The nuggets of 2-95 were nearly ready for the ship. Three more FCLP periods, and they would be finished with Whitehouse.
J. J. was back, and he was feeling good about it. During a four-day holiday weekend and a couple of bad weather days, J. J. received some pump-up training in the OFT (simulator) practicing carrier passes. Then he went out to Whitehouse with an instructor in the “trunk” (the rear seat of a tandem-seat F/A-18D model), where he practiced the real thing while an instructor coached him.
It was working. J. J.’s confidence returned. He was flying acceptable passes on the ball, and even more amazingly—he was enjoying it. Gone, at least for the moment, was the habit of sinking below the glide slope while on short final, scaring hell out of himself and the LSO. Gone was the necessity for the flashing red lights and screams of “Wave off! Wave off!” from the hyperventilating LSO and the inevitable afterburner wave off to keep J. J. out of the weeds.
The seven nuggets were not alone in the pattern. Now they were joined by other students from another class. These were experienced fighter pilots who had been away from the business and were there to re-qualify in carrier landings.
One was Commander Jim Hillan, a former Tomcat pilot and a test pilot who had been detached from carrier duty for the past three years serving as an exchange pilot with the U. S. Air Force. As soon as he had requalified, Hillan would take command of his own F/A-18 squadron. Another old hand was Lieutenant Commander “Smoke” Morgan, a former F/A-18 pilot who had been off in Washington for the past three years at a desk job.
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With only a few more periods out there at Whitehouse before going to the ship, it was time for an old ritual.
They called it “U. S. S. Whitehouse.” It was one of the rare occasions when the pilots could invite their dependents—wives, girl friends, kids, relatives of every stripe—out to see what they really did there.
It was a gorgeous spring Sunday afternoon. They all trooped out to the piney woods at Whitehouse Field, to stand there in the weeds by the LSO shack at the end of runway 11. They came to watch their sons, husbands, boy friends, and, in the case of David Yeates, his wife, Angie Morales, show them what they had been practicing these past three weeks.
Pearly Gates and Plug Neidhold, the LSOs in charge of Class 2-95, were like tour guides at the Smithsonian. Plug loved dispensing arcane facts about carrier flying. “Did you know,” he was saying to a couple of wives, “that your husbands belong to a group of only about two thousand aviators in the whole world?”
“Really? What group is that?”
“Those who are qualified to land aboard aircraft carriers.”
They didn’t know that.
“Did you know that in the French Navy, there are only six pilots—total—who are qualified to land aboard a carrier at night?”
They didn’t know that either.
Plug and Pearly were wearing their own gray-green flight suits. They showed the visitors the equipment: the LSO shack with the big glass windows from which they would control the landing jets; the Fresnel Lens, the big optical “ball” mounted at the edge of the runway behind the LSO shack. They flashed the wave off lights for them. They explained how the jets would come roaring overhead, just as they would next week when they went out to the real carrier, and “break” to the left, one by one, to join the traffic pattern.
Both the McCormacks’ wives were there, standing apart. Peggy McCormack was the senior of the two McCormack wives, having met Rick back when the twins were in Kingsville going through advanced training. She was vivacious, dark-haired and petite. She had a son from an earlier marriage, and now she and Rick had added a son of their own.
The newest Mrs. McCormack, bride of Russ, had been a family member only four months now. Tracy McCormack was a pretty girl, youngish-looking in her short skirt and auburn hair. She was from Jacksonville, and had met Russ only a few months ago when he checked into the F/A-18 RAG. In keeping with the spirit of the Heckle-Jeckle duality, she, too, had a three-year-old son from another marriage.
J. J. Quinn’s wife, Dorothy, was there. She was a tall, gracious woman who had already endured plenty of these Navy and Marine Corps class performances. Dorothy looked like she would be happy when this whole show—not just today’s performance but the whole strike fighter training program—was finished. Then she could settle down again to being a Marine Corps wife in a more or less permanent house up in Beaufort, South Carolina where J. J. would be assigned when he finished.
Pearly Gates’s new girl friend came out for the show. She was a leggy blonde in tight jeans. Her name was Ivy, and Pearly was taking the greatest pleasure in showing her off.
The best looking of them all, though, was Greta, the girl friend of Burner Bunsen, to whom she had now been engaged for one week. Greta had long blond hair and a happy smile. She listened carefully, seeming to be genuinely interested in what the LSOs were telling them.
Also there to watch the action was a trim, gray-haired man in designer jeans and polo shirt. Pearly and Plug had seen many such fathers out there at Whitehouse. Every class, it seemed, had one. This one was the father of Burner Bunsen.
