February, 1999
The Pilot's Tale
At Sea with 90,000 Tons of Diplomacy
I. the flight deck
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Beginning with Doug's first landing and continuing over the next forty-eight hours, the pilots of the Eisenhower would have to prove their skill by performing both day and night landings. The Eisenhower and its battle group then was scheduled to run through a quick, three-day simulated war, using Air Force and other Navy fighter squadrons as adversaries, before starting a four-month patrol of the Mediterranean Sea-first to the Adriatic to threaten Yugoslavia's rusting yet intact Serbian Army and then, for the final two months of its deployment, the ship would steam to the Suez Canal and the Red Sea to take over the patrol of Iraq's southern no-fly zone from the carrier USS Stennis.
As the carrier turned slowly into the wind, the angle of the sun shifted, and my attention focused on Doug, who would have to land on a deck moving thirty miles an hour away from him, into what the pilots call the "trap," zeroing in on a target eighteen inches long. The "arrested landing" is a seemingly crazy idea: a twenty-ton plane moving 170 miles an hour snags its four-foot titanium "tail hook" onto a giant cable connected to hydraulic cylinders belowdecks, and stops in a mere 300 feet.
Even a single bad landing exposes the pilot to the heckling of his squadronmates. More serious landing mishaps, when the pilot must eject from the airplane, often result in sudden death and an unrecoverable body; or, if the pilot survives, three separate Navy investigations and the possible termination of the pilot's career.
Doug broke off his flight pattern directly overhead the Eisenhower and turned in a steeply banked oval at an altitude of 600 feet. The ship increased its speed to "catch" as he lined his plane up with the enormous wake and glided toward the flight deck's center line. His wheels touched down, and the hook from his plane snagged the number 3 arresting wire. Landing-perfect.
But the plane was still moving, still rocketing toward us, fifteen feet tall, fifty-six feet long, roaring so loudly that even through my foam earplugs and ear protectors, I felt the sound rattling my chest, vibrating my teeth, and, worse, crackling my eardrums like cellophane. I stumbled backward, and the safety officer grabbed my arm.
After the plane came to a stop, Doug taxied it a hundred yards to the giant, steam-powered bow catapult and dropped the jet's launch bar, a white piece of alloy the size of a piano leg. A sailor in a bright green jersey kicked it hard with the heel of his boot a few times to make sure it sat firmly against the catapult's holdback; then he signaled to the flight-deck crew chief, who signaled up to Doug, who locked his left elbow to push the engine to full power. White cans of fire flamed out the back of the jet, blackening the twelve-ton blast deflector, which lifted up out of the deck like a barn door. The crewman in green did a dance of hand and body signals, his left hand swinging up as if he were throwing a lariat. He whacked the deck with the flat of his hand, signaling another man to release the catapult, then BOOM, Doug rocketed off the catapult so loud, so fast, so maximum, that it looked like speeded-up film, his two tailpipe engine exhausts dilating and closing, adjusting the flow of oxygen to the flames in the jet's engines.
Another plane landed, trapped a wire, and launched, then another and another. The ocean air became a numbing wind filled with jet fuel; it got in my eyes, I tasted it. A forty-knot wind flattened the front of my windbreaker. Doug landed a second time, fulfilling his daytime requirement. He halted ten feet from where I stood. Sunlight reflected on the plane's canopy in an odd reddish-green tint, like the filmy rainbow on a soap bubble. He sat up inside the cockpit at roughly the height of a tall lifeguard chair, his head helmeted and visored behind a tight rubber oxygen mask.
I hadn't seen Doug in a long time. We met in 1982, in college. After we graduated and he'd begun his flight training in 1986 I consoled myself that he hadn't known what he was doing when he joined the Navy, that he was some nonpolitical flyboy and had backed into his profession for the pure joy of flying. We attempted to stay close through our early thirties by exchanging letters and e-mails, but as time passed, what I read in the newspapers about our American military contradicted what I thought I knew about Doug, and what little he said in his letters revealed only mystery and paradox. I knew, for example, that he was called Hambone by the other pilots, that he used such phrases as "implications our job has on the world's security" and "as we stabilize this hemisphere." But I was perplexed. If the birth of his new son made him so obsessed with safety, why was he constantly risking his life? If he only lived to serve our country, why had his ego grown to the size of a cathedral? When Doug explained that he could get permission for me to come onboard the Eisenhower, I sensed not just an opportunity to see Doug's world and answer my questions but also a chance to find out whether I still, really, knew him at all.
I knew that being a carrier pilot required extraordinary ability. Doug had always been an athlete, a great downhill and water-skier, and since joining the Navy he'd become a nationally ranked triathlete. After going through aviation officer candidate school and learning to fly, he began to practice for carrier landings at the Naval Air Station in Kingsville, Texas, dropping his plane onto a runway painted like a ship's deck. Then Doug had his first try at the real thing, a carrier off the coast of Florida, and failed. He caught the number 1 wire twice, which means that he was landing too short. He was given three more weeks of practice, 150 landings. In need of a friend, he wrote me a letter then, telling me that if he were to catch the number 1 wire again, his career would be over. No more practice, no third chance, no Navy commission, no job as a pilot of lesser status, no wings, nothing. He would have to leave the Navy and start from scratch. Never again would Doug come so close to failure. He returned to the ship and passed with honors at the top of his class. At the conclusion of advanced training, he again earned top honors in his carrier qualification. In his first assignment in the fleet, flying the two-seater A-6 bomber, he again came out at the top of his "nugget" class, and was called up by an A-6 squadron going right to sea that was in need of a pilot.
He first wrote to me from the Eisenhower in 1992, while the ship was patrolling in the north Arabian Gulf just after the Persian Gulf War. He wrote again while trapped above Norway in a hurricane in the North Sea, when a storm called a polar low had overwhelmed his carrier battle group, sending the small ships (nuclear subs and frigates) into the fjords for protection while Doug and his A-6 bomber squadron were required to fly their airplanes in the midst of snow, sleet, and sixty-knot hurricane winds, trying to land with four-story waves crashing over the ship's bow. He wrote to me in 1994 from the carrier George Washington, after the fiftieth anniversary commemoration of the Allied landing in Normandy, where he starred in the "missing man" formation broadcast on CNN—the one lone jet vectoring off slowly as the other five flew past President Clinton at the ceremony. Doug spent a total of forty-two days at home in 1994; the rest of the year he was on deployment or training. He and his wife, Sarah, tried to honeymoon in Europe while Doug's carrier was deployed in the Mediterranean, but the ship never showed up at scheduled ports of call. After crisscrossing Europe, Sarah went home alone. The ship moved to the Adriatic and Doug patrolled the skies over Bosnia. "I flew a mission last night and they shot at me," he wrote while participating in the U.N.'s Operation Deny Flight. "They pay us 150 bucks extra for getting shot at. Sounds pretty reasonable."
