Time Flying (28 page)

As hard as going off to war is for officers, all of us college degreed and to a certain extent, mature, experienced and reliable professionals, for enlisted personnel, the job proved even tougher. They were, for the most part, immature kids from small towns who up until they left for basic training, hadn't spent much time more than 20 miles from when they grew up. Whatever their expectations, their experience in the Navy rarely matched them. Life onboard a naval vessel was cramped, noisy and smelly, and unlike us, they didn't get to get off of the boat every day and experience the wide open sky and sea we got to see from the cockpit of our aircraft. We tried our best to help those kids cope with the constant stream of communication from home, where those who remained stateside complained about problems the sailors were unable to do anything about, successes and troubles their children had they couldn't share in, and of course, the breakups. As hard as we tried though, our arsenal against all of these problems didn’t really amount to much. Though they always requested to be shipped home to take care of the problem, that almost never happened. So, the problems remained on the ship. Hell for us would have been being on the ship without the ability to fly from time to time, even if flight meant getting shot at in the process.

The trap at the end of our first mission was textbook, and by the time Pat and I got to the squadron's ready room, we were happy and proud we'd been among the first to strike a serious blow against Saddam. I didn’t think VA-145 lost any aircraft in the war, but my being here was a bit of a wildcard in the hand. Whoever flew in the right seat of Pat's Intruder during the war in my other timeline (if in fact Pat flew in the war at all, since his career was tied to mine, and another B/N could conceivably have helped move his flying career in a direction away from combat missions in the Gulf in 1991), might have made different decisions. Maybe those decisions led to different people in different jobs in different aircraft, and perhaps all those changes would mean this timeline's Swordsmen Squadron wouldn't escape being part of the “butcher's bill” in the conflict. Those possibilities often made me shudder, and work hard to change my thought patterns.

The next couple weeks proved exhausting, and we realized the qualification rush at the beginning of the cruise had been nothing compared to what followed. We had to plan every mission as if the war depended on our actions, because, as our instructors over the months and years of our training had told us, a poorly planned mission could end your career…and life.

That's not to say life on the ship didn’t have a rhythm. We got more confident, more assured in how we did our jobs, and even more objective about the anti-aircraft fire we experienced as we flew to our targets. Sometimes no AA would bother us, but other times, opposition would be thick, almost as if Saddam's forces were on-again, off-again in their commitment to the Iraqi war effort. The truth being materials, weapons and ammunition had to be shuffled around to where the enemy thought they were needed. Sometimes, the Iraqi war planners projected correctly, sometimes they didn’t. When they were right, we had more streaks of tracers reaching out for us, but when the planners missed, we were even more on edge, flying through the quiet darkness, waiting for the night to explode into a universe of AA tracers.

I don't know if the fact my real age was some 40 years older than my squadron mates helped or not, but though we all grew older during these weeks of conflict, I don't think I changed all that much. Looking back on those days, I guess I wasn't worried about dying, because I assumed I'd wake up in 2007 when something ended my life. 

Pat tried several times to get me to talk about my problems with Amanda, but I didn't want to discuss it, partly because I didn't really want to hear my friend's overly simplistic black/white judgement about it, but mainly, I think, because I was Pat's “baseline.” I think he always measured how much of a risk to take by how much it scared me. My friend tried to live in the area marked from what I would do to just over the horizon of what terrified me. So, I didn't want him worrying about the psychological stability of his baseline in a time of war. Too much rode on both of us operating at maximum effectiveness, so I kept my mouth shut about my time travel.

At times through this experience when I have been certain I was insane, that all my thoughts of time travel, and another life that didn't include Amanda and the boys and the Navy were all an elaborate hallucination. I have to admit, the fact I had memories of being married to, and having a child with an increasingly famous TV news anchor didn't help dissuade me from thinking I'd lost my mind. I didn't want to talk to Pat about the situation, so I couldn't ask him if I had imagined the meeting with my old friend and now Naval Flight Surgeon Walt Steinberg in Pensacola. None of the doctors on
Ranger
knew Walt either, so at times I grew increasing suspicious of the whole thing. I’m sure a lot of my uncertainty was due to the weird, detached-from-the-world perspective you had serving on a warship far away from home. Keep in mind too, the internet hadn't arrived in full force yet, so communication with home, at least the non-emergency kind warranting a satellite phone call, had more in common with World War Two than with the second Gulf war, where a soldier could get a text from his wife with a picture of the family taken seconds before at Sea World. A lot of time separated 1991 from 2007.

