The Magical Stranger (25 page)

And that's how, in March 2006, Brian Danielson found himself digging through the Laotian clay looking for his father's remains. Every morning, Danielson and twelve others would leave their Laotian base camp and ride a rickety helicopter fifteen kilometers to a dried-up riverbed where he'd claw and sift with his hands until they bled.

But he didn't find any bones, just pounds and pounds of unexploded American bombs. Because of unexplained Laotian government restrictions, the dig took place almost a kilometer from where Benjamin Danielson actually landed and was likely killed. When Danielson told his superiors they were digging in the wrong place, they politely told him to shut up. It was never explained why they couldn't dig at the exact site.

Finally, on day 26, Brian Danielson, with the help of some smuggled-in whiskey, persuaded the Laotians to fly him the extra kilometer to where his father was murdered. He arrived at the killing spot on his father's sixty-fourth birthday.

At this point, Steamer took a long sip of water and stopped for a moment. The room was quiet. I could hear his breathing through the public address system.

“I was carrying a bag of flowers,” said Danielson. “I laid them where we assumed that he was killed.”

He paused again and gave the same, sad smile.

“I'm not very happy about admitting this, but I tried to go where I thought he was.”

He pointed with his finger at a speck on a map.

“I started walking into the trees, and I got lost. It wasn't what I'd expected.”

The room remained silent except for the sound of a woman weeping. Danielson then pivoted to the end of his story. He flew back to Whidbey. Two weeks later, he was on a joint training exercise at Cold Lake Air Force Base in Alberta, with a German squadron that was still flying his Dad's plane, the F-4. Like me, he got a ride and tried to imagine his dad in the same cockpit.

A few weeks later, Steamer deployed with his squadron to Iraq during the busy days of Operation Enduring Freedom. While overseas, he received a message that the sliver of shoulder bone found years earlier in Laos belonged to his father. He had to make a decision for his whole family: accept the fragment of his dad or hold out hope for more significant remains. Brian thought of his aging grandmother and his still grieving mother back in Kenyon. After returning from Iraq, he flew to Hawaii, signed for his father's bones, and brought him home.

The funeral procession on May 8, 2007, made a slow trek toward Kenyon's First Evangelical Lutheran Church, the place where Mary and Benjamin Danielson had been married forty-four years before. The black hearse passed through Kenyon's downtown of two-story storefronts and diners. It didn't look all that different from when Benjamin Danielson last saw it in 1968.

Outside the church, a band played taps as a flag-draped coffin was removed from a hearse. A flag was folded and presented to Mary Gates-Danielson. Another flag was given to Evelyn Danielson, Benjamin Danielson's ninety-year-old mother. A stoic Norwegian, Evelyn rarely spoke of her son. But that day she held an American flag in her wheelchair and wept. Her son had finally come home.

Brian Danielson stood in his dress whites a few feet away, his sword held at attention. He saluted his father as he was carried into the church. Eleven hundred people in a town of fifteen hundred attended Benjamin Danielson's funeral.

Brian Danielson clicked off the overhead. He asked if there were any questions. The cranky old man shouted one.

“What do you think of Jane Fonda?”

Danielson winced.

“Well, I'm not going to be sending her a Christmas card, that's for sure. Eventually, she will have to answer to someone higher than me.”

Everyone lined up to shake Steamer's hand. He posed for some pictures. I gazed out the window toward the Navy Chapel and heard some Prowlers rumbling above, unseen in the cloud cover. We then sat down at a table to talk. After a minute or so, Steamer jumped up.

“You know, I'll be a lot more comfortable after I change.”

He slipped into the bathroom and returned a minute later in his flight suit—his second skin. Only then did the lines on his face ease.

W
e talked warily if sympathetically at first, two men trying to feel their way around each other's pain. We talked about Prowlers and his career. He mentioned that he had gotten out of the Navy in 2002 for two years. I assumed it was because of money issues or he was sick of being away from his wife and kids, but it wasn't that at all.

“I was at a weapons school in Nevada and I decided to see my dad's Vietnam roommate,” said Danielson. “Hearing all the stories made me feel like being a navigator wasn't enough. I had to be a pilot like my dad.”

Danielson left the Navy against the advice of his mentors and began applying for pilot billets with air national guard programs in three states. But then 9/11 happened right as he was being processed out. Guard pilots felt the call to serve and few retired. There were never any open slots for Danielson.

