Newsmakers

(Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, Angel of the Battlefield, and newsmaker in Culpeper County. Photo Mathew Brady).

 

I read the Culpeper Times this morning at the farm. I drove the silver Panzer down late yesterday to put the vehicle through its paces, and was generally pleased with the performance. It will take a while to get used to, after the powerful Hubrismobile, but sitting up higher with the rest of the SUVs is nice, and if six cylinders do not produce the kick in the pants that the mighty CLK500 delivered with eight, so be it.

 

The morning coffee was good and I had the satellite radio in the farmhouse cranked up. It is nice to be noisy with only the squirrels and the bunnies to bother.

 

The Culpeper Times is not a morning paper- it comes once a week, and is your usual local small town news. But I feel something that resonates as something unique and American.

 

The front page included an update on the Colonel Awards by the County Board of Supervisors, and a native son bursting into song. A photo and text box in an adjoining story announced that a real Colonel, albeit retired, would be visiting The Raven’s Nest coffee house in town to hold a public forum. Apparently Wayne Powell has been convinced to be the sacrificial lamb for the Democrats opposing incumbent Republican Eric Cantor, the Republican Majority Leader in the House of Representatives.

 

The Colonel reminds me a little of my pal Old Jim, who ran against Marion Barry for Mayor of the District- a quixotic but sincere attempt to ensure that the concept of democracy has to actually be put through its paces.

 

There was a story about the cop who shot that woman and is now being tried for murder, a salacious account that filled the space above-the-fold and extended treatment inside section one. The officer says his arm was caught in the car window of the victim, and he shot seven times in self-defense.

 

There is some strange stuff out in the country, just as there is back in the big city. I am thankful there is not as much of it.

 

The interesting thing about the paper was the other stories on the front page. The Washington Post and the New York Times I read on a normal morning are mostly about news as political and public advocacy. With the exception of a couple token op-ed players, both institutions should have their versions of the news printed in Blue ink.

 

Not that the Culpeper rag shouldn’t be printed in Red- but the issues are generally smaller and more personal. Like, can you imagine that Clara Barton made the front page? She has been in her grave a few months more than a century, and has not been making much news since then. Well, let me put a caveat on that.

 

Clara is still a presence in these parts. Up north, in Fairfax County, where I used to live, she established a field hospital on the grounds of a local white wooden house of worship to accommodate the casualties from the Second Battle of Bull Run. And she briefly popped up in the Washington Post when the papers of her Office of Missing Soldiers turned up in the attic of a building at 437 Seventh Street, NW, in the Gallery Place neighborhood of the District. Her last home, in the Maryland suburbs of the capital, has been preserved in her memory.

 

She was a remarkable woman. She became known as The Angel of the Battlefield through the conflict, and in the peace that followed the defeat of the Confederacy, she set about trying to locate the soldiers who had vanished without a trace in the fierce and sweeping conflagration. Some of those soldiers went missing right here, which is why this week Clara is front-page news in Culpeper County.

 

In 1860, Culpeper was largely composed of trees and small family farms. The vast majority of Culpeper farmers had no slaves, though it is clear that the Winston family and a few other large land-owners who held much of the land around the current Refuge Farm did.

 

African-Americans in bondage formed a 52% majority of the County population, though of course that number came with the Constitution’s fractional means of representing the peculiar institution’s enslaved people for electoral and non-representational purposes.

 

The Times tells me it was a  “harmonious place,” though I have my doubts about that.

 

The presidential election of 1860 was as emotional as this one, if not more so. The campaign produced four candidates: Republican Abraham Lincoln, whose platform included unity and limitations on the expansion of slavery, Democrat Stephen Douglas, who was of the opinion that the new western territories should be allowed to decide the slavery issue for themselves, ‘Southern’ Democrat John C. Breckinridge, an unabashed proponent of slavery, and finally Constitutional Unity Party candidate John Bell, who wished for unity above all other issues.

 

Fractured along a multi-party contest, the result of the election that long-gone November was that Abraham Lincoln won the White House with less than 40 percent of the popular vote nationwide.

 

The vote in Culpeper was not that close. Bell took 526 votes; Breckenridge 525; Douglass 19; and Lincoln tallied 0.

 

It is a curious thing to place the politics of the generations alongside one another. The Republicans of that era presented a change that the County did not believe in. That election led inevitably to the greatest conflict in this nation’s history, and more directly to Culpeper’s deadliest day. The anniversary of the 1862 Battle of Cedar Mountain was this week, and some stories are so big that they resonate over the centuries. They certainly do from this little farm- the point of conflict is just off Rt. 15, about five miles away, and the troops would have swept over whoever was there then.

