The Magical Stranger (23 page)

Chapter
Thirty

T
upper's
favorite film is
This Is Spinal Tap
. The rock
mockumentary about arrested men-children trying to be serious about their absurd
profession was the perfect corollary for the life of a naval aviator. He
prepared for his final flight knowing the angst was about to be turned up to
eleven. It wasn't going to be a quick turn around the Northwest and then
touchdown and taxi to the Black Ravens hangar. Instead, Tupper was flying a
Prowler to NAS Jacksonville, where it would be decommissioned and stripped for
parts. The old man and his ride would hit the glue factory simultaneously.

Originally, I was going to be in the backseat with
Socr8tes for the flight. I still had my swim and survival quals and there
weren't a ton of Black Ravens volunteering for the 6,000-mile round trip. (The
crew would fly back commercial.) But at the last minute, Commodore Slais
informed Tupper that it would be his honor to take the last seat on his final
flight. This was either a touching gesture or the commodore ensuring that Tupper
didn't do anything stupid at his last rodeo.

The flight was typical Prowler, aka screwed from
the start. Tupper made his way down the stairs from his office on an October
morning in full flight gear. He opened the hangar door and found the entire
squadron standing on the flight line saluting their skipper. There were pictures
and handshakes. He loaded into the Prowler with Stonz next to him and Commodore
Slais and Socr8tes in the backseat. He gave his sailors a final wave and taxied
down the runway.

That's when the first red light flashed on the
cockpit suggesting low pressure in the hydraulics of the landing gear. That
should have been a no-go. But the commodore was in the back; he couldn't see
Tupper's instruments. Tupper looked at Stonz, and his maintenance officer just
shrugged his shoulders. Fuck it, Tupper thought. There was no way he was
climbing out of the plane after that dog-and-pony good-bye. He turned back to
the runway and gunned the engines.

Flying with the commodore in the backseat made
everyone nervous. They had plans to stop for fuel at an Air Force base in Grand
Junction, Colorado. But just as they prepared their final approach, Tupper
double-checked the field information and realized the base didn't have the
equipment needed to restart the Prowler after refueling. If Tupper hadn't
noticed, they might have been stranded in Grand Junction with the commodore for
days until a starter could be shipped out. That would have sucked. They refueled
in Roswell, New Mexico, instead and pushed on, overnighting at Robins Air Force
Base outside of Houston.

The Prowler was leaking fluid from its nose gear
the next morning. Stonz tightened a few screws with a borrowed wrench and they
left right after dawn. Tupper flew along the coast over Mobile, Biloxi, and
Pensacola. The men lightened up the closer they got to JAX, sharing hairy
stories from flight school. Before Tupper knew it, he was flying his final
approach into Jacksonville Naval Air Station. He wanted to bend the sky one last
time and bring the Prowler in on a tight break at 4.5 Gs, 450 knots, but he
remembered the commodore was in the backseat.

“Hey, Commodore, should we give them a show?”

“Uh, we should stick to 350 and the regs.”

So Tupper brought the Prowler in at a mild 350
knots. The Prowler hit the runway, taxied, and Tupper climbed down. His plane
was now leaking three kinds of fluid from its nose. It was ready to be put
down.

I waited on the flight line at JAX with some of the
base's senior command and a giant red fire truck. It's Navy tradition that a
naval aviator is hosed down after his final flight. Tupper took off his helmet
and waited patiently as the cold water cascaded over him in the brisk October
air. Commodore Slais shook his hand and posed for some pictures and then raced
off to the airport to catch the last connecting flight back to Seattle.

Someone told me that this Prowler was the oldest in
the fleet, dating back to 1977. Had Dad flown it as a Black Raven or at VAQ-129,
the training squadron? There was no way of knowing for sure, but I wanted to
think he had. Since the plane was bound for the boneyard, the maintainers back
in Whidbey had signed their names on the fuselage. Here in Jacksonville, Tupper
and the crew did the same. Stonz nudged me on the shoulder and handed me a pen.
I signed it “CDR P. T. Rodrick, 1943–1979.”