“It was a gamble and it blew up in my face,” said Danielson. He exhaled and took in a deep breath. “I got really low. I never felt like I was owed anything because of what happened to my dad, but I thought, Christ, can't something good come from it?”

Steamer rejoined the Navy in 2004, but the career interruption means he won't ever command his own squadron. He spoke of missed opportunities to measure up to his father.

“I did my first cruise in 1996 after the first Gulf War and then missed things in 2002 when I got out. A friend once said I couldn't get in a fight if I hit somebody in the face with a baseball bat.”

But the more we talked, the more it became clear Danielson had been in combat, first flying missions enforcing no-fly zones in the late 1990s, during Operation Enduring Freedom, and then on the ground in Iraq in 2008, coordinating Prowler use in-country. He just shrugged as he dolefully ticked off his duty stations.

“You hear stories about Vietnam and combat and it makes me not even want to wear my air medal. It's like, ‘big whoop.' ”

I tried to tell him he'd done more than enough, but I knew that whatever I said would not salve a man trying to please a ghost. We talked about our differences—me knowing my father, him having no memories. His dad's favorite uncle helped out, but Steamer refused to bring him to father-son gatherings.

“I was always, ‘Look, I don't have a father—there's no sense pretending here.' Everyone knew my father and said I was just like him, but I never felt I matched up. He was a star. I barely passed algebra.”

He told me about driving a tractor on his uncle's farm when he was twelve or thirteen. He busted a chain hot-dogging the tractor over a pile of mud. His uncle was pissed, but his aunt just laughed.

“She said, ‘Times like this you remind me so much of your father. He'd do dumb things like that all the time.' ” Steamer broke into a big smile. “That's the story I told at the funeral because that's real and specific. The rest isn't.”

But just as quickly, his face went somber. “I did the whole funeral for other people's closure. That's a word my mother always used, closure, closure, closure. It doesn't change that I still don't have a father and I never will.”

Feeling he'd just let his guard down too much, Danielson corrected himself. “Well, I came to grips with it a long time ago.”

I didn't have the heart to tell him he clearly hasn't, never will, and that's okay. Instead, I mumbled something, urging him not to be so hard on himself. It was advice I easily give but never take.

S
teamer invited me over for dinner that night. He and his wife, Pam, lived about a mile from where I grew up in Oak Harbor. Their neighborhood was more reminiscent of my childhood than the faux Craftsman houses and brew pubs of Anacortes. Navy friends lived down and up the street and they all watched each other's kids and drank wine when the spouses were deployed.

When I arrived, Steamer was making quesadillas for his daughter with his left hand while throwing crab cakes in the oven for the grown-ups with his right. His oldest son, Benjamin, barreled into the room. “Ben, you've got to do your homework,” implored his father. Ben nodded like teenagers do, but his father wasn't convinced of his intentions.

“I don't know what I was expecting, but, boy, being a father with a son isn't what I thought,” said Danielson. “It's not like a mother and a daughter. There's so much I want to teach him, but he's intent on learning everything the hard way. Now I just pray that he passes algebra.”

It wasn't clear whether he was referencing his own algebra issues or not. I didn't get a chance to ask because Pam, a tall, angular Mississippian, ambled into the kitchen. She was charismatic and bubbly, the perfect companion to her husband's solemnity.

“I'm so glad you could come over. Brian doesn't get enough male bonding. He's usually just here with me and the other wives. This is the real Navy, not all the stuck-up folk in Anacortes.”

We made small talk about the Navy and Oak Harbor's sprawl since my childhood. Pam poured me another glass of wine and said a friend was coming over. “I wanted her to meet the famous writer,” she teased. “Her husband's on the
Lincoln
. That's the one problem with all our friends making command: we're not on the same schedule anymore.”

Steamer sighed and Pam quickly changed the subject. A few minutes later, the crab cakes were ready and we sat down for dinner. Sure enough, her friend Tiffany came over trailing a kid or two. Then another wife magically appeared. There were tales of sick babies, sick parents, and a Huck Finn book report that was due in a matter of hours. One husband was back in two weeks; another husband was shipping out over the summer. They all seemed to be hanging on by their fingernails but somehow thriving. The happy chaos made me long for my childhood.

When it was time to go, Steamer said he had something for me. He went upstairs and gave me a copy of
A Pilot's Life
, the diary of a Vietnam pilot kept from the day he shipped out on the USS
Oriskany
until the day he was shot down and killed over South Vietnam. I told him it was a rare book; there was no way I could take it. He insisted.