Now I watched Doug walk slowly across the deck, and although I sensed his relief, I knew also that his perfect daytime landing only delivered him to the much more difficult task of a night landing. The Navy practices these landings in order to be able to complete night strikes, which are more likely to surprise an enemy and are less susceptible to aircraft loss. The night attack, theoretically, paralyzes a shocked and terrified population beneath the full fury of an American bombardment.
For months Doug had hoped that the two night landings required of him would take place at dusk, when visual clues outside his canopy would help in the final moments before touchdown. Night over the ocean bears no relation to the night of anywhere over the land. Unable to discern the horizon dividing the sky from his target bobbing on the water, the carrier pilot relies on such cutting-edge magic as "synthetic aperture" ground-mapping radar, but the instruments lag fractions of a second behind real time at a moment when inches divide the safe landing from the lethal one. When Doug first found out that his night landings would be under a new moon-which is the absence of moon—he told me, "I hate night landings. Flying around the carrier in the dark is an act of insanity." For good measure, he added, "We're all scared of it. Not just me."
II. ready room 3, deck 03
I found Doug filling up his coffee cup in the ready room, the Blasters' one place to conduct meetings, receive instructions, make flight plans, debrief, read the paper. He greeted me with the swagger he's learned since he became a fighter pilot, smiling, his blue eyes glowing. Doug has a prominent jaw and brown hair cut to make his head look square. I could see gray flecks of stubble and heavy lines across his forehead and around his eyes, blood-black circles underneath. A strange crease ran across his face from the rubber gasket of the oxygen mask that had been tightly clamped over his nose and mouth for the last couple of hours. We normally exchange a quick and manly bear hug like men do these days, but the Uniform Code of Military Justice forbids any physical show of affection while in uniform. We shook hands.
Ready room 3 is set up like a small movie theater, and every pilot has a nicely padded armchair that looks as if it were unbolted from the inside of a 1940s airliner, with a Blue Blasters insignia and the pilot's name sewn onto the headrest. A television monitor in the front of the room airs the ship's channel, the five cameras of which provide grainy black-and-white coverage of takeoffs and landings on deck. When there are no flight operations, the channel shows the ocean in front of the bow and a piece of the railing for perspective. Despite its importance, the ready room offers no sanctuary from the ship's endless noise, the sound of an eighteen-wheeler constantly revving its engines, or perhaps a thousand industrial refrigerators humming at once. The roar is draining, because you can't help but pay attention to it, and that's just the background noise. The catapult above us that launches the planes causes the entire ship to shudder, and when planes land, it sounds like bulldozers being dropped from a great height. Except for their quarters, where the pilots can sleep or watch movies, or the wardroom, where they can eat, or their jets, they have no other place to go, suffering, it seemed to me, a form of shipboard incarceration.
Another pilot, C. C. "Heater" Heaton IV, introduced himself. Like the others, he moved and spoke with a stiff confidence, immediate and robotic; even though his squadronmates ran the gamut of personality and looks, and even though they could be charming or pensive or joking, it was impossible to penetrate what an individual man might have felt about something deeply-such as being called sir all day or the off-chance of disappearing in a fireball.
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In preparation for the coming three-day simulated war, a map at the front of the room was laid out with fake countries identical to those in the northern Arabian Gulf but with such names as "Kowonka" and "Ladam" superimposed over a map of the eastern U.S. seaboard. The squadron was already planning dogfighting and bombing scenarios. Beneath the television, Lieutenant Mike "Crusher" Barger quizzed Lieutenant Phil "Stork" Poliquin, about dogfighting strategy.
"What's your mission?" he asked.
"Pre-strike sweep."
"What's that mean?"
"Kill anything that comes out."
Hearing this, Crusher sat back and cracked his knuckles, all of the knuckles, even the thumb knuckle, even the tip of his pinkie.
III. wardroom 3, deck 03
Some of the other pilots joined Doug and me for lunch. Phil Poliquin led the way down the long, narrow corridor through the ship to wardroom 3; he was followed by Commander Chip Miller-known as "Bullet"—then Lieutenant Commander Barry "Butch" Wilmore-Doug's roommate-Lieutenant Commander Peter
"Pépé" Harris, and Lieutenant "Heater." Every seven steps we stepped over a one-foot-high bulkhead. Some of the bulkheads have regular doors with doorknobs; others have watertight porthole doors that have to be unbolted and then bolted shut behind you.
Even though 6,000 sailors live and work on the Eisenhower's seventeen decks, all the flight operations take place in one section of Deck 03, and for pilots this means living, eating, seeing about repairs, changing out of their G suits, and sleeping all in a fairly tight corner among the same faces day in and day out. I'd go back and forth through those corridors, six or seven strides, from my stateroom to the ready room to eat or watch the jets, step up through a bulkhead, let two-way traffic pass, do it again, day and night, and I began to dread the walks, adopting a strut and a mask of efficiency.
The wardroom is one of three where the pilots can eat. There are also a number of enormous enlisted people's messes on the decks below us, a captain's mess (I met him once; he appeared to be in his late forties, haggard and overburdened), and an admiral's mess (the admiral heads the whole battle group-frigates, cruisers, submarines—and looked trouble-free and fit, as if fresh from a tennis court perhaps, and ready to run for the Senate).
