Tupper and Beth worked out a way to make parting less painful. A few months before each cruise, they began a home project that they had no chance of completing before his deployment. (This year it was redoing the backyard.) They would inevitably come up short and snipe at each other just before he left. Somehow, bruising their love made things easier. Tupper knew that civilians found their elaborate routine beyond crazy, but inside the Navy, their friends just nodded. Whatever it takes.
It was time to go. Tupper went down the stairs and talked to his girls: Brenna, the prim ballerina, and Caitlin, who loved to wrestle weeds out in the yard with her dad. Recently, Tupper had watched a video of a younger version of himself recording Brenna’s favorite bedtime stories so she wouldn’t forget him while he was away on his first cruise. There were tears in his eyes as he read, just as there were tears as he watched it a decade later. Still, he went away. And not just that once, but over and over again. He had just turned forty. He was starting to add up all the damage that had been done. Had it been worth it? He didn’t know.
Beth came down the stairs, still as beautiful to him as the day they met. She gave the girls some final instructions, and then the couple jumped into Beth’s BMW SUV. Tupper carefully backed the car out of their cul-de-sac and asked his wife one question.
“Ready?”
The Wares skirted the quaint hotels and art galleries of seaside Anacortes and then drove past the less-photogenic Shell refineries on Washington State Route 20. For a while, they rode in silence. Tupper didn’t like to admit it, but he was a brooder, prone to dark silences that could keep him quiet except for mandatory radio calls on a six-hour combat flight. The melancholia had been there since he was a kid. He cried when his parents put an old chair out by the curb, convinced the chair had feelings. He told his mother that it wasn’t right to abandon it. Cindy Ware had to lie and tell him another family of chairs needed the chair even more. Around the same time, Jim took him fishing for the first time. His boy had just reeled in his first catch when his dad noticed he had tears in his eyes.
“Dad, can a fish scream?”
But as they turned off toward the Hope Island Inn by the Sea, Tupper’s default melancholy vanished, replaced by something else: unfettered relief. He knew the emotion well. It was the feeling that you’ve cheated death, whether a real one or just a career killer. He’d known the feeling as a pilot a handful of times around the carrier, mostly back when he was a rookie pilot, a nugget, having trouble getting aboard. You name it—almost ramp strikes, coming in too fast, overshooting the carrier’s four arresting wires—Tupper had problems with it early in his career.
The United States is the only country in the world that has pilots land on carriers in the dark—other countries having decided it is far too dangerous—and it is an ass-tightening experience under the best of circumstances. Most of the Navy now flew variations of the F/A-18 Hornet, a modern jet that projected all your information—airspeed, altitude, rate of descent—right in front of you with a head-up display. The HUD meant you could keep looking straight ahead, searching out the speck that is a carrier on a dark night, without having to scan back inside the cockpit to look at your instruments. The plane even had an autopilot setting where if you lined the Hornet up behind the carrier it would land itself like a Mercedes parking itself on a Manhattan street.
But Tupper didn’t fly a Hornet. Like my father, he had been assigned to the EA-6B Prowler. The Prowler had no HUD display; its basic airframe was designed a half century ago for the long-discontinued A-6 Intruder attack bomber. There’s a refueling hook on the nose of a Prowler, so Tupper had to peek out and to the left of his cockpit window when lining his jet up on final approach while simultaneously watching the meatball, an infrared spotlight flashed from the carrier’s deck. If he was on course, the lights flashed green. Too low and the light went red, telling him to pull up before he plowed into the back of the carrier.
Tupper would then drop his tailhook and try to catch one of the four wires—actually thick cables—stretched across the carrier’s deck that would bring him from 150 miles per hour to zero in a second. An old Prowler joke was that the only thing scarier than landing the Prowler on a carrier at night was to be one of the three other guys along just for the ride. The up-front navigator at least could see what was ahead and offer some muttered advice. The two electronic countermeasure officers in the back just hung on—listening to the beep of the radar altimeter warning of low altitude—cursing and praying into their masks.
