The Magical Stranger

by Stephen Rodrick

  The air war in Iraq began less than a year after I left the Kitty Hawk. The Chippies were right in the middle of it. One morning, I saw on the CNN crawl news that a Hornet had been shot down over the Iraqi desert. My heart filled with dread. There were a half dozen Hornet squadrons in the zone, but my bones told me it was a Chippie guy. It was reported two days later that it was Lieutenant Nathan White.

  Initially, the Prowler squadron aboard the Kitty Hawk was scapegoated. Hornet pilots grumbled the Prowler had only one job in the fight: jam Iraqi missile sites so they couldn’t track and kill American pilots. Clearly, the Prowlers had failed, and it was their fault a young man was dead.

  But then a few days later it was announced that White had been killed by friendly fire; a Patriot missile mistook him for an Iraqi aircraft. It was just the latest indignity for the Prowler community; everyone joked about their ugly planes, no one knew exactly what they did, but everyone was ready to crucify them if someone got killed. In a way, it didn’t matter. Dead is dead. White left behind Akiko, two sons, and a daughter. After the end of the Iraqi air war, White was laid to rest in Arlington. Dozer invited me to come, and I agonized about it for days, but I didn’t make it, choosing to honor an earlier commitment to profile a musician who was recording at Abbey Road in London. It’s a decision I still regret.

  Akiko remained in Japan where the Chippies were based so her boys could stay in the schools they loved and she could be around her family. By then, Dozer had moved on to another squadron based in Japan, this one commanded by Gordo Cross. One afternoon, his commander took him aside.

  “He asked me if I thought it was okay for him to go out with Akiko,” Dozer told me, shouting to be heard. “He wanted to get approval from someone in the Chippies. I told him, ‘Those boys have been too long without a father. If you’re up to it, you should do it.’ ”

  They were married last year. I felt myself getting angry at what should have been happy news. Hearing about another pilot’s son getting a second father made me profoundly jealous. I waited until Dozer was talking with another pilot and slipped away. I stumbled down to the hotel lobby. I slumped into a chair and checked my email on my phone. There was one from Tupper. It included a link to an article written by former Navy secretary John Lehman entitled “Is Naval Aviation Culture Dead?” Tupper could have written it. Lehman lamented the death of everything from happy hours in officers’ clubs and raunchy call signs to the mandate that naval aviators spend four years out of the cockpit doing soul-crushing staff duty before they can screen for command. I read the story and nodded along, sharing Tupper’s outrage about something having been lost, another connection to Dad vanishing in a haze of bureaucracy.

  But then a young woman with a ponytail walked through the hotel lobby, pushing a toddler in a stroller. Mother and daughter were wearing matching green flight suits. It made me think of Terry and her difficult Army years. There were more women leading platoons and squadrons, and “don’t ask, don’t tell” was coming to an end. Yes, something had been lost, but something else had been gained.

  Not everyone saw it that way. I texted Tupper that I was in Reno, and he wrote back, “Ah, Tailhook. Dead to me like so many other things. Couldn’t stomach running into so many people I no longer respect.”

  By chance, I received another email while I sat in the lobby. It was from James McGaughey, an officer who had served under my father in the Black Ravens. I took a breath and read his attached letter.

  What he said both soothed me and reignited my fear that Dad’s accident had been his own fault. McGaughey wrote of Dad taking forty minutes to do a flight brief that usually took ten just so everyone was sure of his responsibility. But then he paid Dad a compliment that kicked hard in my stomach: “Your father was clearly one of the best pilots I have ever flown with. He would spend hours in the manual looking up the edges of the flight envelope of the aircraft.”

  And there it was again, the idea that Dad pushed his plane beyond its capability. I know McGaughey meant it as a compliment—he ended his letter with “I have no idea what happened on that day in the Indian Ocean, but I can tell you this, it had NOTHING to do with pilot error”—but I fixated on the “edges of the flight envelope” part. Who pushes the edges of the flight envelope in a deathtrap like the Prowler? He knew it was a beast to maneuver. How dare he do that to us.