In the food line Phil warned me away from the pukish trough of green vegetable liquid but gave a thumbs up to the meat loaf, which he'd tested earlier in the day, and the macaroni and cheese, which was predictably delicious. Wardroom 3 was the favorite mess of the 120 pilots of the air wing, and they were pouring out of the food line now, bumping into one another, looking for a place to sit. A steady stream of pilots—Tomcat, Hornet, Prowler, Hawkeye, and helicopter pilots—came by our table in their tight flight suits with their special patches to designate squadrons and plane type. Because their numbers were few and their training took so long and needed constant updating, they crossed paths throughout their careers, at bases in Florida, Texas, Mississippi, and Nevada. They called hello, passing on greetings from somebody named "Bronco," yelling "Hey homo," from across the room or sidling up and asking about the family with a glass of milk in one hand and a classified-weapons binder in the other. Here were the best-trained, best-equipped pilots in the world, professional athletes standing at the farthest promontory of American power, ready at a moment's notice to bring down the pain of death on as many of their designated enemies as happened to stand in the way of a political purpose or military objective, and yet who reminded me somehow—with their powerful builds, their mustaches, and their short haircuts—of Chippendale dancers. Among Doug's Blue Blasters, ten of the eighteen had become new fathers within the last year. Despite the dull conversation, the slouching, the silences filled by chewing noises and stupid Lewinsky/Clinton jokes, a brotherly closeness marks their group, as with a professional sports team who are forced to travel the poky backwaters of the world in close quarters but who still like to play ball together, except that these guys are trained to fight in the air and drop bombs that blow things up and kill people. Every pilot Doug introduced me to was "a great guy" and "an old friend," but I could see the stress of competition. Pilots are ranked within the squadron on every imaginable statistic, from bombing accuracy to staying on the correct frequency to the grace of landings. Some of the younger pilots from the squadron walked into the wardroom with trays of meat loaf and joined the table. Still new to the Blasters, they tended to stick together. They appeared smaller and more innocent, a couple of them not yet filling out their flight suits, and bore diminutive nicknames given to them as part of their invitation into the squadron—Cubby, Odie, Fetus—in contrast to the tough call signs of the older pilots—Bullet, Bone, Crusher, Dirt, Fingers, Rocky, and Butch. The senior officers were discussing something called a FLIR pod, a forward-looking infrared sensor. Looking like a giant Q-tip under the plane's wing, the FLIR costs an ungodly amount of money but, Cubby explained, helps the pilot designate an enemy's radar, which can then be blown up with HARM, high-speed anti-radiation missiles. Cubby discussed its use the way someone might explain a leaf blower, rather than as a device that denudes a country of air defenses in preparation for getting hit with gigantic explosives.
The younger pilots finished eating in five minutes, wiping up their gravy with stale rolls. Doug explained privately that they were still learning the most minute details of flying and the risks they would have to suffer every day, and had only the vaguest understanding that they were being studied intently by the senior men at the other end of the table. Doug asked Phil if he thought there'd be any residual light cast from Virginia this far out into the ocean, to define the horizon. Phil said, "I don't think so."
From the beginning of his Navy career, Doug filled his letters to me with detailed descriptions of how it feels to perform the carrier landing at night. The pilot stares blindly into a "black void," then comes aboard at a high speed, crash-like, at a steep angle for accuracy of hook position, almost out of gas-the plane can carry only a small amount of gas because if it is overburdened with fuel, it might break apart on landing. "Whoever invented the night cat/trap is a lunatic," he wrote. "As soon as I launch, I'm worrying about the landing when I get back."
I wondered why he spent so much energy telling me his fears of landing at night. No other aspect of the job bothered him; the drudgery of military life, wondering whether the targets you're ordered to bomb are "military, you hope, and not too close to civilians," the endless trips far away from home, the endless risk. Why should landing at night bother him so much? Doug is a typical daredevil: this fear seemed like an anomaly, a hysterical concoction, but I couldn't figure out to what end. He talked about the anxiety, the adrenaline that rushed through him during the final moments before touchdown, the sleeplessness, the misery and humiliation of counting days until the moon comes back out. Night-carrier landings are by nature intimate: the pilot reaches back to an intuitive, athletic marriage of instinct and faith in order to land. By last spring, Doug had performed 360 carrier landings, 115 of them at night. Since the birth of his son Craig, though, he'd begun to obsess even more than usual about safety and proficiency. Things seemed to have gotten worse. "None of us likes to fly at night," he told me. "I hate it and I wish I didn't have to go through it."
IV. bomb magazine, deck 6
I was curious to see what a bomb looks like up close, and so Doug introduced me to a crewman called a gunner, who carries a key shaped like a gun barrel with interlocking chinks cut out of it on a chain around his neck. We followed him through an enlisted people's mess. There, two strides from the salad bar, he unlocked an enormous steel hatch and lifted a hinged, quadruple-bolted cover that appeared to weigh hundreds of pounds. We descended by a ladder, then through an even tighter hatch, down another ladder. At the bottom we stood in a rectangular shaft that had no exit except a small door mounted in front of us like a wall safe. The bomb magazines are locked, as prevention against terrorists, surely, but also for the simple reason that if any unhappy sailor gets into a magazine he might start igniting things or accidentally knock a bomb over and set it off; one man could potentially hold the entire ship hostage or blow it up. The gunner slipped in his key, the door swung open, and we squeezed through the opening into a vast, silent, unmanned warehouse full of bombs. Before us stood eight-foot-high stacks of bombs on wooden pallets, missiles on dollies, oil drums with bomb parts, and fuses, tail fins, firing pins. This was a small magazine, one of the thirty-five inside the ship. The Eisenhower's well carries enough destructive capability to decapitate a medium-sized country. No other country can project such destructive capability. Britain and France sport a handful of small carriers, and China may someday, but with the former Soviet fleet sold for scrap or rusting at berth in Sevastopol, no other country poses even a popgun's threat to American global sovereignty. We run NATO, we control much of the world's airspace, we run the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. We are, we know and assume, alone.
Now the gunner grew more animated as he strolled between the high rows of bombs, talking nonstop. He popped open an oil drum whose contents were packed in Styrofoam. Unfused warheads. He handled them the way a butcher handles meat. I envisioned the three of us vanishing in an accidental explosion, blown into peach-colored vapor. Each bomb was wired with a paper tag showing its date of manufacture. Some were Vietnam-era, built in the early Seventies, still usable. The gunner showed us how bombs were assembled on the bomb table. "Six men on a side, we build one in a minute and a half." He showed us where each sailor stood and what each man did, moving on the balls of his feet like a basketball coach sketching out a play. He pointed out one missile about ten feet long that weighed 900 pounds. "This bomb has a bunch of little bombs come out," he explained. "We call them bomblets. There's like 280-something in each bomb, and they'll spread themselves around. You wouldn't want to be under that." His hands opened to imitate the bomb's fuselage. "The pilots really love to drop these and watch them spread." He looked at Doug, who remained unresponsive, his hands hanging at his sides. The crewman touched the bomb's flanks. "I like bombs and missiles and torpedoes, I like all ordnance," he said, "so this is a good job for me." Rubbing the bomb and smiling, he said, "This bomb's got a sister bomb, called Hydra." He looked at another bomb. "This one here's called Gale." He noted items that were part of the "standard missile family." He knew the name, number, payload, and fusing options of every single weapon in the room. He was courteous and attentive to us, and he appeared to perform his responsibilities with vigor. It occurred to me that someone in the Navy, very clever and dark, had identified his special talents and put him there, had understood what type of a person not only survives locked in a roomful of bombs for years at sea but thrives there, believes he is in heaven.
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Doug cleared his throat. "Thanks," he said to the crewman. On the way back up eight flights of stairs, Doug and I didn't speak.
