“Let go,” Mike orders.
Eric releases his hold, one deliberate finger at a time.
“Is Martin stirring up trouble again?” a gruff, familiar voice asks.
My mouth drops as I watch Commander Amicus—Commander Amicus?—step in front of Jonas. What is Animal doing here?
“Of course it would be me,” Jonas says. “It could never be Marxen.”
Animal’s steel-gray eyes stare into Jonas’s without flinching. “Go on, get outta here.”
Jonas moves sideways, his eyes locked with Eric’s in challenge until Bartholomew and Collin steer him away.
Mike pulls Eric around, pinning him to the bulkhead, hand on his chest. Animal quickly joins them.
“You all right?” Animal asks.
Eric doesn’t respond, his jaw muscles working furiously, his teeth clenched.
Mike has moved away slightly to let Animal stand directly in front of Eric, the deference clear. In all the while I’ve known Animal, he’s maintained a calm demeanor. Nothing fazes the man and it’s no different now as he silently communicates with Eric, standing him down in a way I hadn’t thought possible.
I look closely now at Animal, his black hair lying in a tangle over his broad, yet angular, face. His nickname suits him perfectly. His routinely unkempt hair, his well-muscled burly appearance—like a lean, mean grizzly bear. He’s like Eric in that way—that quiet strength underneath.
“You need to brief,” Animal says. He inclines his head to the front of the room, sending Eric forward.
Only now do I notice the hum of background conversation is absent. Quickly replaying the events in my head, I realize the room has been silent ever since Eric grabbed Jonas.
“Take your seats,” Animal instructs those in the room. He looks down to me for the first time. “May I?” he asks, indicating the seat next to me.
“Animal? What are you doing here?”
“I’m here to fly with you.”
“But—”
“You know me. Always making the training rounds.”
True, Animal’s job has him traveling to helicopter squadrons across the country to conduct training. “But, sir? Now? In the South China Sea?”
He motions to Eric, who has begun to speak. “The brief is starting,” he says.
I decide I can ask him after, but when Eric finishes, he whisks me from the room without comment, intent on getting the bird turned up quickly with no extraneous conversation.
I suppose this is a good thing. It doesn’t allow me to dwell on the splinters that now pick at my conscience. Training rounds … Evaluation … Metrics …
* * *
Animal and I take off en route to the submarine, Birmingham, and I’ve no sooner gotten the ops normal call out of my mouth when the caution panel glows orange. At the same time, I feel a shift in the controls. The automatic flight control system, or AFCS, has switched off.
“Sir, did you…?” I ask.
“Of course I switched it off,” Animal says.
I should have expected this.
“Okay, let me hear it,” he says.
I let out a practiced exhale. “AFCS is for pussies,” I say, repeating Animal’s mantra, something he has forced me to say a thousand times.
“Damn straight!”
When the AFCS is on, it makes the aircraft easier to fly. For most pilots, if the system switches off, you would feel the aircraft wobble and yaw immediately, the aircraft instantly squirrely. The degradation in controllability is normally so great, the rules state you can’t transport passengers or fly at night without the system on.
“But sir—”
“The aircraft doesn’t feel any different to me,” he says. “Lego, how ’bout you?”
“Smooth as a pig’s belly, sir.”
Flying without noticeable interruption when switching the AFCS off has always been my goal. And it’s because of Animal that I’m able to do it. When he was the officer in charge on my last cruise, after my first shipboard landing, he declared I no longer required the AFCS, and for every flight thereafter, he turned it off. He never made an exception, either.
And those rules about not transporting passengers or not flying at night? Animal scoffed at those and we did it anyway. Routinely.
I feel I need to do my due diligence, however, and remind him of the rules. “But sir, it’s night and we’re carrying pax.”
“What do you think they did before they invented AFCS?” he asks. “They had passengers then. They still had to deliver ’em. And they still had to fly at night. No reason we shouldn’t be able to do that now.”
Not a lot’s changed with Animal since I last flew with him. I smile. “Aye, aye, sir.”
