It was the end of March, 1995, and they were back at Cecil Field. The two-week Fallon det was behind them and with all the empty boxes checked on the strike phase syllabus sheet, the nuggets settled back into their workaday routine. Up at five, suit up and head for the squadron, brief and fly and debrief and brief for the next one. In between hops you attend more AIDS and sensitivity and community relations lectures. It was all very much the same.
But it was different. In the time they had been out there on the high desert at Fallon, something had happened: They’d made the transition from neophytes to . . .fighter pilots. Almost. They knew how to deliver high explosives on the heads—reasonably close, anyway—of a ground-dwelling enemy. They even knew how to get to the enemy’s ground-dwelling place by skimming the floor of the high desert at no more than a hundred feet or so.
So it wasn’t too hard to understand why some of them were walking now with just the slightest hint of a. . . swagger. Hell, man, they were fighter pilots!
The RAG, too, was recognizing this new level of competence by—oh, so slightly—loosening the leash they kept on the nugget fighter pilots. It meant there was less direct supervision now of what they did in the air. Nuggets were even allowed to launch into the blue all on their own, off to complete a mission outside the watchful scrutiny of an instructor pilot.
It was a heady new experience. It opened up new opportunities for expanding their confidence. And, of course, it presented new opportunities for getting in trouble.
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All the way across the parking lot to the great steel-doored hangar, up the long ladder to the upper deck, down the waxed passageway to the commodore’s office, Van Doren replayed in his head the details of that morning’s flight.
Why the hell did he do it?
Chip Van Doren didn’t know. Some mutant cell gone amok in his brain stem? Maybe it was the scene in Top Gun where Maverick Mitchell comes ripping supersonic back to Miramar and dusts off the tower and rattles all the windows. But in the movie Maverick Mitchell had gotten away with it.
Chip Van Doren had not gotten away with it. Here he was, suited up in his khakis, shoes spit-shined, wings gleaming on his uniform left breast, on his way to do a rug dance in the commodore’s office. He didn’t know whether the wings would still be in place when he came out.
It had been an unbelievably cockeyed stupid idea. If he had just allowed his computer-like brain to process the idea for a few additional seconds, he would have rejected it. But he hadn’t done that. Van Doren had seized on the idea and run with it like a monkey with a football.
He had been coming back solo from a touch and go session over at Whitehouse auxiliary field. He was solo. No leader, no wingman, no instructor observing like a mother hen. No one to keep him from doing something unbelievably cockeyed stupid.
He was only five miles from home. All he had to do was skim over the piney woods back to Cecil, enter the “break,” which meant flying directly overhead the active runway, then “break”—bank sharply to the left—to enter the downwind leg of the pattern, and land.
The only thing was, real fighter pilots liked to add a little pizzazz to the break. They might ask the tower for an “carrier” break, which meant a six-hundred-foot traffic pattern instead of the normal fifteen-hundred feet. And they might notch the speed up a bit hotter than the normal two-hundred-fifty or three hundred knots. The hotter and lower you came into the break, the more awesome it looked on the ground. Looking awesome, as everyone in naval aviation knew, was everything.
Van Doren radioed the tower: “Cecil Tower, Roman eighty-six on a three mile initial for runway three-six left.” And then, after half a second’s pause, added, “Request carrier break.”
“Roger, Roman eighty-six. Carrier break approved.”
Approved? Cool! . . .
It was then that Van Doren’s cognitive power reverted to that of a monkey on a moped. Zooming toward the break at six hundred feet, ripping over the woods like a fire-tailed comet, Chip Van Doren had one objective in mind: Look awesome.
He nudged up the throttles. At the Hornet’s very light weight, with nothing hanging on the external racks and with only minimum fuel on board, the fighter accelerated like a scalded banshee. In his HUD (head-up display) on the windscreen, he might have noticed the digital airspeed indication ticking upward toward supersonic range. But he wasn’t noticing. Van Doren was fixated on the great expanse of Cecil Field up ahead. And looking awesome.
Five hundred knots. . .
Five-fifty. . .
The speed was increasing.
It all came down to applied physics. Somewhere around six hundred knots, varying with ambient temperature and altitude, lurked the mystical “sound barrier,” which was not a barrier at all for the F/A-18 Hornet. At Mach 1.0, the exact speed of sound, a sonic boom was generated that reverberated over the landscape like the hammers of hell, shattering nerves and cracking windows.
