The Magical Stranger

by Stephen Rodrick

  Steve Underriter is now sixty-three and works at the Pentagon on parts procurement for the Prowler and the Growler. I met him there late on a summer afternoon and we had a beer back at his desk.

  The Prowler world is small, and some of the guys knew Tupper. We told some old stories; a few of them might even have been true. Underriter was passing around the Kitty Hawk’s cruise picture and a photo of my dad when another officer walked by.

  “That guy doesn’t have any ribbons. Look at that.”

  Underriter explained it was my dad, and the guy went red and apologized. I told him it wasn’t necessary. Dad felt as guilty about his lack of Vietnam combat as anyone. He hadn’t earned any combat ribbons. Still, he was just as dead as if he’d been shot down over Laos or Hanoi.

  After a while, Underriter and I drifted out of the building past the stained-glass windows of the Pentagon 9/11 memorial and headed to Crystal City in Arlington for dinner. I asked Steve if he thought that the faulty barometric altimeter reading was the cause of Dad’s accident.

  “I think so. Your dad was too careful. He wouldn’t have risked it if he thought he was that low. That’s the thing about flying; we always learn the lesson the hard way. They teach about barometric altimeter problems at flight school because of your Dad’s flight.”

  I excused myself and hit the bathroom. I wiped bitter tears of relief from my eyes, the weight of carrying Dad’s sin for all those years ebbing away. Maybe it wasn’t his fault. Maybe I didn’t need to carry that anymore. I splashed water on my face and went back to the table.

  We ordered another beer and talked about that last Kitty Hawk cruise. In the end, there was no air strike. The helos were transferred to the relieving Nimitz in March and launched from their deck on April 25, 1980. They ended up as burnt-out rubble in the Iranian desert. Underriter let out a sad chuckle.

  “We found out later that the Soviets couldn’t track us by radar altimeters. We had them off for no reason.”

  We got the check and shook hands and headed our separate ways. I was left in my car trying to recalibrate my father in my head. Dad’s death had moved from being his fault to being maybe not his fault but absolutely, completely pointless. I didn’t know if that was any better.

  I had some more interviews the next day and checked into a hotel not far from Arlington National Cemetery. I’d meant to visit my Dad’s marker before the sun went down. But really, what was the point? His remains weren’t even there. They weren’t anywhere. It was just his birth and death date written on a thirty-inch-tall piece of marble.

  That night, Hurricane Irene started to work its way up the East Coast. The windows began to rattle and shake in my room. I slumped on the bed and flipped open my laptop and looked for some music to match my mood. I settled on Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?” I put the song on repeat and turned out the lights.

  If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing

  Let’s break out the booze and have a ball

  I fell asleep and dreamed of my father. He was young and I was little. He buckled me into his MG, rubbing his bristly whiskers across my neck until I giggled. We drove off—to where I didn’t know. It didn’t matter. We were heading off for a great adventure. Just Dad and me.

  I woke up to rain falling sideways. I met Cathy Brown the next day for brunch at the house of Phil Heisey, another VAQ-135 pilot. Cathy’s hair was now long and streaked with gray. I asked her if she blamed Dad for taking away her husband. She told me she didn’t. Matter of fact, she said with a smile, she had screamed at a local Seattle TV reporter who had shown up on her doorstep the day it was announced the crash’s probable cause was pilot error.

  “I know Brad trusted your dad. There’s no one else I’d rather he had been flying with.”

  Cathy then told me another story. She had been laying flowers at my father’s marker the previous Memorial Day when a man walked over to thank her. It was my uncle Danny. In typical Rodrick family tradition, he didn’t tell anyone; he just went every year.

  By now, Irene was lashing at the windows. My hosts suggested I stay and ride out the storm with them, but I insisted on driving back to New York. A few minutes later, I was on a deserted I-95 bombing north at seventy-five miles per hour. The wind shook and rocked my car and I fishtailed a time or two. Even the rest areas were abandoned, but still I drove on. Then, out of nowhere, there was wood and garbage in the road in front of me. I swerved around the debris, crossing into the breakdown lane, barely missing the concrete barrier separating north and south traffic.