But, naturally, I wondered about those bombs and what Doug could do with them. I remembered the phony targets on the eastern U.S. coast in the Blasters' ready room. What if they were real? The Hornet can be outfitted from a vast menu of weapons, twenty-five different types of bombs and missiles (it also carries a six-barrel cannon in its nose that shoots 570 rounds of eight-inch bullets in twenty seconds.) On a typical bombing mission, a Hornet will carry air-to-air missiles-Sparrows, Sidewinders-and, depending on how deeply defended the target is, will also carry high-tech "smart" bombs with TV cameras in the nose so that they may, at least theoretically, be targeted by the pilot (or another pilot nearby, via datalink) into something as small as an open window. But the bulk of bombing is accomplished with general-purpose "dumb" bombs, iron casings filled with explosives, with tail fins that allow the bomb to fall in a smooth, definite curve to the target, instead of tumbling through the air. My Washington, D.C., neighborhood consists of two rows of eight red-brick houses facing one another. The street is lined with eighty-year-old ginkgo trees. If Doug were ordered to attack my neighborhood, he explained to me, it wouldn't take much of his arsenal to destroy it. He'd use 1,000-pound MK 83 or 2,000-pound MK 84 bombs. His dive-bombing skills had been honed on the bombing ranges of a 108,000-acre air station in Fallon, Nevada, so the bombs would fall within just twenty yards of their target. En route to the target Doug would program the type of bomb and fuse setting into the computer in his cockpit. Given thesize of the target he's being sent to destroy-in this case, two rows of two-story houses a block long—he'd set up a program in the air-to-ground mode of the computer so that the bombs would strike the houses in a pattern, say, twenty-five feet apart. He'd follow the heading on his navigational instruments to a spot overhead and, in a steep descent, lay them down on the houses on one side of the street; then he'd turn and lay them down on the other side.
A structure like a house, not reinforced against attack, would be leveled by the smallest bomb he carries. The 2,000-pound bomb would blow up a standard airplane hangar and everything in it, or a blockwide apartment building or a barge or a row of houses. Doug might also consider using some horrifying weapon like the FAE, or fuel air explosive, a canister that disperses huge amounts of fuel into the air that are then ignited to create a vacuum that literally turns human beings inside out and knocks a non-reinforced structure flat. Doug carries enough ordnance on a single run—6,000 pounds—to blow up every man-made structure in sight of my house. The general-purpose bombs, though not designed for penetration, carry enough penetration ability to shred the street and sidewalk and fling pavement into chunks. The ginkgo trees would be defoliated and sheared to stumps. The fire hydrants would explode, sewers would be cut open, electrical wires would come down.
After flying back to the ship, having successfully placed his bombs on target, Doug could be given new orders to conduct another mission, in which case he'd refuel, have new bombs loaded on his wings, and take off again. Returning to this area, he'd view the damage as if for the first time-fire, smoke, dead dogs, blown-up propane tanks, impassable roads. If some of my neighbors in the next target area were putting up a fight with an antiaircraft artillery gun, he would go after them first. Because of superior U.S. intelligence and detailed satellite photos he would have seen before launching, and with the help of a three-dimensional map of every part of the earth hooked up to the global positioning system inside his cockpit, Doug would know exactly where that artillery gun had been positioned, and he'd draw a line from the eyes of the artillery gunner to the sun and set his angle of attack on that line so that his jet would come out of the sun and this enemy would have to stare directly into it to spot him. He could pinpoint the artillery gun with a supersonic missile, steered by a different pilot headed outside the threat envelope, using a datalink hooked up to the second plane's frequency, steered by a tiny thumb-sized mouse on his rudder control stick. Doug would then drop another five tons of bombs. If on his return to the ship he was told that a military facility disguised as the presidential palace or a hospital or a cruise ship or a vegetable farm or a bingo club was his next strike target, he'd bomb it too; he'd execute his orders as many times as they told him to until my whole town was smoldering rubble, mud, and corpses.
V. an unauthorized stroll
Doug was scheduled to fly at 10:00 p.m. and wanted to take a nap, so I left him and roamed the ship. It was vital that I looked like I knew where I was going, because I was absolutely not supposed to be wandering anywhere alone.
I passed the rest of the ready rooms, moving through "Officers' country"—the hallways with blue linoleum floors and wooden handrails on the stairs, where enlisted people were not allowed to walk—and into the regular hallways of basic stainless steel. I hoped that anyone who saw me would think I was one of the private contractors or engineers from General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, or General Electric who ran complex computer programs and dressed in civilian clothing and joined the ship for the entire cruise, carrying black briefcases and wearing ID badges around their necks that gave them clearance into places otherwise locked. I passed the ship's jail, a small cell painted black, with one innocent bench inside. I found a weight room, oneof four, painted bright white with new red vinyl benches and machines, and unbolted a watertight door to enter the cavernous main deck, where planes are stored. Every inch of the ship is a zone belonging to someone, a different fiefdom with its own rules of conduct, and as I stepped between jets a mechanic eyed me. Enlisted people didn't even think of asking me what I was doing; they were just trying to finish their jobs without getting yelled at ("Listen up, shithead," and "Get the fuck off my deck!" were two ways I heard officers addressing sailors). The mechanic had the guts of an F-14 laid out on the floor and was running something deafening that sounded like a vacuum. I knew he'd get in trouble if I stepped on anything, and I'd get in trouble if he asked why I was there, so I queasily tiptoed past him.
I slipped around aileron fins and the folded wings of parked airplanes. In the middle of the main deck sat two huge wood-paneled pleasure boats belonging to the admiral and the captain for use in foreign ports with dignitaries and also to transport officers back and forth for port visits. What a strange sight: two boats in a hangar of planes, inside a ship. The fighter planes had Sidewinders and other missiles loaded onto their wings, with demure little canvas covers on the warhead of what was either a live or a dummy explosive. Sea air blew into this cavern through the house-size bay door; the air felt good after the closeness inside the ship and I could see the ocean beneath the setting sun.
Back inside the narrow corridors I passed along one freezing hallway whose bolted doors said no entrance, restricted access. I cut across the interior of the ship and walked down another corridor toward the keel, where the air was suddenly 130 degrees, and passed some deafening machinery, which sounded like a roomful of printing presses.
