by T. E. Cruise
Greene felt surprisingly calm considering the momentousness of what he was about to attempt. After all, successfully setting a jet down on a flattop was a true rite of passage. Greene guessed that the pain he’d felt on Buzz Blaisdale’s behalf earlier that day had served to numb his emotions concerning himself.
Greene was also feeling good about that fact that he had Popeye Popovich along as his backseater this first time getting his feet wet. Greene had flown with Lieutenant Commander Popovich a couple of times; the senior instructor had come along on most of Greene’s check rides. Popeye, who’d gotten his Navy call-sign nickname for obvious reasons, was in his late forties, with a gray crewcut and light-blue eyes. Of all the squid instructors, Greene liked Popeye the best. Unlike some of the other PIs, the lieutenant commander didn’t have an attitude problem. Popeye didn’t seem to care who you were or where you were from. If you flew the airplane okay, you were okay in his book.
Greene’s radio headset crackled. “This landing should be a piece of cake for a hotshot like you, Air Force,” Popeye said over the cockpit intercom. “My fucking grandmother could land on a flattop on a bee-yuutiful day like today.
“I didn’t know your fucking grandmother was in the Navy, Popeye,” Greene muttered. “Of course it’s a beautiful day with A-1 flying conditions. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be out here in the first place.…”
Greene had no trouble locating the carrier. From three miles away and three thousand feet in the air, the flattop looked like a scant smudge of gray trailing a comet’s tail of white wake across the surface of the blue ocean. Landings on a carrier were made into the wind, so Greene circled the flattop, passing it downwind.
“You know, you young guys today got things sooo easy,” Popeye announced.
Uh-oh. here we go, Greene thought affectionately. Popeye could chew your ear off reminiscing about the old days.
“Back in Korea, this kind of work was still dangerous,” Popeye rambled. “We didn’t have the precision instruments you pussies got now, and those Panthers we flew weren’t anywhere near as throttle responsive—”
“Hey, Popeye,” Greene interrupted as he put the Buckeye into a crosswind turn toward the carrier’s stern. “Didn’t I see you in that flick The Bridge at Toko-Ri?”
“Huh?” Popeye demanded. “What’s that?”
“Yeah, man…” Greene finished his crosswind turn and dirtied up his airplane by lowering his landing gear, flaps, and tailhook as he began his landing approach. “You were in that movie, Popeye…. Weren’t you the guy who held William Holden’s leather jacket for him?”
“Kids today,” Popeye snorted dolefully. “Can’t tell ’em shit.”
A new voice crackled through Greene’s helmet. “Five five five, clear deck, clear deck,” the CATCC Carrier Air Traffic Control Center officer on board the carrier radioed, watching Greene’s approach on his radar screen. The message directed to Greene’s jet number 555 was that the carrier’s deck was cleared for his landing.
“Now, don’t you go spotting that deck, Air Force,” Popeye cautioned.
“Roger.” Greene nodded absently, his mind on the task ahead of him. His tendency to concentrate on the deck to the exclusion of all else was the biggest problem Greene had faced during his training, and “spotting the deck” had been Buzz Blaisdale’s insurmountable error, as well. As an Air Force pilot, it was second nature for Greene during a VFI landing to fixate on the approaching runway, but when you did that trying to land on a carrier, the optical perspective invariably served to convince you that you were coming in too high. It was all an illusion, and if you gave in to it and came in too low, you’d hit the ramp and turn yourself into barbecue. The way to fight the optical illusion was not to steadily eyeball the deck in the first place. Instead, you listened up to your carrier-based controllers and kept your eyes moving across your instruments, as well as peering out your canopy at that itty bit of metal that was home sweet home.
The carrier loomed. That smudge of gray had grown into a narrow strip of hot-topped parking lot sliced from some suburban shopping mall and set afloat in the glinting blue Atlantic. Greene could clearly see the white striping that outlined the five-hundred-foot-long angled flight deck. True to habit, he felt he was coming in too high, but let his angle of attack indicator persuade him otherwise. He glanced at the ocean skimming past beneath his wings. I go any lower. I’ll need windshield wipers to clear the salt spray.
