Bogeys and Bandits Read online

  An experienced formation pilot’s hands would perform these mini-corrections, dozens per second, making tiny control inputs, while his eyes registered every tiny displacement of his jet from the leader’s. But with his brain—his on-line conscious computer—he might be chatting with the leader about the weather. Or solving a navigation problem. Or thinking raunchy thoughts. It was this Zen-like ability to detach, to let the subconscious take over, that made precise formation flying possible.

  Flying three feet apart wasn’t the tough part, at least not after the pilot learned the basic skill. Jets rarely collided when flying formation. It was getting in formation that could be the hairiest of maneuvers. The join-up, in fighter parlance, was called a “rendezvous.” In a jet like the Hornet you could come ripping up to the lead aircraft with a speed advantage of a couple hundred miles per hour. It was like rushing up to the edge of a cliff on skis—and trying to stop exactly three feet away.

  It took practice. When you did it wrong, zinging in with so much closure speed that you couldn’t stop, you performed an “under-run,” meaning you leveled the wings and slid beneath the lead aircraft. As you did this, whizzing under him like a runaway bobsled, he winced and grunted a prayer that you would miss him.

  Night formation flying was even more demanding. “The only difference between night and day formation flying,” Navy flight instructors used to say, “is that at night you can’t see anything.”

  That was all. Since you couldn’t see, you relied on radio dialogue and the little white formation lights that looked like glow worms in a pasture and didn’t tell you much about how fast or slowly you were joining on the lead until—Cheeee-rist!—suddenly there he was right in your face.

  Formation flying was like other phases of fighter training. It seemed difficult and dangerous. But you kept doing it over and over—until one day it struck you: Hey! I can do this. No sweat.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE REAL THING

  The nuggets soon learned about the instructors—who were the good guys and who to watch out for. Slab was a good guy. Another was Zoomie—Lieutenant Commander Allen Baker—a former Air Force officer who had become disaffected because he hadn’t been assigned to fighters and switched his commission to the Navy.

  A favorite was Lieutenant Chris “Barney” Barnes. Barney was thirty-two. He had a crew cut, a beer belly, and a vocabulary like a boatswain’s mate. He also had a reputation as being possibly the best bomber in the business. It was a reputation he wore proudly and didn’t mind advertising. Barney had an eye and some kind of internal aiming device for putting bombs inside a tiny circle on the earth. He didn’t even mind if people were shooting at him, which they had for a while in 1991 while he was dismantling large items of Iraqi infrastructure.

  During her first briefing with Lieutenant “Barney” Barnes, Shrike nearly heaved her lunch. What got to her wasn’t Barney’s language, which was colorful and eloquently profane. And it wasn’t the way he sometimes punctuated his narrative by pausing to scratch his crotch.

  Being a woman in what was still mostly a man’s Navy, she had gotten used to all that—the expletives and crotch-scratching and, worst of all, the noisome and mostly anonymous flatulence of her male colleagues. All that she could deal with.

  But this—yukkkk! It was enough to make her barf.

  It was the Styrofoam cup. They were already five minutes into the briefing before she began to wonder about the cup. It was always in Barney’s hand. He would be going on about today’s four-plane line up, who would fly what position, radio procedures, where they were going to rendezvous, what their bingo fuel (minimum fuel quantity) would be—and without missing a beat he would spit into the cup.

  During a break, she took a peek at the cup. And wished she hadn’t.

  Barney was a dipper, which explained the ever-present lump under his lower lip. The cup was for expectorating the black, evil-looking residue. The lump and the cup and the spitting were as much a part of Barney’s style as his flight suit and boots. And colorful language. And scratching his crotch.

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  Later, no one could figure out how Barney had gotten the gig with Charlton Heston.

  Barney, for God’s sake! After all, it wasn’t as if there was a shortage of glib, good-looking guys in the squadron. VFA-106 had a full roster of Tom Cruise look-alikes who cleaned up well and could grin their way through the most formal occasion.

