The Cannibal Queen (24 page)
That story got me thinking again about the only ex-Blue Angel I ever met in my nine years of active duty in naval aviation. I met him on my second combat cruise aboard USS Enterprise, the last cruise of the Vietnam War.
The ex-Angel was the executive officer of one of the two F-4 fighter squadrons we had aboard. He stood out like a sore thumb. He was the only flyer I ever met who spit-shined his flight boots—they looked like patent leather but it was Kiwi shoe polish. This guy sat down in his stateroom at night and layered the stuff on and polished and polished. Me? I never shined my boots, not once. I thought shoe polish might melt or burn, and anyway, I had better things to do, like read
Playboy
or play poker.
In those days the attack community to which I belonged feuded endlessly with the fighter guys, and vice versa, a rivalry assiduously cultivated over the years with mutual insults and one-upsmanship. The fighters in those days were F-4 Phantoms, which were designed as interceptors and were fuel thirsty. The Navy used them as fighters from necessity—it was the only fighter the Navy had except for the F-8 Crusader, which lacked the Phantom’s sophisticated radar system. But since the North Vietnamese rarely sent a MiG aloft for the Phantoms to jump and shoot down, the fighter crowd insisted that their Phantoms be loaded with bombs so they could get into the war.
You must understand the irony here—for twenty years the fighter jocks had talked about attack pukes dropping bombs because they didn’t know any better, laughed about the air-to-mud guys, usually to their faces. Now they wanted six 500-pound bombs—all their plane would carry—and they wanted an A-6 tanker aloft to give them enough gas to get to the target and back. Six 500-pound bombs was a joke to the A-6 squadrons. Our airplane would carry up to twenty-eight 500-pounders, although twelve or eighteen was a more usual load. Yet we had to devote half our flight time and half our maintenance effort to keeping tankers aloft so the fighter guys could drop their pissy little bomb loads on Vietnam in addition to their aerial guard-duty chores. Now these prima donnas wanted to drop bombs, because otherwise, without MiGs to fight, they wouldn’t get any Air Medals.
And they wanted medals. Whenever any reporter showed up aboard Enterprise, the fighter jocks would roll out the red carpet to ensure they got plenty of press. They wore little silk dickies all the time aboard ship, even when flying. The dickies were the last straw with us, flaming proof, if any more were needed, that our comrades in arms were totally devoid of couth and class.
So imagine our ex-Angel on the very last day of fighting before the armistice went into effect, decked out in his spit-shined boots and tastefully arranged yellow dickie. He mounted his trusty F-4 Phantom and blasted into the blue with his six little green bombs, hit the KA-6D tanker for gas and headed for the DMZ to give the gomers hell.
Meanwhile our skipper was leading a flight of four A-6s to the DMZ. He was given orbit instructions—which meant that he held his flight of four overhead while the ex-Angel and his wingman made their runs.
The ex-Angel told the Forward Air Controller, the FAC, that he could make
six
runs. That meant he would drop one lousy bomb per run. On the last day of the war. With the armistice signed, sealed, and delivered. If he had put one into General Giap’s outhouse with Giap on the throne, it would have made no difference at all—the war was over. Well, you guessed it— the North Vietnamese got the lead just right on the fourth or fifth pass and shot our hero out of the sky.
The Radar Intercept Officer—the guy in back—never got out. He was killed in the crash. The ex-Angel got on his survival radio and the FAC went in for a look. The bad guys blew the FAC out of the sky with a shoulder-launched heat-seeking missile, a Strella. He didn’t get out of his plane.
The ex-Angel was never heard from again. Apparently the North Vietnamese weren’t taking any prisoners that day. Maybe they had all the POWs they wanted. Maybe they were irritated about being bombed.
Our skipper called an all-officers meeting that night after the last plane landed. The war was over. The shooting had stopped. No peace treaty, just a ceasefire. Yet the skipper knew and we junior officers knew and the North Vietnamese knew that the United States wasn’t going back to Vietnam unless the North Viets detonated a thermonuclear device on Los Angeles.
