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  BOGEYS AND BANDITS

  THE MAKING OF A FIGHTER PILOT

  by

  Robert Gandt

  What they’re saying about Robert Gandt’s books. . .

  Gandt manages to evoke both awe at and sympathy for these young yet distinguished aviators, so that readers will agonize over their defeats and cheer their triumphs.

  —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  Robert Gandt is a former Pan Am pilot who also happens to have the pen of a poet.

  —CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

  Gandt is a rare treasure, a Navy jet jock with the rare gift of being able to tell a compelling story in a believable and exciting manner that leaves the reader exhausted at the end.

  —PACIFIC FLYER

  A red-hot aerial shoot-‘em-up by an aviation pro who has done his homework.

  —STEPHEN COONTS

  Gandt has a way with words that will send the reader soaring.

  —NEWS CHIEF

  BOGEYS AND BANDITS: THE MAKING OF A FIGHTER PILOT

  Robert Gandt

  Copyright © 2013 by Robert Gandt

  Smashwords Edition

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the work of this author. Visit his site at www.gandt.com.

  To the memory of

  Lieutenant Commander Scott Speicher USN

  Lieutenant Kara Hultgreen USN

  First Lieutenant Michael Blaisdell USMCR

  Nonfiction by Robert Gandt

  SEASON OF STORMS

  The Siege of Hongkong, 1941

  CHINA CLIPPER

  The Age of the Great Flying Boats

  SKYGODS

  The Fall of Pan Am

  BOGEYS AND BANDITS

  The Making of a Fighter Pilot

  FLY LOW, FLY FAST

  Inside the Reno Air Races

  INTREPID

  The Epic Story of America’s Most Famous Warship

  THE TWILIGHT WARRIORS

  The Deadliest Naval Battle of WWII and the Men Who Fought It

  Fiction by Robert Gandt

  WITH HOSTILE INTENT

  ACTS OF VENGEANCE

  BLACK STAR

  SHADOWS OF WAR

  THE KILLING SKY

  BLACK STAR RISING

  Preface

  USS Nimitz: Santa Barbara Channel

  It was all vaguely reminiscent: the hard lurch of the arrested landing, the wind and din of the carrier flight deck, the orderly violence of the jets launching from the catapults.

  I climbed out of the twin-turboprop C-2A that had just delivered me to the U. S. S. Nimitz. The scene had an old familiarity: fighters perched like hawks in a row with their wings folded, clouds of steam wisping from the catapult tracks, yellow and blue and green-jerseyed deck crewmen in survival vests and Mickey Mouse ear protectors, scuttling between the shrieking jets.

  It was a place I remember, like a long-ago hometown.

  But it wasn’t until I ducked through a steel door and started down a ladder that it hit me—the smell! I stood there, frozen on the ladder, stupefied by the scent—an evocative mix of oil, steel, jet fuel, foodstuff, paint, machinery, sweat—the peculiar internal atmosphere of a ninety-ton aircraft carrier.

  A flood of old memories, anxieties, forgotten glories swept over me. I was back! I’d been transported in time, over a quarter of a century. back to another life.

  I had just turned twenty when my mother came to Chase Field, in the hill country of Beeville, Texas, to pin on my Navy wings. In a year-and-a-half I had metamorphosed from college dropout to officer and aviator in the United States Navy. In a few more months, before I had yet reached legal voting or drinking age—I’d be flying off aircraft carriers with nuclear weapons hung on my jet.

  Which seems unimaginable today. No one that young gets near a Navy cockpit or is allowed such immense responsibility. Today’s naval aviation candidates are all college graduates before they are even considered for flight training. Most have degrees in engineering or the sciences , and many have graduate degrees. To win their wings and fly Navy or Marine Corps jets, they incur obligations that keep them in uniform into their thirties.

  It wasn’t always so. By the age of twenty-five I had completed my service and bade farewell to the Navy. I would be an airline pilot, instructor, journalist, husband, father, air show pilot, writer of aviation and military books. And, always, frustrated fighter pilot.

  Now I wanted to write a book about modern Navy fighter pilots—who they were, where they came from, what they did. My motives, of course, went beyond just reporting. I wanted to get back in the cockpit of a Navy jet. This was going to be a sentimental journey.

  For such a journey I needed inside help.

  Most of my former shipmates who had made the Navy their life’s work were now retired. One of the few still on still on active duty was Dick Allen, a fellow graduate of the old naval aviation cadet program. Allen and I had arrived together as fresh young pilots in Carrier Air Group Three, and we twice deployed together aboard the carrier Saratoga. Because of his freckle-faced, cherubic looks, Allen drew the nickname, “Sweepea,” after the cartoon character in “Popeye.”

  Sweepea survived Vietnam, Tailhook, and the perils of the military political machine. He rose in rank to command a squadron, an air wing, an aircraft carrier. And he kept going. Now Sweepea wore three stars and commanded all the naval air forces of the Atlantic Fleet. I had my inside help.

  With Vice Admiral Allen’s endorsement, I received official authorization to check into the Navy’s F/A-18 Hornet fleet replacement squadron at Cecil Field on January 23, 1995. Cecil Field was where I (and Sweepea) had spent four years flying the A-4 Skyhawk—then the Navy’s state-of-the-art attack jet.