  The Navy was throwing a dinner party for movie star Charlton Heston at the Naval Air Training Command in Pensacola. The old actor was a long time Navy booster and a Reagan Republican who had helped lead the chorus for the massive military build up of the eighties. The bash was supposed to honor Heston for his long record of support for naval aviation. It would be covered by television and newspaper reporters and, in the wake of the Tailhook mess, was supposed to throw some favorable light on Navy pilots.

  VFA-106 had a special relationship with the actor. Because the squadron had always been called the Gladiators, and because their emblem was a gladiator helmet, Heston had years ago donated to the squadron the helmet he wore in the movie Ben Hur. For two decades now the helmet had been enshrined like the Hope diamond in the VFA-106 ready room.

  Now the squadron thought it would be a neat idea to send someone to the affair in Pensacola—with the helmet. They would have pictures taken with the helmet while Heston chatted with a pilot from the squadron. It would be great publicity. And for the pilot who got to go. . . well, it was a chance to be seen in the company of celebrities and perhaps get his own career nudged along.

  But Barney. . .? Barney was jovial and chatty, sure, but was he. . . refined? Barney Barnes, of ball scratching and dip spitting fame, was about as refined as a Shriner at a debutante ball.

  Barney Barnes was chosen because he happened to be from Pensacola. The squadron executive officer decided that it would be fitting that Barney return to his home town to represent VFA-106 at the Heston bash.

  Later, considering the circumstances, it was agreed that Barney had comported himself with aplomb. He looked grand in his starched dress whites, high collar snapped up to his chin, gold winged and bemedalled. He sat there on the dais with the heavies—a couple of flag officers and Pensacola city officials and, of course, Charlton Heston, who everyone said had portrayed so many biblical characters that he looked more like God than God Himself.

  Barney couldn’t help noticing that Heston, whom he vaguely remembered as a studly young warrior in Ben Hur, and later as a flint-eyed Navy pilot in The Battle of Midway, was old. Jesus, he looked ancient. Even his clothes were old, patched at the crotch, as though they were his favorite togs, and now that he had reached a certain seniority he’d wear any damn thing that pleased him. His shoes looked like he’d been gardening in them and forgot to change when he came to dinner. Charlton Heston might still look like God—but a senescent, absent-minded God.

  It came time for the helmet. The cameras were blinking away. Barney and Heston were standing there at the dais. Barney hauled out the helmet and started to say his thing about how grateful the squadron was that Heston had given it to them and how they kept it in a glass case in the ready room. . .

  A flicker of recognition passed across the old actor’s face. He stared at the artifact. Helmet. . .. oh, yeah, I remember that thing. . . He grabbed the helmet and thanked Barney for the gift.

  “Uh, sir, I’m just supposed to show it to you and then—”

  The old actor had the script wrong. He thought the helmet was for him. Now he wanted the damn thing!

  Heston had a firm grip on the helmet. So did Barney. They stood there tugging at the helmet while the cameras whirred.

  Barney could see his life flashing before his eyes. And his career. “Mr. Heston,” he muttered in a low voice, “my executive officer said if I don’t come back with this goddamn helmet, he would kick my ass all the way to Cuba. I gotta have this thing back.”

  Heston gave him a perplexed look. What the hell is this kid talki
ng about. . . Suddenly—synapse! He got it! Heston laughed and released his death grip on the gladiator helmet. The crisis passed.

  From then on they got along famously. They went from dinner to a closed room where a local television reporter wanted to interview the two of them together.

  The interviewer, a woman, said to Barney: “You must be honored to be in the company of someone like Charlton Heston.”

  “No, not really.”

  “No?” she said. “Why not? Charlton Heston is a famous actor.”

  “Sure,” said Barney, “But Mr. Heston got famous by acting. Pretending to be someone like me. I’m the real thing.”

  Heston cracked up. He thought this was very funny. The interviewer did not. The segment was cut from the final telecast.

  But what Barney had said was captured there on video tape. It was what fighter pilots really thought of themselves. Movies like Midway and Top Gun were pure illusion. Actors like Tom Cruise and Charlton Heston were wishful pretenders. Barney Barnes was the real thing.