* * *
We start the exercise by dropping Peter’s and Jonas’s squads to the Birmingham, followed by Mike’s squad to the frigate, Melbourne. The Lake Champlain is also included in the rotation, the teams taking turns between each ship and submarine. Over and over, we repeat the sequence, rotating crews from platform to platform.
Our final run will be to the Birmingham, and we wait now on the deck of Nimitz to pick up Mike’s team. I count eleven men walking toward the aircraft for this last go-round. Odd. The SEALs have been working in teams of eight or sixteen throughout this cruise, including this evening—no deviation.
Mike is usually last in the aircraft, but now, three others follow. Because everyone’s faces are camouflaged tonight, I only recognize one of the extra men—Jonas. Even through the black face paint, those eyes shine through. Strange that he’s with Mike’s squad.
As Eric calls us in, I wonder if he can actually see us, make out the form of our helicopter in the night sky when we’re working without lights. I know my night vision has improved, catching shapes as I hadn’t before—like now, when the sail of the Birmingham emerges seemingly from the air itself.
As Lego directs me in, I find the faint demarcation between ocean and sky, a sky of diamonds. The diamonds are up and the black nothing is down. Keep the diamonds up and the black nothing down and the helicopter will remain airborne.
Lego keeps me steady and on target with his calls; however, the amount of time spent over the sub’s deck is definitely longer than over the ship’s. Having any kind of visual reference to a ship’s superstructure allows my inputs to the controls to happen far more quickly, because I can already sense that we’re moving off target. But now I’m referencing an only semivisible sail and relying almost exclusively on Lego for positioning. As a result, my corrections come just that microsecond later than normal.
It’s not horrible—we’re in and out in less than thirty seconds—but I’ve gotten used to some awfully fast transitions over a ship. As Lego gives the clearance to go, I nose over and gain altitude, arcing around the aft end of the Birmingham. For a brief moment, I can discern eleven black shadows slinking across a solid obsidian surface, but just like that, they’ve disappeared into the night.
28
“Cock-a-doodle-doo!” I flap my wings and crow reveille once more. “Cock-a-doodle-doo!”
Em and I share a look that says it all. Are we really doing this? Are we really standing on the bow, drenched in maple syrup, covered in feathers, and crowing reveille as the sun rises? Because it’s Wog Day, the answer is yes.
And as weird as this is, I’ll take it any day over arguing with Em. Without consciously agreeing to do so, we put our flight-hours spat aside so we could join forces to conquer the challenges of Wog Day.
Underneath our feathers, we wear our khaki uniforms inside out and backward as all Pollywogs are required to do. We’ve also donned knee pads underneath our pants, and gloves on our hands, because on Wog Day, crawling is the only acceptable mode of transport. And just for me, long sleeves under everything to cover the bruises on my arms that are doing anything but fading.
After we finish crowing, our handlers determine that it’s time for Wog Breakfast. So we crawl along the main deck, passing through a gauntlet of fire hoses that spray hu
ndreds of gallons of seawater on the two hundred or so Pollywogs that crawl in line with us.
It’s the shillelaghs that make this crawl so torturous. Shellbacks line the main deck, armed with two-foot-long strips of fire hose, fashioned with duct-taped handles. I steel myself for the next blow as they aim for the butt and back of the legs. The Shellbacks are motivated in part by the T-shirts that Em and I wear, worn inside out and backward, of course, that our air detachment Shellbacks were so careful to stencil. In clear, bold, black lettering, our T-shirts read, AIR DET WOG—SHIP’S COMPANY CAN’T BREAK US. Great.
But they’re also motivated—even gleeful—because we’re officers. On this day, hundreds of enlisted Shellbacks get to have a go at the nine Pollywogs in the officers’ wardroom who scrabble on hands and knees, at their mercy for several humiliation-inducing hours.
By the end of the crawl through the main deck, my backside is a bruised, welted, stinging, achy mess. I thought I would be thankful to reach the mezzanine deck for Wog Breakfast. To find relief from the beatings of the shillelaghs.
