Breining and his wife, Nicole, didn’t join in the photos. I thanked him for inviting us, and we made awkward, stilted conversation. He was a compact man—his wife was almost a full head taller—and smiling seemed like an act of will for him. Making small talk is a basic job skill for me, and I can usually find common ground with anyone. It shouldn’t have been difficult with Doogie: he was a flier like my father, holding the same rank and job, but it still felt like we were speaking past each other with a seven-second delay.
Mercifully, we were seated a few minutes later. The head table was made up of Alix and me, the Breinings, the Zardeskases, and Commander Vincent Johnson—the squadron’s new executive officer—and his wife, Marci. Two seats remained empty.
Then, an older officer, his cap in the crook of his arm, emerged from a scrum of other officers. He held a chair for his wife and then reached his hand across the table.
“I’m Tupper and this is Beth. I’d like to apologize in advance for whatever damage tonight does to your view of the United States Navy.”
Everyone laughed, except for Doogie.
A few minutes later, a short, squat young officer wheeled in a cart holding a boom box. His call sign was Oompa because of his stature and he was the Vice, aka the master of ceremonies. He shouted into the room.
“Officer’s call!”
Everyone stood at attention. Oompa pushed play and “Anchors Aweigh” sifted out of the tinny speakers. Then someone shouted, “Parade the beef.” A tray of steaks was carted around the tables. There was a series of toasts. Most were lighthearted but formal. Breining said, “To the Commander in Chief” and everyone shouted back “To the Commander in Chief.” “To the wives!” “To the wives!” And so on. But then, for a moment, things turned solemn.
“To missing comrades,” said Commander Breining. He looked at me for a moment.
Every movement at a dining-out—going to the bathroom, taking off a jacket—requires formal permission. Do anything without prior approval and you are guilty of an infraction. Your punishment is drinking out of the grog bowl, a mixture of whiskey, gin, wine, and Tabasco sauce. Soon, Doc, the squadron’s female flight doctor, declared a desire to urinate.
“Mr. Vice, I request that table four be allowed to use the facilities.”
Oompa answered.
“Doc, your request is denied. Drink from the bowl of grog.”
Doc did as she was told, but then she started rifling rolls at the Vice. In a few seconds, rolls were bouncing off my head, much to Doogie’s consternation. I fired one back. Tupper gave me a thumbs-up. Dinner staggered on for another two hours. Eventually, the tables were allowed to use the bathroom. Doc clutched my arm and smiled at me crazily.
“Who are you and why are you here?”
I didn’t know what to say. A few hours later, Doc passed out in the gravel driveway of another officer’s home while looking for her car keys. By then, I was back in my motel room staring at the ceiling, still trying to answer her question.
Names and faces long past swirled through my head that night. One of them was Timmy Newman. Timmy was my best friend when I was five. He was a curly-haired boy whose dad was also a pilot. We met in Monterey the year I fell out of the car. There were play dates with Hot Rods and whispers across blue mats during kindergarten naptime. Our friendship was typically Navy, intense and sporadic. After kindergarten, his dad was sent off somewhere and my father to NAS Alameda outside of San Francisco. Timmy just disappeared one day. That’s how it went.
Three years later, I found myself in Mrs. Hunt’s third-grade class at Clover Valley Elementary, a quarter mile from NAS Whidbey’s gates. We had just arrived in town. It was the first day of school, and, as usual, I knew no one. I sat down at my desk and stared at a dog-eared Matt Christopher book that I carried with me everywhere. A finger tapped me on my shoulder. I spun around. There was Timmy Newman in a white turtleneck.
His dad was flying Prowlers too! For little boys, our reunification was a profound miracle, too fantastic to contemplate. We became inseparable, chattering over cheese pizza, CCD, and Cub Scouts. Nothing could part us.
Then, one damp January morning, Timmy came to school late. His father’s Prowler received a weak catapult launch off the Constellation in the Mediterranean. Not having enough power to maintain altitude, Commander Roger Newman and his crew ejected from their plane. Tim’s dad survived, but a crewmember drowned. Timmy told me about it while we played four square at recess.