 

Major General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson had 22,000 Rebels in the field opposing 12,000 Union troops under the command of Major General John Pope’s Army of Virginia. These Yankees were in their first battle, and they acquitted themselves well. It is said this was the only time “Stonewall” Jackson ever had to draw his sword. The fight was intense, and resulted a narrow victory for the Confederates who had the home-field advantage.

 

Three thousand men were killed or wounded right here. In the five hours of the battle, the casualties surpassed US combat losses in a decade in Afghanistan.

 

This was Clara Barton’s first trip to ‘See the Elephant,’ as the troops called it then. She said later the fight at Cedar Mountain was where she “broke the shackles and went to the field.” She stayed there through the rest of the Second Bull Run (Manassas) campaigns and on to the end of the war. She went from battle to battle, always bringing in needed supplies and nursing the wounded soldiers of both sides.

 

She several times barely escaped injury or death from shells landing on the battlefields or the hospitals, but she never stopped her work. She founded the American Red Cross, among other good works, and I throw them some money when something awful happens.

 

I toss some to the Civil War Preservation Trust, too. The collapse of the housing bubble has made some of the disappearing rural property affordable, and the Trust is pretty good about scooping up land on which the blood was spilled in the interest of future generations, who might contemplate how swiftly things can lurch out of control and into chaos.

 

I sent the Trust a donation to help preserve several historically important features of the battlefield where Clara served: the Gate, the wheat field, and the monument erected during the war on the spot where Rebel General Charles Sidney Winders was killed.

(Confederate Brigadier Winders, late of the U.S. Army. Photo Wikipedia).

 

The site also affords views over large portions of the battlefield under private ownership and is reportedly a terrific site for birding, too. On my way back North, I am going to drive the Panzermobile over there and feel what the weather might have been like in August of a summer long ago.

 

I will not be wearing itchy woolen clothes, nor humping a pack with sweat born of stark fear rolling down between my shoulder blades.

 

But it is pretty country, and one that remembers.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

 

 

Ragtops

I retreated from politics into autos yesterday, and got rid of what may be my last ragtop. That is sort of an abrupt introduction, I know, but this has been an issue percolating since the endless series of road trips to The Little Village By the Bay two or three years ago.

 

Both kinds of government were after me. The Westin Hotel next to our office building was hosting a campaign function for Veep Candidate Paul Ryan. We see the politicians a lot in Arlington; Hillary had her Presidential campaign HQ in an adjacent building, so we are accustomed to having Secret Service in the alley next door, but I thought it would be a good day to “work from home.”

 

I had been on tap to drive my pal Mac to the hospital for his radiation treatment, but he sent me a note in the morning that his neighbor at The Madison had to be at the hospital around the same time as his appointment, and they had arranged for independent transportation. The vast interior of the Ford Crown Vic P-71 Police Cruiser was perfect to handle Mac’s walker, or a wheelchair, if it came to that.

 

But with Mac’s transportation needs covered, there actually was no reason to go to the office at all, except for the promo check from my credit union that I discovered in my in-basket this week offering me an insultingly good offer of almost free money for a car loan at 1.9%.

 

The car thing was on The List in this year of lists: estate, business, health, all with little tick marks as I relentlessly moved down through them.

 

Bury parents. Check.

Settle and distribute estate. Check.

Have surgery to fix leg. Check.

Stat walking again. Check. 

Refinance properties. Check. 

Get rid of that wonderful expensive convertible. My pencil hovered above it. “Check,” I thought, or “Not to Check.”

 

I did my homework on Kelly Blue Books. The Hubrismobile was worth around $17k on the hoof, and that was a decent down-payment on whatever the follow-on was going to be.

 

I loved that last ragtop, just as I did the five before that; the ’67 Canary-yellow Ambassador; the ’72 Beetle, the ’99 champagne Sebring, and the three Mercs- the ’73 350SL, an SLK-320 and the CLK500.

I loved all of them, to one degree or another, and they all had their quirks and reasons for replacement. I gave the Sebring to my older boy when he graduated from college, smelled pungent gas fumes from the old 350SL, and trading up from the SLK-320 because it was too small. The CLK500 had seating for four, and was about the sweetest ride I ever saw- and at $56,000 to drive off the lot, the most expensive car, much less used car, I ever bought. It probably will be the most expensive one I ever owned- I think they listed new at over $80K for the 2004 model.