“Give it back when you can.”

We walked out into the spring night and talked about mothers and widows.

“My mother still says, ‘You're just like your father,' ” said Danielson. “But how does she know? He's been gone for forty years.”

We shook hands, both of us holding it for an extra beat. He wanted to tell me one more thing,

“Look, I don't want you to have the wrong impression. Some of this has been tough, but I have a great, great life.”

I wanted to believe him. A month or two later, I got an email from Steamer. He was down at Pensacola Naval Air Station on a cross-country flight, training a young pilot. He wrote: “Click on the attachment. I think you'll appreciate it. This is hanging behind the bar at the officers' club here.”

I clicked and squinted at the cell phone photo. It was a cruise plaque. I looked closer. It read “VAQ-135 May 1979–April 1980.” In a small box at the bottom I could just barely make out the writing: “In Memoriam of Prowler 626-158541.” There were four names. At the top was Commander Peter T. Rodrick.

Chapter Thirty-Two

S
hortly after Steamer's speech, I learned that Dad was a shitty pilot.

It took all of twenty minutes. My best friend, Mark, and I were banging out the fourteenth draft of the screenplay
Long in the Tooth
, a puckish vampire comedy set in a Philly nursing home. We thought it was hilarious, a viewpoint shared by exactly zero people in Hollywood. We were tweaking a cheery line for Reggie the old boxer: “I used to wear silk trunks, now I wear Depends. I want this to end”—when my phone rang.

It was Tim Radel, an officer who'd served with Dad on his department head tour at VAQ-130. I'd tracked him to Florida through an acquaintance and sent him three emails. He ignored the first two but finally left me a message.

“Here's my number. But I think it's best if I don't say anything.”

The reporter in me pricked up his ears. The guy who says it's best if he doesn't say anything is always the guy you want to talk to. I left him a voice mail saying I was a big boy and prepared to hear whatever he had to say. Radel called me the next day. We bullshitted for a few minutes before he asked me a question.

“Do you really want to hear this?”

“I do.”

Radel proceeded to rip Dad a new one. In 1976, Dad's squadron, VAQ-130, was flying back to Whidbey from workups on the East Coast. Radel was assigned the backseat behind Dad. The flight was uneventful until the Prowler hit the Cascade Mountains east of Whidbey. The sky grew thick with clouds, usually a sign for the pilot to take his jet high above the mountains. But Dad didn't do that. Instead, Radel looked out the window and saw peaks appearing between the clouds on both sides of the plane. Dad was cloud-surfing in the mountains, a sphincter-puckering move. Radel was scared shitless.

“We landed and I asked the guy up front what the hell that was all about, and he just said, ‘Ah, that's just the way Pete flies.' ”

Radel told me that wasn't a one-time deal. He was in the front seat with Dad on another flight, a low-level exercise. The Prowler had to hit certain air coordinates, and Dad had the map on his left knee. He kept glancing down at it as the earth passed a few hundred feet below. Radel offered to help.

“Pete, let me take a look.”

“No, damn it, I've got it.”

Radel did his best not to fly with Dad after that.

“He was flat-hatting it, and he wouldn't let me help him. I didn't want any part of that.”

Radel survived a cancer scare and two years later was an instructor in VAQ-129, the Prowler training squadron. Dad had screened for command and was returning for a refresher course in the Prowler after six months at Armed Forces Staff College. Radel told the scheduler that he didn't want to be in the same cockpit with my father.

“Rodrick scares the shit out of me.”

This being the Navy, the scheduler quickly put Radel on the schedule with Dad. It was a routine training mission where the instructor has the pilot turn off his navigational system and then the pilot must find his way home with just compass, radar, and some dead reckoning. Dad took off and maneuvered the plane over the Pacific. Radel started the test. Dad got his bearings and started heading for Vancouver. Unfortunately, that would be Vancouver, Washington, 250 miles south of Whidbey. He thought he was flying north when he was heading south. Radel lost it.

“Jesus, Pete, look at the radar. Do you have any idea where you're going?”

“Shut up, give me a minute.”

Dad finally got his bearings after a series of wrong turns and flew the Prowler back to Whidbey. Radel gave Dad a “down,” meaning he'd have to repeat the flight. Dad smirked at him.