We were eight.
We remained best friends over the next five years, riding bikes and belting each other with his dad’s old boxing gloves. Then came Dad’s accident. A month or two after the crash, Tim and I joined some other kids on a school trip to Mount Baker for a day of skiing. The bus wound its way over the Deception Pass Bridge and Tim reluctantly handed me a copy of the local paper. There was a small headline about Dad’s crash.
The story reported that after an investigation the Navy ruled nothing was mechanically wrong with Dad’s Prowler and the probable cause of the crash was pilot error. There were no real details. I read it twice and then handed it back to Tim. I stared out the bus window, not wanting him to see the tears in my eyes. He waited a moment and then spoke quietly. I could barely hear him above the screaming of our classmates.
“I didn’t know if I should show you this.”
“No, I’m glad you did.”
That was a lie. We moved from Whidbey Island a few months later. I never saw Tim Newman again.
Since then, I’ve lived with the fact that Dad was responsible for his own death and that of his crew. What exactly he did wrong was never fully explained. I remember grown-ups whispering about flying low without a radar altimeter. But none of it mattered. The mishap was ruled pilot error. Dad was the pilot. Simple as that.
It was a wound that never healed. My father, everyone said, was a straight arrow, a grinder who worked eighteen hours a day. He’d won mathematics prizes and been promoted ahead of his peers. On the carrier, he briefed, he flew, he debriefed, and then he went to Mass. That was it. He was not a cowboy. Yet the Navy maintained it was his mistake that created a riptide of tragedy that destroyed four families.
I didn’t talk about this with anyone. (I didn’t know if anyone else in my family had read the story.) In my world, no one spoke about Dad except in hushed, reverent platitudes. I possessed dangerous information that could destroy that. It was my dark secret. I kept quiet and avoided Whidbey Island for three decades. How could I not? What if I ran into someone who remembered him? I carried his sin. And that’s what I thought it was: a sin. Dad’s Catholicism had soaked me good. No action that killed four men could be a mere mistake.
A few miles away, Tupper tried to get some sleep as well. He’d come home to his dad freaking out. Two drunken men had started banging on the door about an hour before Tupper and Beth made it home. His dad wondered if he should call the cops. Tupper laughed and told him not to worry. He had an idea who it was. He checked in on his girls and loosened the collar on his uniform. Then he checked his voice mail.
There were multiple calls from his buddy Roast, a friend from his younger Prowler days in VAQ-134, the Lancers. Tupper and Roast had led the Gutter Rats, a motley assortment of junior officers who flew hard and partied harder. They’d flown over Iraq together and spent hundreds of hours with their thumbs up their asses while the squadron was deployed at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia for Operation Enduring Freedom. Roast was a great pilot who tired of the bullshit. He got out, took a straight job, and flew part-time for the National Guard out of Omaha.
“Hey Tupper, I’ve flown cross country for a Gutter Rat reunion. You fucking pussy, where the fuck are you? You better let us in before one of us takes a shit in your driveway.”
Tupper laughed. There was no sign of Roast or Flounder, another Gutter Rat. They must have circled back into town for more provisions.
A few minutes later there was pounding on his porch. Tupper cursed with a smile and opened the front door. There were Roast and Flounder, gang-tackling each other. Tupper invited them in, and they tiptoed as quietly as drunk men can tiptoe onto the back porch. A bottle of whiskey appeared. Cigars were lit. For a few hours, Tupper was back in an old scene.
Maybe it was a natural rebellion against fatherhood, the stress of the cockpit, and finally being freed of the shackles of the academy and flight school, but once Tupper became a Navy pilot he decided he wasn’t going to take shit from anyone. He built a reputation as the guy who always pushed the joke a little too far. The tradition actually started in his final days at the academy when—with graduation assured—he posed for a photograph on the roof of Bancroft Hall, the academy’s dormitory, as “the Secret Ninja,” wearing only a black mask and black socks. That made him a minor legend, but other actions had the opposite effect. He went to a Prowler tactics school and started bullshitting with a much older Marine instructor. But when the Marine ripped on Tupper and Tupper came back with the classic “That’s not what your daughter said last night,” the Marine had to be held back from popping Tupper in the mouth.
