The Cannibal Queen

by Stephen Coonts

  The motel even sends a van, which turns out to be driven by a college student who tells us he is going to move to Denver. He’s been all over the east coast, he says, and is ready for The West. I nod my understanding. I joined the Navy to get out of West Virginia, so I know how he feels. The worst mistake a young person can make is to whittle down his dreams to fit the size of his hometown.

  After a dip in the motel pool, David and I trot across the parking lot to the mall and take in Robin Hood with Kevin Costner. The previews of coming attractions give me a jolt. Sandwiched in between the trailers on a Danny DeVito comedy and a cop shoot-’em-up is a farce about naval aviation. The logo is a direct rip-off of the Flight of the Intruder movie triangle artwork, which was taken directly from the Vietnam-era Intruder patches that still adorn the leather flight jackets of A-6 pilots and bombardiers. Did my book start this? I sigh as I listen to this Pensacola Navy crowd guffaw at the foolishness on the screen.

  That evening before bed I remembered Bill Butterworth’s remark about how much he enjoyed the big publishing blowout in New York, and I recalled the one I got invited to several years ago. It was Doubleday’s ninetieth anniversary party and they held it in the ballroom of a swanky hotel on Fifth Avenue, just north of the southeast corner of Central Park. I wore one of my Denver oil-company-lawyer suits and my best tie.

  All of Doubleday’s heavy hitters were there. The booze was free and there were bushels of shrimp and crab legs and even caviar. I didn’t know a soul except Nancy Evans, who was then the president of Doubleday, and David Gernert, my editor. Of course they knew everybody and had to mix and mingle.

  I got a double scotch since the price was right and sat on one of the railings overlooking the entrance. I was perched there when Bill Cosby arrived in a blue jogging suit, two-piece. Must have set him back at least fifty bucks, but what the hey, he could afford it. He looked at me and I looked at him and then he recognized somebody and started talking to them. I spotted a woman with a truly awesome cleavage and started staring.

  Then Jackie Onassis, Doubleday’s best-known editor, arrived. Every eye in the place went to her. She is the only true celebrity I know of—she doesn’t have to hire a publicist or call the reporters when she’s in Aspen to try to get her name in the papers. She doesn’t have to sing, dance, write, act, or do the Carson show. And until the day she dies every living soul who sees her will gawk. I did.

  Mrs. O stayed for ten minutes or so as the television cameras ground and the crowd milled around her, then when I turned my head to look for a waiter bearing another scotch, she vanished. Everyone was craning to see where she went but she made her exit slick as a pickpocket. Later I heard she had been escorted there by a man. He’s the most anonymous guy on the planet. Nobody saw him.

  I went over to the TV guys and watched them twiddle knobs and check lights. One of the cameramen and I mingled socially. “You here with the party?” he asked finally.

  “Security.”

  “Oh.”

  “You see anybody pocketing the silverware, you let me know.”

  When I left I saw actress Betty White waiting alone on the sidewalk for a limo or taxi. I said, “Hi.”

  She said, “Hi.”

  She’s a nice lady.

  Pensacola, Florida, is one of my favorite cities. Here the dreams begin. When I first saw it in the summer of 1966, a month before my twentieth birthday, it was a small, sleepy southern town and my stay did not promise to be a good one. I arrived at the local airport at the end of my very first long trip on an airplane with a small suitcase and a set of mimeographed orders to report the following afternoon at 4 P.M. to Aviation Officers Candidate School (AOCS) at the Naval Air Station. The admirals had concluded that the Vietnam War might be long and bloody and trained pilots might become scarce, so they had resolved to increase the supply. I was to be a small morsel of their cannon fodder, although from my vantage point the Navy’s need for pilots looked like an opportunity to learn to fly and fulfill my military obligation. If I lived through it, fine. If I didn’t, well … the grim reaper was still a long way away and who could say how a man’s life would run?

  I took a taxi from the airport, the first taxi ride of my life, and had the driver drop me in front of the biggest hotel in town—indeed, the only hotel in town. The San Carlos is gone now but in its day it was a beaut—six or seven stories, lots of velvet drapes and leather chairs and all in all, one hell of a fine place for a youngster who had just completed his sophomore year of college and was out adventuring for the first time.