On deck, relief came for Tupper only after he caught the wire, preferably the two or three. (One meant you came in too low and risked smashing into the back of the boat; four meant you were too fast and nearly overshot the carrier.) He’d power down the Prowler’s twin Pratt & Whitney engines. Only then did the stress release from his body, a furious adrenaline drain that sometimes caused his back and arms to spasm, making parking the jet on the edge of the carrier’s deck a dicey final move. Tupper consoled himself after a bad landing with a shrug and a “Well, at least I didn’t kill someone. I survived.”
And that’s the best Tupper could say about his time as XO—executive officer—of VAQ-135 under Doogie Breining. Tupper had survived and Breining had not killed anyone. Beyond that, Doogie’s tour had been a shit show.
Dining-out follows a strict protocol and order borrowed from the early British Royal Navy. This was particularly appropriate tonight since Breining was about as popular with his men as Captain Bligh had been with the sailors on the Bounty. He was a smart man—his call sign came from the NBC show starring Neil Patrick Harris as an adolescent doctor—but socially awkward, something Tupper and Beth picked up on while dining with the Breinings after joining the squadron a year earlier. Attempts to make small talk were met with smaller talk and then long, uncomfortable silences.
Ware and Breining were contemporaries, but Tupper couldn’t remember ever seeing Doogie out for a beer at the officers’ club or socializing with other aviators at the Brown Lantern, a Navy watering hole in Anacortes. In the workhard, fly-hard, set-your-hair-on-fire world of naval aviation, being a loner was a professional flaw. You didn’t need to be a boozer, although that helped, but you needed a sense of humor, which Doogie Breining didn’t have.
Breining’s social awkwardness had not gone unnoticed, but he was well connected. He did a tour at Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base, where he held a mouthful of a job, flying hour program chief. He did a bang-up job managing flight hours and sorties for the base’s pilots. An impressed general wrote a rave recommendation, and he screened for command.
Tupper didn’t play the angles like Doogie. He prided himself on his tunnel vision when it came to flying. “Concentrate on what’s in front of you. Can’t worry about yesterday’s pass or tomorrow’s flight.” It was a useful tool as a carrier pilot but a crushing liability as an officer trying to negotiate a career. He screened for command in 2008, and his personnel officer asked if he’d have a problem serving as Doogie Breining’s executive officer, his second-in-command. This was a common courtesy afforded commanders in a small community like Whidbey. Except for a forward-deployed squadron in Japan and a Marine detachment in Cherry Point, North Carolina, the entire active Prowler community was based on Whidbey. Hoping to head off pairing officers who despise each other or fought over a woman a decade ago, officers were given an unofficial right of first refusal when being assigned to a squadron as a commander. Breining’s reputation was an open secret, but somehow Tupper was clueless. If he’d heard the stories, he’d forgotten them. He told his personnel officer he was fine with the pairing. Pals told him he’d made a grave mistake. They were right.
As Doogie’s XO, Ware was Breining’s Biden, charged with supporting the front office no matter what, but he did it with increasing dread. He bit his lip as Breining screamed at officers over minor mistakes. And he watched as the power of being CO went to Doogie’s head. Coming back to the Nimitz af
ter a port call, Breining didn’t want to submit his bag to a routine search, claiming a commander’s prerogative not to be searched. It was Breining’s right, but senior officers rarely invoked it. It caused a scene as sailors gawked from down the gangplank, wondering what was causing the holdup. Tupper defused the situation with the Nimitz’s MPs, but he seethed inside.
Down the chain of command, the squadron’s junior officers cringed as Doogie sent routine paperwork back with WTF and SEE ME scrawled across the front. One lieutenant commander had the misfortune of having an office near the CO, and his hands would begin to shake whenever Doogie yelled his name. A star junior pilot told Tupper he was thinking of quitting flying to get away from Doogie. Tupper talked him out of it; three years later the pilot was chosen for the Blue Angels.