However, that wasn’t what the AOM was about. Even though the war was over, the skipper wanted to tell us what he would do to anyone in his squadron who was damn fool enough to make multiple runs in a hot area. And he wanted to say what he thought about Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara and all that political crowd that had gotten so many good men killed for seven long years for no reason. And he wanted to tell us what he really thought about asshole fighter pilots. And asshole ex-Angels.
Then he stalked out and went to his stateroom, where he probably got stinking drunk. It was that kind of war.
That memory from the early months of 1973 came flooding back as I listened to Chuck tell about the Niagara Falls airshow crash three years ago. I’ll bet after they landed, the four surviving Blue Angels taxied in and shut down in tight formation, put on their khaki fore-and-aft caps and marched away in a neat row, in step, the sun gleaming on their spit-shined boots. Being Blue Angels, that’s what they should have done.
That’s showmanship of course, the P. T. Barnum side of the job. The military is in love with that kind of showmanship, and occasionally it gets substituted for thinking. Too often.
Vietnam left me with a profound distrust of politicians, an antipathy bordering on contempt. As a writer I have to work to put it in my pocket and sit on it because the general public doesn’t share it and wouldn’t understand. For seventeen years newspaper and magazine journalists have liked to refer to the “so-called theory” that the U.S. military could have won in Vietnam if they had been given free rein by the politicians to win the war. I think Desert Storm showed what a professional, well-led modern armed force can do. The U.S. military could have crushed the North Vietnamese just as easily. But our politicians didn’t want to “win,” they didn’t want to take the chance that Red China would be drawn into the war. Yet they were afraid to leave. So 58,000 Americans died and God only knows how many Vietnamese. For nothing.
I don’t think about Vietnam very much anymore and I don’t want to write about it again.
Flight of the Intruder
was my first and last Vietnam novel. Yet I am a Vietnam veteran. I know full well the scope of the tragedy that occurred when a generation of young men was betrayed by incompetent, foolish politicians interested only in self-aggrandizement and reelection. I know that war is not spit-shined boots or a geopolitical chess game or a football game with bodies.
I know what real war is.
But my antipathy for politicians has another side. My Vietnam experience turned my simple-minded acceptance of democracy into a deep-rooted faith. Vietnam proved that democracy works, slowly and inefficiently and inevitably—the rascals who got us into Vietnam were thrown out by the voters when they saw what a mess it was, and the replacement rascals were thrown out when the press showed the public the smoking gun.
Democracy is built on the simplest premise that has ever supported a political system, that a majority of the voters will be right more often than they are wrong. The inevitable errors will be corrected by the voters—when they perceive those errors. Democracy assumes that saints won’t run for public office. The human condition being what it is, many of those that seek power successfully are charlatans, hypocrites, liars, thieves, and nincompoops, yet democracy provides a way to deprive these people of power when their excesses prove too much. The voters weigh the follies of fallible politicians against their contributions at every election.
Messy and inefficient as it is, the system works. Not very well and with agonizing slowness, but it does work.
Talking to a Flight Service Station briefer on Monday morning, I resist the urge to tear out my hair. Another front is moving across Michigan and Lake Erie on its way to western New York and Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio. But the scud might lift if I wait until early afternoon, when isolated thunderstorms will be doing their thing.
Out onto the parking mat to look at the sky. Maybe 1,500 scattered or broken, the dark gray scud whipping along at about twenty knots. I get back into Mr. Hertz’s 1987 Corsica and drive to a McDonald’s for a linger over coffee. Then slowly back to the airport to turn in the car and stroll across the parking lot to the FBO for a visit with Chuck. Finally I load my stuff into the plane and sit on one wheel contemplating the sky and the sad state of my tennis shoes. I pull the sectional from my hip pocket and study it one more time.
The matchbox where I keep my patience is empty at 10 minutes past 10
A.M.
Aaagh! Ten minutes later the
Cannibal Queen
is airborne headed for the Falls. The powers that rule the skies have agreed that sightseeing aircraft will orbit the Falls clockwise at 2,500 feet, but I can get up only to 2,000 and still stay under this overcast. Fortunately the
Queen
is the only machine aloft over the Falls. In the cockpit I snap a few photos as a gap in the clouds admits a shaft of sunlight. The sunlight looks better to me than the Falls. I do love it so.