  I had read the orders word for word and made careful note of the hour of my required arrival. Instinctively I knew that it would be not wise to arrive early. After a fitful night’s sleep, I spent the next morning wandering the streets of Pensacola and looking at the trains in the yard and glancing through the windows of the sailors’ bars. It was hot that late June day in the deep south, with the heat rising in shimmering waves from the streets and a humidity that was truly oppressive to anyone not accustomed to it. Situated right on the Gulf of Mexico, Pensacola had its full share of humidity but was spared some of the heat that makes towns a hundred miles inland smoldering hells in late summer. But Pensacola was without doubt a southern town, full of loafers and farmers in bib overalls piloting pickup trucks. What it had that most towns didn’t were sailors and airplanes out at the base, but these weren’t very noticeable my first morning.

  The day went too quickly as my mouth got dryer and dryer. At last I hailed a cab in front of the hotel and set off. Not very many minutes later I became rudely acquainted with my very first drill instructor, a U.S. Marine Corps staff sergeant. The officers candidate school received a supply of newly minted drill instructors every year from the drill instructor school at Parris Island, South Carolina. I thought it was nice of the Marine Corps to share with the Navy. Actually, in spite of the hell those combat veterans put us through, I found myself acquiring a deep respect, affection even, for those model soldiers who tried to make military men of us college boys. That feeling has continued to grow as the years have passed.

  After six weeks of fun and games the sergeants sent me back to college via bus since the airlines were on strike at the time. I remember that bus station, dirty with the usual grimy patina and peeling paint of public buildings the world over, with one large fan suspended from the ceiling turning slowly, lazily, while the short-order grill filled the room with the odor of grease, a WHITES ONLY sign over one men’s room and a COLORED over the other. Integration had just arrived in the Deep South in 1966 and they hadn’t gotten around to repainting the signs.

  The next summer I returned to Pensacola for another six-week visit with a few handpicked drill instructors. We saw Pensacola for only a few hours on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. The rest of the time was spend studying Navy stuff, marching and getting inspected and getting ready to get inspected again. The last week of AOCS I got to be a candidate officer, a term of art that meant that the academics and physical training were over and I got to march the other candidates around.

  One night that week, while I was standing an all-night duty officer watch, I sneaked into my drill instructor’s office, sat in his chair and put my feet up on his desk. It was a sublime moment.

  Then I noticed a metal box filled with file cards on the desk. I confess, I looked.

  Yep, each card had the name of a guy in my class. In the blink of an eye I had mine out. There were exactly three words on the card: “Lacks military bearing.” That was it. Nothing else. Staff Sergeant Balyette had chosen those three words to summarize my twelve weeks of AOCS and to predict my future in the military. He was an expert, so I knew it was true. They can put it on my tombstone as my epitaph.

  I came to Pensacola to stay and fell in love with the place in late May, 1968, as a spanking-new college-graduate ensign assigned to flight training.

  AOCS was turning out thirty new ensigns a week, the Naval Academy was popping them out, and the Naval ROTC units around the nation
were shipping them here. The town was awash in ensigns the summer of 1968, or so it seemed to me. The “gouge” on the best restaurants—cheap with edible food— and fun places swirled through the training classes. We cruised the streets and went over the causeway to Pensacola Beach and sparked what few single women there were. I never managed a date.

  Still, we saw Pensacola as a great adventure, our first step into the real world after college, with a real paycheck and a real chance to succeed or fail solely on our own efforts. I still see her that way. I get a warm fuzzy every time I visit.

  In the last twenty-five years the city has doubled in size and changed dramatically. Now it has four-lane highways, a big civic center with an attached Hilton Hotel sporting a cutesy old-timey railroad station for a lobby, all the usual malls and three-bedroom two-bath suburbs. Here and there in this homogenized glitz are a few remnants of Pensacola the way it was before the developers and improvers got their hands on the controls.