There was a certain smugness to him. He had that master-of-the-universe countenance that let everyone know he was being a hell of good sport by taking the time out of his busy career to come out here for this little show. He was wearing all the distinguishing insignia of a successful career: Gucci loafers on sockless feet, tortoise shell sunglasses, sixty-dollar Manhattan haircut. Accompanying him was the current wife, a lithesome trophy twenty years younger than he.
You could tell by the expression, by the questions he asked, that Burner’s father wasn’t thrilled about his kid’s choice of professions. It was easy to imagine the shock when he heard that his son wanted to be, of all things, a goddamned fighter pilot! Now, look, son, I know it probably seems glamorous and cool and all that, but damn! Think about your future. Why do you want to waste all that expensive education. . . I mean, hell, you ought to be in business school this very minute. I can get you into the firm at. . .
No, Burner’s father definitely wasn’t happy about all this. It was hard for him to contain his disappointment. Why, for Christ’s sake, the military? Wearing that bristle-headed hair cut, tearing around in those jet-propelled scooters like some kind of speed freak.
But here he was, doing his fatherly duty, standing out there with the wives and kids and girl friends in the weed patch at Whitehouse Field, waiting and watching the afternoon sky where it touched the Florida pine trees.
Then the jets came. From over the pine trees appeared the first flight of three Hornet fighters, in echelon formation, stacked to the right. They made a circling pass around the field, then came boring straight down the runway at six hundred feet. They looked like killer angels swooping down on the spectators.
A fan of wrinkles appeared at each of the father’s eyes as he squinted into the sun. He was staring intently at the jets swooping down the runway. One of them was Burner, his kid. Burner? That was the call sign he’d acquired. Where the hell did they get these names, anyway? Why couldn’t they use real names?
Abruptly the lead jet banked hard to the left and pulled away from the formation, entering the carrier traffic pattern. Three seconds later, the number two jet broke to the left, then number three. From the weed patch the relatives could see them flying downwind now, opposite the landing direction, extending their landing gear and wing flaps.
“Burner’s in the lead jet,” called out Plug.
The father nodded. His son would be the first to land. He watched the first jet bank toward the runway, skimming the pine trees. Two plumes of gray trailed from the Hornet’s engines.
The noise of the engines swelled as the jet approached. It came closer, growing in size until it was big. . . a hell of a lot bigger than when they first saw it whistling through the distant sky at six hundred feet. Now he could see the long pointed snout of the fighter, the sleek wings and strakes, the sinister missile racks at each wing tip. And the noise! Jesus, the engine noise was swelling, rising in pitch and volume, approaching the threshold of pain, even with the foam earplugs they had been given. The spectators, all in unison, covered their ears with their hands.
The father’s mouth was open. The master-of-the-universe expression was fading. . . replaced by a perplexed expression. . . something he was trying to figure out. . .
The jet crossed the threshold. It swept down on the landing zone marked on the concrete, thirty yards away from the weed patch where the relatives stood holding their hands over their ears. Kaaploooom! The fighter’s tires screeched onto the concrete. In the next instant the pilot shoved both throttles to the stops, and the jet’s afterburners kicked in.
Baaaroooom! Flame belched from each engine’s tailpipe. The fighter leaped back into the air, trailing a twenty-foot inferno behind the engine tailpipes. Dirt and grass and concrete dust and rubber and jet exhaust revolved in a whirlwind behind the fighter.
The thunder rattled the windows of the LSO shack. The earth beneath the spectators’ feet shook. Heat waves shimmered through the dirt and debris on the runway. Back into the sky the jet roared, thrusting upward like a hurled spear.
And out there in the weed patch the spectators stared. They had expected to see some action, hear some jet noise, be a little impressed, but this. . . Christ! This was awesome.. . .
Something had happened to the father in the designer clothes and expensive haircut. He was standing transfixed. His jaw hung open. He looked like he had been walloped with a mallet.
From his lips came a single utterance: Ho-leeee shit!
You could tell that he was struggling to understand what the fuck was going on. Here was his kid, his bright and good and sometimes-misdirected kid, who had always needed his help with tough tasks. Here was the kid whom he had raised and whom he thought—until this very moment—he was still raising. Here was his kid commanding that goddamned earth-shaking fire-breathing behemoth, doing a job that he, with his money and success and experience, would never—could never—dream of doing.
It was beyond his comprehension.
Something peculiar had happened. Gone was the smugness. Gone was the father’s disappointment, at least for the moment. When the Hornet fighter slammed down out there at Whitehouse Field, then roared like a rocket back into the Florida sky—the father’s relationship with his son had changed forever. His kid was no longer a kid. He was his own man.