The Magical Stranger (28 page)

Before I could say no, Sherm pushed his friend toward me and vanished with his girl, swallowed up by the horde of green. I shook his friend's hand, and we headed toward a quieter part of the hotel.

T
hen Air Force Captain Christopher “Joe Dirt” Lucas told me about his life, a story that made my own narrative seem like a rejected afterschool special. Nothing had come easy for him. He was raised on the Louisiana bayou and still spoke with a deep drawl. That's how he got his call sign, named after the white-trash janitor played by David Spade in a 2001 comedy. His father was drafted into the Army in 1968 and could have gotten out of it because his new wife was pregnant, but if he didn't go, someone else in his small town would have to go instead. So he went to Vietnam right before his son was born in 1969.

He returned home a year later. His legs had been blown away by a Vietcong grenade. Something else was missing too.

“He became a high school counselor, but he was so compartmentalized,” said Lucas softly. “He could talk about other people's problems, but he couldn't talk to me or my mom.”

I listened quietly. I let him take his time. Lucas had done everything the hard way. He enlisted in the Navy at seventeen, working his way up from sailor to Officer Candidate School. He then went back for his degree and became a naval flight officer, flying Prowlers with Sherm over Iraq. Passed over for promotion, he transferred to the Air Force, serving as an electronic warfare officer flying B-52s over Afghanistan. I asked him where he was stationed.

“A place called Diego Garcia. Just a speck of land in the middle of nowhere. Have you ever heard of it?”

“Yes.”

Not content with having flown two planes into combat, Lucas then volunteered to serve as a forward air controller attached to the Army outside Kandahar, coordinating Air Force and Navy air support for ground troops. He was the ground guy that pilots like Tupper talked to from five miles above. For weeks, he pleaded with his battalion commander to let him go on night patrol with the soldiers. He told him it was just so he could understand their needs better. In reality, he wanted to know what his father knew but never shared.

The sky filled with tracer bullets his first night out. His patrol had walked into a firefight.

“It didn't last that long, maybe fifteen minutes,” Lucas said with a shrug. He swirled whiskey around in his plastic glass. “But when the sun comes up and you can see the bullets lodged in the walls a few inches from where your head was, well, it makes you think.”

Lucas told me that a few years back he tried to reconnect with his father when he was home on leave. His first son was about to be born, and he wanted him to know his granddad. He stopped by his dad's school and went to his office. He spoke calmly about how his dad's neglect had made him feel unwanted as a kid. His father sat impassively in his wheelchair. He offered no apology and told his son to get over himself. Lucas got up and walked out of the office; he hasn't spoken to his father since.

We sat in silence for a minute. I didn't know what to say. A cheesy video of 1980s-era Blue Angels blasted behind us on a massive television. It was all there: a distant and disfigured father, a son trying to understand him through combat. I finally spoke.

“That sounds like a hell of a book.”

Joe Dirt just laughed.

“No, my book isn't about that at all. It's called
Killing Jane Fonda
.”

For the next twenty minutes, he laid out the plot of the novel he'd been working on for seven years. It involved Fonda, the Weathermen, the son of a Vietnam vet, and a murder that may or not be in the protagonist's head. The story was dizzyingly intricate, and I soon lost track of the characters. Lucas talked excitedly about drafts and redrafts until he snapped his own head back.

“Oh, man, sorry to go on like that. Shit. That's the bourbon talking.”

I told him it was fine, but I had a question.

“Why don't you write about your dad? That seems really interesting.”

He looked at me with benign confusion.

“Why? In this story I can move things around. My dad? I can't change any of that. It happened and it's never going to change. He's never going to change. Why waste my time on things I can't change?”

I didn't know what to say. I just stared at the video of long-ago Blue Angels pilots shaking hands with a wide-eyed kid. The boy beamed back at the pilot. There was no context, just awe and joy. Then I shook Chris's hand, wished him luck, and pushed my way past shitfaced aviators playing grab-ass with their brothers. Their laughter sounded like it would never die.