The doubts about the reality of what I had been experiencing since 1976 had been persistent. Those doubts ended forever on an overcast day in January of 1991.

On
Ranger
's fantail, still in my flight gear, getting some air after a particularly hairy mission, I stood, by myself, unwinding. A paperwork snafu gave us old intel, and I had a bitch of a time finding our target, since BDAs (Bomb Damage Assessments) had been misfiled. Our intel guys didn't know to update the recon pictures we used to plan the mission, and over the target coordinates, I sweated buckets in the boot, trying to make sense of the landscape below and isolate the local command/control point on our attack orders. The target was embedded in a mixed-use area, and I didn't want to drop on anything except the target, not wanting to endanger civilians, especially kids.

Pat rode my ass hard over this, because at the time, we hadn’t figured out we had been given bad intel, and loitering too long over a target you couldn't find got you killed. By the time we figured out the pictures were old, we received permission to proceed to our alternate target, which thankfully, we'd been briefed correctly for, and dropped. Our flight back to
Ranger
was similar to our return from the strike the first night of the war, but this time, the silence had been an awkward, rather than exhausted one. 4 hours later we both laughed about it, because in war anything that doesn't kill you is made into a joke. At the time, though, both Pat and I were mad at Lt. (JG) Brett Wiley, our junior intel officer, not so much for screwing up our mission plan by supplying old intel, but for doing something that got in between us. Plus, Pat and I both were mad at Pat for going apeshit on me while I tried to do my job, and I think he had been more mad at himself than anything else.

Flying combat missions are almost always sweat-inducing, but this one soaked me to the bone, and since the tight flying schedule didn’t give me time to get my flight suit cleaned, I decided to try and air it out on the fantail. I didn't want company, and so stood in an out-of-the-way alcove, arms crossed, trying to discern where the steel-gray sky ended and the currently steel-gray water began. I couldn't tell.

Around the corner on the main platform of the fantail, a sailor, relaxed, and since he hadn’t just returned from a stressful couple hours flying in a huge multi-million dollar weapon turned target, lingering dangerously behind enemy lines, he appeared to be a bit more relaxed than I, as he sang acapella in a clear voice...A pretty good voice, too, I thought, as I began softly humming the song. 

The lyrics of the song suggested not worrying about being caught cheating, about the singer not being worried, and neither should the woman he wooed. He begs her to “follow him, because everything’s all right.”

But something wasn’t right. I haven’t heard the song in years, I thought, and loved the tune, if not exactly the message. Uncle Kracker recorded, and I believe, wrote the song, but something didn’t seem right...Alarms sounded in my head as I listened to the singer more carefully.

Don’t be worried…I’m not, and you should be either… 

What wasn’t right about this?

Holy shit. Uncle Kracker. The song won't come out for at least another 10 years, and as a musician, I knew for a fact it wasn’t a cover, and Uncle Kracker composed and recorded “Follow Me.” I thought back. When did I first listen to the song? I possessed a knack for associating pop songs with what was going on in my life, where I worked at the time, and what was going on in the world around me when I first listened to them.  “Follow Me” came out in 2000, 2001, 2002 at the latest.

A few feet from me stood a sailor singing a song that wouldn't be written for 10 years, melody, lyric and all, which meant one of two things:

Either Uncle Kracker served in the Navy during the first Gulf War, and stood on the fantail of the USS
Ranger
, writing songs right now. Or...

I had found another time traveler.

I rounded the corner and realized I would need to modify one of those two possibilities. Either Uncle was in reality, a young, thin black man, not the tattoo’d redneck former Kid Rock sidekick or...