“Five five five, on line, one mile,” said the carrier’s air controller. He was informing Greene that he was flying a correct approach toward the carrier, and that he was a mile away.
“R-Roger,” Greene managed. His mouth had suddenly gone so dry that he had difficulty getting the word out.
“You’re sounding tense, there. Air Force,” Popeye said lightly. “You don’t want to hit that ramp now.… If you bolt the carrier, I can take control of the airplane and get us out of it. You trap a little too much to the right or left, we’ll merely slide off the deck and into the nets, and probably come out of this with just a couple of broken necks. But you hit that ramp, and we become deep-fried food for the fishes.”
“Thanks, Popeye, I really needed to hear that right now,” Greene snapped.
“No problem. Air Force.” Popeye chuckled. “Did I mention that my fucking grandmother could set her down on a bee-yuutiful day like today?”
“This is where I came in,” Greene said. He heard himself laugh.
“There you, go. Air Force,” Popeye said. “Smile and the world smiles with you…”
Son of a bitch, I do feel better, Greene thought gratefully. Talk about stress, he wondered how a guy like Popeye could take so many backseat rides with first-timers and still find it within himself to joke the novice pilot out of his funk.
“Five five five, all down, call the ball,” said another voice from the carrier, that of the landing signal officer. The LSO would be in charge of Greene’s landing during its final moments. talking him down with last-second corrections if necessary, or, if the LSO didn’t like the look of Greene’s approach, waving him off. Just now, the LSO had told Greene that his landing-gear flaps and tailhook were down, and had asked Greene if he had visual contact with the LLD Light Landing Device.
“Five five five on the ball,” Greene said, telling the LSO that he had visual contact with the LLD.
“Roger, ball,” the LSO said.
Greene’s touchdown aimpoint was the center of the four arresting cables that bisected the angled flight deck, roughly parallel to the carrier’s superstructure. The cables were spaced forty feet apart: 120 feet of sanctuary in all, hence the 120-foot training rectangle painted on the tarmac way back when all this was just make-believe.
“Five five five on line, very slightly right, one half mile, call the ball.”
Greene nudged the Buckeye starboard as he replied, “Five, five five. I’ve got center ball.”
The carrier was coming up fast now. Just another few seconds, Greene thought.
The instant before Greene touched down, he would have to go to full throttle—full military power—so that his bird would have the energy to make it back into the sky in case Greene “bolted,” missing all four cables, or in case something else went wrong. At full throttle, he’d travel from the first cable to the fourth in less than a half second.
“You ideally want that number-three wire. Air Force,” Popeye said calmly.
“Five five five on line,” the LSO radioed. “Good luck, Air Force.”
“Well, well, well,” Popeye laughed appreciatively. “Looks like you provisionally got yourself your call-sign moniker.”
“Provisionally?”
“Sure,” Popeye said. “You’ve got to earn it to keep it.”
Don’t think, Greene warned himself, pushing out of his mind the cautionary films they’d shown the pilots during training of those who’d done this wrong, in the process transforming themselves into fireballs. Don’t think. Do.
The carrier was rocketing to
ward him with incredible speed. Greene’s stomach was doing nervous flip-flops. Come onnnn, he thought, his eyes flitting from the ball, the expanding carrier deck, and his instruments. Popeye’s fucking grandmother could do it on such a bee-yuutiful day.
Greene glimpsed the LSO officer and his people on their platform cantilevered off the carrier’s aft port side, and then his bird’s nose crossed the ramp—
He was over the ship!
Greene pushed forward his throttle to full military power, hearing the Buckeye’s shrill scream as he slammed his bird down, transforming the silky rush of flight into a roaring, vibrating nightmare. “Trapped!” somebody yelled into his headset as Greene felt his harness straps bite his shoulders the way his tires were biting the nonskid coating of the deck.
“Power at idle. Feet off the brakes,” Popeye calmly reminded Greene.
Greene didn’t reply. He was flattened against his seatback, willing the plane to stop its forward rush, too busy staring wide-eyed at the fast-approaching front edge of the angled flight deck—and the sea!
“P-Popeye! W-We’re going over into the nets!” Greene gasped.
“Nah,” Popeye replied. He was sounding bored. “There, see?”
