The Intruders (18 page)

“I like smart women.”

“I’ll see if I can find one for you. So you’re in Pearl Harbor?”

“Yep. Hawaii. Got in a while ago. Gonna be here a couple days, then
maybe Japan or the Philippines or the IO.” Realizing that she probably
wouldn’t recognize the acronym, he added belatedly, -That’s the Indian
Ocean. I don’t know.

Admirals somewhere figure it out and I go wherever the ship goes. But
enough about me. Talk some so I can listen to your voice.”

“I got your letter about the in-flight engagement. That sounded scary.
And dangerous.”

“It was exciting all right, but we lost a plane yesterday on a day cat
shot. An A-6. Went in off the cat. The pilot was killed.”

“I’m sorry, Jake.”

“I’m getting real tired of this, Callie. I’ve been here too long. I’m
a civilian at heart and I think it’s time I pulled the plug. I’ve
submitted a letter of resignation.”

“Oh,” she said. After a pause, she added, “When are you getting out?”

“Won’t be until the cruise is over.”

“Are you sure about this?”

“Yeah.”

He twisted the telephone cord and wondered what to say.

She wasn’t saying anything on her end, so he plunged ahead.

“The plane that went in off the cat was the one I had the in-flight
engagement in, ol’ Five One One. The in-flight smacked the avionics
around pretty good, and when they reinstalled the boxes one of the
technicians didn’t get the VDI properly secured. So the VDI box came
out on the cat shot, jammed the stick. The BN punched and told us what
happened, but the pilot didn’t get out.”

isi

“You’re not blaming yourself, are you?”

“No.” He said that too quickly. “Well, to tell the truth, I am a little
bit responsible. With better technique I might have avoided the
in-flight. That’s spilled milk. Maybe it was unavoidable. But I was
briefing these Marines on carrier ops–everything you need to know to be
a carrier pilot in four two-hour sessions, and I forgot to mention that
you have to check the security of the VDFI 61 see.”

I’m you?”

“Not really. But aren’t these risks a part of carrier aviation?”

“Not a part. This is the main course, the heart of it, the very
essence. In spite of the very best of intentions, mistakes will be
made, things will break. War or no war, people get killed doing this
stuff. I’m getting sick of watching people bet their lives and losing,
that’s all.”

“Are YOU Worried about your own safety?”

“No more than usual. You have to fret it some or you won’t be long on
this side of hell.”

“It seems to me that the dangers would become hard to live with-”

“I can handle it. I think. No one’s shooting at me. But see, that’s
the crazy part. The war is over, yet as long as men keep flying off
these ships there are going to be casualties.”

“So what will you do when you get out?”

“I don’t know, Callie.”

Seconds passed before she spoke. “Life isn’t easy, Jake.”

“That isn’t exactly news. I’ve done a year or two of hard living my own
self.”

“I thought you liked the challenge.”

“Are you trying to tell me you want me to stay in?”

“No.” Her voice solidified. “I am not suggesting that you do anything.
I’m not even hinting. Stay in, get out, whatever, that’s your choice
and yours alone. You must five your own life-”

“Damn, woman! I’m trying.”

“I know,” she said gently.

“You know me,” he told her.

“I’m beginning to.” -How are your folks?”

“Fine,” she said. They talked for several more minutes, then said
good-bye.

The vast bulk of the ship loomed high over the bank of telephone booths.
Jake glanced up at the ship, at the tails of the planes sticking over
the edge of the flight deck, then lowered his gaze, stuffed his hands
into his pockets and walked away.

The problem was that he had never been able to separate the flying from
the rest of it–4he killing, bombing, dying.

Maybe it couldn’t be separated. The My Lai massacre, Lieutenant William
Calley, napahn on villages, burning children, American pilots nailed to
trees and skinned alive, Viet Cong soldiers tortured for information
while Americans watched, North Vietnamese soldiers given airborne
interrogationstalk or we’ll throw you from the helicopter without a
parachute: all of this was tied up with the flying in a Gordian knot
that Solomon couldn’t unravel.

