March 18, 2014; Embarked USS George H.W. Bush, Departing the Mediterranean
We departed the Mediterranean and transited the Suez Canal on our way around the Arabian Peninsula, threading the needle through the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and finally arriving at our destination—the North Arabian Sea—the operating area where we planned to spend the bulk of our deployment.
Throughout our travel around the Arabian Peninsula, and during our entire deployment, we constantly flew missions, trained, and practiced our tactics. There were fifty-four fixed-wing aircraft aboard the Bush and another twelve or so helicopters. Our air wing consisted of about twelve hundred people, 180 of whom were aviators. With aircraft taking off and landing and helicopters operating twenty-four hours a day, the flight deck, simply put, was one of the most dangerous and terrifying work environments imaginable. There are four runways on the flight deck of a carrier from which aircraft can launch. Yes, that steel cork in the ocean can launch two jets at once, with four jets launching within thirty seconds of one another. Each blasting off with thirty-four thousand pounds of thrust, which is enough force to knock over a building. The planes themselves are monstrous, heavy, and loaded with weapons.
One day, while waiting to take off for a training flight, my pilot and I had a front-row seat as one of the blue shirts—enlisted maintainers responsible for towing jets around the flight deck—almost lost his life. He went to pull the chocks from an F/A-18 right as the plane was pulled forward prematurely, and because the kid neglected protocol and improperly removed the chock, his leg was run over by the plane. As the plane rolled forward, I watched helplessly as he fell to the ground, the tire crushing his leg. His foot, in a cheap, steel-toed boot, squeezed out on the other side and popped off, leaving him writhing on deck, screaming in agony, blood seeping from his freshly amputated leg. We called tower to get the medical crews up on the flight deck, but after doing our duty to get the kid help, we had to take off. Flight-deck operations could not stop, because we had to clear the deck and make room for the helicopters to land and medevac the Sailor off to the nearest hospital in Oman.
Running the length of the carrier, there were painted lines called foul lines, and these delineated where it was safe to stand. Depending on whether aircraft were launching, landing, or hovering to come in and land, different foul lines were active, and should an aviator, maintainer, guest VIP, or admiral cross on the wrong side of the line, they were tackled out of the way by the safety observers. When doing anything on the flight deck, every person had to keep their head on a swivel, because something was always trying to kill you. There were warheads hanging off jets to duck under, and hoses of explosive jet fuel to step over. There was jet blast to dodge, and turning props that would chop you up as if with a samurai sword. All of the dangers made the space reminiscent of a medieval gauntlet. The arresting cable—which we caught with our tailhooks to help us stop on the runway—was a steel cable three inches thick. When a plane snagged it, it bent like a rubber band from the force.
On the Bush, there were three cables in constant use, and like all equipment on the boat, they were prone to wear. The Navy has strict maintenance requirements for how often the cables must be swapped out, but even so, cables have malfunctioned and snapped. If one breaks after a jet has slowed down, the jet cannot stop, and most of the time, it cannot fly away, so it precariously rolls off the carrier’s front end. If they can, aviators in those situations eject before the jet plunges into the ocean. (E-2s do not have ejection seats, so their crews must try to fly away or ditch after the plane has crashed into the water.)
It’s dangerous, not only for the crew in the plane but for everyone working on deck, as the broken cable instantly transforms into a deadly scythe, whipping back and forth in a space that’s packed with hundreds of support personnel. With its speed and energy, the cable can easily cut a body in half, take off a leg, or, if you’re lucky, just send you flying twenty feet, leaving you with a concussion and shattered limbs.
Even though we didn’t have any cables part during our deployment, we knew the dangers, and so we spent as little time up on the flight deck as possible. When we were assigned our jet for the day, we found exactly where it was parked, or spotted, and then planned our route to it using the inside labyrinth of passageways, popping out as close as we could to the jet. This was especially necessary at night, when all of the daytime hazards were amplified by the dark and the flight deck that was dimly lit. Much like Alcatraz, if something went wrong on the flight deck, there was literally no escape. Unlike on a small ship, swan diving into the waves below is not something you want to do. Not only will your body get sucked underneath the boat and chewed up by the gigantic propellers, but the deck itself is nearly ten stories high, moving and pitching in the waves. There are steel nets off its sides to catch anyone who might blow overboard or dive from the path of a rogue aircraft, but trust me, this is not something anyone wants to do.