The trapped bird had rolled forward about three hundred feet before coming to a halt; its forward velocity had stretched the one-and-a-half-inch-diameter arresting cable as if it were an elastic band. Greene started to relax as the Buckeye came to a halt, and then began to roll backward a few feet, due to the arresting cable’s rebound.
“Five five five, OK,” the LSO radioed.
Greene smiled. “OK” indicated that Greene had made a perfect landing, trapping the number-three cable.
“Welcome aboard. Air Force,” the LSO signed off.
“Not bad,” Popeye commented. “Welcome to the Navy.”
“Welcome to the Navy,” Greene now murmured out loud, staring blindly at the deck of cards in his hand. Over on the far side of the rec room, the TV still offered Captain Bly in counterpoint to Gillis’s snoring.
That first time out landing on a carrier had kind of been like Greene’s first time going all the way with a girl: Driving that initial glide path was scary as hell, but once you’d been through the routine, the rest was just perfecting your technique.
In the weeks after, Greene completed CARQUAL. He progressed to solo VFI landings in his Buckeye, practiced IFS instrument and night landings in the simulator and then did the real thing with a backseater, and finally soloed at night. Then he went through the whole training schedule again, this time in the far more grown-up A-4 Skyhawk. The humpbacked, short-tempered “Scooter” truly made the lovable little Buck seem like a child’s three-wheeler.
In addition, Greene learned how to take off from a carrier flight deck, which was a snap compared to setting down on one. After all, when you were strapped into a trimmed-for-takeoff bird with a wide-open throttle and then catapulted away, doing zero to 170 miles per hour in two seconds, you were pretty much just along for the ride.
From Pensacola, Greene moved on to Corpus Christi, Texas, into a Replacement Air Group for a stint familiarizing himself with the plane he’d be flying during his carrier tour. That was when interservice jealousy on the part of the Navy first reared its ugly head, and Air Force Captain Robbie Greene, for the first time in his military career, found himself a victim of the infamous military catch-22 mentality. All along Greene had expected to be destined for the front seat of a carrier based F-4 Phantom: the core jet fighter shared by both the Air Force and Navy. After all, the whole purpose of the Indian Giver project was to acquaint Greene with Navy air-combat tactics. Unfortunately, each gentleman on the list of naval flight officers available to crew with Greene in the tandem-seat Phantom made it clear that he was not interested in becoming famous—or infamous—as the only naval aviator to serve as the backseat “bear” radar intercept officer to an Air Force pilot. Now, any one of those RIOs in waiting could have been ordered to fly with Greene, but everyone involved realized that forcing an RIO into Greene’s backseat would have defeated the whole purpose of Indian Giver. You needed the spirit of teamwork to excel with the Phantom: why else was the “Double Ugly” a two-man airplane in the first place? Anything less than wholehearted support from his bear and Greene might just as well go back home to the Air Force, because he was not going to be in a position to apply himself to learning anything about Navy air-combat manuevers.
There was a single-seat supersonic jet fighter in the Navy’s arsenal: the shit-hot F-8 Crusader. Greene hungered for it. The F-8 was fast, carried a gun, and Greene had never liked the idea of flying with backseaters in the first place. The problem—enter catch-22—was that Greene had already been slotted for duty aboard carrier CV-22, the USS Sea Bear, and the Sea Bear didn’t fly Crusaders, just dual-seat F-4 Phantoms, A-6 Intruders, and single-seat A-7 Corsair lls. The tandem-seat A-6 Intruder was a subsonic attack-bomber, which made it totally unsuitable for Greene, even if the Navy could have come up with an NFO to fly with him. The A-7 Corsair was a subsonic version of the F-8 Crusader fighter that Greene had wanted but couldn’t get. The A-7 was a visual-flight-rules-only operable light attack craft that would have been right at home flying close-support missions for the infantry back in Korea. It was a totally unsuitable airplane for a fighter-jock participant in Indian Giver to fly, but the Navy argued that at least it carried a gun, and, at times, a pair of fuselage-mounted Sidewinder heat-seekers—to be used only for self-defense, of course.
