April 6, 2012
My mom and dad were in Jacksonville, Florida, staying with my brother Craig before he left for a deployment in the Middle East. Since Craig’s fridge had little more than beer and Red Bull, my mom was loading up on groceries when her cell phone rang. She saw the call was from Karen, her best friend back in Colorado.
“Hey, what’s up?” she answered, but quickly her tone faded.
“Have you talked to Caroline?” Karen said, frantic.
“No, she’s at work, why?”
“Call her NOW! And call me right back.” Karen hung up and my mom stared at her phone.
Her stomach lurched and a wave of nausea hit her. Karen had, ironically, been married to an Air Force fighter pilot during the Vietnam War. Karen’s husband had flown for the Air Force and then moved on to become a United Airlines pilot and fly for the Colorado Air National Guard. He died in a freak training accident when his jet malfunctioned and he tried to eject. Tragically, the canopy didn’t release, and he was killed just like the character Goose in the movie Top Gun.
My mom’s hand shook as she fumbled with her cell phone. It took her several attempts before she could call me. It rang, and rang. No answer. She left a message.
“This is Mom, call me as soon as you get this.”
She knew I could be anywhere out of contact, in the jet flying, in a sim, or in a briefing, so she tried not to panic. She called Karen back. “I can’t reach her … what’s happening?”
“Are you near a TV? There’s been an F/A-18 crash in Virginia Beach … and it’s a two-seater.”
My mom walked away from her full grocery cart and headed back to Craig’s house. By that time, her phone rang off the hook, as one friend after another tried to reach her. She could barely get Craig’s car started, all while trying to answer her phone, hoping one of the calls was me. She somehow made it safely back to the house and ran in, yelling to my dad to turn the TV on. There, on all the news stations, was live video of the crash. Firefighters and first responders streamed toward the giant black plume of smoke and flames that rose from the crash site, which was an apartment building three blocks from my house.
My parents sat glued to the screen as they watched the horror unfold. The squadron was confirmed as VFA-106, where I was currently training, but still no proof of life. Gradually, reports started coming out that the crew had ejected at the last possible moment while trying to steer the aircraft away from a school and had also dumped as much aviation fuel as possible. My mom called my brother Craig at his squadron. He had heard about the crash, and she told him to see if he couldn’t get through to me by his channels.
Karen called again. “The station I’m watching says that the pilot and WSO are alive, but injured. Still no word if one is a female.”
My parents continued to watch and flip between the news programs, and eventually they saw one of the crew members being loaded into an ambulance. He was bloodied and injured, but it was one of the guys. All this time my mom had silently been praying over and over for the survival of the crew and the people on the ground. She was still shaken and feeling ill, and could only imagine how awful it had to have been for the families and loved ones that had to watch a similar scenario during the World Trade Center and Pentagon crashes on 9/11, waiting and wondering, feeling powerless.
Finally a reporter mentioned that a second injured aviator had been transported to the hospital—another male. Though she felt a wave of relief, she couldn’t understand why she still hadn’t heard from me. It would not be until a few days later that my mother would learn that when an incident like this occurs, all cell phones in the squadron are immediately put in a locked box to keep family members from hearing, or even worse, not hearing from their loved one.
Finally, after what seemed an eternity, my mother heard from me. She had tears welling up when I explained that I had been in a simulator and, like my mom, had heard something had happened. We ran out of the hangar and saw the smoke from the crash, but by then, I had no access to phones.
This proved a pivotal experience for my mom. Though she knew that our training and workups could be dangerous, she had naively assumed that my squadron’s eventual deployment overseas would be the hardest time for the families, and indeed it was for most of them. Of course the danger would be heightened when we headed toward combat, but the reality was that every single time we climbed into an F/A-18, my mother had to deal with the possibility that human error or mechanical failure could take us down. For the next few years, she would never rest easy or take my well-being for granted.