Leaving the circle over the Falls, the
Queen
takes me southward along the western shore of the Niagara River and along the western side of Grand Island. The buildings of downtown Buffalo slowly materialize out of the haze. At 2,000 feet I am just two hundred feet below the floor of the Greater Buffalo ARSA while my course takes me just offshore of the downtown and the empty docks and seemingly dead loading yards and factories adjoining them. To my right Lake Erie stretches westward until the gray water merges into the gray haze. As far as I can see the surface of the lake is empty—not a boat, not an ore freighter, not a wake of any kind. It’s as if the city waits at the end of the lake for ships that don’t come anymore.
I am about ten miles past Buffalo following the shoreline of the lake southwestward when the Lycoming stumbles. The adrenaline jolt is milder this time, but it still has a kick.
Yet now I know what causes the hiccups. I had just finished leaning the mixture knob another sixteenth of an inch thirty seconds before the hiccup occurred, so now I give back that sixteenth of an inch, then another because I don’t like to do adrenaline on an hourly basis. I just leaned the air-gas mixture too much, that’s all. Ha! And I was worried that something was wrong with that engine.
That engine is forty-nine years old! It didn’t survive to this great age by indulging in mechanical shenanigans while airborne. Why, some ace without my vast aeronautical skill would have shattered that pretty engine against a granite cloud decades ago if it liked to stop running when provoked.
Cannibal Queen
, you baby doll—we’re on our
way!
T
HE FLIGHT SERVICE BRIEFER
I
CALLED FROM THE
E
RIE
, P
ENNSYLVANIA
, FBO’s office began like he was reading my obituary. “VFR flight southward is not recommended. The front is currently passing over Erie. Pittsburgh is predicting thunderstorms and severe rain showers.”
“What does Pittsburgh have right now?”
“Forty-five hundred feet scattered, eighty-five hundred broken, ten miles.”
“Youngstown?”
“Forty-five hundred scattered, eight thousand overcast, eight miles.”
“And forecast?”
“Chance of thunderstorms with ceilings down to fifteen hundred overcast.”
I gave him my politest thank-you and hung up the phone. I had just landed in the midst of this front passing over Erie, and it wasn’t bad—a couple thousand feet scattered to broken, eight miles or so visibility, just about the conditions I have come to refer to as an Eastern Standard Day. Forty-five hundred scattered and ten miles visibility would be an improvement, about twice as good as the weather I had flying over Florida, the Carolinas, and New England. Definitely flyable. Chance of thunderstorms. Talk about weaseling! Not one chance in ten, or one in two, or one in a hundred, but just a chance! Obviously one must just avoid the thunderstorms. When that looks like it’s going to be impossible, land.
Listening to weather briefings, one must try to visualize the sky the patter of words is describing. This can be difficult if one pays more attention to the intonation of the briefer’s voice than what is being said or fails to ask questions. You should turn in your pilot’s license if you’re willing to let the briefer make the decision on when to fly. On the other hand, you should also turn in your license if you don’t carefully weigh his advice. The license is in your pocket, Jack!
Climbing out of Erie I pick up the interstate heading south for Pittsburgh, 1-79. The sky is relatively clear and soon I am up at 3,500 feet to get my piece of that tailwind.
I cover the fifteen nautical miles between my first two checkpoints in nine and a half minutes. Holding the stick between my knees, I try my hand at higher mathematics. My calculations yield a ground speed of 95 knots. I am indicating my usual 84 at 2,000 RPM and 22 inches, which at this altitude and temperature would give me a true airspeed of about 90, so I’m getting a free ride of five knots. My next check, fourteen miles in eight minutes, gives me a computed ground speed of 105 knots. Better yet, if true. Call it an even 100 knots over the ground with a tailwind component of ten knots. I’ll take that.
Tailwinds are like smiles from beautiful women—rare and to be cherished. Scientists say that headwinds and tailwinds average each other out over time, but any pilot will tell you he spends most of his flying hours subtracting winds from his ground speed, not adding them. It certainly seems so.
The sky darkens off to the west, over Youngstown, but I stay over the highway and pass safely without meeting rain. I seem to be racing southward over the scattered farms and towns of the rolling Pennsylvania countryside.