Then I found a "gee dunk," one of the two 7-Eleven-type stores on the ship. A line had formed outside. As I watched, an officer in khakis who outranked everybody else simply cut the line and entered. The file of enlisted people stood by. The store sold aspirin, Timex watches, shampoo, baby powder, pens and paper, hats and pins and decals emblazoned with the Eisenhower CVN 69 insignia, Zippos with same, phone cards, Saltines, gym shorts, Norelco electric razors, Barney videos, flavored lollipops, Obsession cologne by Calvin Klein, batteries, Herpecin lip balm, cameras, film, cheese in a can, Tastykakes, ginger snaps, Paco Rabanne face lotion, khaki uniforms, Chicken-in-a-Biscuit crackers, Fig Newtons, cigarettes, tampons. No beer. Nor was any pornography for sale, but the pilots told me that every single man on the Eisenhower received the Victoria's Secret catalogue in the mail. I heard something unintelligible over the loudspeaker, and tried to make it out. At lunch Chip had told me, "If you hear general quarters called and you can't find our ready room quickly, wherever you happen to be, just freeze, because you will soon find a Marine sticking the barrel of his M-16 in your face and asking you what you're doing on the ship."
The tone of the bustle around me seemed unchanged, however, so I moved on, found a staircase, and went down again. I still wanted to find the engine room, perhaps, or the chapel, the two barbershops, the dry cleaner. I found another staircase and went down. Doug said, "You don't want to go down to the lower area where the enlisted people berth," ostensibly because as many as 250 live in one room, sleep on cots in cubbyholes the size of bookshelves, and an officer, like Doug, would disrupt their privacy. But, more important, he explained, I shouldn't walk among enlisted folks because "you don't want to be in places where you're not supposed to be." When I asked for clarification, he said that I could "end up disappeared." One could get attacked. Anyone, even officers, could get beaten and thrown overboard. Maybe this was true, maybe not.
Some crewmen went by carrying a desk. I passed many closed porthole doors, then began to feel lost and doubled back through an enlisted people's rec room/weight room. Music was playing in a much more rough-and-ready atmosphere than the officers' weight room. Guys sat around in sweats watching CNN sports headlines. Nothing felt dangerous. I looked up at the numbers, called a bull's-eye, painted above the doorway, and above every doorway in the ship, which allow people to identify exactly where they are on the ship. I had no idea where I was.
An officer in khakis and a black sweater turned a corner and stared up at the bull's-eye, then at me, and told me unsmilingly that I was not where I should be.
VI. the pilot's stateroom
I knocked on Doug's door. He lay on his bunk in the dark, not sleeping. He asked me to flip on the light. Pale fluorescent bulbs came on. His "stateroom" was as ugly and barren as a high school locker room, the furniture and walls constructed of that same thin, dented metal they use to make lockers, with paint chipping on the ceiling; beside the door was a list of phone numbers and a heavy black inter-ship telephone. The room was like the inside of a steel crate, two strides across, and, like the rest of the ship, it shook with vibration.
The bathrooms were no better. Doug had told me to be sure to bring shower shoes "for the scupper trout," because the plumbing got funky onboard sometimes and forced shit back up the shower drains. And you couldn't find a worse shower—tepid water dribbling out of those water-saver showerheads, cold wind blowing through the stall. When the ship was in port, he said, it couldn't dump sewage, and the whole ship stank. I was onboard for two and a half days, and after the second day, even though we were out on the Atlantic and could dump waste all we wanted, every toilet I visited made my eyes burn.
He started taping a photo of his baby on the metal bureau. "I want to be home more. That's the effect that little bastard has," he said. Aware that soon he would have to perform the night landing, he waved to the face in the photo, stepped across the room, and grabbed his flight suit off a hook on the wall.
I watched Doug carefully in an attempt to understand how he felt about being a father and, potentially, a killer. The answer began to emerge in a conversation with his roommate, Barry, who, in his high-pitched Tennessee cadence said, "We don't train to kill people, we train to stop aggression—to alter things that we as a country see as immoral, like invading Kuwait." Barry had flown twenty-one missions during the Persian Gulf War off the carrier USS Kennedy in 1991. His voice quavered with earnestness as he tried to resolve the thrill of flying combat with the remorse he felt for killing. "We don't train to kill people. That's just kind of a by-product, and that's kind of a bummer. It stinks, it really does. People actually die and lose limbs, and it's horrible. Certainly at the moment it's exhilarating-they're shooting at you, you're dodging this, dodging that, and you successfully put your bombs on target. But the reality of it is people die."
I imagined Barry in the months following the Persian Gulf War: a lowly lieutenant junior grade who had, by the war's end, been at sea for two whole years, trying to make sense of the unfinished feelings he'd encountered there. I pictured him standing before a crowd at the local Lions Club or at his church. I imagined him developing some of the phrases he used to describe his bombings, and I saw how over time he might have been able to turn his own actions into a kind of victimization. I saw his struggle as a way to create order out of chaos, to explain rationally the irrational act of killing people.
He described his very first night mission of the war, when Iraqi weaponry had not yet been vaporized and the enemy was offering up an enormous defense. His strike group dodged bombs and missiles the size of telephone poles, flew through dense clouds of antiaircraft artillery; he dropped his bombs on the target and watched them explode and then on the way back to the ship had four missiles fired at him in a span of ninety seconds, tracking the heat signature of his plane's exhaust; he dodged and flipped upside-down, spitting out flares and chaff (flares, if someone's shooting a heat-seeking missile; chaff, to defeat enemy radar). Planes thirty miles in front of him from a different strike were also spitting out flares, which were indistinguishable from the missiles coming at him in the night sky; other pilots in Hawkeyes and Prowlers and Tomcats and Hornets thousands of feet above him watched the scene unfold, calling out warnings. Barry got so flustered he ended up heading back toward the antiaircraft artillery he'd just passed through.
Doug said, "I think there is an enlightenment to dropping live bombs on people that I have not experienced."
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Doug explained that the risks were known—one in four died during a twenty-year career—and he kept a will on file with the squadron, in case of a mishap. He had had talks with Sarah; she was always very strong about such things, though in the last conversation, "She got a little edgy," because now they had a son.
I mentioned that I'd read that Naval aviation was safer now. "Safer than what?" Doug asked. "I personally know ten guys—these are guys I flew in the same airplane with, students and instructors-who died in crashes in my twelve years in the Navy." Barry sat calmly and listened, nodding along. "Not just people I'd met or knew—that number is much higher. But these are names written in my flight log." Later he told me, "My roommate on my first cruise, a guy named 'Wild Bill,' was killed because of a mechanical problem in an F-14. They fixed that problem after it killed him. My T-2 instructor, Victor, had a bird strike a few years after he taught me, and the bird came through the canopy and killed him. Randy didn't fuel his plane properly, and it rolled over on him on takeoff. His student ejected and walked away. Craig flew into the water two years ago. A kid I taught in Kingsville, I forget what happened to him. Eric flew into a mountain in Japan. Rob flew into a mountain in Virginia. His bombardier navigator was killed, too. XO and Chet had a midair and were killed." Doug went on, "The most disturbing one was a Harrier pilot, a Marine guy I trained with, who was lost at sea. He just never showed up back at the ship."
