Punk's War

by Ward Carroll

  “What the hell are you saying?” the air ops officer screamed into the phone. “You’re supposed to be open.”

  “Ah, that’s a negative, sir. We’ve been closed since 2200 local,” the Air Force enlisted phone watch replied.

  “That’s bullshit. We requested that the field remain open throughout the night.”

  “Whom did you talk to?”

  “I don’t fuckin’ know! I do know that one of my—”

  There was a click in the earpiece. “That little shit hung up on me,” the air ops officer said as he re-dialed the phone.

  “Al Jabar air operations, Major Holmes.”

  “Yeah, Major. I’m calling from the aircraft carrier in the Gulf and—”

  “Did you just curse at one of my men?”

  “Huh?”

  “Are you the Navy officer who just called and cursed at one of my men?”

  “Yeah, I guess I am . . . look, I apologize. We’re kind of stressed out here. Look, major, I need your help right now.”

  “I can’t have the Navy calling at three o’clock in the morning and cursing at my men.”

  “I said I was sorry!” the commander screamed, veins popping from his forehead and throat. He regained his composure and in a more civil tone repeated, “Look, major, I said I was sorry.”

  The lieutenant across the control center, who seemed to be in charge of bad news in air ops, shouted, “Strike just relayed from the airborne Hawkeye that the crew in one-zero-three told them they were unable to talk to Al Jabar on any of the published frequencies. They think the field might be closed.”

  “I know that,” the commander returned with his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone. “I’m talking to Al Jabar now trying to get them to open the goddam thing back up.”

  The commander put the phone back to his ear and tried to calm himself. “Major, again, I apologize for cursing at your man. I meant nothing by it. Now, I have a jet on its way to your field with very little gas.”

  “What unit do you claim to have talked to here to get approval to keep the field open?” the Air Force major asked.

  “My phone log indicates air operations,” the commander answered.

  “Well, there’s your problem,” the major said with a chuckle. “Air operations doesn’t approve those kinds of requests. They don’t have the authority. You needed to talk to the command post.”

  “So can you open the field for us?”

  “No way.”

  The bad news lieutenant called out once again. “Commander, the captain wants to know why Al Jabar is closed.”

  The air ops officer winced and dejectedly hung up the phone.

  “So, are they going to open the field for us?” Smoke asked.

  “No.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “Get fired.” The commander pushed his way past Smoke and left the space.

  “Maybe I could pick up the runway with the landing light if we did a low approach,” Punk suggested to Spud over the intercom. “I mean, I can see some lights from the buildings down there, and we know about where the runway is. It might work.”

  “The only problem with that is we’d have to drop the gear to use the landing light,” Spud replied. “We’ve only got fifteen hundred pounds of gas left as it is. We’d better just stick with the max endurance profile overhead the field and hope the ship works this out quickly.”

  As Spud finished his sentence, both low-fuel-warning lights illuminated on Punk’s advisory panel. “We’ve only got about twenty minutes of flight time left, Spud,” Punk said, “maybe even less than that. This fuel gauge starts to get unreliable below about eight hundred pounds, or so I’m told.”

  Spud petitioned the E-2, their sole contact due to the distance to the Boat, for help once again on Strike. “Hawkeye, any word on the status of the field opening up?”

  “Negative.”

  Spud ran the situation through in his mind, and reconsidered Punk’s idea from a minute ago. “All right, let’s drop down to one hundred feet and fly the runway heading and see if we can make anything out. If not, we’ll climb back up, head out to sea and get ready to punch out.”

  Punch out? Spud made ejecting sound so matter-of-fact, such a perfectly normal option. Punk pushed the nose of the Tomcat below the horizon and started the descent to a hundred feet.

  Smoke asked one of the enlisted men for any of the numbers to Al Jabar. He was handed the phone log, and inside the front cover more than a hundred numbers were scrawled with half of them scratched out. After several lifetimes of running his fingers through the maze of ink and lead, he located the listing for Al Jabar air operations.