Not that he was alone. As a junior officer he was often flying circles over Iraq enforcing no-fly zones. Port calls were rare, so you had to take advantage when you could. Back then, Tupper, Roast, and his buddies were all binge drinkers, if you wanted to put a label on it. One night, Tupper and the rest of the squadron were partying in a Singapore hotel suite. Tupper found the conversation so scintillating that he didn’t want to leave to urinate, so he grabbed a hotel glass and relieved himself. He put it back on the table and watched with horror as his skipper came dangerously close to downing his piss. He almost got a new call sign: D-Hop, for “drinks his own piss.” Tupper was glad it didn’t take.
He was getting a reputation as a cowboy in the cockpit. Toward the end of a 1999 cruise, Tupper brought his Prowler into the Constellation on a tuck-under break where he flipped the Prowler on its back and rotated 270 degrees on his approach. This was dangerous and forbidden, but Tupper couldn’t resist. The men thought it was badass. The skipper was pissed. Tupper didn’t care.
In a way, Tupper was just following his superiors. Back in Anacortes after a hard night of drinking, one of his early skippers asked him to throw him through a store window. The cops intervened before Tupper could execute a direct order.
Things changed as he got older. He made lieutenant commander in 2003 and was assigned to the Scorpions of VAQ-132 for his department head tour, a stint that would decide if he’d make command. It was time to put childish things away, or at least store them on a higher shelf. Tupper made one of his trademark wiseass remarks early in his tenure, and the squadron’s XO took him aside. The commander showed Tupper the paper trail on his career up to that point. It read something like this:
Incredibly competent, will do anything and move mountains, leader, rock star, going places, and he has a tendency to light his hair on fire. There’s risk there.
Tupper read the words and told his boss he heard him loud and clear. He stopped drinking with the junior officers and did his best to keep his mouth shut.
But tonight was an ode to the old days. They smoked and drank and bullshitted for hours. Tupper protested that it was getting late, but he loved it. He had joined the Navy for this, the sheer unpredictability of it all, a midnight flight over Kandahar or the possibility that even in early middle age in sleepy Anacortes a night might go to dawn. Sure, he’d rather not have to talk Roast out of shitting in his front yard when he left, but that was just the cost of doing business.
He had already stocked his garage fridge with cases of beer in preparation for the day his Black Ravens green-lighted him, another Navy tradition: a junior officer calls the skipper and just whispers “Green Light,” a sign that the entire squadron is about to raid the skipper’s house demanding pizza and beer.
Roast and friends cleared out around four, just as morning twilight began creeping up in Anacortes. Tupper filled the dishwasher and wiped down the counters—he had an OCD streak a mile wide—and grabbed three hours of sleep.
He woke before seven and showered and shaved quietly, trying not to wake Beth and the girls. He noticed his dress uniform was missing its command pin, so he ducked out of the house with his father and drove to Whidbey Naval Air Station and waited for the Navy Exchange to open.
Together alone, Tupper and his father often couldn’t find the words even though they were close. While Jim and Cindy Ware waited on the birth of their first son, Jim’s brother Bev was killed in Vietnam and awarded the Silver Star posthumously. Jim Ware would be the first to tell you he never fully recovered from that day. He adored his first son. There would be two more, even if he was so exhausting—Hunt was found scaling a fence trying to escape on his first day at day care—that they put off having another child until he was five.
When he was fourteen, Hunter and Jim joined some other Boy Scouts and dads for a weekend sailing trip up the Chesapeake on two sailboats. The weather turned ugly soon after the group left the Sassafras River and headed into the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. Thunder sounded and rain fell sideways. The dad-in-charge panicked. He shouted contradictory instructions as visibility deteriorated. The boats rammed each other. Jim Ware’s son vanished below deck. Hunter turned on the boat’s navigational system, an antiquated gizmo that told you your position based on sonar buoys in the water. He had never seen the system before, but he mastered it in fifteen minutes. His father shouted down to his son.
