The Magical Stranger (27 page)

We had lunch before our walk, and I mentioned that
my mother had not gone through my father's cruise box since the accident. I told
him I couldn't understand why she wouldn't want to look in there again. Timberg
put his fork down and sighed.

“I've got a box of my own from my Vietnam tour.
It's filled with pictures and letters. I've never looked in there. I'm not sure
I could handle knowing what I was like before that.”

I think I understood what he meant. Timberg and I
walked around Bancroft Hall, putting our fingers on a statue listing all the
Annapolis grads who died in Vietnam. He told me stories about some of them.

Then he dropped me back downtown and there was
Laddie Coburn waiting for me, the man who told me that Dad was gone. Thirty
years on, Laddie didn't look all that different from the day at the Roller Barn
when he told me that Dad had been in an accident. There was a little bit of
paunch on his tall frame and his mustache had gone steel gray, but otherwise he
looked the same. We caught up quickly. Laddie had divorced his first wife, Ulla,
a decade ago and had lived the life of an aging playboy nerd, working in
Prowler-related defense fields outside of D.C. He told me those days were behind
him, and he was moving out to Colorado and getting married again. I
congratulated him and we walked across town to a seaside restaurant for
dinner.

We made small talk, and Laddie casually mentioned
that he'd become interested in astrology after the breakup of his first
marriage. I bit my lip to stop myself from breaking into howls of laughter. This
was like Colonel Sanders confessing he had become a vegan. But Laddie was way
into the occult.

“Pete was a Capricorn and I'm an Aquarius. Guess
what? My ex-wife was a Capricorn and I'm an Aquarius. A lot of Capricorns are
CEOs, strong people, and good leaders. But the downside of Capricorns is that
they're assholes.”

I did a cartoon double take. Was Dad's best friend
saying he was actually an asshole? Yes, he was.

“There's no bullshit here. Pete was a strong male
Capricorn. He had his own frustrations, he couldn't get people to do what he
wanted to do, and he would carry all that turmoil inside of him.”

We were now at the restaurant. Sailboats carrying
happy, drunken revelers slipped by our dockside table. When I started the
journey this was exactly what I was looking for, but right now I was filled with
“careful what you wish for.” I let Laddie keep talking. He debunked some other
long-held myths. I'd always been told Dad and Laddie were best friends, rooming
together on early cruises. Laddie let me know that it wasn't exactly a great
experience.

“A lot of women accuse me of being very uptight.
Pete was much more uptight than I am. Your father was truly a workaholic. I'd
want to go to bed; he would be up until two o'clock in the morning with the
lights on, doing paperwork. I had a strong sense of duty, but not like your
Dad.”

Our food arrived. Laddie kept babbling. He told me
everyone thought Dad was a hard worker but he had a tendency to get “snarly”
with people under his command.

“Your dad was not the greatest communicator. A lot
of times he'd just choke up and he wouldn't say anything.”

It wasn't the first I was hearing of Dad's temper.
Dad was once so frustrated by a junior ECMO's bad radio calls that he slammed
his fist against the rearview mirror of his Prowler and shattered it. But
Laddie's depictions of my dad's impatience could have been ripped out of my own
life: the days I couldn't hit the goddamned baseball. The days spent with my
fists clenched as I wrestled with some Cub Scout project that required
unobtainable dexterity. The days I needed someone to tell me that it didn't
matter . . . but that man was never there.

Laddie ordered another drink and then piled on Dad
some more.

“Your dad wanted us to be best friends. But I had
other friends I'd rather spend time with.”

It was at this point I debated letting Laddie know
how much as a boy I'd enjoyed his porn stash that I'd found in his bedroom at
the condo we shared. But I didn't say anything. Instead, I asked why they had
bought property together if they weren't really good friends. Laddie said that a
couple of other guys fell through.

“I knew your dad would be good for it. And he was.
Every month, he was there with the mortgage check.”

Well, if I'd been searching and searching for
someone to puncture Dad's hallowed image in my head, I'd found the guy! Perhaps
thinking he'd said too much, Laddie tried to backtrack. It wasn't exactly true,
he said, that Dad always had a stick up his ass. Sometimes, when they were in
port Dad would split from the guys and head out on his own. Laddie didn't know
where he went. All he knew was the next day Dad was back in the
confessional.