Chapter Thirty-Six

I
'm not an organized man. Plane tickets get tossed with the takeout. If I only have to request two copies of my 1099s in a tax year I declare victory. I left Dad's academy watch in an office desk drawer until it was stolen. I swear things will be different every six months or so. Receipts are filed, piles of crap are dismantled, and then two weeks later I'm hunting for my birth certificate amid the Chipotle wrappers.

I've made an uneasy peace with the remnants of my childhood ADD. I still curse and kick the filing cabinets, but I let it go. I have to. It's a part of me that is not going away.

Merging the precious and the worthless is just my way. For almost a year, three flyers advertising 1979 Thanksgiving dinner at the Cubi Point Naval Air Station's Bachelor Officers Quarters fought for space on my desk with magazines and desiccated bento boxes. Dinner came in two options, waiter-served for $4.75 and buffet-style from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. for $3. Kids were $2.75.

But decades-old buffet information wasn't the lure for me. Dad had used the back of the flyers to write his second-to-last letter to Mom. (“I'm out of money and can't afford to buy any stationery. Seriously—I'm at the Cubi BOQ and don't have anything else to write on.”) The letter isn't one of Dad's best—he had to hand it off by 7:00 a.m. to a squadron mate heading back to Whidbey—but it's a relic of sorts. It's written on November 19, 1979, the last moment when Dad thought he was almost home. He wrote of homecoming parties and vacations and my trip out to Hawaii for the Tiger Cruise. (“I know Steve is probably getting excited and driving you crazy but 10 December will be here soon and you'll have some peace and quiet.”) He even mentioned a rumor that the Black Ravens would be home for all of 1980, meaning Dad would not have to go to sea again before his change of command.

I stapled the flyers to another found document of last hope. It's an invitation from Mom to the VAQ-135 wives for an end-of-cruise party. The front page features a drawing of an old-timey pilot coming in for a landing with a headline reading “Here Come Those Black Ravens Again.” The second page invites the wives over for wine and ends with a note from Mom:

Dear VAQ 135 Wives,

I would like to take this time and opportunity to thank you for your support during this cruise. Thank heavens, it's finally coming to an end. As wives we are supposed to play both roles as mother and dad, besides keep dad happy with letters. You have handled it beautifully. Happy Homecoming!

Mrs. Barbara Rodrick.

After a few months on my desk, Mom's words had soy sauce smeared across her signature and Dad's letter was faded from the summer sun coming through my office window. I knew I was ruining them, but I didn't care. I thought treating them like bills and junk mail would demystify them.

That didn't happen. Instead, I read them repeatedly and was reminded of
before
. A prior life of Mom and Dad chattering about Christmas parties and whose marriages in the squadron were on the rocks. Normal conversation, not the obscene silence of death that was waiting for all of us.

I decided to piece together Dad's last days, hoping to better understand our family's final moments as a real family. Was it masochism? Perhaps, but I thought that if I knew what Dad's life was like right before the crash I could recapture the better part of him, the better part of us.

M
om left the Philippines in tears on July 9, 1979. Dad and the
Kitty Hawk
spent the next four months maneuvering up and down the Asian coast making port calls in Hong Kong, Japan, and Thailand. A crisis in North Korea appeared and vanished.

The flying was good. In October, the
Kitty Hawk
participated in Operation Cope Thunder, a series of elaborate war games with the Air Force. Dad and the Black Ravens took off and set up their jammers and then watched with glee as Air Force F-15s drifted below them, unable to pick them up on their jammed radar. He took pride in that. After a career in the backwater of A-3s, he was flying a plane that mattered.

Dad's landing grades were above average, suffering only one wave-off when he broke too close to the carrier at 450 knots and came in too fast and high. Still, according to a fellow pilot, he berated himself in the post-flight brief.

“Why do I do that? Why didn't I give myself enough time to get set up? What's wrong with me?”

But that was a minor thing. It was peacetime and he was a skipper of a squadron at sea. He was still sending paperwork back to the JOs covered in red, but he let other things slide. The Prowlers had high-frequency radios capable of reaching Japan from 500 miles away. There, calls could be bounced home to wives and Navy personnel officers with news of next assignments. Soon, other squadrons were scrambling for backseat rides in the Prowler so they could call home. Dad let it go as long as mission accomplishments were still being met. He was a hard-ass, but not an asshole.