I am wrong.
Wog Breakfast is served in a long trough filled with noodles, cottage cheese, oysters, fish parts, and who knows what else. The whole rotten mixture is purple in color and I get a close-up view, just prior to dunking my head in it. We’re required to blow bubbles.… And it’s not the breakfast mixture itself that’s the worst part. It’s the vomit from the Wogs before us.
I lift my head to breathe, but I dare not use my nose, because if I smell this, I’m just going to add to the vomit pile. Which means … if I want air, I’m going to have to open my mouth. The slimy, chunky ick that floats in the trough now leaks and oozes into my mouth. I breathe. I spit. I scooch down the line. I dunk my head once more.
I declare a mini victory when I make it to the end of the trough without throwing up. Next to me, poor Em. She lost it before we even started.
After “breakfast,” the Shellbacks herd us to the flight deck, shillelaghs flying. You’re not allowed to speak when you’re a Wog, nor look anywhere but down as you crawl. Em moves in front of me, but that’s all I really know. Just that she’s there.
Zack is not here. He won the Wog Queen Beauty Contest last night with a lacy red bra and underwear supplied by Emily. He shaved his legs and Emily and I did his hair and makeup. It was scary, truth be told, how good he looked when we got through with him. Music blared on the 1MC, the contestants strutted across the catwalk on the flight deck, and just when I thought it couldn’t get any more hilarious, they started dancing—the naked-stripper-against-a-pole kind of dancing. I actually peed my pants I laughed so hard.
A good laugh is hard to come by for me, so I took it, wet pants and all. But I’m not laughing now as we’re ushered to face King Neptune’s Royal Court at the far end of the flight deck. The Court consists of King Neptune, his wife Amphitrite, the Royal Baby, the Royal Police, and even Davy Jones—all played by crew members. Pollywogs are summoned before the Court to undergo trial for their offenses to the God of the Sea.
Em and I are brought up together and the powers that be read the “charges” against us. Em screws up and pleads not guilty. Crap. She’s sent to the back of the line and I can hear the slap of the shillelaghs that accompany her. I’m right behind her. I know the right answer. But I don’t want to get separated, so I plead not guilty as well. Back to the end of the Royal Court line I go. More waiting. More whacking.
The next time we reach the Royal Court, we plead guilty to our nebulous crimes and are sent to the stockade. Our hands and heads are inserted into a giant wooden contraption and I wonder who on earth built it and where they’ve been keeping it. Once we’re positioned, the top is closed over us. We take a chance, turning our heads slightly to look at each other. Oh, my. If I look like Emily, and I’m sure I do, it’s not pretty. Her face is green and purple and her hair … strands of slimy I don’t know what. I turn away.
I turn away not only from Emily, but from the sight of what is coming next. It is foul. In fact, I’m seriously wondering if I can do this next bit. How bad do I want to be a Shellback? I don’t know if I want it this bad.
The sight that makes me nauseated for the first time today is the Royal Baby. They’ve picked the fattest guy on the ship with the biggest, ugliest, hairiest stomach to sit in a throne in nothing but his underwear. Fellow Shellbacks have greased his furry gut and ever-so-delicately placed a cherry in his belly button.
I watch in horror as the Pollywogs in line on their hands and knees are forced to pick the cherry out of his belly button with their teeth.
I finally throw up. I’m not even in front of the Baby yet.
The Shellbacks whoop with delight as they release us from the stockade and whack us from behind en route to the Baby. I’m in front of Em this time, crawling with my head down, not wanting to look at or think about what’s coming next. Without warning, someone lifts my shoulders from behind so that my torso moves upright while I’m still on my knees. My vision is filled with black, curly, greasy stomach hair on a gut that is outright offensive.
There’s no time to deliberate, because it’s done for me. The Baby pulls my head into his stomach and rolls it around in the grease. God only knows how I do it, but when I’m released, I clutch a cherry in my teeth. The dry heaves start in earnest now, because there’s nothing left to throw up.