“Your father was one of these ninety-ten guys.
Ninety percent of the time, he was totally straight arrow and did everything by
the books, but every once in a while, he would just wander off and nobody knew
where he went. The 10 percent was totally irrational and unaccounted for, and
you couldn't quite figure out what happened. Only Pete knew.”

I decided that was a good place to leave it. I
picked up the check. Laddie and I wandered out into the Annapolis night. I
thought of Mom and Dad on these same streets, young and vital and not knowing
what would come next. I shook Laddie's hand and we headed our separate ways. But
then I stopped and turned back. I watched my messenger of death vanish into the
summer crowd. Still, I waited, making sure he was completely gone. Only then did
I head for home.

Chapter Thirty-Five

O
ne of the things I found buried in Dad's cruise box was a faded patch from the 1970s trips to Tailhook, the annual drunkfest-reunion of naval aviators.

All you need to know about Tailhook is that the first one was held in 1956 at a hotel in Rosarito Beach in Baja, Mexico. In other words, the decadence was so high that naval aviators thought it best to take their party to another country. Maybe it should have stayed there. Tailhook moved to Las Vegas while Dad was at the academy. He never talked about the trips, but I remember him coming back from one and going to sleep for a very long time.

Tailhook remained an underground bacchanal until 1991, when eighty-three female officers and civilians were groped in a hallway of the Las Vegas Hilton packed with intoxicated aviators. Some of the victims threatened to sue, so the Naval Investigation Service launched a tepid investigation under the less than vigilant command of Rear Admiral Duvall Williams. Williams professed to have found no evidence of less than gentlemanly behavior and quipped that “a lot of female Navy pilots are go-go dancers, topless dancers or hookers.”

This didn't instill a ton of confidence in his investigation, so the Department of Defense launched its own probe. The DOD determined that groping wasn't an isolated incident and had been witnessed by senior officers who did nothing to stop it. After the second investigation, Secretary of the Navy H. Lawrence Garrett resigned and fourteen admirals lost their jobs. The careers of another two to three hundred naval aviators were either ended or permanently crippled merely for being on the floor.

Depending on where you stood, it was either a comeuppance for decades of asshole behavior or a witch hunt that killed the careers of good men who did nothing wrong except laugh along and not rat out their friends. Tupper was in flight school during Tailhook '91, but he saw that Vegas night as the end for the old Navy. He wasn't for sexual assault or criminal behavior, but he believed that all the drinking, all the jackass behavior, had an actual point: a happy few building camaraderie that could come in handy for aviators feeling their way back to a bobbing speck of light in a dark gulf.

Tailhook moved from Vegas to Reno after the scandal, and I had planned to go in 2010, during Tupper's CO tour, but I woke up the morning of my trip with a searing pain in my stomach that ended with first my appendix and then my gallbladder leaving my body. Going the next year didn't look much more promising.

Alix and I were moving out to Los Angeles, and we detoured to Whidbey for a few days. Getting to Reno seemed a logistical impossibility. But we stayed with Sherm in Anacortes and he talked up Tailhook. “It's the hundredth anniversary of naval aviation, you should go,” Sherm told me.

It was easy for him to say. He would be flying down on a chartered plane the Navy provides every naval air station. There was no way I could swing it; we had to be in LA in two days to meet our movers. But then I looked up directions. Reno would only add a few hours to our trip. I'd drop off Alix and the dog and head over to the hotel for a cameo. She sighed but agreed.

Twenty-four hours later, we arrived at Reno near dinnertime. I took a shower and headed over to the Nugget Hotel, expecting a lame evening of bad jokes and warm beer. Sure, guys like Tupper still let their freak flag fly from time to time, prancing around Japanese bases in a kimono. And yes, guys like Sherm complained about not being able to wear an electronic warfare patch on their flight jackets that resembled the anal, digital penetration of a woman. But those were retreating, final-guard actions. Most of the aviators I'd met were more Jimmy Neutron than Maverick. (Of course, every last one of them thought of himself as the last Maverick while everyone else was the Neutron sellout.) The old days weren't coming back.

Or maybe they were. I parked my car and took an escalator upstairs to the Nugget's ballroom. I was deposited in an ocean of flight suits clutching beer mugs. There were thousands of them, most in standard green, but peppered with old timers in optic orange—a brief 1970s infatuation of the Navy—and Iraqi vets in suits the color of desert sand.