  I slowed down, half to catch my breath and half to check and see if I had pissed myself. I started to laugh, a happy one this time. I was driving like an idiot. I was driving just like Dad.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Dad never made it to the Persian Gulf, so I went for him. Little had changed: Americans and Iranians were still at each other’s throats. It was early 2012, and Iran was rumored to be on the cusp of nuclear capabilities. This didn’t sit well with the Americans and Israelis; both were contemplating a preemptive strike on Iran’s nuclear labs.

  The possibility whipped the Iranians into a nationalistic furor rarely seen since November 1979. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad huffed and puffed about closing off the Strait of Hormuz and choking U.S. access to Middle East oil. It was bullshit—the Iranians didn’t have the muscle to pull it off—but everyone was getting itchy.

  I walked onto the USS Lincoln in Bahrain and joined Tupper up in the tower. He was now an air boss and ran the show. We had the best seat in the house as the Lincoln sauntered down toward the Strait and another two months on station in the Arabian Sea. We watched through binoculars as Iranian trawlers with a nest of antennas bobbed in the Gulf maybe a kilometer away. The Lincoln was impregnable and vulnerable at the same time. There was no way a trawler could sink the boat, but we were in international waters and there was nothing to stop a boat from moving within 200 meters and launching a couple of Stinger missiles onto the Lincoln’s deck, killing hundreds.

  In another time, Tupper and I might have chattered with adrenaline about the situation, Tupper talking about Plan Bs and me babbling about finally getting aboard a carrier that was sailing into harm’s way. But we were both exhausted; we had no distance left to run.

  I had spent much of the summer of 2011 up in Anacortes watching Tupper try to figure out the rest of his life. It was hard to keep up. One day Tupper was loading boxes from their home and moving them into storage in preparation for selling their home and building their dream house on Burrows Bay. That afternoon, he was definitely getting out and hoping to get a job at Boeing in Seattle. A few weeks later, Tupper and Beth had talked some more, and he was staying in for another five years so he could retire with the higher pay of a captain. Or maybe he would open a vineyard in Walla Walla.

  The Fourth of July found us standing on Commercial Street in downtown Anacortes playfully mocking the town parade as cheerleaders in convertibles and fire trucks rolled by. The reality of staying in the Navy and moving his family to a new town—or worse, leaving them here and commuting on the weekends—was giving Tupper second and third thoughts.

  “I really don’t know what I’m going to do with the rest of my life. Any ideas?”

  I wasn’t helping. In August, the Lincoln headed down the coast and pulled into San Pedro Harbor for LA Fleet Week. As a senior officer, Tupper was assigned to give a few wave-the-flag speeches, but the rest of his days were free. I flew in to keep him company.

  We checked into a hotel and went over his command tour. Tupper brought out his journal to refresh his memory. Sometimes, just reading the entries unleashed lashes of self-recrimination:

  January 2009, this year I promise to put my family before the Navy. That is my solemn goal.

  Tupper read the lines and threw his journal on the table, his face red with fury. He paced for a minute before slumping into his chai
r, a look of utter defeat on his face.

  “That’s another fucking promise that I didn’t keep. God, what have I done to my family?”

  I was torturing him by making him relive the past. But I was torturing myself as well. Tupper was having his come-to-Jesus moment about the Navy screwing his family. It took almost twenty years to realize it, but at least he was having it. Did Dad ever have it? Sure, he wrote about missing us in his letters and he was always promising Mom that he’d be around in the always distant future, but did he really feel that? His words about us being together after his command tour now rang false. Most likely he’d have been sent back out to sea just like Tupper. Maybe they were just words Dad used to buy time with Mom. I would never know.