  I then read McGaughey’s email again. He had Bill Coffey in the front seat, which I knew was flat-out wrong. Maybe what he had to say wasn’t reliable. Maybe nothing anyone had to say about my father was reliable. Not the words of his wife, not the words of his fellow pilots, and not the words of his only son.

  I headed back upstairs looking for a friendly face. The cocktail party had split into smaller “admin” rooms hosted by each squadron. In the Prowler room, junior officers were getting their fleet wings, signifying the completion of flight training. Their fellow aviators chanted, “go, go, go” as they chugged thirty-two-ounce glasses filled with grenadine, vodka, cranberry juice, and beer. Their eyes bulged as they choked back their own retch. The new kids were then given Velcro squadron badges for their flight suits. Their superiors attached the badges by punching their chests so hard I could hear muscles snapping. The old culture wasn’t completely dead.

  The tiny room was filled with mirrors on the ceiling. I looked up and could see a hundred faces in flight suits, all looking familiar and strange at the same time. I finally found Sherm. He’d been fixed up on a blind date with Beav’s sister-in-law. I laughed to myself. That dude could fall off the back of a carrier and land with a date. I gave him a hug, one that he refused to relinquish for a moment. His eyes were running more red than blue.

  “You’re like a brother to me.”

  I smiled back at him. We were from different worlds but both desperate for another family, something, anything, to fill the space in our hearts. I told him I felt the same way. I turned to leave, not wanting to cramp his style, but he grabbed my arm. He pointed to another aviator with coal black eyes nursing a glass of bourbon. His call sign badge read Joe Dirt.

  “Talk to Joe Dirt before you go. We were JOs together. He’s a good guy, little weird, but good guy. He’s writing a book. Mean a lot to me.”

  Before I could say no, Sherm pushed his friend toward me and vanished with his girl, swallowed up by the horde of green. I shook his friend’s hand, and we headed toward a quieter part of the hotel.

  Then Air Force Captain Christopher “Joe Dirt” Lucas told me about his life, a story that made my own narrative seem like a rejected afterschool special. Nothing had come easy for him. He was raised on the Louisiana bayou and still spoke with a deep drawl. That’s how he got his call sign, named after the white-trash janitor played by David Spade in a 2001 comedy. His father was drafted into the Army in 1968 and could have gotten out of it because his new wife was pregnant, but if he didn’t go, someone else in his small town would have to go instead. So he went to Vietnam right before his son was born in 1969.

  He returned home a year later. His legs had been blown away by a Vietcong grenade. Something else was missing too.

  “He became a high school counselor, but he was so compartmentalized,” said Lucas softly. “He could talk about other people’s problems, but he couldn’t talk to me or my mom.”

  I listened quietly. I let him take his time. Lucas had done everything the hard way. He enlisted in the Navy at seventeen, working his way up from sailor to Officer Candidate School. He then went back for his degree and became a naval flight officer, flying Prowlers with Sherm over Iraq. Passed over for promotion, he transferred to the Air Force, serving as an electronic warfare officer flying B-52s over Afghanistan. I asked him where he was stationed.

  “A place called Diego Garcia. Just a speck of land in the middle of nowhere. Have you ever heard of it?”

  “Yes.”

  Not content with having flown two planes into combat, Lucas then volunteered to se
rve as a forward air controller attached to the Army outside Kandahar, coordinating Air Force and Navy air support for ground troops. He was the ground guy that pilots like Tupper talked to from five miles above. For weeks, he pleaded with his battalion commander to let him go on night patrol with the soldiers. He told him it was just so he could understand their needs better. In reality, he wanted to know what his father knew but never shared.

  The sky filled with tracer bullets his first night out. His patrol had walked into a firefight.

  “It didn’t last that long, maybe fifteen minutes,” Lucas said with a shrug. He swirled whiskey around in his plastic glass. “But when the sun comes up and you can see the bullets lodged in the walls a few inches from where your head was, well, it makes you think.”