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  Every Navy fighter pilot will tell you that one of the silliest aviation movies ever made was Top Gun. He would say the film was cartoonish, adolescent, sexist, technically erroneous, simplistic, farcical. He would also tell you he had seen the movie maybe, oh, eleven times.

  That was the peculiar paradox about Top Gun. It had a story line that might have been constructed by Dr. Seuss. The Tom Cruise leading character was something out of MTV, a cocky, swaggering, motorcycle-riding bad boy named “Maverick” Mitchell, who broke all the rules. Maverick buzzed towers and ships and busted altitude limits and pursued women into the ladies’ room, and he got away with it because everyone thought he was as cute as a cockatoo. Maverick’s only problem was, he wasn’t a team player, which caused him a few problems with his work.

  During the intense competition for Top Gun honors in the fighter weapons course, Maverick and his back-seater, Goose, lose an engine in their F-14, go into a flat spin and have to punch out (eject). Goose, who is also Maverick’s best buddy, is killed in the ejection, which sends Maverick into a tizzy. He loses his cockiness and, thus, his combat edge. He walks away from the Top Gun school. At the end of the movie, in a dog fight with MiGs, Maverick experiences a personal epiphany, regains his confidence, and blows the enemy out of the sky.

  It was all very silly, real fighter pilots would tell you. But the absolute silliest part about it, the plot twist that got the biggest hoo-haws in Navy ready rooms, was when Maverick lost his nerve. He quit? The candy-ass copped out just because somebody got killed?

  Of all the errors of fighter pilot portrayal, that was considered the most serious. In the view of the real fighter jocks, the specter of death was just something you accepted—a fact of life, so to speak. Hell, man, people get killed. You don’t let it spook you. . .

  But Top Gun, for all its silliness, broke box office records like Maverick Mitchell shattered windows. It was the top box office grosser for 1986. Even the hard rock sound track from the movie shot to the top of the billboard.

  Top Gun was a huge hit because it splashed all over the screen the thunder and glamour of Navy fighters in action. Sitting in a surround-sound theater, you could feel the afterburners of the F-14 Tomcats. You could get nauseous watching the real—not animated, made-in-Hollywood—dog fight scenes shot from real cockpits over the high desert of southern California. The spectacular aerial footage was real because the Navy, most uncharacteristically, had placed a squadron of F-14s at the disposal of the producer, Paramount studios (calculating the per-hour cost of an F-14 Tomcat fighter at $7600), and even allowed the studio to shoot part of the movie aboard the carrier, USS Enterprise.

  It turned out to be a salutary investment for the Navy. Top Gun became the Navy’s top recruitment draw. After Top Gun hit the screen, enlistment offices were overrun with aspiring naval aviators and Tom Cruise stand-ins. And even though Navy public relations officers cringed when they first saw the movie, with the Maverick Mitchell antics and the bawdy language, it was clear that nothing had ever come along to glamorize naval aviators like Top Gun.

  The movie also scored because it tapped into another perennial theme: the image of the single combat warrior, the lone fighter pilot who sallies forth at high noon to do combat with a single combat warrior opponent. It was the ancient knightly sport of jousting, with updated equipment. Sir Galahad in a flight suit.

  The movie endures. Somewhere in every Navy ready room, stuffed in a locker among the stacks of videos that pilots watch to kill time between flying duty, is a much-viewed copy of Top Gun. It still gets played a lot. The pilots all know the film is silly. Farcical. Cartoonish. They love it.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  KARA

  “Well, it finally happened. . .”

  That’s how the news spread around the squadron ready rooms in the Navy. Everyone was saying it: It finally happened. . .

  What had finally happened was an event out on the West Coast in the Pacific waters off California. It occurred about the time the Class 2-95 nuggets were beginning their training at Cecil Field, and it delivered a seismic shock through the Navy, all the way to Washington.