“You're kidding me, right?”

Radel wasn't. But Dad pulled rank and told the squadron CO that Radel had it in for him. The CO overrode the down. Radel was furious.

“This guy is going to kill someone.”

Radel finally took a breath.

“When I heard about the accident, I wasn't surprised it was your dad's plane. I thought it was just a matter of time.”

We talked for a few more minutes. In some ways, it was thrilling to talk with someone who didn't idolize Dad. The more I listened, the less Radel maintained any pretense that he liked Dad on any level.

“He'd sit in the ready room reading old papers until 3:00 a.m. We'd tell him, ‘Pete, go to sleep,' but he'd just keep reading. He was a hard-ass. I heard that he used to correct your mom's letters with a red pen. Is that true?”

I told him I didn't know. I filed away the assholic anecdote about editing Mom's letters—no one else I talked to copped to seeing him do it—and centered in on Dad reading the newspaper until 3:00 a.m. Somehow, that seemed as important as Radel telling me Dad sucked in the cockpit. It opened a door for me. I'd wait up for my
Seattle Times
to be dropped off at 3:00 a.m. on Sunday. I'd read every page until 4:30 a.m. and then deliver my papers before dawn, not sleeping until I was done. Did I somehow pick that up from him?

Radel was a musician, and we found some common ground talking about bands we liked. We wrapped things up and Radel had a last question.

“So are you glad I called you back?”

I told him I was. It wasn't even a lie. I hung up the phone and Mark tried to read my face.

“Are you okay?”

I made a bad joke.

“Hey, it's not every day that someone tells you that your dad sucked at his job and his death was only a matter of time. Good times.”

We laughed and went back to writing jokes for Reggie.

N
ot everyone bought Tim Radel's version. Mom and a couple of Dad's buddies said he was a subpar junior officer and Dad let him know it. They said he was just settling an old score.

Maybe so, but I found other evidence of Dad's flying acumen, or lack thereof, jammed at the bottom of his cruise box. It was a U.S. Navy computer printout of Dad's official pilot history report, a dry accounting of mishaps that occurred while he was a pilot. The first one begins: 30 APRIL 68: LAND SHORT OF RWY.

It's exactly as it sounds. Dad, just learning jets, brought his T-2 in too fast and landed in the Meridian, Mississippi, clay 208 feet short of the runway. The jet bounced and stumbled its way onto the runway. Dad and his instructor got out without a problem. Still, it reflected poorly on him.

The next page read 06 FEB 69 and was an accounting of his crash.

CLB MADE TO 18000 FT, 2 MORE ACCEL CKS MADE. ON 2ND CHK ENG MADE EXPLODING NOISE, PLT ATTEMPTED TO SET UP GLIDE FOR FLD, HOWEVER HE EJT AT APPROX 900 FT, WHEN REACHING FIELD WAS IMPROBABLE.

The rest of the report made it clear it wasn't his fault.

IN CONTROL PILOT FACTOR NOT ASSIGNED TO THIS INDIVIDUAL.

I anxiously flipped through the next six or seven mishaps. They were all minor mechanical issues, no screwups on Dad's behalf. But I still wondered. Another friend of Dad's told me that Dad liked to fly low and fast.

“Everyone knew that. He liked to bend the airplane around, but a lot of guys did back then.”

But didn't he know the danger? Back in flight school, instructors told aviators to take a look around the room: “In ten years, one in four of you will be dead.” It wasn't bullshit. In the 1960s and 1970s, the fatality rate for a Navy pilot hovered around 20 percent for a twenty-year career. In 1978, the year before Dad's crash, 128 naval aviators were killed in 102 crashes. That was in peacetime.

Dad was a smart man; he must have known the risk. If he didn't, Mom was sure to remind him. When he started flight school, she wrote of her fear.

I know you must think it is silly me worrying about planes going down. I want you to fly because that's what you want and will be happy doing. I'll just have to have faith that someone greater will watch over you and bring you back to me safe and sound.

I love you forever, Barb.

By chance, Dad's sister, Dorothy, and her husband, Sonny, visited us at NAS Meridian two days after his 1969 crash. We stayed home with Mom while Dad gave them a tour of the base. Dad came around a corner where workers were loading a pile of burnt, twisted metal onto a flatbed truck. Dad drove around the truck and then provided a little background.

“That was my jet.”

He didn't slow down. He didn't say anything else. He just kept driving.