The menu letter was dated November 19, nine days and 1,500 miles from Diego Garcia. Everyone was just running out the clock. Ordnance was loaded off and empty ammunition stores were filled with recently purchased stereo equipment, wooden plates for the wives, and black market Adidas for the kids.

But then President Carter ordered the
Kitty Hawk
to head for the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf. The
Midway
was already there, but Carter and the Joint Chiefs thought two carriers camped off the Iranian coast might persuade the ayatollah to let the hostages go, or at least educate him that there would be a lethal price to pay if they came to harm. So stereo equipment was dumped overboard and bombs were reloaded. The decision came so quickly that some pilots learned the
Kitty Hawk
was pulling out when they watched the ship leave the harbor from their hotel rooms. That's the night Dad called me from the Cubi Point BOQ bar and said he was sorry.

Dad and the Black Ravens flew their Prowlers onto the boat on November 21. They wouldn't fly again until November 28. The reason for the no-fly days was simple: the
Kitty Hawk
was trucking toward the Gulf at maximum speed, and there was no time for turning into the wind and all the other things the carrier needed to do to facilitate landing and takeoffs.

The
Kitty Hawk
then made a clandestine detour that would determine the location of Dad's last flight. Once the
Kitty Hawk
battle group—consisting of the carrier, a cruiser, two destroyers, and a supply frigate—passed through the Strait of Malacca south of Singapore they didn't head directly west toward the Strait of Hormuz, the gateway to the Gulf. Instead, the
Kitty Hawk
dipped 700 miles south toward Diego Garcia, a spit of an island in the Indian Ocean that served as a British air base. The reason was simple: the
Kitty Hawk
needed to pick up six RH-53D Sea Stallion helicopters for use in a possible rescue mission.

President Carter wanted to get the helos onboard without word funneling back to Tehran via the Soviet spy trawlers that habitually shadowed American carriers during the cold war. Naval Command ordered the
Kitty Hawk
to go “dark,” cutting off radio communications and most of its radar capabilities, anything that might help the Soviets track the ships.

The
Kitty Hawk
's CAG added an extra wrinkle: launched jets wouldn't use their radios except in absolute emergencies. More important, pilots would fly with their radar altimeters turned off. All Navy planes had two devices that read their altitude. There was the barometer altimeter, the hoary old instrument used since before World War II to judge altitude by tracking barometric pressure. But the radar altimeter was far more precise: a “ping” sent from the plane's belly would bounce off land or sea and give an accurate altitude reading. Of course, if you were an A-4 Skyhawk escorting bombers at 12,000 feet, a precise reading of your altitude wasn't all that important. But if you were flying at low levels, a faulty altimeter reading could mean the difference between death and life.

November 28 was set as the day the
Kitty Hawk
would restart air operations. (The helos from Diego Garcia would be flown aboard in the afternoon.) The only aircraft scheduled to fly low and fast that day was an EA-6B Prowler flown by my father.

T
he last thirty-six hours of Dad's life were typical Navy, serious, idiotic, and lonely. The
Kitty Hawk
crossed the equator in the small hours of November 27. This meant there would be a Wog Day, a shellback initiation in the morning for first-time crossers. The tradition dates back to the seventeenth-century British Navy and has mellowed in the modern Navy. But in the 1970s, it was still fairly brutal, a rite of passage where bones might be broken. Dad met with the squadron at 5:00 a.m. in Ready Room 5 for the festivities. He watched as first-time crossers—pollywogs—were clad in shorts with underwear on the outside. First, they were blindfolded and then covered in Crisco, gravy, and whatever else viscous was on hand. Then they were run up and down ladders and passageways and whipped with fire hoses and screamed at until they bled from their knees and elbows and ears.

The wogs reached the flight deck only to meet another gauntlet of punches and paddling from shellback vets. They finally reached the throne of Neptune, a crusty thirty-year chief petty officer with the most equatorial crossings. The wogs kissed his belly and it was over.

