The Magical Stranger

by Stephen Rodrick

  After graduating, Dad headed off to flight school, and Frazier went to submarine school in New London, Connecticut. By 1966, Dad wasn’t too far away, flying the P-2 Neptune, a bulky prop sub chaser out of Quonset Point, Rhode Island, where I was born. On February 27, Dad checked out a Neptune and took Frazier down to Florida for the Daytona 500. They landed at Sanford Air Force Base, about thirty miles from the raceway, and parked the plane on a grass airfield. They hitched a ride to the track and watched Richard Petty take the lead late in the race. A heavy rain began to fall. The race was ended two laps short of completion with Petty declared the winner.

  By the time Dad and Frazier made it back to Sanford it was almost dark and there was a big problem: the Neptune had sunk a foot into the Florida mud.

  They were screwed. If they didn’t get back to Rhode Island in twelve hours, they’d both be AWOL. Dad thought quickly. He called the local fire department and paid them fifty bucks to pull the plane out of the mud. It took a half hour, but they got the plane onto the runway.

  Dad finally took off, but the weather was still shitty, so they had to head south and then west before they could loop back north. It took them nearly ten hours to make it home.

  Or at least that’s how Frazier told me the story via email. By chance, I found myself vacationing on Kauai a few months later, and we met for lunch at Dukes, a beachside bar. Frazier was a rail-thin sixty-eight-year-old man who still surfed, built low-income housing, and made occasional trips to Brazil to see faith healers. He talked about Dad and his Navy days with an incredulous chuckle, hardly believing that was him in the stories that he told. The duality of my father, the churchgoer and the adrenaline junkie, fascinated John.

  After their second year at the academy, they’d driven cross-country so they could visit the Seattle World’s Fair and then head down to Los Angeles to see a girl that Frazier was sweet on. They made the drive in two and a half days, pulling over to sleep under their car when they were exhausted. They had a nerdy contest to see who could get the best gas mileage, and Frazier could still see Dad’s calculations in his memory.

  “He beat me. His mind was so precise he figured exactly fifty-seven miles per hour would give him the best mileage and he wouldn’t go faster.”

  The conversation swung back to the Daytona flight and Frazier gave a little shiver at the memory. He told me that when they approached Quonset Point on the return trip, visibility was so bad that the tower suggested they divert to a different airfield. But Dad didn’t want to be late for duty. Frazier looked out the window and saw nothing but thick, angry clouds.

  “Pete, maybe we should land somewhere else.”

  “No, we’re fine.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’ve got this.”

  A few seconds later, there was a deafening noise. It took Frazier a second to place it: the Neptune had hit the runway hard and fast.

  “I thought for sure the plane was breaking in half. But it didn’t.”

  Frazier told the story with a smile on his face, clearly hoping to amuse me with a tale of madcap Dad and how he wasn’t the straight arrow everyone made him out to be. All that was true, but that wasn’t what popped into my head. Instead, I heard Tim Radel saying, “Your dad was an accident waiting to happen.”

  I headed to Annapolis to see what else I could find. I made arrangements to have lunch with the journalist Robert Timberg, a fellow class of 1964 graduate. Timberg had chosen the Marine Corps as his vocation. In 1967, his face and body were badly burned by a land mine while he was leading troops in Vietnam. He spent two years in the hospital enduring dozens of skin grafts, his face barely recognizable to the one I saw in Dad’s 1964 Lucky Bag, the Naval Academy yearbook.

  Timberg became a journalist and through pure chance found himself at the Annapolis Capital and then the nearby Baltimore Sun. His Annapolis years were never far away, and he eventually spent more than five years writing The Nightingale’s Song, a brilliant account of the academy’s five most famous, or notorious, 1950s and 1960s graduates—John McCain, Oliver North, James Webb, Bud McFarlane, and John Poindexter—following their lives from Annapolis to Vietnam and then on to Washington. The book helped me understand my father’s time, and it was a privilege to get a tour of Bancroft Hall by a man who’d sacrificed so much. But there was one omission in Timberg’s book that I didn’t quite understand. He never described the horrors he personally survived.