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  Lieutenant Matt Klemish, riding in the back seat of the Tomcat fighter, didn’t like what he saw. They were in their approach turn to the aircraft carrier, Abraham Lincoln, and they had just overshot the turn, veering to the right of the approach path.

  Klemish was the RIO— Radar Intercept Officer. The aviator sitting in the front seat was a newly qualified fighter pilot. And at this moment the new pilot was having a hard time getting the Tomcat lined up—slewing the nose to the left, skidding the airplane, trying to get back to the center line.

  “You’re five knots fast,” Klemish warned on the intercom.

  “Roger,” the pilot acknowledged.

  The Tomcat was still turning. About then, Klemish heard a barely audible “Pop” from one of the engines. What the hell was that? But then his attention was drawn to the airspeed indication. It was decreasing.

  “We’re ten knots slow,” he said in the intercom. “Let’s get some power on the jet.”

  He didn’t feel the power coming up. The jet was still slow.

  Now Klemish really didn’t like what he was seeing. They were much too slow. And low. Three hundred feet, and settling. What the hell was going on? The Tomcat didn’t seem to be responding to the throttle the way it should.

  Through the front portion of the cockpit canopy, Klemish could see the blunt gray aft end of the aircraft carrier. From this angle it looked like an apparition jutting from the ocean.

  Klemish thought this would be a good time to knock off this approach. Things were getting hairy out here. Go back up and try it all over again.

  The LSO (Landing Signal Officer), standing on his platform at the port deck edge of the aircraft carrier, had already reached the same conclusion. The two rows of red wave off lights began flashing. The LSO called, “Wave off! Wave off!”

  A wave off signal was an order. It meant GO! Abandon the approach and try it all over again. Shove the throttles up and get the hell out of there.

  The pilot shoved the throttles up. But the Tomcat wasn’t answering like it should. Instead, it yawed left. They were still slow, cocked up at a dangerous attitude, slewing leftward.

  “WAVE OFF! WAVE OFF! Level your wings and climb!” the LSO called.

  Now Klemish knew they were in trouble. They were still settling.

  He could see the deck of the carrier. He told himself when they had sunk to deck level, he was going to eject.

  “Raise your gear,” the LSO was calling. His voice was emphatic now. “Raise your gear! Power!”

  At that instant, they lost it. The big Tomcat fighter stopped flying.

  Klemish felt the jet lurch to the left. The nose plunged downward toward the ocean.

  “Eject! Eject!” yelled the LSO.

  Klemish was already grabbing for the ejection handle between his legs.
His hands found it, and he yanked.

  Blam! Klemish’s seat fired like a shell from a cannon. In a blur of motion he felt himself blasted into the wind stream, arcing through the air. . . separating from the seat. . . felt the jolt of the chute deployment. . . waiting for the ocean to take him--

  Splosh!

  It felt like hitting concrete. Gagging on the gallon of seawater he had just ingested, he yanked downward at the toggles on his survival vest, then felt the sides of the vest inflate.

  He thrashed at his Koch fittings to release the parachute. Klemish was moving by instinct, by imprinted training, bobbing in the ocean swells, trying to recall the rules of water survival every naval aviator learns.

  As he thrashed in the water, he became aware of the whop-whop-whop above him. He looked up, and there was the plane guard helicopter over his head, frothing the water like a goddamn Kansas tornado. A couple of seconds later, the rescue swimmer was out of the helicopter, there in the water with him, getting him stuffed into the padded sling dangling at the end of the hoisting cable.

  As they were being hoisted back up to the helicopter, Klemish could see the other plane guard helo. It was hovering over the gray mass of the Tomcat fighter, which was quickly settling beneath the waves.

  He didn’t see a rescue swimmer or a sling being hoisted down to the water.

  It had all happened so quickly. Fewer than five minutes had elapsed from the time they rolled into the groove, overshooting the centerline, to when Klemish stepped out of the rescue helicopter onto the deck of the Lincoln.

  He was on his way to the dispensary to be checked out for injuries. On the way down the ladder, he paused to look back toward the flight deck. Maybe the pilot had gotten out okay.