  “It’s like I told the other guy,” the major said emphatically to Smoke through a filter of static on the line. “The command post controls when the field is open, not air operations.”

  “There’s a Tomcat coming to you to land!”

  “I can’t help you. The colonel’s asleep and even then it would take a half-hour to get the crew out of their tents to turn the runway lights on. Sorry.”

  Smoke hung up in a huff and muttered, “Well, jointness is alive and well. Thank you very much, United States Air Force.” He was about to slam the phone log shut when another listing grabbed his eye: Kuwait International Airport. It was a long shot, but worth a try at this point. He knew 103 had to be close to flaming out by now, but Kuwait International was only about forty nautical miles north of Al Jabar. They might be able to make it.

  It was a commercial number, not a seven-digit military theater network number like the one for the Air Force at Al Jabar. Smoke endlessly pressed the digits into the phone, and wondered how many satellites he was going to have to hit to complete the call. Although they were only a hundred fifty miles from Kuwait, the carrier’s phone system was routed through the communications center in Norfolk, Virginia, so his voice was traveling about ten thousand miles. After listening to several international busy signals, Smoke got a legitimate ring.

  “Hello?” a meek voice called from what sounded like deep space.

  “Hello, can you hear me?” Smoke heard his voice echo several times as the signal bounced between the earth’s surface and the near-reaches of the universe.

  “Yes, I can hear you,” the voice came back, obviously Arabic, but apparently possessing an adequate command of English.

  “Is the . . . is the field open?” The echo was confusing, and Smoke tried to talk without being too distracted by his own voice through the receiver.

  “No, the field is closed. We will open tomorrow, eight o’clock.”

  “I need your help, sir.” Smoke slowed his speech as he passed the details of the situation. “I am calling you from an aircraft carrier out in the Gulf off the coast. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “There is an F-14 . . . Tomcat . . . fighter jet . . . just south of you . . . low . . . on . . . gas. It is an emergency. Do you understand?”

  “Yes. Aircraft call sign?”

  “Slinger one-zero-three.”

  “Roger. Zinger one-zero-three.”

  “No, Slinger one-zero-three.”

  “Singer one-zero-three.”

  “No, er, whatever; close enough. Could you turn the runway lights on and let . . . him . . . land at Kuwait International.”

  “Yes. I am the facilities manager.”

  It seemed too easy. Smoke wasn’t convinced that the Arab understood. “I mean right . . . now.”

  “Yes, I know. I’ll turn on the lights. Give me two minutes to call the tower to make sure the runway is clear.”

  Smoke couldn’t believe dealing with a Kuwaiti at a foreign international airport was easier than working with a U.S. Air Force officer, but then again, maybe that wasn’t such a big surprise. He felt a bit maudlin bathing in the light of his apparent success, and he closed the conversation with, “God bless Kuwait, and may she enjoy independence forever.”

  Smoke hung up the phone with a sigh and the hope he’d helped rem
edy the situation. The battle watch captain burst into air ops accompanied by the same two security force members who had hassled Einstein. As the three moved hurriedly across the space, the battle watch captain pointed a shaky finger at Smoke and said, “Arrest this man for the destruction of government property.”

  Punk flew around the area of Al Jabar’s runway between one and two hundred feet, paralleling its published axis, trying to somehow identify the smooth surface, but there was no discerning the asphalt from the desert. They’d also hoped buzzing the field might alert someone to their presence and cause the runway lights to come on; Punk even dropped the gear briefly and flashed the landing light off and on, but the field remained dark as death save the lighting around the tents and at various spots along the perimeter of the base.

  Punk added up the tapes on the fuel gauge: eleven hundred pounds. “This ain’t working, Spud,” Punk said with resignation. “We’re outta here.” Punk lifted the nose once again and headed due east.

  As they passed through ten thousand feet, communications were reestablished with the E-2 on Strike. “. . . and your steer is Kuwait International.”