I quickly spotted the jet black hair and sleepy smile of Brandon “Dozer” Sellers. Dozer had been a pilot in VFA-195, the Hornet squadron I'd followed onboard the
Kitty Hawk
back in 2002. The Georgian had steered me through Navy bureaucracy and dim
Kitty Hawk
passages. I repaid him by serving as his wingman on a long, slow night in Singapore that ended at an after-party held in the circular drive of an abandoned hotel. Dozer earned his call sign when he got drunk as a young pilot, found the keys in a bulldozer, and crashed it into a fence. He loved telling women that he worked in military construction as a civilian contractor. We drank warm beer that night and listened to an American expat woman rip on the Navy until the sun came up. It was only when we stumbled into a cab at 6:00 a.m. that Dozer flashed his Navy ID at the woman. He happily gave her the finger as we drove away.

We caught up and he told me not to expect much from Tailhook.

“A few years back, there would be two girls making out at a squadron party. I don't think that's gonna happen tonight.”

The last time I'd seen Dozer was in New York two years ago for a boys' weekend. He had just been grounded for repeated dizzy spells while exercising. He ran marathons to prove he was fit, but he never got back his wings. Now he worked for Senator John McCain as his Navy liaison—a not-bad job, but it was a long way from doing barrel rolls in his Hornet over Iraq. Being back here among his kin was bittersweet. We drank beers for a while as we ogled a Boeing exhibit on the hundredth anniversary of naval aviation and maybe the hot girl in the next booth over selling $5,000 Rolex aviator watches.

Dozer then elbowed me in the ribs.

“Hey, you got to meet this guy.”

He introduced me to another Hornet pilot and former squadron mate. The pilot was still active, but he wore a golf shirt and shorts. I could tell he thought the old men in flight suits were foolish. We swapped Dozer stories for a few minutes, and then the pilot shook my hand and vanished into the crowd. Dozer whispered in my ear.

“That's Gordo Cross, the guy who married OJ's widow.”

The name OJ transported me back to my time on the
Kitty Hawk
. Dozer's squadron was nicknamed the Chippies and was a storied fighter squadron. Unlike the Prowlers, where the testosterone is spread between one pilot and three ECMOs, everyone in the Chippies flew one-seaters and ran his own show. They exuded swagger wherever they went, whether it was pulling shit-hot breaks on carrier approaches or doing shots in a Hong Kong dive.

With his movie star jaw and blond hair, Lieutenant Nathan “OJ” White looked the part of a fighter pilot. But he was different, beginning with his call sign, given to him because he was a Mormon and drank nothing stronger than juice when everyone else was getting wasted. I remembered a late-night poker game in a junior officer's room on the
Kitty Hawk
. OJ's religion didn't allow him to play, but he watched intently, talking strategy between hands.

He was the son of a Vietnam-era Air Force pilot, the seventh of eight children who interrupted his studies at Brigham Young to serve a two-year mission in Japan. That's where he met his wife, Akiko. From there, he went to OCS and on to flight school. OJ didn't lord his religion over anyone, but people knew it mattered to him. He spotted me wandering around the
Kitty Hawk
one afternoon and helped me find the chapel where my father prayed every day. It was a kindness I never forgot.

The air war in Iraq began less than a year after I left the
Kitty Hawk
. The Chippies were right in the middle of it. One morning, I saw on the CNN crawl news that a Hornet had been shot down over the Iraqi desert. My heart filled with dread. There were a half dozen Hornet squadrons in the zone, but my bones told me it was a Chippie guy. It was reported two days later that it was Lieutenant Nathan White.

Initially, the Prowler squadron aboard the
Kitty Hawk
was scapegoated. Hornet pilots grumbled the Prowler had only one job in the fight: jam Iraqi missile sites so they couldn't track and kill American pilots. Clearly, the Prowlers had failed, and it was their fault a young man was dead.

But then a few days later it was announced that White had been killed by friendly fire; a Patriot missile mistook him for an Iraqi aircraft. It was just the latest indignity for the Prowler community; everyone joked about their ugly planes, no one knew exactly what they did, but everyone was ready to crucify them if someone got killed. In a way, it didn't matter. Dead is dead. White left behind Akiko, two sons, and a daughter. After the end of the Iraqi air war, White was laid to rest in Arlington. Dozer invited me to come, and I agonized about it for days, but I didn't make it, choosing to honor an earlier commitment to profile a musician who was recording at Abbey Road in London. It's a decision I still regret.