On it went. Then there was the holiday fiasco. The entire base was off on a federal holiday, but Breining made his squadron report that morning so they could catch up on the paper he wanted pushed. There was just one officer missing: Doogie. Word was he was skiing with his family. His junior officers struck back in a way only testosterone-filled twenty-seven-year-old men can: they swiped Doogie’s rarely used beer mug from the officers’ club, pissed in it, and returned it to its place of honor without a wash.
All of this left Tupper feeling like a passenger in a car driven by a drunk who refused to give up the wheel or use his brakes. He knew that VAQ-135 had become a mess he would eventually have to clean up, but there wasn’t a lot he could do about it. It was a dilemma that stretched back to Bligh and Fletcher Christian. Unless there was a grave dereliction of duty, the XO simply did not contradict the commanding officer.
Tupper at least still had the solace of flying. But even that got messed up. A few months earlier, the Black Ravens were returning from a six-month cruise on the Nimitz in the Persian Gulf. With Doogie’s management style—small screwups got junior officers routinely grounded—the cruise had seemed never ending. Even the port calls were lame. Finally, after 182 days, the Nimitz was just off the coast of San Diego, flying range from Whidbey. It was time to go home.
One of the highlights of a skipper’s command is the fly-off, when he leads his planes in tight formation—wings nearly touching—over his home airfield before landing and reuniting with the families. In the Pacific Northwest, cloud cover can make this a dangerous move. The men did a preflight brief on the Nimitz, as they did for every flight. It was agreed that the squadron’s four jets would rendezvous above Smith Island, just a few miles from Whidbey. If the skies were clear, they would fly their four jets into Whidbey in formation. If not, they’d go in separately at five-minute intervals. Doogie was the flight’s mission commander, the officer responsible for the briefing and for executing the flight plan, but, in theory, once in the air it wouldn’t be Doogie’s call. He was a navigator—the pilots would decide.
By the time the planes arrived over Smith, the skies were overcast, with multiple layers of thick clouds. Now was the moment for Tupper or another pilot to speak up. But no one dared cross Doogie. The Black Ravens headed to Whidbey in formation, the clouds so thick Tupper couldn’t see the other jets just a few feet away. He was the second jet of a four-plane formation, boxed in by Prowlers on both sides. He had nowhere to go if something went wrong. A slight jerk of the stick or some turbulence and wings could touch. People might die, ten minutes from home. In his head, Tupper kept repeating the same thought.
“This is a mistake. This is a mistake.”
The Prowlers broke through the cloud cover a mile short of Whidbey. The Black Ravens flew by in formation, put on a show for the home folks, and then landed safely. They taxied to a stop, popped open their canopies, and climbed down. Five minutes later, Tupper ordered everyone except Doogie into the squadron ready room. He screamed at his aviators.
“That was seriously fucked. Unsat. I don’t care if it was the goddamned CO’s fly-in. That was unsafe. We will not do that on my watch.”
Later, Doogie saw that Tupper was pissed. He asked him what was the matter. Tupper considered letting him have it, but he didn’t.
“We didn’t fly the flight that we briefed, sir. We didn’t fly the brief.”
But that was all in the past. Doogie would be gone in the morning. Finally, Tupper would be able to place his own stamp on the squadron. He only had sixteen months and there was so much he wanted to change. Tupper and Beth made their way into the restaurant. Someone remarked they had not seen Tupper smile that much since he arrived in the squadron eighteen months ago. Everyone knew the reason.
The future was now in Tupper’s hands. There was just tonight’s dinner to get through. Alcohol would help.
Chapter Four
I made my way to the same dinner by a different route. Off the ferry, Alix and I drove past lush farmland converted into weekend estates for Microsoft millionaires. Signs pointed the way to artists’ colonies. But Whidbey Island is thirty-five miles long. By the time you reach Oak Harbor, pickups with blue base stickers replace VW Bugs and “Co-Exist” decals. We quickly drove through town, and I gawked at box stores that now filled once-open fields. The Roller Barn was still there, outsized and bright red. My old neighborhood was just a mile away, but there was no time.