On the flight deck, you cannot have any skin showing because of safety concerns, so our Sailors dressed from head to toe in long turtlenecks, heavy pants, and thick protective gear. In the Gulf, where temperatures routinely reached the 120-degree mark (and with the engine blast, often exceeded that), they worked in face masks, helmets, goggles, and gloves, drenched in oil, content to be there, working on jets and serving their country.
What most people don’t know is that the average age of the men and women working in this insanely perilous environment is around twenty years old. During the Vietnam War, it was nineteen. Literally, the flight deck is manned by kids, fresh out of high school, maybe a little college under their belts; enlisted Sailors who volunteered for the Navy, having no idea what they were getting into. Some of this made us nervous, especially when an inexperienced one was taxiing our plane so close to the edge of the flight deck that the tires slipped on the greasy surface, threatening to send us plunging to our deaths. But at the end of the day, we wholly trusted these young boys and girls and were grateful for the risks they took. Our lives, in the most literal sense, were in their gloved hands.
March 2014; Embarked USS George H.W. Bush, transiting the North Arabian Gulf
The morning of March 23 was the day I heard the command, “Launch the alert 30.” Seventeen minutes later, Crocket and I tore off the end of our carrier in search of an Iranian F-4, a two-seat fighter jet. Our plane was banking hard to the heading 330, wings shrieking through the hot, humid gulf air.
Crocket had the controls. My eyes were trained on my radar looking for our contact. “Got ’em,” I said as the contact appeared on my display. Almost as soon as our radar picked the plane up, the F-4 changed his course. “He’s turning away.” I checked his location superimposed over a chart on my other screen.
He was back in his airspace and out of our vital area, flying what I assumed to be a standard patrol route.
“Let’s continue to monitor him, Crocket. Stay on our heading and wait to see.”
Keeping an eye on the F-4, I bumped out the area on my radar and my heart jumped in my chest. “We have another contact,” I said, seeing another bogey appear on our radar attack display.
“Let’s check it out,” Crocket said.
I gave him a new heading, and he arc’d the jet around, tearing into a new part of the sky. Something didn’t feel right. Two encounters with Iranian fighters in one day was unheard of.
We were in hot pursuit of the second intercept, talking to controllers back on the Bush who were confused and not giving clear answers. The ship’s controllers were thinking and operating at the twenty-knot pace that the boat was steaming at, but we were closing in on the bogey at over five hundred knots, trying to get a declaration of the unknown aircraft.
“Lion 11,” I kept repeating to the controllers, “contact BRAA 305/45 23,000 declare.” I was essentially asking them to tell us if they had any other intelligence to give us if the contact we were pursuing was declared anything other than an unknown aircraft operating in our airspace. But despite our inquiries, we got nothing out of them.
Closing at five hundred knots, we were seconds away from discovering what was on the horizon. And then we saw it.
“Tally one, right one o’clock high,” I said to Crocket, “an Iranian P-3.”
We were not supposed to join up on a P-3. The plane was just a reconnaissance aircraft. Immediately, I heard the controller in my ear telling me what I already knew, “Contact is an Iranian P-3. Do not intercept the P-3! I say again, do not intercept the P-3!”
A little late for that, I thought as the plane became visible in the crosshairs of my helmet targeting sight.
“Roger that,” Crocket mumbled, peeling off the reconnaissance plane. Instead of returning to the carrier, we took up a position called a defensive counter air-cap between the P-3 and the aircraft carrier, maintaining our airborne alert, just in case the F-4 decided to come back and check us out after all. But Crocket and I knew this was unlikely, and we both shifted into a de-escalatory mindset.
Heart still hammering in my chest, two words came to mind. “Pump fake, Crocket.”
“You’re right about that one,” he said. “Always next time.”