  For the next six months I attached myself to a class of students in strike fighter training. I sat in on their mission briefings and debriefings as they progressed through each phase of the strike fighter curriculum—familiarization, strike, fighter weapons, all the way to the big one—carrier qualification. With them I endured endless lectures on subjects ranging from instrument flight procedures to carrier deck protocol to AIDS prevention. I pored over F/A-18 systems and procedures and logged numerous sweaty hours in the very realistic flight simulators.

  Like everyone who flies Navy jets, I underwent flight physiology qualification: aeromedical exam, ejection seat training, high-altitude pressure chamber, and water survival qualification (wherein you are strapped into an aircraft cabin, inverted, and plunged to the bottom of a twenty-foot pool, ramming something like forty gallons of water up your nose). Somehow I survived the survival test.

  With my tutor and fighter pilot friend, Lieutenant Tom Bacon, I flew the Hornet through all its realms—supersonic flight, aerobatics over the Atlantic, low-level navigation over the Florida hinterlands, dive-bombing on the Pinecastle range, field carrier landing practice at Cecil Field.

  I accompanied the students on training detachments, most notably to the anything-goes Key West fighter weapons facility. On half a dozen mosquito-swarmed days and nights I stood in the weeds at the end of practice runways while they rehearsed day and night carrier landings. I stood again on the landing signal platform of the USS Nimitz while they did the real thing.

  But mostly I listened. During hurried lunches in the squadron duty office, over beers in late-night bars, on the back porches o the students’ rented Florida homes, in the eerily red-lighted ready room aboard the aircraft
carrier—I listened to them talk. In snippets, small pieces at a time, they told me about themselves, their wives and husbands and children, their passions and fears, their larger-than-life dreams.

  This book is their story.

  <>

  Certain usages in the book deserve explanation:

  These days the matter of pronouns can produce a migraine. He, she, him, her, it? Though it is now acceptable (and even fashionable) to use the female pronoun when generalizing about aviators, it can be confusing. Only a few women naval aviators were in uniform before the nineties, and none had joined fighter squadrons until after April 28, 1993, when Secretary of Defense Les Aspin signed the order lifting the ban on women in combat.

  Thus, an arbitrary decision: For clarity of understanding, when referring to military aviators in the aggregate, I have opted for the traditional male pronoun.

  In the interest of readability, the time lines of some of the pilots in training have been compressed. The F/A-18 strike fighter training syllabus normally takes about five months, but the students’ actual progress varies according to weather, medical problems, mechanical status of their jets, and available deck time on aircraft carriers. Though all my subject students of Class 2-95 were in the F/A-18 training pipeline at the same time, their actual beginning and finishing class assignments were staggered throughout the year.

  For reasons of privacy, certain of the characters’ names and identities have been changed. In two instances, the identities of separate persons have been merged into a single composite character.

  <>

  I owe thanks to numerous officers and aviators of the Navy and Marine Corps. My old pal from cadet days, Commander P. J. Burke, USNR, pushed the right buttons to make the project fly. Admiral R. C. Allen, Commander, Naval Air Forces Atlantic, gave the crucial green light to get me into the strike fighter training pipeline. Successive commanding officers of VFA-106, Captains Matt Moffit and “Rico” Mayer made me feel at home in their squadron and extended the ultimate favor: They put me back in the cockpit of a Navy fighter. Hornet pilots Commander John Wood, USNR, Lieutenant Commander Allen “Zoomie” Baker, and Lieutenant Tom “Slab” Bacon kept me honest by vetting the book for technical and literary errata.

  The staff of the Strike Fighter Wing Atlantic, commanded by Captain “Flamo” Fleming, extended unfailing courtesy and assistance with my many requests. I am indebted to the superb instructor pilots of VFA-106, the F/A-18 Fleet Replacement Squadron, and the landing signal officers for allowing me to sit in on their briefings, for patiently answering all my questions, and for taking me to sea with them. Thanks to the officers and crew of the U. S. S. Nimitz for the sentimental journey in the Pacific.

  Special gratitude goes to my agent, Alice Martell, of the Martell Agency, and to Mindy Werner, executive editor at Viking Penguin, for their patient and professional guidance.

  Most of all, thanks are owed to the young men and women—strike fighter pilots—whose lives I shared for six months, and for whom I developed a profound admiration. I salute them all.

  RG

  Part One

  NUGGETS

  nug·get (n¾g“¹t) n. 1. A small, solid lump, especially of gold. 2. Neophyte naval aviator, wearer of shiny new gold wings. 3. Occupier of lowest stratum in naval aviation hierarchy.

  PROLOGUE

  His squadron call sign was “Mongo,” an inevitable mutation of his real name—Nick Mongillo. Mongo was an unlikely hero. He was what they called a “nugget,” which meant the same thing as “rookie”—a naval aviator on his first squadron assignment. He had only been in the squadron three months when they were sent to the Red Sea.

  As a nugget Mongo had already done most of the knuckleheaded nugget things: being out of position as a wing man, missing frequency changes, losing sight of his flight leader. It was all part of learning to be a fighter pilot.