Later it would be debated whether Chip Van Doren was actually doing Mach one or some fraction of a decimal point under. To the officer sitting there on the second floor of the building at the confluence of Cecil Field’s runways, this fine distinction didn’t make a bit of difference.
WhaaaaRoooooom!
It was a bit like the scene from “Top Gun,” when Maverick Mitchell buzzed the tower in his Tomcat fighter, causing the operations officer’s coffee to spew like a geyser from his cup.
Except in this case it was the commanding officer of Cecil Field Naval Air Station, who was a Navy captain. The captain not only spilled his coffee, his pulse rate spiked to near-seizure level. Within seconds he was on the phone, demanding to talk to someone, anyone over there at the goddamned Strike Fighter Wing.
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The commander of the Strike Fighter Wing was also a Navy captain, but he held the honorific rank of commodore. He had responsibility for all the Atlantic-based F/A-18 squadrons, including the RAG. It was the commodore’s job to dispense praise, promotion, and punishment.
Today was a day for punishment.
Van Doren didn’t have to wait long. He was summoned right into the commodore’s office. The commanding officer of the RAG was also there, looking grim.
The commodore had Chip Van Doren’s personnel and training jackets in front of him. “You had a good record all the way through flight training, Mr. Van Doren. Top of your class.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What the hell were you thinking about this morning?”
Van Doren told him the truth: He hadn’t been thinking at all. Certainly he hadn’t thought about the outcome of his actions. He had no excuse for having rattled every window and jangled every nerve at Cecil Field.
“Was it worth losing your wings?”
Van Doren’s heart sank. Lose his wings? His boyhood dream was slipping away like sand through his fingers. “No, sir,” he said.
The commodore was an old attack and fighter pilot. In his time he had commanded his own squadron and a carrier air wing. He knew all about fighter pilots—the thin distinction between envelope-pushing and professional discipline. He knew you had to cull out the bad weeds, the immature cowboys who flaunted orders and disregarded rules. Guys like that would take your squadron down with them. You had to get rid of them.
“In cases like this, I usually order an evaluation board,” said the commodore. “The board almost always recommends that the aviator be terminated in the program. He’s finished as a naval aviator.”
Van Doren stood there, his pale Dutch complexion paler than ever before. He kept his mouth shut, waiting for the commodore to deliver the coup de grace.
The commodore took his time. He sat behind his desk, gazing at Van Doren like he was a specimen in a lab. He seemed to be considering the matter: Was this kid worth keeping? The commodore knew that you sometimes had to allow for misjudgments. An aviator could learn from such an experience—if he was smart. Was this kid smart? Or was he dumb as a dog turd?
“Mr. Van Doren, for making a stupid decision like you just did this morning, you’ll receive a SOD. An unsatisfactory grade.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I want your record to show that you’ve displayed a tendency toward irresponsibility and immaturity.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Barring any recurrences of this behavior, you’ll be retained in the program.”
Van Doren felt his life being returned to him. He did his best to keep a straight face.
“But get this,” said the commodore. “If you show any traits—the slightest inclination—toward this kind of flying again, you will get an evaluation board. And I assure you any such board is going to yank your wings for good. Is that message loud and clear, Lieutenant?”
“Yes, sir.”
“One more thing. You’re going to write a letter.”
“To whom, sir?”
“The commanding officer of this air station. You’re going to apologize for cracking his goddamned window.”
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Burner Bunsen’s classmates had begun worrying about him. He was behaving strangely. For one thing, he had stopped showing up at Hop’s, the hangout down in Orange Park where the single guys went to make hits on the local secretaries and nurses and groupies (Oh, you’re one of those fighter pilots!). And on the weekends, which was the only time the nuggets could get together for some water-skiing, or golf, or do some serious partying—Burner was nowhere to be found. He had disappeared. It was very peculiar because Burner Bunsen, of all the nuggets of Class 2-95, was the king of the party animals.
And then one Friday evening in mid-April, it all made sense. It was a squadron social at the Cecil Field Officers’ Club. Everyone was supposed to be there—instructors, students, all the squadron officers. Burner walked in—and everyone got a good look at the reason he had been acting funny.
Her name was Greta. She was a graduate student in economics at Gainesville, over at the University of Florida. She was tall, with flowing blonde hair, dressed in a long red and white cocktail dress. In the opinion of every gawking young aviator in the room, Greta was a knockout.