  Spud wasn’t sure what he’d heard. “Say again for Slinger one-zero-three.”

  “Hawkeye says again: your steer is Kuwait International. Initial vector zero-zero-five. They’re turning on the lights for you.”

  Spud punched the coordinates into the system, hooked the symbol with his cursor on the navigation display and passed the bearing to Punk, who confirmed that the heading pointed them toward the bright lights of Kuwait City. He flew to the coast, not too far out of their way, and followed the shoreline for the short trip to the north so that if they flamed out, he’d be able to convert his altitude and last bit of hydraulic control into a heading change over the water, away from the oil fields and populated areas.

  Fifteen miles from the field, absent communications with the airport, Punk established the Tomcat on the final portion of the published approach. At ten miles, he dropped the landing gear and flaps. The city was a well-lit, major metropolitan area, but he still didn’t have the runway lights in sight.

  “This may have been the final insult, my friend,” Punk passed over the intercom. “I don’t see a field here.” He looked at the fuel again: roughly eight hundred pounds, but the gauge had ceased to provide any meaning.

  At three miles, he leveled off at one thousand feet. He stayed level and passed over the field, left wing slightly down in another attempt to find a prepared surface.

  “Sorry, Spud,” Punk offered, banking the jet to the right, away from the city, as he raised the gear and flaps again. “I’m afraid we’re going to get wet.”

  “Oh, well,” Spud responded without emotion. “It’s a good thing my survival swim quals are up to date.”

  Then the runway lights came on at their seven o’clock, about two miles away. Punk looked at the fuel: six hundred pounds. They could make it.

  “Gear’s coming again,” Punk said. He threw the handle down and waited for the jet to slow to two hundred knots so he could lower the flaps. As he fished for the flap handle with his left hand, the right engine’s RPM began to decay. “We just lost the right, Spud. Hold on here.” At that call, Spud reached between his legs and located the lower ejection handle.

  Punk continued to maneuver the jet to a modified downwind position with the remaining good motor. “Come on, baby,” he said into his mask. “Hold on . . . hold on, now . . .”

  He started the final turn for the runway at five hundred feet, one hundred fifty knots, with 180 degrees of turn to go—180 degrees to safety and another dodged bullet. Punk raced through the landing checklist: “Gear’s down, flaps full, spoilers—” He was interrupted by the sickening sound of the left engine dying of fuel starvation. His mind fired through the decision matrix thousands of times in a second and came up with only one result: no options. Too low and too slow to try and maneuver the jet, they were left with a single course of action.

  Punk started to say, “eject!” but Spud had already beat him to the draw. Punk’s voice on the intercom was drowned out by the explosion of the canopy blowing off and Spud’s seat traveling up the back rail. Punk jammed his head back and waited an eternity for his kick in the pants.

  Life suddenly seemed surreal. Punk heard the rockets fire. He watched the instrument panel slide away and felt the Gs push him hard into his seat. He studied the Tomcat below him as he tumbled though the night. He wondered why he didn’t have a parachute and feared it had failed to open automatically, but then felt the reassuring jolt and knew he was safely earthbound.

  Punk watched the jet hit behind him and become a fiery mass. A short time later, the young pilot landed in a heap and rolled on the hard sand just before the near end of the runway. His chute billowed in the wind, and he was pulled through the rough desert until he managed to locate and release his attachments to the risers.

  The dust settled and he sat up, taking stock of his condition. Cautiously, he tried to stand. He put weight on his left foot and immediately collapsed in pain. His ankle . . .

  He worked to get his gear off, careful to route the straps around his damaged leg, until he saw a black outline of a body moving toward him, silhouetted by the bright glow from the fire at the crash site behind it. “Spud?” he called out, voice slightly cracking as the shock of their ordeal settled on him. It had to be Spud. Who else would have been out there?

  The figure answered in some foreign tongue. “Saluba bereesh non-reesh ba!”