  We had lunch before our walk, and I mentioned that my mother had not gone through my father’s cruise box since the accident. I told him I couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t want to look in there again. Timberg put his fork down and sighed.

  “I’ve got a box of my own from my Vietnam tour. It’s filled with pictures and letters. I’ve never looked in there. I’m not sure I could handle knowing what I was like before that.”

  I think I understood what he meant. Timberg and I walked around Bancroft Hall, putting our fingers on a statue listing all the Annapolis grads who died in Vietnam. He told me stories about some of them.

  Then he dropped me back downtown and there was Laddie Coburn waiting for me, the man who told me that Dad was gone. Thirty years on, Laddie didn’t look all that different from the day at the Roller Barn when he told me that Dad had been in an accident. There was a little bit of paunch on his tall frame and his mustache had gone steel gray, but otherwise he looked the same. We caught up quickly. Laddie had divorced his first wife, Ulla, a decade ago and had lived the life of an aging playboy nerd, working in Prowler-related defense fields outside of D.C. He told me those days were behind him, and he was moving out to Colorado and getting married again. I congratulated him and we walked across town to a seaside restaurant for dinner.

  We made small talk, and Laddie casually mentioned that he’d become interested in astrology after the breakup of his first marriage. I bit my lip to stop myself from breaking into howls of laughter. This was like Colonel Sanders confessing he had become a vegan. But Laddie was way into the occult.

  “Pete was a Capricorn and I’m an Aquarius. Guess what? My ex-wife was a Capricorn and I’m an Aquarius. A lot of Capricorns are CEOs, strong people, and good leaders. But the downside of Capricorns is that they’re assholes.”

  I did a cartoon double take. Was Dad’s best friend saying he was actually an asshole? Yes, he was.

  “There’s no bullshit here. Pete was a strong male Capricorn. He had his own frustrations, he couldn’t get people to do what he wanted to do, and he would carry all that turmoil inside of him.”

  We were now at the restaurant. Sailboats carrying happy, drunken revelers slipped by our dockside table. When I started the journey this was exactly what I was looking for, but right now I was filled with “careful what you wish for.” I let Laddie keep talking. He debunked some other long-held myths. I’d always been told Dad and Laddie were best friends, rooming together on early cruises. Laddie let me know that it wasn’t exactly a great experience.

  “A lot of women accuse me of being very uptight. Pete was much more uptight than I am. Your father was truly a workaholic. I’d want to go to bed; he would be up until two o’clock in the morning with the lights on, doing paperwork. I had a strong sense of duty, but not like your Dad.”

  Our food arrived. Laddie kept babbling. He told me everyone thought Dad was a hard worker but he had a tendency to get “snarly” with people under his command.

  “Your dad was not the greatest communicator. A lot of
times he’d just choke up and he wouldn’t say anything.”

  It wasn’t the first I was hearing of Dad’s temper. Dad was once so frustrated by a junior ECMO’s bad radio calls that he slammed his fist against the rearview mirror of his Prowler and shattered it. But Laddie’s depictions of my dad’s impatience could have been ripped out of my own life: the days I couldn’t hit the goddamned baseball. The days spent with my fists clenched as I wrestled with some Cub Scout project that required unobtainable dexterity. The days I needed someone to tell me that it didn’t matter . . . but that man was never there.

  Laddie ordered another drink and then piled on Dad some more.

  “Your dad wanted us to be best friends. But I had other friends I’d rather spend time with.”

  It was at this point I debated letting Laddie know how much as a boy I’d enjoyed his porn stash that I’d found in his bedroom at the condo we shared. But I didn’t say anything. Instead, I asked why they had bought property together if they weren’t really good friends. Laddie said that a couple of other guys fell through.

  “I knew your dad would be good for it. And he was. Every month, he was there with the mortgage check.”