And so, Greene, kicking and screaming, was assigned to an A-7 RAG for six weeks of training in the cuddly, low-level “Mud Mover” Corsair. Greene continued to complain his head off about the stupidity of the assignment: why not just issue him a grenade launcher and assign him to the Marines if ground support was what the Navy had in mind for him? His complaints were duly noted, but nothing happened in response to them. Finally, a kindly CO advised Greene to save his breath. It seemed that the Air Force and Navy brass were so pleased with how smoothly the “important” Air Force personnel had been integrated into the Top Gun school at Miramar that nobody was in the least interested in spoiling the interservice love fest by heeding Captain Greene’s may-day.
When Greene’s RAG time was done, he was airlifted onto the Sea Bear, where for the past three months he’d been flying regular cyclic ops in the A-7, puttering around sub-sonically, strafing towed targets and the like, while high above him the elite, supersonic Phantoms were mixing it up in practice furballs. Talk about being the ugly duckling!
On the TV, the movie abruptly went off in midscene, followed by static hissing from the speaker and filling the screen.
Gillis snorted awake. He was a sandy-haired, soft-featured man in his twenties, wearing the Navy’s summer-issue uniform of tan cotton trousers and a short-sleeve, open-neck shirt. Gillis sat up, blinking and yawning, staring at the TV, and then, accusingly, at Greene.
“Hey,” Gillis said. “I was watching that.”
Greene shrugged. “I didn’t touch it. It just went off.”
The television’s sound and picture returned, but instead of the movie the TV showed a nervous-looking junior officer seated behind a desk. Behind the officer was the world map divided into a time zones backdrop they used for the daily news broadcasts.
“This is a special bulletin,” announced the TV anchorman, reading from a stack of papers on his desk. “We have been informed that early this morning an American container ship, the merchantman Mayaguez, en route across the Gulf of Thailand, has been fired upon and boarded by Cambodian forces. “
“Holy shit,” Gillis breathed, getting out of his chair to turn up the volume.
The TV anchorman continued: “… President Ford and the National Security Council have met, and the White House has since issued the following statement. I quote: The President, concerned that the Mayaguez has been seized on the high seas, condemns the Cambodians for this act of piracy, and further demands the immediate release of the ship. Failure to do so will h
ave the utmost serious consequences.’ End of quote.”
The reporter paused. “The Sea Bear has been ordered to the Gulf of Thailand concerning this matter. The skipper anticipates that the Sea Bear will be operational to the vicinity in approximately forty-eight hours, and has authorized further news bulletins to be broadcast as they come in.” The newscaster smiled shyly. “Now, back to the movie.”
Greene jumped up to turn down the sound. “What a break!” he said excitedly. “We’re going to see some action!”
“Bullshit.” Gillis shook his head. “No way is it going to come to that. The Commies will back down.” He looked thoughtful. “I think that diplomacy will resolve the issue.”
“Maybe it will,” Greene said. “On the other hand, the Sea Bear, and who knows how many other ships are heading into the area…”
Greene glanced at his watch. It was a little after 1600 hours. The flights would be wrapping up for the afternoon. He headed for the door, thinking that now was a perfect time to start the ball rolling if he wanted a piece of the possible action to come.
The man to see was Gil Brody, the carrier’s air boss.
* * *
Greene didn’t get to see Brody until late the next day. As the chief officer in charge of supervising all air operations, Brody ended up spending the rest of Monday and most of Tuesday tied up in meetings with the skipper and the rest of the executive officers concerning the Mayaguez incident. Greene alternately checked in with the air boss’s clerk and cooled his heels waiting, brooding anxiously over his chance to get a piece of the increasingly likely action as more developments concerning the Mayaguez were announced.
Late Monday night it was revealed that at about the same time the Sea Bear had been ordered to make full speed toward the Gulf of Thailand, Navy reconnaissance aircraft from out of Subic Bay, the Philippines, had been ordered to locate the captured American ship and keep it under surveillance. The planes had found the Mayaguez. reporting it anchored off the Cambodian mainland, near the port of Kompong Som. The excitement level on board the Sea Bear was raised a notch when it became known that the Navy’s unarmed reconnaissance planes had been fired upon by the Cambodian patrol boats ringing the Mayaguez. Fortunately, none of the high-flying planes had been hit.