“Which way should we go? What do we do?”
Hunt told him to relax. He started issuing commands to Jim on the bridge: steer the boat to the left; steer it a little to the right. Hunter had both boats snugly anchored in a quiet cove within an hour.
Tupper and his old man picked up the pin and settled into his new office with Styrofoam cups of coffee and stale doughnuts. They didn’t say much. But at that moment—before the band began practicing—the silence was welcome. His dad flashed him a proud smile. That was all Tupper needed.
Later that morning, Hangar 8 filled with over two hundred people. Two gleaming Prowlers separated rows of folding chairs. Kids in blue blazers chased each other around as Alix and I took our seats.
I thought of Dad and my only memory of him in this same hangar. I was twelve, and there was some paperwork he wanted to pick up after Sunday Mass on base. We walked into the hangar, and Dad spotted a young enlisted man on guard duty. His nightstick was twirling down around his waist. Dad strode directly toward him, looking as imposing as a man in a turtleneck, leather sports jacket, and flared plaid pants can look. He moved the baton back up the sailor’s shoulder.
“This is how it is to be worn. Got it?”
The sailor, a kid really, whispered a response.
“Yes, sir.”
I was embarrassed and proud. Now I looked through the crowd at the sons and wondered what would happen to them without their fathers. Would they remember them? Would their example carry them through? Or would they crumple under the weight of what was expected and be lost?
The band began to play. The base commander welcomed everyone and a chaplain gave his blessing. Doogie spoke, mercifully briefly. Then he and Tupper met in the middle of the stage and saluted. Tupper read his orders, relieving Breining of command. Everyone clapped.
Tupper strode to the microphone. He took off his hat, fished his speech out of the hatband, and put the hat back on, all in one motion.
“That’s an old Navy trick.”
Beth and the girls sat in the front row. Tupper thanked his family and paid his respects to Doogie. Then he paused and looked out at the men and women of VAQ-135 standing in formation.
“We have sacrificed much in the nation’s defense, and we will sacrifice much more in the years ahead. Some of us will lose loved ones, some will lose relationships, and some will miss the birth of o
ur children.”
He looked down at Beth holding hands with the girls.
“Others, such as myself, will return home to children very different than the ones we left. We accept these trials with open hearts and also with the determination that these sacrifices not be made in vain.”
The ceremony ended. There were a few minutes before the reception at the officers’ club, so Alix and I walked across the street to a mothballed EA-6B Prowler. In front of the plane were bronze statues of two small children, frozen in play as if captured in a light moment at the park. But their eyes gazed on golden plaques at the base of the Prowler. Each one contained the names of the twenty-eight men who had been killed flying the Prowler. I found Dad’s name and something dawned on me: the kids’ faces were frozen in the moment before they were told that their father was dead.
I wiped tears away and we headed over to the officers’ club where I remembered dining with Dad once or twice on special occasions. The club’s walls were covered with beer mugs and wooden cruise plaques celebrating the exploits of squadrons with nicknames like Scorpions and Flying Lizards on deployments to the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, Iraq, and Afghanistan. I stared at the names, recognizing one or two of Dad’s friends. An old man tapped me on the shoulder. It was Zeke Zardeskas.
“If you want to talk about it, I’ll tell you what I know.”
I told him I’d think about it. It was time to go. I looked for Doogie to say good-bye. Whatever his faults, it was his kindness that brought me here and I wanted to thank him. I found him alone, relieved of command; none of his men feeling bound to talk with him. I thanked him for inviting me and asked if he’d seen Tupper. I then saw Doogie Breining genuinely smile for the first time.
“Tupper’s been delayed. He’ll be here in a few minutes.”
Commander James Hunter Ware III had been skipper for an hour and he had lost his keys.
The Magical Stranger Page 4