  It took an eighty-five-year-old man to cheer us up. One of Tupper’s speeches was before the Hollywood/Los Feliz Kiwanis Club luncheon in a hipster neighborhood. It seemed an unlikely place for an officer and a gentleman to speak platitudes about duty and honor. But it wasn’t going to be all hipsters. We did some Googling and found out about an octogenarian named Jimmy Weldon who ran the club. Weldon used to have a morning show in Dallas that he hosted with his puppet Webster Webfoot. He moved to LA and did some voice-overs for Hanna-Barbera cartoons but never quite made the big time. Jimmy Weldon now spent his free time putting together highly entertaining YouTube summaries of Kiwanis Club activities. We cracked up at his videos, and tomorrow’s speech seemed like less of a drag.

  The next day, a distinguished officer in his dress whites and a writer desperately in need of a haircut walked into a cut-rate Mexican restaurant. Tupper gave his usual ripping speech about sacrifice and duty and country before a spellbound crowd of seventeen. The mostly geriatric types came up to Tupper afterward to shake his hand. As the room cleared, an elderly man with a walker made his way across the room and stuck out a shaky hand.

  “I want to thank you for your service.”

  Tupper shook the old man’s hand and looked him straight in the eye.

  “No, I want to thank you, Mr. Weldon. I’ve been a fan for a long time.”

  Jimmy Weldon’s blue eyes popped open, his aching back straightening for a moment.

  “How did you know that?”

  Tupper smiled.

  “Everyone knows Jimmy Weldon. You did the voice of Solomon Grundy on The SuperFriends. I love that show.”

  Weldon smiled and shook his head in wonder.

  “Thank you for remembering.”

  Tupper told him it was an honor to meet him. Jimmy Weldon teetered away with a smile on his face.

  Tupper’s face looked happier than it had in a long time.

  “Let’s go have a beer. Our work here is done.”

  That November, I gave Tupper a ride to his last speech. It was Veterans Day, and he was speaking before the student body at Anacortes High School, a particularly daunting endeavor since Brenna was now a freshman. Tupper didn’t tell her he was speaking until the night before.

  “She’s at that age where Dad coming to school is completely mortifying,” Tupper told me. “She may hate me afterward.”

  She didn’t. I sat with Beth as Tupper spoke about the usual stuff, the thrill of flying off a carrier and the privilege of defending American freedom across the globe. Then he glanced down and made eye contact with his daughter in the third row.

  What I didn’t understand when I started were the sacrifices to be made by my family—birthdays missed, anniversaries absent, Christmases spent floating in some God-forsaken corner of a very unfriendly part of the world.

  Tupper paused for a moment. The kids were silent.

  Those days and months, that now add up to years in the lives of my family, are ones I’ll never get back. But as I spent those months at sea away from those that I loved, I came to realize what I really believed in life. It was ironic that I surrendered, willfully, personal freedoms to achieve what I saw as the greater good—to defend our Constitution, to keep our families safe, and to protect those people from all nations not strong enough to protect themselves from the tyranny of evil men.

  Fifteen years ago, when someone asked me, “What do you do?” I would have said, “I’m a Navy pilot,” with all the ego and bravado I could muster. But if someone asked me of what I am most proud, I say, “I’m a dad.”

  Tupper stopped there. The kids gave him a standing ovation. Brenna came over and gave him a giant hug. She didn’t care who saw.

  Tupper changed back into civvies at home and we headed downtown in his pickup for a sandwich. I told him the crowd loved his speech. He winced a little.

  “That’s the last one. I’m getting out.”

  I asked him if he was sure this time. He said absolutely. I asked him what made him finally decide to give up the only life he’d known since he was a boy.

  “You know that stuff about defending freedom for everyone and all that stuff? I don’t think I believe it anymore.”

  We pulled into a parking space and stepped out into the weak afternoon sun. Tupper locked the car and smiled.

  “The only part I know I believe in is being a dad.”

  A few weeks later, Tupper shipped out for the last time. He just had to make it through one last cruise, one that almost immediately was extended from six months to nine months. The only good news was the cruise was now so long he wouldn’t have to spend the last few months of his tour in Norfolk, he could just get out when they pulled back into port.

