Spring 2014; Embarked USS George H.W. Bush, Gulf of Oman
We arrived in Afghanistan in late March 2014. Initially, we were there to support Operation Enduring Freedom, the war on terrorism which the United States had been fighting against the Taliban since 2001. When I say we arrived, the only people who actually went into Afghanistan were the aviators. The boat was parked south of Pakistan in the North Indian Ocean, and each day it took almost two hours to fly from the aircraft carrier to our assigned area of operations where we would get to work and then fly home.
We fell into a steady pattern of long days and short weeks. As a WSO, I flew more often than my pilot peers because there weren’t any restrictions on the events I could fly. That meant I flew every day except for Sundays, which were our no-fly days even though helo pilots still had to fly. On Sundays, the flight-deck crews would rest, and the supply ships would pull alongside us in the morning, and with the help of our helicopters, the carrier would restock with fresh food, new mail, and more jet fuel for the week to come.
During my six days of flying per week, two or three of the days I would fly into combat and the other days I would fly training missions or tanking flights, which were quick and easy. We didn’t fly “feet-dry” or “over the beach” (both terms for flying in combat) every day because it was so mentally and physically taxing that our bodies needed a day off in between to be able to handle the stress. Also, we were limited by aeromedical regulations in how many hours we could fly in a month. Even with our regular flight schedule, we still had to get waivers from the flight doctor to allow us to stay in the cockpit. Like Cinderella, when the clock struck midnight—or in our case, sixty hours—time was up.
Each day I flew in-country, depending on if I was on the early, mid-, or late cycle, I would get up at least an hour before the brief; brief three hours before the flight; eat a heavy meal to hold me over; pack my helmet bag with charts, water, snacks, and magazines; get dressed in my flight gear; load my gun; grab my classifieds; and head up to the flight deck. We then had an hour to preflight the jet—start the engines and check all of the systems prior to launch. An hour seems like a long time, but to get all weapons checked and aligned and all the gremlins out of the system, oftentimes we needed the whole hour to troubleshoot. Taking off and landing on the boat and flying through sandstorms in combat was tough on the jets, and sometimes trying to get the planes cooperating felt like coaxing an ornery toddler. When flying on the boat, we all become grease monkeys in our own way, learning how to troubleshoot and help our maintainers fix our $80 million airplanes.
My mother sometimes tells a story about me when I was three years old. I wanted to take the training wheels off my bicycle. She told me no, but two hours later, caught me with a wrench, removing the wheels anyway. She watched me ride without training wheels until I crashed, but instead of asking her to put the wheels back on, I picked up the bike and tried again. Now, twenty-three years later, I was sitting on top of a Super Hornet, a wrench in hand, twisting bolts, getting dirty, trying to take the training wheels off.
Once the plane was good to go, we went through a host of comms checks with the boat to test all of our encrypted systems and then waited for the catapult to send us rocketing from zero to 170 miles per hour in just two seconds. Once airborne, we joined our wingman, and together we checked all our bombs, sensors, and comms again, and as a flight of two, we proceeded north, feet dry over the mountains of Pakistan.
During the transit north into Afghanistan, we flew on the boulevard, a super-highway for military aircraft that borders Iran to the west and Pakistan to the east. On the boulevard, just like on a road, we followed a myriad of rules. If you passed, you passed on the left, etc. These regulations and different altitudes kept us deconflicted from the host of Air Force, Navy, and NATO jets that were headed up and down the airway. Like the trucking days of old, everyone communicated through various bands of radio and encrypted voice communications channels as we passed from one checkpoint to the next. While flying on the equivalent of the I-95 of the Middle East, we also practiced tactics and warmed up our brains and aircraft systems for the day, because as soon as we crossed the border into Afghanistan, it was game time.
Immediately when we got in-country, we talked to the tactical air traffic controllers who we called Pyramid, and they sent us directly to our tankers so we could fuel up from the transit. In-country, we got most of our gas from Air Force tankers, arcing in huge racetrack patterns miles above the rocky terrain. Once they received our bunno numbers (so they could bill the Navy for the gas), we plugged into their baskets. The most common and most dreaded tanker aircraft was the KC-135, better known as the iron maiden, the kind of plane Tyler was flying when it crashed en route to Afghanistan. The iron maidens were loathed by naval aviators because their baskets were hard, and were suspended by a short hose connected to a long iron boom, which made them extra hard to refuel from. I never minded the iron maiden because it always made me think of Tyler. It was rare that I got close enough to see the pilots in their massive jets, but sometimes I’d just hear their voices and imagine Tyler, still at the controls.
In the Air Force, just like the Navy, the junior officers are the workhorses. The people in the sky flying with us were generally young guys like us from home and countries like Australia, Britain, and France. We were all there doing a job and talking to each other, our conversation alternating between business and chitchat. We often asked each other about our respective hometowns, and what we were eating for lunch or dinner in the plane that day. The Air Force always had better food than the Navy. They also had bathrooms and coffee in their aircraft, but I still wouldn’t have traded my sexy jet, with its cramped cockpit and broken AMXD, for their big fat buses with Hot Pockets and lavatories.
After fifteen minutes plugged into the tanker, we were complete and ready to go to work. Pyramid told us where to support the troops on the ground, whether they were British commandos, Spanish soldiers, US Marine Special Forces, or Army infantry units. When we were operating and providing air support for ground troops, as the WSO, I was the one constantly in communication with the joint terminal air controllers embedded with their units, looking for bad guys, providing overwatch protection for their convoys, and asking what they were eating for lunch. From the sky, I could see everything—giant, craggy mountains, extreme shifts in elevation, villages of mud and brick, American forward operating bases, and deep, smoky river valleys. The physical beauty clashed with a culture that seemed forever doomed to war.
Three hours into the flight, I typically lost feeling in my butt cheeks and my shoulders would have a dull ache penetrating through them into my neck. By hour five, my lumbar region screamed for mercy. The jet seats are intentionally hard so that in case we eject, there’s no give, otherwise, it could snap our femurs upon ejecting. When we started the long transit home a half hour later, the fifty pounds of gear on my body in my flight suit, my G-suit, my harness, and my survival vest would start to torment me. I’d imagine myself straitjacketed in an asylum. Joint helmets, because they were so expensive, were just passed along from aviator to aviator, and so the hot spots made it feel like all my hair follicles were on fire from the pressure of my ill-fitting helmet. From this point in the trip onward, it was a battle of wills. By hour six, I usually had to pee so badly I wanted to chew through a leather strap, but I’d learned my lesson.
At six and a half hours, the discomfort was so intense, it was almost comical. But with the most difficult part of the flight complete and the plane on autopilot, I could relax a little and open a magazine—Architectural Digest, Vanity Fair, and yes, People—and snack on breakfast bars and dried fruit. At some point, I’d pass Taylor in her jet, on her way inbound to replace me. She’d likely be reading the magazines I’d finished on my last flight and enjoying a lollipop. She loved lollipops in the cockpit. We’d pass each other, each going about five hundred miles per hour, and my plane’s touchscreen would signal a text. Yes, American girls and boys are even texting in F/A-18s over a secret, encrypted communication system.
Everybody sucks but us.
“What did she say?” Crocket asked, hearing my giggle.
“Nothing.” I checked my flight schedule in my stack of papers on my kneeboard to make sure she wasn’t flying in a section with the skipper or XO. (You didn’t want to send any joking messages with “mom” or “dad” on board.)
Go get ’em. I’ll have dinner waiting for you when you land.