  The saving grace is that the town is still full of young men—and now women—just out of college and trying to earn a place for themselves in naval aviation. For them the future is a bright glowing road that stretches ahead toward an infinite horizon. That is as it should be. Youth without optimism would be unbearable.

  The two men who made the most impression upon me at Pensacola were Jimmy Hanks and George Dustin. Lieutenant Commander Jimmy Hanks was my first flight instructor. Like most naval aviators, he was a medium-sized fit man who spoke softly and meant what he said. Fate had played him a nasty trick: he owned a lumberyard in Pensacola but had been recalled to active duty by the Navy and assigned as a primary flight instructor at VT-1 at Saufley Field. So he flew students all day and managed his business at night—I don’t know when he slept. It seemed to me that if the Navy was going to recall him to active duty, they should at least have the decency to ship him somewhere for an adventure. He seemed to regard his recall to active duty as another shit sandwich. Still, he was an excellent flight instructor.

  I was one of three students Mr. Hanks was shepherding through primary, and I was perhaps his dullest and least promising. On the first flight in the T-34 I became deathly ill and filled the barf bag he had thoughtfully provided beforehand. Doped with Dramamine, I worked like a slave on subsequent flights yet acquired the skills so slowly that Job would have thrown his hat in the dirt.

  Jimmy Hanks explained it for the sixth or seventh time, his voice low, trying to use nontechnical words so this bumpkin from West Virginia would finally comprehend and convert that comprehension to cockpit performance. But he wasn’t a saint. The fifth time I taxied the airplane in after a flight and forgot which space we had taxied out of at the start, he didn’t scream, he didn’t shout—he just informed me curtly that if I didn’t write the row and space number on my kneeboard from now on, he was going to shove my pencil up my ass.

  One day he asked, “You want to fly jets?”

  I admitted that I entertained that ambition. So he began to pad my grades, salt in some above-average marks that I hadn’t earned. In those days a student needed above-average cockpit grades to qualify for the jet training pipeline.

  Years later when I was a flight instructor on A-6 aircraft I came to understand the risk that Jimmy Hanks decided to run. Sending a marginal student to a challenging program just because he wants to try it is merely giving him a golden opportunity to fail. Failure for a student pilot usually means being washed out of the program, but occasionally the consequences are more catastrophic. Thirteen student pilots crashed fatally at the bases where I flew in the fifteen months it took me to earn my wings. Jimmy Hanks decided to give me the opportunity I wanted well knowing that I was going to have to learn to acquire the critical skills quicker or I was going to be washed out or dead.

  I occasionally wonder what my life would have been like if I had not gone to jets, not gone to A-6s, not gone to Vietnam. I wouldn’t have met the girl I married, I wouldn’t have had the children I did, perhaps I would not have become a writer. Who knows? Maybe I would have married an heiress or be living in sin with a starlet with silicone tits.

  George Dustin had an equally significant influence on my life. He was a lieutenant in his late twenties, a Spad pilot. The Air Force called their Spads A-l Skyraiders but George Dustin never did. A Spad was a Spad was a Spad.

  Mr. Dustin had a massive head that sported a square, handsome face, this atop a pair of broad shoulders and oak-tree arms. His voice was a hoarse, gravelly bass that carried even when he tried to speak softly. I got to know Mr. Dustin because he taught the pre-solo course that gave us students the basic information about the Alabama gulf coast peninsula where we flew and he administered a multiple-choice examination on this body of knowledge. The fledgling had to pass the exam before he could solo. I failed it the first time around and got to spend extra time with Mr. Dustin reviewing the material—“stupid study” we called it.

  Then my parents arrived in Pensacola for a vacation and I got busy squiring them around and not cracking the books. I failed my first retake of the exam. And the second. Now I needed a perfect score to pass this hurdle. To Mr. Dustin’s and my dismay I failed the third retake by missing one question.