  Meanwhile, the buffoonery reached new, untold heights. In December, the USS Stennis rescued an Iranian crew whose boat had been seized by Somali pirates. The Iranians were returned home, but the Navy decided that handing the pirates over to the Iranians, where they would meet certain death, would be a bad PR move. But no one knew what to do with them. So the pirates were CODed from the Stennis to the Vinson and finally to the Lincoln as they sat in legal limbo.

  Tupper had to shut down the flight deck and a hangar bay to facilitate the pirate transfer. It was an extra shift of work for everyone. That night, Tupper got on the intercom and thanked his sailors for their hard work.

  “We’re the only country that would so freely spend our resources on those so undeserving of our grace. This is what makes the United States great.”

  But then Tupper learned that the pirates were feasting on Klondike bars and Navy-supplied cigarettes, perks none of his sailors were entitled to. Five times a day, a call came up to the tower for the ship’s exact coordinates so the pirates would know exactly where to place their prayer mats to face Mecca. And then Tupper thought to himself, “This is what makes the United States the idiots of the world.”

  He was now more certain than ever that retiring was the right call. I met him in Bahrain in February and he was in emotional shutdown mode. There was a five-hour alcohol brunch, but it didn’t lighten his mood. Bahrain was a tin-pot kingdom that brutally oppressed its own people, while the United States looked the other way because the Navy needed Bahrain’s ports. Tupper was sick of it all, sick of Americans being led around by a bunch of criminals.

  We headed to Bahrain’s Naval Support Activity Base the next day so he could get a haircut and buy Beth a Valentine’s Day card. The base was designated an American safe space in the troubled kingdom and was overrun with hundreds of Lincoln sailors drunk off their asses, building pyramids out of empty beer cans. Afterward, we rode a bus reeking of vomit back to the Lincoln. Where he once would have dived headlong into the depravity, now it just made Tupper depressed.

  “I can’t be around this anymore.”

  Two days later, back in the tower, the light returned to Tupper’s eyes little by little. We watched flames shoot up from oil rigs at sunset, the sky a golden storm, while the Iranian trawlers bobbed and weaved off the Lincoln’s bow. The phones chattered with intel about the boats’ intentions. The sun receded and Tupper began supervising the afternoon launches, jumping on the ship’s intercom.
>
  “Clear the catwalk and catapults; we’re launching aircraft.”

  Two dozen planes took off without a hitch. Running the tower wasn’t that different from flying: minutes of terror followed by hours of nothing. We waited on the recovery and bullshitted the afternoon away. Tupper was just hoping Beth could make it through his final cruise. I’d watched them struggle through three years of good-byes and misunderstandings. I knew they still loved each other with a devotion that was real and substantial. It was now sixteen years since he had placed his bride and their wedding day ahead of getting his wings of gold. Now, finally, Hunter Ware had once again chosen Beth over the Navy. He just prayed it wasn’t too late.

  “I’m not sure she’s ever going to forgive me for what I took away from her,” Tupper told me as he scanned the sea with binoculars. “But now that I’ve filed my papers, she can see the end. It’s no more bullshit; it’s the actual end. That gives her hope.”

  He put down the binoculars and slipped his sunglasses back on.

  “It gives us hope.”

  An hour later, the recovery started smoothly, with three Hornets catching the two wire. But up next was a Prowler being flown by a junior pilot. Trouble began when the plane entered the landing pattern. Tupper watched the Prowler begin to imperceptibly drop from 800 to 500 feet.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  Tupper jumped on his radio.

  “501 Prowler, altitude.”

  The plane didn’t respond. Tupper spoke louder this time.

  “PROWLER ALTITUDE.”

  “Roger that.”

  The Prowler popped up in the sky and made his turn for home. Tupper kept an eye on him. Everything seemed to be fine. But on final approach the Prowler dipped below the Lincoln’s deck for an instant. Tupper noticed it first. The LSOs barked at the pilot to pull up. The Prowler surged in the sky, rising above the deck and passing us at eye level. The ECMO in the front seat seemed to be looking right at us. Tupper shook his head.