  Well, if I’d been searching and searching for someone to puncture Dad’s hallowed image in my head, I’d found the guy! Perhaps thinking he’d said too much, Laddie tried to backtrack. It wasn’t exactly true, he said, that Dad always had a stick up his ass. Sometimes, when they were in port Dad would split from the guys and head out on his own. Laddie didn’t know where he went. All he knew was the next day Dad was back in the confessional.

  “Your father was one of these ninety-ten guys. Ninety percent of the time, he was totally straight arrow and did everything by the books, but every once in a while, he would just wander off and nobody knew where he went. The 10 percent was totally irrational and unaccounted for, and you couldn’t quite figure out what happened. Only Pete knew.”

  I decided that was a good place to leave it. I picked up the check. Laddie and I wandered out into the Annapolis night. I thought of Mom and Dad on these same streets, young and vital and not knowing what would come next. I shook Laddie’s hand and we headed our separate ways. But then I stopped and turned back. I watched my messenger of death vanish into the summer crowd. Still, I waited, making sure he was completely gone. Only then did I head for home.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  One of the things I found buried in Dad’s cruise box was a faded patch from the 1970s trips to Tailhook, the annual drunkfest-reunion of naval aviators.

  All you need to know about Tailhook is that the first one was held in 1956 at a hotel in Rosarito Beach in Baja, Mexico. In other words, the decadence was so high that naval aviators thought it best to take their party to another country. Maybe it should have stayed there. Tailhook moved to Las Vegas while Dad was at the academy. He never talked about the trips, but I remember him coming back from one and going to sleep for a very long time.

  Tailhook remained an underground bacchanal until 1991, when eighty-three female officers and civilians were groped in a hallway of the Las Vegas Hilton packed with intoxicated aviators. Some of the victims threatened to sue, so the Naval Investigation Service launched a tepid investigation under the less than vigilant command of Rear Admiral Duvall Williams. Williams professed to have found no evidence of less than gentlemanly behavior and quipped that “a lot of female Navy pilots are go-go dancers, topless dancers or hookers.”

  This didn’t instill a ton of confidence in his investigation, so the Department of Defense launched its own probe. The DOD determined that groping wasn’t an isolated incident and had been witnessed by senior officers who did nothing to stop it. After the second investigation, Secretary of the Navy H. Lawrence Garrett resigned and fourteen admirals lost their jobs. The careers of another two to three hundred naval aviators were either ended or permanently crippled merely for being on the floor.

  Depending on where you stood, it was either a comeuppance for decades of asshole behavior or a witch hunt that killed the careers of good men who did nothing wrong except laugh along and not rat out their friends. Tupper was in flight school during Tailhook ’91, but he saw that Vegas night as the end for the old Navy. He wasn’t for sexual assault or criminal behavior, but he believed that all the drinking, all the jackass behavior, had an actual point: a happy few building camaraderie that could come in handy for aviators feeling their way back to a bobbing speck of light in a dark gulf.

  Tailhook moved from Vegas to Reno after the scandal, and I had planned to go in 2010, during Tupper’s CO tour, but I woke up the morning of my trip with a searing pain in my stomach that ended with first my appendix and then my gallbladder leaving my body. Going the next year didn’t look much more promising.

  Alix and I were moving out to Los Angeles, and we detoured to Whidbey for a few days. Getting to Reno seemed a logistical impossibility. But we stayed with Sherm in Anacortes and he talked up Tailhook. “It’s the hundredth anniversary of naval aviation, you should go,” Sherm told me.

  It was easy for him to say. He would be flying down on a chartered plane the Navy provides every naval air station. There was no way I could swing it; we had to be in LA in two days to meet our movers. But then I looked up directions. Reno would only add a few hours to our trip. I’d drop off Alix and the dog and head over to the hotel for a cameo. She sighed but agreed.