I asked Doug what his father thought of all this.
"Every time I go home my dad cries."
Barry interrupted. "Your dad, too?"
VII. the cat seat
After dinner Doug and I entered the Carrier Air Traffic Control Center, which Doug called the "cat seat"—a cool, dark room where dull green lights glowed in the ceiling and a bank of radar screens and floor-to-ceiling clear Plexiglas backlit status boards formed a wall in front of us. Doug joined Chip and Pépé Harris to help with any emergencies the other Blasters might have in the air that night. All the other airborne squadrons had their own representatives, so the two long benches were almost full. A large man in khakis sat in the center of the room, coffee mug on the arm of his chair, staring straight ahead at the screens. A woman in a headset stood before the Plexiglas status board filling in boxes so that for each type of plane, we could see exactly how much gas the plane had, what the plane weighed, where it was in the sky, and projected times when it would have to refuel at the airborne tanker if it ran out of gas. She wrote numbers quickly in white grease pencil and because she stood on the wrong side of the Plexiglas, she wrote backwards.
The control rooms were placed all together here in the center corridor of the ship. Behind the Carrier Air Traffic Control Center was a larger dark room with a six-foot-tall triptych of computer projections showing a map of the world displayed on a wall, the purpose of which was to track any important ship or aircraft positions around the globe. Behind that room was one that relayed attack plans to everyone airborne and tracked air activity within 100 miles of the ship; another room specialized in tracking submarine and torpedo threats, another watched vessels on the water, another positioned the ship in a fight, another positioned the whole battle group, telling the subs and missile cruisers and frigates where to go to meet up with the Air Force and Marine and Army ground troops, coordinating those movements with the movements of our NATO allies.
Each room was manned by skinny young sailors staring at screens in semi-darkness, sitting beside other sailors speaking on telephones in monotone streams of acronyms. In front of them their supervising officers sat in swivel chairs. If and when it came time to fight a war, control of the actual combat would descend in a pyramid shape of commands with surveillance and intelligence redundantly overlapping. The crew here on the Eisenhower would be compiling and sharing information simultaneously with the ship's captain upstairs on the bridge, and with the admiral of the battle group, who also had a dark room like this around the corner. (He never went anywhere without his "admiral's aide," who was young and blond and handsome. Somebody at lunch called him "towel boy.") They in turn would be in contact with CINCLANT-the commander in chief of the Atlantic fleet, based in Norfolk, Virginia, and with generals and strategists at the Pentagon, who with the help of modern technology might be able to run the next war in their pajamas.
As to whether aircraft carriers are still necessary, the answer, of course, depends on who is being asked. Because "forward deployment" of American military resources is supposed to "deter and prevent foreign aggression," Army strategists ask how a carrier, which does not come into contact with a population, can provide as much preventative "influence" as the 37,000 American troops that have been stationed in Seoul for the last forty years. The Air Force, in turn, argues that in the three regions where U.S. military deployments are most likely—the Middle East, Europe, and northeast Asia—military access is already assured and that, moreover, there are only a handful of countries on the planet that wouldn't welcome us to refuel bombers in their territory; if our military decides to shoot a Tomahawk missile across, say, Syria's airspace, we only need to ask Syria's permission. Yet the Navy insists that forward deployment comes down to intimidation. A soldier is just a man; an Air Force plane is here and then zoom, gone. Navy posters call a carrier "90,000 tons of diplomacy" and "four and a half acres of sovereign U.S. territory, when it's needed." Or, as Steve Fleischmann, a former State Department intelligence officer, admitted to me, "Nobody knows what the carrier is out there for. We just know it's big."
The longer I stayed on the carrier and the more I learned about the ship's capabilities, the more threatening the world became—like a big, bug-infested peach—and the safer I felt aboard. More than once I imagined a full-scale invasion of the United States by some unspecified aggressor and how safe I'd be here, and thought of my girlfriend back home, poor soul, innocent and trusting enough to sleep at night without a helmet. Unprotected, unarmed people of America seemed farcical to me, unbelievably naive and misguided dummies. Every few minutes I learned about some other amazing weapon: the radar-guided Phalanx Gatling gun on each corner of the ship that can fire fifty rounds a second at the front end of a missile the diameter of a pie plate approaching the ship at 500 miles an hour and obliterate it in midair. Others were too fantastic to believe: a secret radar so powerful it bounces off the moon and fries the electronics of anything airborne, causing it to drop out of the sky. Hearing about these weapons gave me the same dull cushiony feeling I had when I took Dilaudid, synthetic morphine, after having my wisdom teeth ripped out. Nothing could happen to me out here, nothing could touch me, nobody in the world. I come from a family of very paranoid people—if you wake one of us up in the middle of the night we jump to our feet in karate position—and this was the first time in my life that I was surrounded by people far more paranoid than I am.
The lighting in the cat seat reminded me of a dark, late-night bar lounge, except that the days of drinking and smoking in here were gone and nothing about this room was relaxing. Each landing began with the pilot's voice playing loudly over the speaker, "Two-oh-six-Hornet-ball-four-point-five," signaling his plane's approach and the beginning of dread. Then we'd all look up on the black-and-white TV screen in the corner to see how the approach looked, and although every pilot watching beside me stayed cool, by the micromumblings and grunts or bits of laughter you could get a sense of whether the pilot on approach would make his landing. I also noticed a kind of bull's-eye on the TV screen that after a few landings helped gauge whether the plane would hit home in the right spot on the deck, whether it was coming in high or low (the best pilots could also get a sense of glide slope, velocity, relative position of the jet to the center line off the television). The pilots were all business, and their reaction to a bad landing attempt was always the same: disgust. It was what separated them from their nightmares.
Then there was the noise, through the ceiling, of the planes crashing onto the deck. The arresting wires laced through the surrounding walls and were connected to the tractor-trailer-size hydraulics two rooms away. Every fifty seconds you heard, first, a whistling, which was the approaching jet; followed by a shudder as the jet hit the ship; a loud clacking, which was the arresting cable paying out, sounding like an enormous broken torque wrench pinging and banging against metal; a hollow steel sound like a washing machine flailing with broken gears; followed by anvil-size booming hammer blows pounding down on the ceiling just above us. Pépé sat on the far side of Chip with a clipboard on his lap reading the status boards, making notations. Doug and Chip watched the planes on the TV screen. Everyone ignored the noise.