Another time traveler served on
Ranger
.

“I love that song,” I said when he had finished and was in the process of lighting a cigarette, cupping his hand to shield the flame from the breeze.

Forgetting the cigarette for a moment, a startled sailor named Jeff Campbell, I found out later, turned toward me, a flash of panic on his face, but quickly realizing it had been an officer addressing him, stiffened up, coming to attention, his eyes locked forward, arms at his side, the now forgotten lighter and cigarette both discreetly tucked in different hands. “Yes, SIR, Commander!” he snapped.

Interesting.
“At ease, sailor,” I responded. “Finish your smoke.”

“Aye, aye sir,” he said, relaxing a bit.

“How long have you been in?” I asked, walking to the fantail railing and leaning against it, my right hand on the gun metal gray rail, my left holding my flight helmet at my side.

I heard him take a deep breath and answer “8 months, Commander.”

“Bullshit.” 

“Sir?” He asked, concern creeping into his voice.

“You look to me like a lifer, sailor,” I quietly replied.

“Maybe, sir,” he cautiously replied.

“Follow me…” I said, turning to regard the young sailor, still facing away from the water side of the fantail, but more or less at ease. The expression on his face showed puzzlement, as if he wondered if I intended to lead him to the brig.

I laughed a short chuckle. “The
song
.
Follow Me
.” From the side, I detected his eyes widening the tiniest bit. “Written by Uncle Kracker in...2001 or so.”

At this, his eyes closed and he sighed, but said nothing. He turned to face me, his eyes, open again, but hooded and suspicious. “ And how would you know that, sir?”

I smiled a small, but reassuring smile and answered “I suspect, the same way you do. I heard it on the radio.” He nodded. Didn't return my smile, but acknowledged what neither of us wanted to say out loud. The expression on his face had turned from suspicion to dread. 

“Nothing to worry about, Seaman…” I said, walking around in front of him to check out the name on his blue shirt. “…Campbell. As I said, it’s a good song.” I casually returned to the railing extending above our heads, designed to keep sailors from tumbling off the back of the ship in bad weather, or maybe jumping off in the lonely, middle part of a non-wartime cruise. I put my left booted foot up on one of the lower bars and sighed, looking at the gray than encircled us.

Seaman (First Class, I found out) Campbell relaxed a little and came to stand a comfortable distance from me. A little familiar for a fresh swabbie, but how I would expect a seasoned veteran of the Navy who had spent much of his life at sea to act.

“How long have you been back?” I asked, sure he would understand the question.

“It’s been about eight months, sir. I Woke up in ‘Basic’ at Great Lakes,” he replied, referring to the Navy's Basic Training facility on Lake Michigan, where new recruits went to learn how to live a life at sea.

I nodded without saying anything. Campbell took a long drag on his now lit cigarette and blew the smoke out of the right side of his mouth, politely keeping the cloud away from me.

He contemplated on the cigarette and with a wry grin, said, “When I first got back, I swore I'd quit these things before they got their hold on me again.” He shook his head and took another drag. “Oh well…” He finished, flicking the half-finished cigarette off the back of the ship, another move a new recruit would never try in front of an officer, he asked “How long have
you
been here, sir?”

I kept my eyes fixed ahead, into the gray and said flatly, “15 years.”

“Holy shit…” he exclaimed, adding a hasty “sorry, sir,” for cursing in front of an officer. I waved his apology off.

“Yea, Chief, you may be here a long time,” I said.

“Chief? Sir, I'm a Seaman, First Class, not a Chief,” he corrected me.

I laughed. “Right. Were you still in before you came here, or retired?” I asked.

Campbell glanced around, making sure we were alone, no one able to overhear what we said. “Retired. Living in Chicago with my daughter, and…” He suddenly appeared embarrassed as his eyes darted to mine. The sailor paused, finishing the sentence clearly difficult for him.

“I fell down the stairs.” The silence that followed seemed to be a mixture of respectfulness and a fight against the urge to break out laughing.