  Lucas told me that a few years back he tried to reconnect with his father when he was home on leave. His first son was about to be born, and he wanted him to know his granddad. He stopped by his dad’s school and went to his office. He spoke calmly about how his dad’s neglect had made him feel unwanted as a kid. His father sat impassively in his wheelchair. He offered no apology and told his son to get over himself. Lucas got up and walked out of the office; he hasn’t spoken to his father since.

  We sat in silence for a minute. I didn’t know what to say. A cheesy video of 1980s-era Blue Angels blasted behind us on a massive television. It was all there: a distant and disfigured father, a son trying to understand him through combat. I finally spoke.

  “That sounds like a hell of a book.”

  Joe Dirt just laughed.

  “No, my book isn’t about that at all. It’s called Killing Jane Fonda.”

  For the next twenty minutes, he laid out the plot of the novel he’d been working on for seven years. It involved Fonda, the Weathermen, the son of a Vietnam vet, and a murder that may or not be in the protagonist’s head. The story was dizzyingly intricate, and I soon lost track of the characters. Lucas talked excitedly about drafts and redrafts until he snapped his own head back.

  “Oh, man, sorry to go on like that. Shit. That’s the bourbon talking.”

  I told him it was fine, but I had a question.

  “Why don’t you write about your dad? That seems really interesting.”

  He looked at me with benign confusion.

  “Why? In this story I can move things around. My dad? I can’t change any of that. It happened and it’s never going to change. He’s never going to change. Why waste my time on things I can’t change?”

  I didn’t know what to say. I just stared at the video of long-ago Blue Angels pilots shaking hands with a wide-eyed kid. The boy beamed back at the pilot. There was no context, just awe and joy. Then I shook Chris’s hand, wished him luck, and pushed my way past shitfaced aviators playing grab-ass with their brothers. Their laughter sounded like it would never die.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  I’m not an organized man. Plane tickets get tossed with the takeout. If I only have to request two copies of my 1099s in a tax year I declare victory. I left Dad’s academy watch in an office desk drawer until it was stolen. I swear things will be different every six months or so. Receipts are filed, piles of crap are dismantled, and then two weeks later I’m hunting for my birth certificate amid the Chipotle wrappers.

  I’ve made an uneasy peace with the remnants of my childhood ADD. I still curse and kick the filing cabinets, but I let it go. I have to. It’s a part of me that is not going away.

  Merging the precious and the worthless is just my way. For almost a year, three flyers advertising 1979 Thanksgiving dinner at the Cubi Point Naval Air Station’s Bachelor Officers Quarters fought for space on my desk with magazines and desiccated bento boxes. Dinner came in two options, waiter-served for $4.75 and buffet-style from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. for $3. Kids were $2.75.

  But decades-old buffet information wasn’t the lure for me. Dad had used the back of the flyers to write his second-to-last letter to Mom. (“I’m out of money and can’t afford to buy any stationery. Seriously—I’m at the Cubi BOQ and don’t have anything else to write on.”) The letter isn’t one of Dad’s best—he had to hand it off by 7:00 a.m. to a squadron mate heading back to Whidbey—but it’s a relic of sorts. It’s written on November 19, 1979, the last moment when Dad thought he was almost home. He wrote of homecoming parties and vacations and my trip out to Hawaii for the Tiger Cruise. (“I know Steve is probably getting excited and driving you crazy but 10 December will be here soon and you’ll have some peace and quiet.”) He even mentioned a rumor that the Black Ravens would be home for all of 1980, meaning Dad would not have to go to sea again before his change of command.

  I stapled the flyers to another found document of last hope. It’s an invitation from Mom to the VAQ-135 wives for an end-of-cruise party. The front page features a drawing of an old-timey pilot coming in for a landing with a headline reading “Here Come Those Black Ravens Again.” The second page invites the wives over for wine and ends with a note from Mom:

  Dear VAQ 135 Wives,

  I would like to take this time and opportunity to thank you for your support during this cruise. Thank heavens, it’s finally coming to an end. As wives we are supposed to play both roles as mother and dad, besides keep dad happy with letters. You have handled it beautifully. Happy Homecoming!

  Mrs. Barbara Rodrick.