  But no one had prepared him for this new role: Nick Mongillo—hero. Suddenly he was supposed to act like some sort of celebrity, grinning and spouting one-liners for the fans back home. He was supposed to be cool.

  Instead, Mongo was standing there like a zombie. He couldn’t think of anything cool. He looked like he was still scared to death from the five hour mission. And, in fact, he was scared to death—but it wasn’t from anything out there over Iraq. At the moment, Mongo was scared to death of Christiane Amanpour and all those freaking CNN cameras and lights that were trained on him like a battery of howitzers.

  Here she was, dressed up like Ernie Pyle in her war correspondent bush jacket, sticking that goddamn microphone in his face, peering at him with those big brown eyes, asking the kind of question television reporters think they have to ask to prove that they comprehend the ghastliness of war.

  Her question was: “What did it feel like to kill another man?”

  Mongo stared at her blankly. The question had come off sounding like an accusation, which, of course, it was. For the life of him, he couldn’t come up with a good answer. But he knew what not to say. In a tiny, flea-speck portion of his brain, Nick Mongillo knew that it definitely wouldn’t play well back home in millions of living rooms if he stood there and blabbed the truth: It felt GLORIOUS! The guy flying that MiG was trying to kill me. But I smoked the fucker first. . .

  He didn’t say it. Mongo just shrugged and tried to look anguished about having performed such an execrable act of aerial homicide. He mumbled something about just doing his duty. . . war was hell, you know. . . they were all in it together. . . he hoped it would be over soon. . .

  And other such balderdash.

  Later the Navy would complain that they “lost the media war.” This was because their heroes in Desert Storm, they claimed, didn’t receive the same treatment by the media that had been given the Air Force. But that was nothing new; it had always been so. The Air Force always managed to outplay the Navy in the public relations department, somehow coaching their heroes to deliver the apple pie, Boy Scoutish, Rotary Club answers to inane questions. For whatever reasons, Navy pilots just didn’t know how to talk to reporters like Christiane Amanpour. They never seemed to have the right answers to questions like, “What did it feel like to kill another man?”

  It felt GLORIOUS. . .

  <>

  The reason it felt glorious was because the war had become very personal for the fighter pilots aboard the U. S. S. Saratoga. During the previous night, on the first strike of Desert Storm, one of them had become the first American casualty.

  No one knew—officially—what happened to Scott Speicher. He had been number four in a flight of F/A-18 Hornets thundering through the darkness toward the target. On the way to the target, something happened. Speicher disappeared.

  So the next day, there was Mongo, a nugget on his first squadron tour, on his way to bomb the enemy. He was busy—almost too busy—to be scared. Almost.

  “It was like juggling crystal,” Mongillo remembered. “They kept throwing new pieces to juggle. You were scared that you were going to drop one.” It was hard to keep up with all the frenetic activity around him. He had to keep sight of the other three fighters in the flight. He had to keep track of where they were going, how much further they had to go to the target, had to interpret data from the airplane’s mission computer, had to listen to all the hysterical radio calls flooding the tactical frequency.

  That was the hardest part: listening to the non-stop hysterical jabbering on the radio. The frequency was a cacophony of madness. Everyone was yelling. No one was transmitting in a normal voice. You could smell the adrenaline pumping through each cockpit.

  The airborne strike controller in the Air Force E-3 AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) jet was trying to call out information to the strike fighters:

  “Bogeys twelve o’clock, forty!”

  “Where? Where? Say again!”

  “Manny, one-eight-zero, thirty-five.”

  “Quicksand 400,” the controller said, using the lead strike fighters’ call sign, “bogeys are at Manny, two-ze
ro-zero, thirty. . .”

  “Manny?” Mongo tried to remember what the hell was “Manny?” It was a spot on the ground, an airfield or something up north, that they decided to use as a reference point. The technique was called “Bullseye Control,” referencing everything around a geographical point, or “bullseye.” All unidentified aircraft would be called out in relation to the point called “Manny.” If something was south of Manny at thirty miles, you were supposed to give the bearing and distance: “Manny, one-eight-zero, thirty.” Trying to orient everything around “Manny” was a mental gymnastic that was getting very difficult.

  The chatter was incessant, overwhelming. None of it was making any sense to Mongo. He was Dash Two—the number two position in the four-plane flight—stuck out there on the left flank of the formation. They had only forty miles to go to the target.

  Four more minutes. Mongo stopped trying to make sense of the radio chatter. It was time to think about bombing.

  A “bogey” was an unidentified airplane. By the stringent ROE (Rules of Engagement) applied by the allied coalition command to the Navy strike fighters in Desert Storm, you couldn’t take a shot at a bogey until he had been labeled a “bandit,” which meant he had been positively identified by an airborne electronics ship, either a Navy E-2 Hawkeye or an Air Force E-3 AWACS, as a bad guy. The only other way you could legally shoot was after a VID (Visual Identification), which meant you had get close enough to see that the bogey was, indeed, a bandit. Of course, the bandit might already have reached the same conclusion about you. The confrontation then became an aerial quick draw.