He thought he had cut the knot-well, Commander Camparelli and the Navy
had cut it for him-last winter in Vietnam. He had picked an
unauthorized target, the North Vietnamese capitol building in Hanoi,
attacked and almost got it, then faced some very unhappy senior officers
across a long green table. They knew what their duty was: obey orders
from the elected government. What they couldn’t fathom was how he,
Lieutenant Jake Jackass from Possum Hollow, had lost sight of it.

We’re all in this together. We must keep the faith. Wasn’t that what
you and your friends were always telling one another when the shit got
thick and the blood started flowing?

We do what we must and die when we must for each other.

The faith was easier to understand then, easier to keep.

Now the war was over. Although some people want to keep fighting it, by
God, it’s over.

Now the Navy was peacetime cruises, six- to eight-month voyages to
nowhere, excruciating separations from loved ones, marriages going on
the rocks under the strain, kids growing up with a father who’s never
there; it’s getting scared out of your wits when Lady Luck kisses your
ass good-bye; it’s seeing people squashed into shark food; it’s
knowing-knowing all the time, every minute of every day that you may be
next. The life can be smashed out of you so quick that you’ll inhale in
this world and exhale in hell.

Lieutenant Jake Grafton, farmer’s son and history major, was going to
get on with his life. Do something safe, something sane. Something
with tangible rewards. Something that allowed him to find a good woman,
raise a family, be a father to his children. He would bequeath this
flying life to dedicated half-wits like Flap Le Beau.

Yet he would miss the flying.

This afternoon as Jake Grafton walked along the boulevard that led into
downtown Honolulu, huge, benign cumulus clouds were etched against the
deep blue sky, seemingly fixed. He would like to fly right now-4o strap
on an airplane and leave behind the problems of the ground.

We are, he well knew, creatures of the earth. Its minerals compose our
bodies and provide our nourishment. Our cells contain seawater,
legacies of ancestors who lived in the oceans. Yet on the surface man
evolved, here where there are other animals to kill and eat, edible
plants, trees with nuts and fruits, streams and lakes teeming with life.
our bodies function best at the temperature ranges, atmospheric
pressures and oxygen levels that have prevailed on the earth’s surface
throughout most of the age of mammals. We need the protection from the
sun’s radiation that the atmosphere Provides. Our senses of smell and
hearing use the atmosphere as the transmitting medium. The earth’s
gravity provides a reference point for our sense of balance and the
resistance our muscles and circulatory systems need to ftmction
property. The challenges of surviving on the dry surface provided the
evolutionary stimulus to develop our brains.

Without the earth, we would not be the creatures we are.

And yet we want to leave it, to soar through the atmosphere, to voyage
through interplanetary space, to explore other worlds. And to someday
leave the solar system and journey to another star. All this while we
are still trapped by our physical and psychological limitations here on
the surface of the mother planet.

Sometimes the contradictions inherent in our situation hit him hard.
Last fall, while he was hunting targets in North Vietnam as he dodged
the flak and SAMs, Americans again lked on the moon. Less than seventy
years after the wa Wright brothers left the surface in powered flight,
man stood on the moon and looked back at the home planet glistening amid
the infinite black nothingness. They looked while war, hunger,
pestilence and man’s inhumanity to man continued unabated, continued as
it had since the dawn of human history.

it was a curious thing, hard to comprehend, yet worth pondering on a
balmy evening in the tropics with the air laden with fragrant aromas and
the surf flopping rhythmically on the beach a few yards away.

Jake Grafton walked along the beach, stared at the hotels and the people
and the relentless surf and thought of all these things.

An hour later, as he walked back toward the army base with traffic
whizzing by, the tops of the lazy large clouds were shot with fire by
the setting sun.

The problem, he decided, was keeping everything in proper perspective.
That was hard to do. Impossible, really.

To see man and his problems, the earth and the universe, as they really
are one would have to be God.

The officers’ club was full of people, music, light, laughter.

Jake stood in the entrance for several seconds letting the sensations
sink in. He tucked his hat under his belt, then strolled for the bar.

He heard them before he got to the door.

“How ugly was she?” three or four voices asked in a shaky unison.