We checked into a motel and changed into our formal wear—Alix in a black dress, me in a too-tight borrowed tuxedo—and headed down to the lobby. A matronly front-desk clerk interrupted us and asked where we were headed.
“It’s a Navy thing, right?”
I said yes. Before I could provide any more information she launched into a monologue about her Navy life. Her husband was recently retired, but now her daughter was overseas, serving on a cruiser. Times were tough, but she loved—loved!—the Navy. I’d forgotten the cut-to-the-chase nature of military conversations. No wasting time with pleasantries while waiting for secrets to spill out over time. Someone could be shipped overseas tomorrow. You got down to whatever crosses you were bearing quickly.
“So why are you two here?”
I helped myself to some lobby popcorn and gave the clerk a sketch of my backstory, including Dad’s accident. Her smile vanished. After thirty years, I still didn’t know when to disclose my dad’s death. When a new acquaintance asked me about my parents, I usually joked, “And now we have hit the sad portion of the conversation” before coughing up the particulars. Rationally, I knew the best time to talk about my dad’s death was never; it wasn’t a stranger’s business. But another part of me relished dropping the tragedy on anyone who seemed on the verge of breaking into Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.”
The exchange made me dread tonight’s dinner even more. We arrived early and pulled into the gravel parking lot. I turned off the engine but didn’t budge. I told Alix the whole trip was a really bad idea. She insisted we actually get out of the car before fleeing.
“We’ll stay just a little while and then we can leave.”
There was a nerve-calming walk around the parking lot and then we headed inside. The inn was a regular Navy hangout with the added benefit of not being on actual base property. The sun bounced off the sea and through the windows. We were early and the dining room was empty except for a gray-haired man and his wife. Breining had invited former squadron skippers in the area to the dinner. Only one couple took him up on the offer. They clung to each other tenderly as they stared out at the water. I took a breath and tapped the man on his shoulder. He turned around slowly, and I reached out my hand.
“You’re Zeke Zardeskas, right?”
Surprised, the old man sized me up. My hair was too long to be active Navy, and I was a tad young to be an old CO returning to the scene of long-gone triumphs.
“Yes, I am. How did you know? Have we met?”
“We have, a long time ago. My name is Stephen Rodrick, Pete Rodrick’s son.”
His wife gasped.
“Oh my God.”
The couple looked like they had
seen a ghost. They had in a way. Zachary “Zeke” Zardeskas had been Dad’s XO. It wasn’t as bad as Doogie and Tupper, but the two were not close. They tolerated each other, but their wives didn’t get along at all. Mom thought Diana was a drama queen. She said Diana panicked at minor problems and passed on rumors of the squadron’s comings and goings to the other wives, creating confusion and fear.
But it was the Zardeskases’ actions after my father’s accident that left a permanent mark on my mother. Zeke had taken the command pin off Dad’s spare uniform before shipping his effects home. This was both understandable—it could take weeks for a command pin to be shipped from the States to an aircraft carrier—and loathsome—if you needed a pin to show authority, you’d already lost—and it broke Mom’s heart. Back home, Diana suffered a meltdown after the accident. She wasn’t exactly a calming influence for Mom; my aunt ordered her out of our house after the memorial service because of her wailing.
Now Zeke and Diana stood in front of me, senior citizens. We caught up quickly. He had made captain, served in Washington, and then returned to the area for retirement. They talked of their kids. I could feel jealousy about the life my family never had creeping up my throat. But I just smiled. I didn’t have time to process everything because the room soon filled with close-cropped young men in dress whites, all with shiny wives or girlfriends on their arms. (And they were almost all young men. About 10 percent of Navy aviators are now female, but VAQ-135 only had one at the time.)
The officers looked at Alix and me with a distant curiosity. They nodded politely and then steered their dates onto the restaurant’s terrace for pictures. Clad in white uniforms and aviator glasses, they looked impossibly young. I wondered if they knew how quickly their moment would pass.
The Magical Stranger Page 3