There was nothing else to do except get very, very
drunk. But there were obstacles. Canine, an old Prowler guy, ran the boneyard
and seemed lonely down here in a forgotten outpost. He offered to give us a
quick tour of the base, and we felt like we couldn't say no. We rode over in a
van to a faraway hangar and went inside. In front of us were six Prowlers
splayed open like the catfish gutted by my grandfather in his Alabama garage.
Some were missing cockpits; some were a pinkish color from being sprayed with
preservatives that prevented rusting. Tupper and I exchanged looks. It was hard
not to see his career and Dad's life reduced to dissected and discontinued
planes withering in the Florida heat. We wanted to be anywhere but there.

But the tour dragged on and on. We were told in
excruciating detail how a Prowler is embalmed, catalogued, stripped, and then
melted down for scrap. About three hours passed by. We stepped out of the hangar
to a fading sun. Socr8tes seriously debated making a break for a nearby exit,
climbing a fence, and hitching his way to our hotel.

We thought we had made our escape, but Canine
wanted to show us one more thing: the Prowler parts depot that was housed in a
nearby warehouse. It was straight out of a hoarders horror show. Rows and rows
of Prowler screws, pads, and flaps were stacked to the ceiling. Stonz walked
around in stunned silence, picking up random parts and mumbling.

“I tried to get one of these for months. They said
they didn't have any.”

The depot's manager was a potbellied guy who had
flown Prowlers back in the 1970s. I asked him a question.

“Did you know Pete Rodrick?”

The old man paused for a moment.

“Oh, yeah, he was a real asshole.”

I told him he was my father. The old man told me he
was just joking. No one laughed.

We finally made it to our hotel on Jacksonville
Beach around sunset and tried to make up for lost time. There was whiskey,
barbecue, and more whiskey. Tupper put up a brave front until the alcohol burned
it away. Well past midnight, he asked me a question.

“Can I still call myself a Navy pilot now that I
have had my last flight? What if you were told you would never write again?
Would you still be a writer?”

I didn't know the answer, so I changed the
subject.

“Let's prank-call Sherm.”

Tupper thought this was the best idea of the day.
We called Sherm, and the skipper cursed him over the fact that the Anacortes
Taco Bell closed at 10:00 p.m., an unacceptably early hour.

“Sherm, that is an outrage. I want you to get on
this first thing in the morning. This cannot stand.”

Sherm's voice was muffled, uncertain if his boss
was serious.

“Uh, yessir. I'll get on that first thing.”

Tupper gleefully snapped off my phone. We closed
down a dive bar and did a final shot of Jack Daniel's. How we got the two blocks
back to our hotel I will never know. Tupper hugged me and mumbled something
about sharing the last flight with him. I told him I loved him like a brother or
some such nonsense. I made it back to my room on the eighth floor. I had to
piss. I looked at the toilet and decided that wouldn't do. I headed out onto the
balcony. I dropped my jeans and sent a cascading arc eighty feet down into the
hotel swimming pool. I zipped up and staggered to my bed. I felt closer to Dad
than I had in years.

W
e flew
back to Whidbey in the morning, hungover, barely able to converse for the first
leg. Tupper was largely silent; his skipper tour was ending in five days. The
following afternoon, I drove up to Whidbey from Anacortes and stopped in to see
him in his office. He was buried behind his desk in paperwork like the Robert De
Niro character in Terry Gilliam's
Brazil
. He had to
write fitness reports on all his officers and sailors in the next five days. He
pushed the folders aside and we talked for a little while. He was in a sour
mood; the moment his whole life had built to was passing and he couldn't stop
time. Tupper flipped through a Navy magazine that had a feature on squadron
commanders. He pointed out the ones who would be promoted ahead of him.

“That one was a suck-up.” He flipped the page.
“That one had a sugar daddy protecting him on CAG's staff.” He turned another
page and let out a sad laugh. “That one, I have no idea how he got promoted. One
of life's great mysteries.”

We talked about the squadron for a while. Mongo,
the new XO, had arrived, and every time Tupper saw him it was like seeing a
ghost. Vinnie was starting to assert himself in staff meetings, which rankled
Tupper and made him feel more like a lame duck. But after we talked for a while
I realized that wasn't what was bothering Tupper. He talked about Vinnie
organizing a bash commemorating the change of command and how excited the junior
officers were for the party.