Next stop—garbage chute. Haven’t we been crawling through what has effectively been a garbage chute all morning? So the fact that the Shellbacks are chanting that it’s time to crawl through the “garbage chute” has me wondering … in a very bad way.
The chute looks like a play toy that preschoolers use—a long, plastic tube, colored in bright pinks and yellows, that runs about thirty feet in length. And the rumors are true. All the chatter about saving up the ship’s garbage for weeks and roasting it in the ovens is true. They’ve filled the chute with it and we’re slithering through on our stomachs, army crawl style. I’m not sure how anyone has anything left to throw up at this point, but I’m sludging through vomitus from the word go.
Surely this is the end. Surely this obstacle course from hell is complete. I envision breaking through this torture tube to sunlight on the other side and having it over. Done and over.
Right. Next stop—the coffin. The coffin reminds me of my time in S.E.R.E. School—Survival, Evasion, Rescue, Escape—POW training for anyone who might find themselves in a combat position. All pilots have to attend, and when we were in the prisoner phase, the guards locked us in small boxes without room to lift our heads. We sat, curled in the dark, for hours.
At least with this “coffin,” we get to lie flat. So I shimmy into the elongated box, filled with muck much the same as I have just crawled through, and the lid is closed. They’ve created a peephole on the top, so when they order you to roll around in the garbage, they can ensure you’re doing it properly.
I’m starting to think this isn’t worth it. Everyone was given the option to sit in the library and not participate if they didn’t care to. But the stigma. And especially for me. I really want to show that I can do this. That women can do this. I think most sailors on the ship felt that Em and I were going to sit this one out. Surprise, surprise when they found out we were game.
I squint when sunlight floods the coffin as the lid is pulled back. I’m then led to a giant tank filled with something green. I climb in and am ordered to submerge. It takes every ounce of willpower I possess to dunk myself. How can it be that with everything I’ve been through this morning, the simple act of dunking my head would garner more stress than all the other obstacles combined? I do it quickly, and when I surface, I hear the shouts of those in front of me, including Emily.
The sailors yell, “What are you?”
“A fuckin’ Shellback!” she shouts.
I exhale in relief. “Yeah, what she said.”
29
The sailors at the end of the Pollywog obstacle course shake my hand and send me straight to the makeshift
shower rigged on the flight deck. I meet up with Emily and we strip on the spot. We’ve worn our swimsuits underneath, so we take our T-shirts and khakis off—clothing that will never be worn again—and dump them in the trash pile with everyone else’s.
We’re able to get the worst of the muck off our bodies before trudging to our stateroom and the showers that await.
We flip for it. Em wins and jumps in first.
She’s a long time in the shower and when I finally get my turn, I realize why. I shampoo and re-shampoo my hair at least five times and it still feels like the ick of a lake bottom. It’s going to take several more washings to make it fully right again.
When I exit the shower, Em gapes as she looks at the backs of my legs. I peek over. I’m black and blue and covered in welts. Lovely.
“They got your arms, too,” she says.
Oops. I had completely forgotten. But, hey, I’ll take it. An excuse gift from the sky.
“I guess so,” I say.
Em slips into a light pink stretch camisole and form-fitting black shorts and reaches into her closet for a pair of flip-flops. “Going to the steel beach picnic?” she asks.
All newly christened Shellbacks are being rewarded with a steel beach picnic—the first of the cruise. For these “picnics,” barbeque grills are set up on the flight deck—made of steel, and thus the name—and it’s a chance for the crew to eat and relax on a good weather day.
“I’ll wait if you’re coming,” she adds.
What’s this? Maybe our flight hours truce is going to last longer than I thought. Thank heavens. I so want it to be normal between us.
“Yeah, give me just a second.”
I throw on my running shorts, a moisture-wicking technical T-shirt, and lace up my running shoes.
“This is a picnic, not a workout,” she says.
“This is all I have,” I say, making for the door and stepping into the passageway. “Besides, it’s too hot to wear anything else.”
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