Dad watched from the flight deck and laughed as his young men stripped off their stained clothes, tossed them into the ocean, and got a fire hose shower.

He did paperwork in the afternoon and had an early dinner. Around 8:00 p.m., he briefed with his XO, Zeke Zardeskas, and his electronic warfare officer, Lieutenant Commander Bill Coffey, about the next day's flight.

The
Kitty Hawk
's air wing was operating under the assumption that there was a strong possibility of an air strike against Iran, particularly if any of the hostages were executed. The fact that Iran had been an American ally just a year earlier created some problems. The Iranians had American-made Hawk antiaircraft missiles, the precursor to the Patriot missile, and mobile launch sites with sophisticated tracking equipment. The Navy had piles of tactics and battle plans for destroying Soviet-made SAMs, but no one had come up with a plan for defeating an American missile.

The Prowler's pods were set to jam the frequencies used by Soviet radar stations and SAMs, but Hawks were at a completely different bandwidth. Zeke took the pods off and recalibrated them so the Black Ravens would be covered. Dad and Zeke both agreed the best way to defend against the Hawk was to fly in low and fast below enemy radar. When they arrived in-country, they would pop up to 20,000 feet, above Hawk missile range, and begin jamming. A-6 Intruder bombers would follow as soon as Iranian radars were reading a blizzard of snow. Zeke and the technicians made adjustments to the jamming pods, but that didn't make them battle ready. The pods were temperamental and susceptible to falling offline when set at unfamiliar frequencies.

That meant the Prowlers had to be taken out for a rigorous test drive. Dad decided that as skipper he should take the first Prowler out with the new specs. There was an added wrinkle: The
Kitty Hawk
had intelligence that Soviet trawlers were just north of the carrier. So Dad filed a flight plan that would take his Prowler south of the
Kitty Hawk
. He planned to keep his plane low and close to the ocean, minimizing chances that Soviet radar could pick up his movements.

Bill Coffey, the squadron's top electronic warfare officer, requested to be subbed in for Lieutenant Steve Underriter. Dad agreed that was a good idea. That night, the squadron gathered in the ready room and watched
The Champ
with Jon Voight and Ricky Schroder. The projector jittered and jumped, a sign that the
Kitty Hawk
was hauling at its maximum of 28 knots. Dad headed back to his stateroom around midnight. At 1:15 a.m., he wrote a letter to Mom.

Nobody is more disappointed than me that we're not on our way home—but it's part of the reason we were out here in the first place . . .

The letter closed, as always, with a message of devotion:

I love you Barbara, and want to be with you always. I will be with you sometime soon and we will make up for all the days and nights we missed. I am thinking of you constantly and am waiting to hold you in my arms and kiss your wonderful lips and feel your body around me. Just knowing you love me and are waiting for me makes it all worthwhile. Take good care of yourself and we'll all be together soon.

All my love forever, Pete.

By the time he finished the letter it was almost 2:00 a.m. He woke six hours later and made his way to the flight deck for the Black Ravens cruise picture, scheduled long ago when they thought they were almost home. The photographer positioned them in front of Prowler 626, the plane Dad would fly later in the day. The sky above was an endless blue and the water was glassy and clear. Dad stood to the left, a step separated from his men. He looked gaunt and exhausted.

The men returned to the ready room and shot the shit for a while. Dad had early chow with Zeke and then briefed his flight. Coffey would be in the back monitoring the pods with Lieutenant James Bradley Brown, the husband of Cathy Brown, who lived behind us in Crosswoods.

In the front seat, Dad put Lieutenant John Chorey, a soft-spoken redhead who had become an ECMO after washing out of the pilot program after some hairy moments around the boat in an A-4. He was a quiet guy with a beautiful blond wife and a baby boy at home. He had just 300 hours in the Prowler, by far the fewest in the crew. Chorey had received an earful from Dad after he misspelled his name on a flight schedule, so he tried to keep out of Dad's way. Placing him in the front seat was counterintuitive but standard Navy: the only way a rookie gets experience is to play the game.