October–November 2012; NAS Oceana, Officers’ Club, Virginia Beach, VA
Late fall, as deployment neared, I was visited by a bad omen. The omen came in the form of a convenient death. After a long day of riding bikes at the beach, followed by drinks at Waterman’s, I returned to my house with friends for one last round. When I went to put Wizzo, my hamster, into a play ball so we could give her a little love and entertainment, I lifted off the top of the cage and found her lying still in the paper shavings below—stiff as a rabbit’s foot.
While sad, and a little grossed out, it did occur to me that Wizzo’s passing could not have been timed better. She’d led a good life, as good as any pocket-sized rodent could wish, and I was leaving for a nine-month trip around the world, and let’s be honest, who wants to take care of someone else’s hamster? As I did not know any eight-year-olds with really, really tolerant parents, I was relieved to say goodbye to my old friend and let my classmates come to the rescue and properly dispose of both the cage and mortal remains of the faithfully departed.
Once I was officially qualified as a combat wingman, weapons systems officer in an F/A-18 Super Hornet, the Navy could, at any moment, send me around the world to join my squadron on deployment.
“In a week or two,” I told Craig on the phone one afternoon, “I could be flying a fully armed fighter jet into combat.”
“So you got a hunch what will happen?” Craig asked.
“Depends on the squadron.”
I’d done well in all of my flight training and there were only three WSOs graduating in my RAG class, and of those three, I was the only single person of the bunch. I knew too well that in the Navy, family plays a role in where they send you and how fast they want you to get there. I told Craig, “The rumor is that the forward deployed squadron in Japan and the deployed two-seat squadron in the Middle East need WSOs.”
“Middle East, as in the Gulf?” Craig said. “I’d just tell Mom about Japan.”
“Yeah, well, you know how it goes. I won’t know anything until after our patching. I’ve heard rumors the Blacklions are going to start picking people up. They have the fanciest jets, the best reputation, and some of my friends just went to their sister squadrons.”
“Sounds like a perfect fit,” Craig said. And it was. I dreamed they would pick me, but I wouldn’t dare get my hopes up.
“Thanks for coming out to the class 12-1 patching, we’re excited to be sending this class of newly qualified aviators out to do great things in the fleet!”
A hundred or more of us—RAG students and instructors, sixteen local fleet squadrons, parents, wives, and significant others—were piled into the O’Club for happy hour, waiting as the moderator asked the question that would determine our fates.
Like many of the ceremonies in flight school, the patching was held at the Oceana Officers’ Club, but what made this event so special was that we would find out our fleet squadrons and where we would spend the next three years of our lives. We all knew the squadron—the location and people in it—would largely shape the rest of our naval careers.
The rite of passage worked like a sports’ draft. One by one, each newly minted aviator was called up before those in attendance. Our class mentor first roasted each pilot and WSO separately, recalling the highs and lows of the past year, before dramatically asking the question we all waited for, and the mentor would call out the aviator’s call sign.
There would be a pause for suspense before a squadron stepped up to accept the new person. Sometimes there wasn’t a squadron to claim the aviator, which meant the aviator would be sent to a squadron not based in Virginia Beach. Almost halfway through the ceremony, no one yet had soaked up the west coast, Japan, or deployed billets we’d been hearing about, so we all held our breaths. An electric excitement pulsed through the O’Club. Huddled to the side of the crowd, surrounded by classmates and wives, I nervously awaited my turn. With no family in town, Minotaur in California, and my classmates chatting with family, I scanned the room, trying to distract myself when I overheard one of the wives giggle.
“It’s amazing we actually look cute in these,” she said, gesturing to the flight suits some of the women in the group had tailored to fit their bodies like costumes. “I mean, it’s so unflattering on some of those girls.” She tilted her head toward a small group of Jet Girls on the other side of the club. “They fit them like potato sacks.”
My friend Ashley was in the group of girls wearing the “potato sacks.” Ashley was a beautiful woman, a total babe. If seen in a bikini or dolled up for a night out at the clubs, most guys would describe Ashley as hot, maybe even smokin’ hot. But she’d just landed from a flight less than an hour prior and had hustled straight out of her jet parked at her squadron to run over to the Officers’ Club in order to make sure she was there for the start of the patching—my patching. She didn’t stop to put on a dress or even a cute top and jeans, she didn’t hover in front of a mirror to touch up her makeup or fix the slight hint of sweaty helmet hair, because for Ashley, attending an important moment in my life or any of her Jet Girls’ lives was more important than a few strands of hair gone awry.
The exact opposite was true of the wives. All of their attention leading up to this event was focused on turning issued flight suits—our survival gear—into sexy flightsuit dresses. The tradition of spouses altering their husbands’ old uniforms was supposed to be a fun part of the festivities. They went so far as to wear squadron patches with custom name tags bearing their husbands’ call signs with Mrs. in front of them. Some kept their husband’s Navy rank on their shoulder or had it changed to little cloth hearts—the rank of Navy wife—where the rank insignia should have been.
I glanced down at my own uniform, this so-called potato sack which I had no control over. Yes, it certainly was not flattering on my body. But I depended on it to stay alive. The baggy green attire was not designed to look good in a photoshoot but to keep my skin from burning off if I ejected from my jet. The lieutenant junior grade rank was not stitched on the night before, but earned over the past seven years of study, toil, and immense personal risk. My hands inadvertently clenched my drink napkin as I felt myself seething at these women who were dressed for a night of trick-or-treating as slutty pilots. I, like them, hated to see a fashion misstep, but they were out of place. It would have been one thing if they had donned their costumes and left us alone, but the fact that they openly criticized our uniforms and appearance was what really bugged me. These Navy wives had joined us as our guests, and yet a select few of them chose to mock me and my fellow Jet Girls over something so petty yet so important to us as our flight suits. I reeled in this momentary mix of anger and embarrassment when I heard, “GotNo, you’re up.”
I made my way to the front of the crowd, in a haze, freezing on stage as all eyes shifted to me.
“Well, we all know to lighten our load when Caroline is coming along on a det. Gotta make sure we have room for her five suitcases. I mean, what does she have in those things?” my mentor teased, and the crowd laughed. More of the same followed, but overall, I got off easy. After all, I still had a smile on my face when he said, “Now, which squadron wants Caroline ‘GotNo’ Johnson?”
A long silence followed. The longest of my life. For the past three years I had helped to decide my own fate by reaching number one. But my future was about to be made for me, and for the first time, I had absolutely no influence nor did I have any idea which way it would go.
The silence dragged on and I wondered if I would be chosen by any squadron. Maybe there was a mistake. Maybe I was forgotten. Then I heard, “VFA-213!”
The world-famous fighting Blacklions had chosen me.
An enormous cheer boomed from the crowd. Twenty aviators, led by the squadron skipper, surrounded me, replaced my old patches, and chanted “Drink, drink, drink!” A warm shot of Jager was put into my hand. I tilted my head back and drained the glass.