  Twenty-four hours later, we arrived at Reno near dinnertime. I took a shower and headed over to the Nugget Hotel, expecting a lame evening of bad jokes and warm beer. Sure, guys like Tupper still let their freak flag fly from time to time, prancing around Japanese bases in a kimono. And yes, guys like Sherm complained about not being able to wear an electronic warfare patch on their flight jackets that resembled the anal, digital penetration of a woman. But those were retreating, final-guard actions. Most of the aviators I’d met were more Jimmy Neutron than Maverick. (Of course, every last one of them thought of himself as the last Maverick while everyone else was the Neutron sellout.) The old days weren’t coming back.

  Or maybe they were. I parked my car and took an escalator upstairs to the Nugget’s ballroom. I was deposited in an ocean of flight suits clutching beer mugs. There were thousands of them, most in standard green, but peppered with old timers in optic orange—a brief 1970s infatuation of the Navy—and Iraqi vets in suits the color of desert sand.

  I quickly spotted the jet black hair and sleepy smile of Brandon “Dozer” Sellers. Dozer had been a pilot in VFA-195, the Hornet squadron I’d followed onboard the Kitty Hawk back in 2002. The Georgian had steered me through Navy bureaucracy and dim Kitty Hawk passages. I repaid him by serving as his wingman on a long, slow night in Singapore that ended at an after-party held in the circular drive of an abandoned hotel. Dozer earned his call sign when he got drunk as a young pilot, found the keys in a bulldozer, and crashed it into a fence. He loved telling women that he worked in military construction as a civilian contractor. We drank warm beer that night and listened to an American expat woman rip on the Navy until the sun came up. It was only when we stumbled into a cab at 6:00 a.m. that Dozer flashed his Navy ID at the woman. He happily gave her the finger as we drove away.

  We caught up and he told me not to expect much from Tailhook.

  “A few years back, there would be two girls making out at a squadron party. I don’t think that’s gonna happen tonight.”

  The last time I’d seen Dozer was in New York two years ago for a boys’ weekend. He had just been grounded for repeated dizzy spells while exercising. He ran marathons to prove he was fit, but he never got back his wings. Now he worked for Senator John McCain as his Navy liaison—a not-bad job, but it was a long way from doing barrel rolls in his Hornet over Iraq. Being back here among his kin was bittersweet. We drank beers for
a while as we ogled a Boeing exhibit on the hundredth anniversary of naval aviation and maybe the hot girl in the next booth over selling $5,000 Rolex aviator watches.

  Dozer then elbowed me in the ribs.

  “Hey, you got to meet this guy.”

  He introduced me to another Hornet pilot and former squadron mate. The pilot was still active, but he wore a golf shirt and shorts. I could tell he thought the old men in flight suits were foolish. We swapped Dozer stories for a few minutes, and then the pilot shook my hand and vanished into the crowd. Dozer whispered in my ear.

  “That’s Gordo Cross, the guy who married OJ’s widow.”

  The name OJ transported me back to my time on the Kitty Hawk. Dozer’s squadron was nicknamed the Chippies and was a storied fighter squadron. Unlike the Prowlers, where the testosterone is spread between one pilot and three ECMOs, everyone in the Chippies flew one-seaters and ran his own show. They exuded swagger wherever they went, whether it was pulling shit-hot breaks on carrier approaches or doing shots in a Hong Kong dive.

  With his movie star jaw and blond hair, Lieutenant Nathan “OJ” White looked the part of a fighter pilot. But he was different, beginning with his call sign, given to him because he was a Mormon and drank nothing stronger than juice when everyone else was getting wasted. I remembered a late-night poker game in a junior officer’s room on the Kitty Hawk. OJ’s religion didn’t allow him to play, but he watched intently, talking strategy between hands.

  He was the son of a Vietnam-era Air Force pilot, the seventh of eight children who interrupted his studies at Brigham Young to serve a two-year mission in Japan. That’s where he met his wife, Akiko. From there, he went to OCS and on to flight school. OJ didn’t lord his religion over anyone, but people knew it mattered to him. He spotted me wandering around the Kitty Hawk one afternoon and helped me find the chapel where my father prayed every day. It was a kindness I never forgot.