  After a few months on my desk, Mom’s words had soy sauce smeared across her signature and Dad’s letter was faded from the summer sun coming through my office window. I knew I was ruining them, but I didn’t care. I thought treating them like bills and junk mail would demystify them.

  That didn’t happen. Instead, I read them repeatedly and was reminded of before. A prior life of Mom and Dad chattering about Christmas parties and whose marriages in the squadron were on the rocks. Normal conversation, not the obscene silence of death that was waiting for all of us.

  I decided to piece together Dad’s last days, hoping to better understand our family’s final moments as a real family. Was it masochism? Perhaps, but I thought that if I knew what Dad’s life was like right before the crash I could recapture the better part of him, the better part of us.

  Mom left the Philippines in tears on July 9, 1979. Dad and the Kitty Hawk spent the next four months maneuvering up and down the Asian coast making port calls in Hong Kong, Japan, and Thailand. A crisis in North Korea appeared and vanished.

  The flying was good. In October, the Kitty Hawk participated in Operation Cope Thunder, a series of elaborate war games with the Air Force. Dad and the Black Ravens took off and set up their jammers and then watched with glee as Air Force F-15s drifted below them, unable to pick them up on their jammed radar. He took pride in that. After a career in the backwater of A-3s, he was flying a plane that mattered.

  Dad’s landing grades were above average, suffering only one wave-off when he broke too close to the carrier at 450 knots and came in too fast and high. Still, according to a fellow pilot, he berated himself in the post-flight brief.

  “Why do I do that? Why didn’t I give myself enough time to get set up? What’s wrong with me?”

  But that was a minor thing. It was peacetime and he was a skipper of a squadron at sea. He was still sending paperwork back to the JOs covered in red, but he let other things slide. The Prowlers had high-frequency radios capable of reaching Japan from 500 miles away. There, calls could be bounced home to wives and Navy personnel officers with news of next assignments. Soon, other squadrons were scrambling for backseat rides in the Prowler so they could call home. Dad let it go as long as mission accomplishments were still being met. He was a hard-ass, but not an asshole.

  The menu letter was dated November 19, nine days and 1,500 miles from Diego Garcia. Everyone was just running out the clock. Ordnance was loaded off and empty ammunition stores were filled with recently purchased stereo equipment, wooden plates for the wives, and black market Adidas for the kids.

/>   But then President Carter ordered the Kitty Hawk to head for the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf. The Midway was already there, but Carter and the Joint Chiefs thought two carriers camped off the Iranian coast might persuade the ayatollah to let the hostages go, or at least educate him that there would be a lethal price to pay if they came to harm. So stereo equipment was dumped overboard and bombs were reloaded. The decision came so quickly that some pilots learned the Kitty Hawk was pulling out when they watched the ship leave the harbor from their hotel rooms. That’s the night Dad called me from the Cubi Point BOQ bar and said he was sorry.

  Dad and the Black Ravens flew their Prowlers onto the boat on November 21. They wouldn’t fly again until November 28. The reason for the no-fly days was simple: the Kitty Hawk was trucking toward the Gulf at maximum speed, and there was no time for turning into the wind and all the other things the carrier needed to do to facilitate landing and takeoffs.

  The Kitty Hawk then made a clandestine detour that would determine the location of Dad’s last flight. Once the Kitty Hawk battle group—consisting of the carrier, a cruiser, two destroyers, and a supply frigate—passed through the Strait of Malacca south of Singapore they didn’t head directly west toward the Strait of Hormuz, the gateway to the Gulf. Instead, the Kitty Hawk dipped 700 miles south toward Diego Garcia, a spit of an island in the Indian Ocean that served as a British air base. The reason was simple: the Kitty Hawk needed to pick up six RH-53D Sea Stallion helicopters for use in a possible rescue mission.

  President Carter wanted to get the helos onboard without word funneling back to Tehran via the Soviet spy trawlers that habitually shadowed American carriers during the cold war. Naval Command ordered the Kitty Hawk to go “dark,” cutting off radio communications and most of its radar capabilities, anything that might help the Soviets track the ships.