“She was ugly as a tiger’s hairball.” Flap’s soaring baritone carried
clearly. People here in the lounge waiting to -be called for dinner
looked at each other, startled.

“How ugly?”

“Ugly as a mud wrestler’s navel.” Eyebrows soared.

iss

“How ugly?” Eight or ten voices now.

“Ugly as a pickled pervert’s promise.” Women giggled and whispered to
each other. Several of the gentlemen frowned and turned to stare at the
door to the bar. Jake saw one of the men, in his fifties, with short,
iron gray hair, wink at his companion.

“That’s not ugly!”

“She was so damn ugly that the earth tried to quake and couldn’t-it just
shivered. So ugly that five drunken sailors pretended they didn’t see
her. The city painted her red and put a number on her-two dogs relieved
themselves on her shoes before I got to the rescue, that’s how ugly she
was.

She was so desperately ugly that my zipper welded itself shut. And
that, my gentle friends, is the gospel truth.”

Jake Grafton grinned, squared his shoulders, and walked into the bar.

THE AIR WAS OPAQUE, THE SUN HIDDEN BY the MOISTURE IN the air. Two or
three miles from the ship in all directions the gray sea and gray sky
merged. Columbia was in the midst of an inverted bowl, three days
northwest of Pearl laboring through fifteen-foot Swells. The wind was
brisk from the west.

From his vantage point in the cockpit of a KA-613 tanker spotted behind
the jet blast deflector-the JBD-for Cat Three, Jake Grafton could see a
frigate a mile or so off the port beam. Just ahead, barely visible on
the edge of the known universe, he could make out the wake and
superstructure of another.

Jake and Flap were standing the five-minute alert tanker duty, which
meant that for two hours they had to sit in the cockpit of this bird
strapped in, ready to fire up the engines and tad onto the catapult as
soon as the F-4 Phantom that was parked there-also on five-minute
alert-launched.

There was another fighter on five-minute status sitting just short of
the hook-up area on Cat Four, and an airborne early warning aircraft, an
E-2 Hawkeye, parked with its tail against the island. Sitting on the
waist catapult tracks was a manned helicopter, the angel, which would
have to launch before the catapults could be fired. A power unit with
its engine running was plugged into each aircraft, instantly ready to
deliver air to turn the engines. All five of the alert birds had been
serviced and started, checked to make sure all their systems worked,
then shut down.

The crews were strapped into the airplanes. The pilot of the Phantom on
Cat Four was reading a paperback novel, Jake could see, but he couldn’t
make out the title.

On the deck behind the waist catapults sat two more fighters and a
tanker on alert-fifteen status, which meant that their crews were flaked
out in their respective ready rooms wearing all their flight gear, ready
to run for the flight deck if the alarm sounded.

Alert duty kept flight crews busy any time that planes were not aloft.
Except in waters just off the shore of the United States, it was rare
for a carrier to be below alertthirty status. Alert-fifteen was the
usual status for the high seas, with alert-five reserved for the South
China Sea during the war just ended or other locations where a possible
threat existed. Today a possible threat existed. Intelligence expected
the Soviets to try to overfly the carrier task group as it transited to
Japan with land-based naval bombers from Vladivostok or one of the
fields on Sakhalin Island or the Kamchatka peninsula.

The Russkis were going to have their work cut out for them overflying
the ship in this low visibility, Jake thought, if they came at all. He
sat watching the frigate on the port beam labor into the swells, ride up
and then bury her bow so deep that white spray was flung aft all the way
to the bridge.

Columbia’s ride was definitely more pleasant, but Jake could feel her
pitching and see the leading edge of the angled deck rise and fall as
she rode the restless sea.

To Jake’s right, in the bombardier-navigator’s seat, Flap Le Beau was
reading a book by Malcolm X. Every time he got to the bottom of a page,
he lowered the paperback and glanced around, his eyes scanning several
times while he turned the page.

On one of Flap’s periscope sweeps, Jake asked, “That book any good?”

. ……….. –Guy sure is interesting,” Flap said, and resumed his
reading.