  I was on the verge of flunking out of flight school. Nauseated, unable to eat, trying to be pleasant to my folks, I studied the material in my BOQ room until the wee hours—the names of all the outlying emergency fields that a solo student could use for an emergency landing, their shapes and dimensions and runway orientations, their precise locations, the shape and orientation of the landing patterns, the height and location of the tallest tower in gulf coast Alabama, and so on, rudimentary essential information that had to be acquired by rote memorization, which I loathed. But I had to do it.

  On my fifth attempt at the test, the fourth retake, Mr. Dustin gave the answer sheet a cursory glance and marked “100%” on the top. He stared at me, gave his leonine head a slow shake, and rumbled, “Get outta here.”

  I found out later that the powers that be changed the rules after my record-breaking academic adventure. From this day forth, they decreed, a student would get only two retakes of the pre-solo examination if he failed it the first time. And failure to pass the second retake with a perfect score would be considered irrebuttable evidence that the student was incurably, hopelessly stupid, incapable of ever becoming a naval aviator. A wise and merciful course was mandated: since capital punishment was no longer in vogue and the jails were already full, the wretch would be washed out of the flight program and sent someplace where he would not need to operate any machine more complicated than a safety razor, with, of course, appropriate annotations in his service record to ensure that he would never be promoted.

  The lesson I got out of all of this was that I had to study and be prepared for every flight, every written examination. I couldn’t loaf in flight school as I had done in college, expect to read the book the night before the exam and waltz in and rack up an A or B. Uh-uh. So I dug in for the most demanding period of my life and never failed another written exam or had an unsatisfactory flight. And I became a jet pilot.

  I don’t know whatever happened to Jimmy Hanks or George Dustin. Neither is listed in the Pensacola telephone directory, which is too bad because I wanted to give them both a ride in the Cannibal Queen. If they ever read this they will probably be surprised to find their names here. They probably won’t recall the incidents related here or remember my name. I can’t remember the names of the students I instructed. But students remember instructors.

  The next day, Sunday, Father’s Day, David and I got a rental car and drove over to the Naval Aviation Museum at the Naval Air Station. This is quite a museum and it’s worth the trip if you ever get the chance.

  Among the planes that you will see nowhere else is the NC-4, the first aircraft to fly across the Atlantic Ocean, a feat this particular aircraft performed in 1919. It’s a huge four-engine flying boat, an open-cockpit biplane with a boat hull. The size of this wood and fabric ma
sterpiece will stun you.

  The pre-World War II collection is superb. The World War II exhibit, is, I believe, the most comprehensive collection of U.S. Navy aircraft of that era under one roof anywhere. The PBY Catalina is the best specimen I have yet seen.

  Displayed without apology is a Stearman painted silver and two N3Ns, the Naval Aircraft Factory version of the Stearman company’s masterpiece. The N3Ns have different landing gear, but they are yellow sisters to the Cannibal Queen. I bragged to David that the Queen looked as gorgeous as the two N3Ns before I started putting a lot of hours on her.

  “You bought yours to fly,” David said, “not hang in a museum.” I think he sensed that I was apologizing for the Queen’s chipped paint and accumulating grime. This is not as perceptive as you might think since he has watched me carefully wipe her down after every flight.

  The airplanes in the Naval Aviation Museum are in as good a condition as those at the Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. In comparison, the planes at the Air Force Museum, in Dayton, Ohio, look like old airplanes that were merely de-fueled and rolled inside, a condition the Air Force refers to as “flight line ready.” The Navy planes glisten and gleam, sparkle and shine.

  I suppose one could argue that airplanes shouldn’t be shined like a pair of drill instructor’s inspection shoes since the lay tourist might get a false impression, but I contend they look better indoors when they are spotless and shiny. Ask the owner of any antique car why he put five layers of paint on his pride and joy, then waxed it to a high gloss. No fool thinks Model A Fords came from the factory that way. Women intuitively understand that looking one’s best adds to the aura of romance, which is what aviation museums are all about. Flight is romance—not in the sense of sexual attraction, but as an experience that enriches life.

  After touring the museum we drove out to Pensacola Beach. We forgot our bathing suits, so we took off our shoes and socks and waded into the surf with our jeans rolled up as high as they would go. They got wet anyway. In minutes David was in to his knees.