Burner was in love. “My sister introduced us,” he explained. “She works at a bank in New York, and Greta was doing an internship there. My sis calls up one day and says, ‘You’ve gotta meet this girl I know who’s going to grad school down in Florida.’ So I did. And I’ve been spending a lot of time lately in Gainesville.”
It was amazing, seeing Burner like this. Gone was the steely-eyed Marine, the bristle-headed, snake-eating, belly crawling philosopher-killer. Here was a guy none of them had seen before, suited up in his Brooks Brothers hounds tooth, falling all over himself fetching things for his date, introducing her around. Burner Bunsen was grinning like a sophomore at his first dance.
From then on the nuggets didn’t see much of Burner outside the squadron. A few speculated that the new romance might be a distraction. Ol’ Burner might, you know, lose his edge. Going through strike fighter training was something that took all your concentration.
They needn’t have worried. Burner wasn’t losing any of his edge. He finished strike phase with the best weapons scores of the class.
Even Barney, who seldom passed out compliments, was impressed. “The kid’s good,” he said. “For a Marine, he’s un-fucking-believable.”
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There was a side to Shrike that few ever saw. In fact, few of the instructors in the F/A-18 RAG even wanted to acknowledge that beneath the plain-faced, flight-suited, quarrelsome exterior was a woman.
And then one night, at the Cecil Field Officers’ Club, the men in the squadron got a rare glimpse of Shrike Hopkins’s other side. Bruce, Shrike’s old boy friend from postgraduate school, now a lieutenant commander and a helicopter pilot in San Diego, came to town. They went to a squadron party at the club.
When they came in, heads turned. Hey, look at. . . Is that who I think it is . . .?
It was. It was Shrike, in a white cocktail dress cut daringly brief across the top, revealing a figure no one at the squadron would ever have perceived, having only seen her in a shapeless gray-green flight suit. Now her high heels made her look taller, almost. . . lithe, an attribute that had been hidden by the standard clunky black flying boots. Her long blonde hair, unfettered by the bands and pins she used to keep it bundled inside her helmet, flowed naturally over her bare shoulders.
Shrike was, if not a knockout, at least an eye-catcher.
A stunned silence fell over the bar.
She loved it. What she loved most was that these were the same guys who, in the ready room, glowered at her like she was an alien on their front porch. Now they were gaping like spaniels at a cat show. She treated them to a demure smile.
After a short stay, Shrike and her date paid their respects to the senior officers and left. The men at the party—instructors and nuggets alike—stared after them as they exited.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” said an instructor. He downed his drink and gestured for another. “Who would have guessed?”
“Guessed what?”
“That Shrike was really a fox in disguise?”
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What they had glimpsed, of course, was the other Sally Hopkins, the one that Shrike, the naval officer and woman fighter pilot, seldom turned loose in public.
It was only on weekends, when she was free from training duties, did the other, softer Sally Hopkins come out of her shell. Then she could let her hair down. Literally. She could unpin the long blonde hair, put on sandals and cotton shorts and a halter, and climb into her jeep. She liked to put the top down and head for the beaches, or for the river walk downtown where they had outdoor concerts, and she could rollerblade along the water. It was the only time Shrike could feel like a girl.
A real date for Shrike was, actually, a rare event. For one thing, there just wasn’t time enough to keep up the tedious training schedule and also have a social life. For another, the only men she was likely to meet during this time in her life were other pilots at Cecil Field. And that, thank you, was the last thing she needed: hearing more macho guy talk from the same Neanderthal fighter jockeys she worked with every day.
Sometimes Shrike wished she was finished with this whole business of being a pioneer. Trailblazing for future generations of women just wasn’t fun, with the resentment, the rancor, the pass-or-fail pressure of the strike fighter curriculum.
Sometimes she thought it would be so nice just to be. . . a girl. That was all. Just be a girl and wear pretty clothes and go dancing and have men open doors for her. She would take long bubble baths and have her hair permed and go to the theatre. She would meet men who did not feel threatened by her and who respected her for what she was. She might even find the right one, and if she did, she might even consider starting a family.
It was all fantasy, of course.
When she caught herself indulging in wishful thinking, Shrike yanked herself back to reality. After all, she was too disciplined for such daydreaming. She had worked too hard, been focused on her goal for too many years to give it up now. She was almost there. Almost a fighter pilot. Almost on her way to the stars.
But, still, sometimes she dreamed. It would be nice, for a while, just to be a girl.