So far the Blasters were having a perfect night. Then Phil Poliquin came over the loudspeaker as he approached. In the view of the fuzzy TV monitor he looked to be high at the ship's ramp, the nose of the plane up, and he "boltered" (landing beyond the area where the arresting cables lay before touching down, his dragging hook making an awful sound, missing the fourth wire); off he accelerated for another try (otherwise he would have dropped into the ocean). A pilot from another squadron sitting behind us muttered, "That was ugly," and laughed. A minute later Phil came around again, this time too close to the ramp with his nose pointed too steeply down, adding power in a burst at the end to keep from flying into the back of the ship, and caught a number 1 wire, hitting the deck with an enormous thump. Chip turned and said, "Ouch." Phil was done for the night. The essential ingredient in night carrier landings is an intangible—which Phil had lost tonight, going from too long on the first pass to too short on the second. Pépé wrote something down on his clipboard. Doug folded his hands around the coffee cup in his lap and watched the screen.
Fetus caught a number 2 and then a number 3 wire. It sounded each time like he was crashing through the ceiling. Latka called over the radio, right behind Fetus; he was mysteriously low on fuel. The Hornet burns 100 pounds (15 gallons) of fuel a minute on approach, and Latka was 1,000 pounds short. The problem was serious. Latka had only two more chances to try to land before he would need to go to the airborne refueling tanker or head to the mainland.
Latka came in high and shallow, and boltered. Two bolters for the Blasters. Chip got up and stretched his short legs, sat back down, and rubbed his bald head. Doug said, "It's no big deal. This shit happens all the time." A minute later over the loudspeaker Latka called in his altitude and fuel status; five minutes of flying time before he'd have to head to land or get more gas.
The pointy nose of his F/A-18 came into view on the TV. Another bad approach and he boltered again; the mood in the room shifted. Pépé exited the cat seat to see when Latka began his flight. Doug figured out exactly how many minutes of fuel Latka had left to keep him airborne. The officer in front of us called the boss in "primary flight," air-traffic control, in the tower, who called the airport in Oceana, Virginia, to see what time they closed in case Latka had to coast to a landing on fumes. (When a pilot has real trouble getting aboard he goes to the tanker as many times as is needed; compared to the $35 million plane and the $2 million cost of a pilot's training, fuel is the cheapest expendable out here. The reach for a seaside airport is a final option if the carrier is too far, but if the ship is in, say, the Kara Sea, 250 miles from shore, or if the weather is bad, there may not be a safe way to land.)
They announced over the deck loudspeaker that Latka was "Bingo on the ball"—his fuel status was dire. One pass away from bad trouble. Doug looked at me matter-of-factly and said, "He's trick or treat." He added, somewhat more compassionately, "Latka's tired and ashamed and is going to be beating himself up hard right now, inside his jet, and that'll just make everything worse." Doug said, "Latka's solid, no question. But if he shows any kind of a trend, develops any kind of a pattern, he'll be removed and retired." Pépé returned and looked at his clipboard and said, "The whole schedule is backed up now." Then Latka came in very smoothly on the TV monitor and caught a number 2 wire. Chip turned to Doug and said, "It's a good thing I'm already bald."
VIII. on the flight deck at night
Doug looked at his watch. It was almost time to fly. He suddenly seemed fragile. He hadn't slept well the night before and complained how he wasn't yet in the groove of life on the ship, how it would only get worse, how this first week always felt like a month, the first month felt like a year. I wondered if the lack of sleep would bother him when he was flying. He hung his head and said, "Sometimes they fly us all night just to stress us." The fear in his face reminded me of who he used to be. Then it was 9:00 p.m., and he said he was going to head to his rack for a few minutes, to get into his "box"—not some coffin he kept handy, but the common term for the inviolable time before flying. From the time he left the cat seat until he reached his jet at 10:00 p.m., if anybody wanted to speak to him he'd say, "I'm in my box," and they would have to wait until later. He went to his crappy stateroom and closed the door, and in anticipation of landing his jet on the ship, did something to his mind.
A few minutes before ten, he dressed in his flight gear. It seems appropriate that when he's at work he wears an elaborate costume, a strange form-fitting G suit, like a giant external jockstrap, with its rubber air bladders that inflate when he flies to keep the blood pressure up in the top half of his body so that he won't faint while doing what he has to do; the white helmet, the tight rubber oxygen mask, fireproof gloves. He went up to the deck. After his plane captain signed off as the final inspector of number 205, Doug did his own pre-flight check, looking for any oddity, maybe a blown hydraulic line leaking on the graphite and epoxy skin of the jet. At the end of the tail-hook bar, tucked up between the Hornet's two jet engines, Doug examined an ordinary looking nut and bolt the size of a quarter, made of titanium, that held the hook onto the bar. Notched through the nut and bolt was an inch-long cotter pin, folded over on one side. Before every flight Doug grabbed the pin and pulled on it. If the pin were to break or fall out, or if, by a deck strike or some other bad coincidence the hook came off, there wouldn't be any way for him to snag the wire to arrest his landing.
Heater took me out to the flight deck to watch. We wore earplugs and flameproof life vests and ski hats, and he pulled out a little flashlight with a red lens. Then we were on the outside platform that rims the deck of the ship. I didn't know it until I saw water shooting by beneath my feet through a steel grate. This was the darkness I'd been hearing about. Heater pointed the light down where I stepped, making sure I didn't trip, and we moved carefully along the edge of the flight deck—you couldn't see the edge at all—toward a small, exposed spot off to one side of the landing strip, the LSO (landing signal officers') platform. From there the LSOs-pilots themselves-helped the airborne pilots to land, while grading each attempt. Behind us hung a huge rubber safety net, stretching seven stories above the water; if a plane came crashing toward us, we were supposed to jump into that.
We were in the middle of the ocean, without the moon, whipping along as fast as a water-ski boat. A jet came invisibly out of the darkness and landed, kicking up dislodged pieces of rubber from the newly tarred deck, and in the momentary light I saw that there were five or six people up here besides Heater and myself: two female helicopter pilots, one with a French-braided ponytail, the other wearing a long wool ski hat with a pom-pom on the end, and a couple of LSOs from other squadrons. When the plane passed it got dark again. I couldn't see my hand in front of my face. Up at the catapult, Doug pushed the throttle up, watching the plane captain for signals, waiting for the engines to spool up, watching the RPMs, temperature, fuel flow, hydraulic pressure. He didn't have the same fears about night launches that he had about landings. "I guess I put faith in all that engineering. If it works, it's gonna work. If it doesn't work, you're gonna die, there's nothing you can do about it." He cleared his head and did a quick emergency procedure, touching the thick braided loop of the ejection handle between his legs, and a second later the whole ship shook and off he went.
