain . . .”

  “Yes, Captain, this is the boss. We’re going to have to rig the barricade immediately. I don’t know if you caught that last transmission, but one-fourteen has a hydraulic failure along with the missing wheel. We can’t wait.”

  “Did the pilot say whether it was the combined or flight hydraulic system?”

  “Combined.”

  “Ouch, that’s the big ticket,” said the captain. “I guess we can’t afford to attempt to land one-zero-three first, huh?”

  “No, we’d better not risk him blowing a tire or somehow clobbering the landing area,” the air boss advised. “We’d lose one-fourteen for sure then. We’ll probably wind up sending one-zero-three to the divert field.”

  More hairs dropped to the deck. “Okay, let’s keep our fingers crossed. Do what you have to do quickly.”

  The air boss picked up the flight deck P.A. microphone and bellowed, “All right, let’s rig the barricade. I say again, rig the barricade.”

  At four thousand feet directly over the Boat, Punk dropped his landing gear and flaps to match Fuzzy’s configuration and steered his fighter under the other Tomcat in an attempt to see if there was any more damage to the stricken jet. Satisfied one-fourteen’s crew was aware of the full extent of their troubles, Punk pulled loosely abeam.

  Spud read through the pocket checklist to back Turtle up, quite sure that his fellow department head was behind the situation. “A real quick courtesy heads up, guys,” Spud diplomatically said on the squadron’s common frequency. “Don’t forget to get rid of your external stores. You don’t want the barricade to rip a missile off and sling it across the flight deck when you land.”