“That was the squadron I was trying to create, but
they wouldn't give it to me.” He mentioned a long-nursed grudge, his men never
showing up on his doorstep for an impromptu bash. “You know, they didn't even
green-light me. I've never been in a squadron where the skipper wasn't
green-lighted. Did they hate me that much? Was I that awful?”

I reminded him that Doogie hadn't been
green-lighted. This just pissed him off more.

“Do they all hate me because of Doogie? You can
tell me.”

I told him they didn't hate him, but he didn't
believe me. That night, there was better evidence. At an Anacortes Italian
restaurant, the officers of VAQ-135 gathered with their wives for Tupper's
change-of-command dinner. It couldn't have been more different from Doogie's
farewell. The couples were dressed casually and the formality of the dining-out
was replaced by toasts and drunken skits. Stoli led the JOs in a round of “What
I Said, What I Meant.”

What I said: excuse me from the Christmas
Party. What I meant: I need to puke. What I said: nothing on a six-hour combat
flight. What I meant: you've been in the biz long enough; you realize everyone
around you is an idiot.

Everyone laughed. Tupper stood up to cheers. He
spoke about how grateful he was for everyone's hard work. He mentioned the Wolf
and presented him with a tiny pillow that read “Quiet, the princess is
sleeping.”

He then singled out his department heads for
special praise. Their hard work had so moved Tupper that he bought each of them
gifts. He called each of them by name up to the front of the room. He handed
each of them a vaguely creepy Hummel-like statue of a German schoolboy in short
pants that I'd found at a rummage sale. The wives were skeeved out, but the men
loved it.

The following Monday morning, it was all over. A
band played for Tupper's change of command. His family was there: Jim and Cindy,
Beth and the girls. Tupper had asked me to speak, so I sat up on the podium with
Tupper, Vinnie, CAG, and the commodore. The muckety-mucks read rote speeches
from binders describing command as a wild roller-coaster ride.

Then it was my turn. I looked out at the squadron
and saw Beav and Sherm and Lil Chris and Stoli. And I saw the family I'd always
wanted. I talked about how kind they had been to me even if they thought I had
hippie hair. Then I recounted what one of Dad's maintainers had said about
keeping Prowlers in the air:

“The normal status was: One plane is close
to fully operational. One plane has stuff broken, but works pretty good. One
plane can fly, but nothing else works, and one is the hangar queen and sits in
the hangar bay all tore apart.”

Sound familiar? Now remember, this was when
the planes were new. Understandably, the Navy sees all squadrons equal, no
matter the age or condition of their aircraft. It doesn't matter if you're
flying brand-new, fancy-pants Super Hornets or moaning and groaning middle-aged
Prowlers. You must perform.

That's all great in theory, but let me provide
some context. Commander Ware took over a bone-tired squadron that had been at
sea for much of the past three years. His jets were between twenty-five and
thirty-eight years old. And yet the Black Ravens flew an astounding 186 sorties
over Afghanistan with a 98 percent completion rate on the last cruise.

This is a tribute to Tupper, the department
heads, the JOs, and the maintainers, the unsung heroes of the squadron. Tupper
took a squadron that could have been counting their days to transition and
transformed them—in my humble and biased opinion—into the best damn Prowler
squadron in the fleet.

Then Tupper spoke. He thanked CAG and the commodore
and then looked at Beth and his girls sitting in the front row. He took a long
pause, and when he spoke his voice cracked and wavered. He talked of being in
the Black Ravens for thirty months and having been gone from home for seventeen
of them.

Caitlin, I missed your fifth grade. Brenna, I
missed your seventh. I came home from eight months at sea and girls had become
young women. I was not there to help with homework. I was not there when you
needed your dad. I can't get those months back.

Tupper stopped again, his bottom lip quivering.

There are more coming before I can come back
to you. Just know I think about you every day before every flight, before every
move I make.

He then turned to his wife, sitting below him in a
black skirt and silver necklace. He thought of the woman who had stood beside
him since he was a boy of nineteen. All the sacrifices she had made for him and
his dream. He almost couldn't speak.