After a while a few stars became visible. On nights like this, Heater told me, it was just as confusing for the LSOs as it was for the pilots. They have the same problem orienting themselves to the horizon line. Heater said, "It feels like you're wearing a baseball hat that goes on forever. Sometimes they'll throw a flare in the water just off the stern of the ship to give everyone a relative sense of things."
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Landing-perfect. Of course.
I found Doug afterward, that line from the mask indenting his cheek again, a grin of relief on his face. He'd made his second landing without incident. He poured some coffee (it was almost midnight), and as we headed down to the wardroom for one last meal of meat loaf, he mentioned that when he'd climbed into his jet at ten, he noticed that two of the cockpit instruments that help the pilot with his approach, the "needles" and the "bull's-eye," were broken. A third navigational instrument, the least desirable of the three, still worked. Doug, trained for less than perfect conditions, took off anyway.
In the wardroom we found Latka lost in thought, eating in a corner by himself. He looked spooked, as if he were trying to hold it together. Doug and I sat with our food trays, and they spoke about fuel problems. Latka took his fork and knife and cleared a space on the blue tablecloth to show Doug how, after taking on fuel, he got stuck sitting behind a Tomcat waiting to launch and couldn't get around him, and didn't get any help from the tower, both planes running their engines, the Tomcat blowing exhaust into Latka's air intake as he sat there for thirty minutes, second in line. This was why he'd come back aboard so low on fuel-it was the Tomcat, it was the tower. Doug listened. He was patient but explained, "It's your fault. I know what you're thinking but you're wrong."
"Two bolters are a lot worse than one. It sucks," Latka said. "The worst part is that everybody's laughing at you." For the rest of the meal Latka quietly bit his fingernails.
Doug grabbed some cake and strutted stiffly out, still somehow my longtime friend, yet also the man in the visored helmet and tight oxygen mask, now and forever unknown to me.
Footnotes
The ship carries 120 pilots divided into nine squadrons, three of which—the Sunliners, the Rams, and Doug's group, the Blue Blasters—fly F/A-18 Hornets. The other squadrons fly F-14 fighters, radar-jamming EA-6B Prowlers, anti-submarine S-3B Vikings, and radar communications E-2C Hawkeyes as well as SH-60 helicopters. A C-2 Greyhound ferries mail and personnel back and forth.
There are four two-inch-thick steel cables suspended five inches high across the back of the flight deck. Number 1 is closest to the stern. Number 3 is preferred because it's safely away from the edge of the stern. Hitting the edge is called a "rampstrike." The plane folds in half at the belly and explodes.
Fighter planes sometimes plunge into the ocean without warning, and I'd read about jet engines capriciously catching fire, about crash landings, infernos tumbling across the flight deck. In ejection, the canopy blows off the plane and then the pilot shoots straight out in his rocket-powered ejection seat. Seats today are "zero-zero" capable, meaning that at zero altitude and zero ground speed, the seat will send a pilot high enough for his parachute to deploy effectively. Two months before my visit, one of the F/A-18 pilots, Tom "Big Comet" Halley, had to eject after a weak launch. Halley survived, but his $35 million jet was lost. The Navy doesn't retrieve planes that fall into the ocean unless doing so aids its investigation of the incident.
If I had fallen, I could have clung to the safety officer's pant leg and taken him with me. Perhaps we would have survived the seven-story fall and a helicopter would have had to pluck us out. But people disappear on carriers; sometimes there's an explanation, sometimes not. I'd been warned, in both written and verbal form, about the jet exhaust that could knock you off your feet or fry you dead where you stood. The air intakes on the jets could suck you in whole. Propellers, especially at night, are quiet and invisible. The arresting cables on the landing strip sometimes snap during arrestment and whip across the deck, razoring sailors in half the way a knife cuts through butter. An ensign told me a few days later that when someone goes off the deck unseen, his disappearance might not be noted until the next roll call, which could be as long as twelve hours later. By then the ship could be 300 miles away.
Military-grade jet fuel burns at a rate of between $1,000 and $4,000 an hour in the F/A-18. Over Doug's twelve years, the gas for his 3,000 flight hours cost perhaps $4,000,000.
Doug later explained that the tint was designed to filter out certain parts of the light spectrum for pilots using night-vision goggles. I tried the goggles on in a dark closet in the squadron's equipment room; weighing about twenty ounces, and at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars, they made everything appear to glow green, as if I were peering through a jar of mint jelly.
I found his fear notable, given the fighter pilot's gift for intuiting the relationship of the three spatial dimensions, moving objects, and time. I am reminded that in college one night my friend Jim was at the wheel of his tired red Subaru driving recklessly on a hard snowpacked road in New Hampshire. Doug sat in the passenger seat and I was in the back. As a five-ton municipal sand dumptruck approached, our car went into a skid. "Lift your foot off the brake, Jim," Doug commanded. We stopped skidding, and Doug actually helped Jim steer the car away from the oncoming truck. It was over in a flash, and he may have saved our lives.
The pilots' nicknames seemed to me transparently super-macho, and I couldn't say "Hi, Heater," with a straight face, but the pilots' use of them suggests not just a willful conformity of identity but a de facto recognition of their own interchangeability and perishability.
The cost of this supremacy is staggering, so large as almost to be invisible to the average citizen—except, of course, if you happen to be standing on a tiny fraction of it steaming across the Atlantic at a cost to taxpayers of $444 million a year, or $51,000 an hour. America's 1999 military budget—$271 billion—is more than triple that of Russia, which has the next highest, and greater than the total expenditures of the next six biggest military spenders. Despite the current lack of a real threat, the Pentagon continues to believe that the military must be capable of fighting two wars simultaneously; for example, in North Korea and in the Persian Gulf.
At the very moment we were speaking, a few doors away, Doug's old friend Ronald "Rhino" Wise was readying for his nighttime landing. Thirty-six, married, father of three, he'd be redeploying with Doug and Barry to the Mediterranean, and on July 30, ten weeks later, he'd be killed after ejecting from his plane following a midair collision with another F-14 during a training flight off Turkey's coast. By September the air wing had suffered three disastrous mishaps, losing two F/A-18s and one F-14; one involved Heater. At the end of the month, new Navy statistics revealed that pilots were crashing their planes at twice the previous year's rate. The rise was attributed to the fact that Navy pilots are increasingly overworked.
A huge sailor with the face of Rodney Dangerfield showed me a book filled with codes for every vessel in the NATO alliance; it looked like a big-city telephone book, with thousands of names and numbers, Italian submarines, Swedish helicopter gunships, Turkish amphibious landing crafts. The codes were changed every few weeks, and the old book would be thrown away.