  Damn, who the hell was it? The intelligence officers had warned the crews that not all the Kuwaiti locals thought of Americans as heroes. “Non-reesh ba. Ba!” the silhouette shouted repeatedly.

  “English?” Punk asked as if he was addressing the Frankenstein monster for the first time. “Do you speak English?”

  The stranger stood processing the words and then answered, “Why, hell yes, I speak English.”

  Spud . . . “Damn, you scared the shit out of me, asshole,” Punk said as he slapped some of the dust off of himself.

  “Now you know how I feel flying with you.” Spud raised his flashlight to his face to reveal his smile and said, “Welcome to Kuwait.”

  FIVE

  Trash and Fuzzy pulled another plank off the deck of the shipwrecked dhow, ran it across the sand and over to the bonfire—a blaze now certainly visible from anywhere in the greater capital city area around Manama, if not the entire island nation of Bahrain. What had started as a former Boy Scout skills challenge had grown into a college pep rally–sized inferno that brought half the air wing’s officer corps and many of the senior enlisted men to the beach.

  The two aviators tossed the rotten timber on the pyre, causing a hail of sparks to shoot skyward and a cheer to erupt from the throng ringed around the heat’s edge. After a month at sea, here was a crowd who’d earned a night such as this.

  Punk leaned against the three flat boards he’d fashioned into a beach chair and took in the mood surrounding him. Maybe it was the horse pills Fighter Doc had given him for the pain following the ejection; maybe it was the ease with which the beers were going down, but Punk couldn’t remember a night as beautiful. He inhaled the fresh salt air pushed by a gentle warm breeze off the Gulf. With relaxed eyes, he followed the path of the fire’s embers up toward the heavens and swept the sky and contemplated its vastness. Call it a cop-out, but from where he sat, struggling for small-minded things like promotion seemed foolish when the moon could explode at any moment.

  He took another slug of Australian lager and listened to laughter, rich and sincere—laughter threaded through the fabric of hatred they’d been forced to weave by the Machine. They weren’t mercenaries. Their actions under the heading of “readiness,” even those short of war, like planning the war, were mentally filed into the category of good versus evil, because good versus evil made sense and justified their sacrifices. It had started this time almost a year ago, during their first major training exercise against the notional
country, “Purple.” The three weeks of conflict based in and around the waters off the coast of North Carolina had spawned a hatred for the people of Purple—not a fill-the-streets passion, but a cold and educated hatred that allowed the aviators to drop bombs without compunction. Since that time, they’d mustered up these same feelings toward Cubans, Tunisians, Libyans, Serbians, Sudanese, Yemenites, Iranians, and Iraqis. War, or posturing for it, required a warrior to wear a war face, and a war face required that a warrior internalize the commitment to war.

  Punk dug his heels, the left one covered by a thick wrap of gauze and bandage, into the sand, and he thought about how tired he’d grown of the feeling of hatred. He studied the smiles of the locals who had curiously wandered over—fishermen, most likely from the harbor just beyond the breakwater, dressed in gray robes and black head wraps—working-class types cynical enough about their own lot not to be offended by the western decadence of drink. Punk’s eyes continued across the crowd. He paused to absorb the cheerful and delicate faces of the handful of Gulf Air flight attendants the chiefs had convinced to come out of the expatriate watering holes and join the party. The scene gave him a profound sense of harmony. At the same time, he felt shallow and duped by those who would have him believe he was better than the rest of the world by the sole virtue of his citizenship—those who had him wear his war face just hours ago.

  Earlier that day, the admiral’s board participants had pushed through the door to Flag Briefing and Analysis and into the passageway, unified in their thanks that the proceeding was behind them. Once through the hatch, the Boat’s boy captain reached across the admiral’s JAG and tapped the air wing commander on the shoulder. “Can I talk to you for a sec?”

  CAG nervously jerked around and reluctantly said, “Sure, I guess . . .”

  “Let’s go to your stateroom,” the captain suggested.