Akiko remained in Japan where the Chippies were based so her boys could stay in the schools they loved and she could be around her family. By then, Dozer had moved on to another squadron based in Japan, this one commanded by Gordo Cross. One afternoon, his commander took him aside.

“He asked me if I thought it was okay for him to go out with Akiko,” Dozer told me, shouting to be heard. “He wanted to get approval from someone in the Chippies. I told him, ‘Those boys have been too long without a father. If you're up to it, you should do it.' ”

They were married last year. I felt myself getting angry at what should have been happy news. Hearing about another pilot's son getting a second father made me profoundly jealous. I waited until Dozer was talking with another pilot and slipped away. I stumbled down to the hotel lobby. I slumped into a chair and checked my email on my phone. There was one from Tupper. It included a link to an article written by former Navy secretary John Lehman entitled “Is Naval Aviation Culture Dead?” Tupper could have written it. Lehman lamented the death of everything from happy hours in officers' clubs and raunchy call signs to the mandate that naval aviators spend four years out of the cockpit doing soul-crushing staff duty before they can screen for command. I read the story and nodded along, sharing Tupper's outrage about something having been lost, another connection to Dad vanishing in a haze of bureaucracy.

But then a young woman with a ponytail walked through the hotel lobby, pushing a toddler in a stroller. Mother and daughter were wearing matching green flight suits. It made me think of Terry and her difficult Army years. There were more women leading platoons and squadrons, and “don't ask, don't tell” was coming to an end. Yes, something had been lost, but something else had been gained.

Not everyone saw it that way. I texted Tupper that I was in Reno, and he wrote back, “Ah, Tailhook. Dead to me like so many other things. Couldn't stomach running into so many people I no longer respect.”

By chance, I received another email while I sat in the lobby. It was from James McGaughey, an officer who had served under my father in the Black Ravens. I took a breath and read his attached letter.

What he said both soothed me and reignited my fear that Dad's accident had been his own fault. McGaughey wrote of Dad taking forty minutes to do a flight brief that usually took ten just so everyone was sure of his responsibility. But then he paid Dad a compliment that kicked hard in my stomach: “Your father was clearly one of the best pilots I have ever flown with. He would spend hours in the manual looking up the edges of the flight envelope of the aircraft.”

And there it was again, the idea that Dad pushed his plane beyond its capability. I know McGaughey meant it as a compliment—he ended his letter with “I have no idea what happened on that day in the Indian Ocean, but I can tell you this, it had NOTHING to do with pilot error”—but I fixated on the “edges of the flight envelope” part. Who pushes the edges of the flight envelope in a deathtrap like the Prowler? He knew it was a beast to maneuver. How dare he do that to us.

I then read McGaughey's email again. He had Bill Coffey in the front seat, which I knew was flat-out wrong. Maybe what he had to say wasn't reliable. Maybe nothing anyone had to say about my father was reliable. Not the words of his wife, not the words of his fellow pilots, and not the words of his only son.

I headed back upstairs looking for a friendly face. The cocktail party had split into smaller “admin” rooms hosted by each squadron. In the Prowler room, junior officers were getting their fleet wings, signifying the completion of flight training. Their fellow aviators chanted, “go, go, go” as they chugged thirty-two-ounce glasses filled with grenadine, vodka, cranberry juice, and beer. Their eyes bulged as they choked back their own retch. The new kids were then given Velcro squadron badges for their flight suits. Their superiors attached the badges by punching their chests so hard I could hear muscles snapping. The old culture wasn't completely dead.

The tiny room was filled with mirrors on the ceiling. I looked up and could see a hundred faces in flight suits, all looking familiar and strange at the same time. I finally found Sherm. He'd been fixed up on a blind date with Beav's sister-in-law. I laughed to myself. That dude could fall off the back of a carrier and land with a date. I gave him a hug, one that he refused to relinquish for a moment. His eyes were running more red than blue.

“You're like a brother to me.”

I smiled back at him. We were from different worlds but both desperate for another family, something, anything, to fill the space in our hearts. I told him I felt the same way. I turned to leave, not wanting to cramp his style, but he grabbed my arm. He pointed to another aviator with coal black eyes nursing a glass of bourbon. His call sign badge read Joe Dirt.

“Talk to Joe Dirt before you go. We were JOs together. He's a good guy, little weird, but good guy. He's writing a book. Mean a lot to me.”