 

Replacing the Hubrismobile was on the list of things that passed through my days of recuperation. It was the year of lists, as you recall, following a year of lists: doing the books for Mom and Dad, paying off the contractors on the household reconstruction, paying the rental fees to the Hertz corporation for rentals to flog up the Turnpikes on the way to Michigan.

 

That, I think, is when I resolved that my ragtop days were done, at least for a while. I was driving into snow and ice, and needed storage room to haul crap. Owning the Bluesmobile convinced me I could be happy in a big piece of iron with a top that did not do anything but keep the rain off, and could absorb dings and dents with equanimity.

 

Of the rental cars, I liked the Caddy cross-over, and the Infinity, and the GLK350 from our German pals. So, that went on the list. The CLK500 was a 2004 model. I kept the miles off it pretty well- it had less than 40K in eight years of service, but we were sliding into Year Nine, and the belts and hoses were starting to get long in the tooth. I had replaced the tires- how do you go through a set of performance tires in 20,000 miles?

 

I wonder about who had the car when it was new and on lease. The big maintenance events were multi-thousand dollar encounters with the Service Department; I was always paranoid about getting dings and dents, and I was driving it the weekend of the accident at the farm, which left me barely able to crawl out to the ragtop and get myself into it for the drive back to medical attention.

 

It was flat impossible to get into once I had my leg encased in that brace, and as far as slinging the wheelchair or even the crutches into the back seat, forget about it. The other thing was that it completely sucked to drive it in the snow. Rear-wheel drive with a honking big German V8, it was sleek and powerful, and utterly worthless in the thick wet white stuff.

 

So, I had a bunch of money sunk in a vehicle that I drove only in the summer, and which was phenomenally expensive to maintain and was off warranty. As much as I loved it, it was becoming a burden that occupied the single only garage parking spot. I was on the American Service Center web page to get an appointment for the annual safety inspection, and the oil change, and all that, and idly clicked through the inventory of certified used SUVs.

 

There it was. A GLK350 4Matic all-wheel drive that will perform in the snow and ice. 2010, with an available extended warranty, good through 2016. This might be the last car. I dunno. Anyway, I took my paperwork to the office and hung out for a while, then drove the Cabriolet down to the dealer and got rid of it.

 

Sad. Last ragtop? Maybe. But as it fades in the rear-view of the SUV, I salute its muscular beauty.

 

The GLK350 is a beauty in its own right, and great for hauling crap around- which is just what I need for this next phase of life.

 

 

As I drove off the lot in the SUV, I opened the Panzerkampfwagen’s sun-roof and cranked up the satellite radio. A moderately-sized trash hauler, suitable for hauling around my junk.

 

The government provided another adventure when I got the new ride back to Big Pink. I won’t bore you with that, but the upshot was that I was not going to go for a swim, but rather head for a government facility to see a mysterious communication that could only be read on a Government machine.

 

Damn. I glanced at the clock and realized that if everything went well, I could get to the facility, badge myself in, find an unoccupied terminal and retrieve the message, which would have to be printed and if classified, double wrapped and packaged for removal.

 

Except that I knew my password would be expired, and something else undoubtedly would go wrong.

 

It did, but I was content with the rest of the day. I drove the Bluesmobile, to the Government site, unwilling to have the new car get dented in the employee lot.

 

Wait, I thought, have I been down this road before?

 

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

 

 

Visions of Johanna

(The younger Bob expresses his views of the car keys in “Visions of Johanna.” Photo Robert Zimmerman.)

I have inflicted enough on you. Re-cycling is something I believe in, but the process of transforming long-ago manuscript into modern digital screeds is harder than I thought. So, for now we will leave the Good Ship Midway and her merry pirate crew as they were in those days, when the South China Sea was an American lake, and the Mercedes Mullahs were just getting started on the Shia paradise.

I am done with that for a while, as I am sure you must be gratified. When the October Surprise happens, we can turn our attention to the volatile region again.

t was a quiet day here. Since we left for 1980, things have changed dramatically here in the present and recent past. Doc “Elvin” Hayes pronounced me healed a week ago this morning, which filled me with a sense of triumph that lasted all the way home. No more Walter Reed, and the queasy feeling looking at the kids who have suffered such devastating wounds in combat with the latest generation of jihadis.

In honor of being cured, I have been back in the office, and that brings a remarkable sense of liberation. I got all the way through the in-basket yesterday in preparation for a meeting with a small business concern whose owners wish to join our team on that new contract we won, but which is under protest and actual business is a ways down the road.

(Hubris in motion. Photo M-B.)

I made an appointment to get the Hubrismobile into the shop for the annual safety inspection. They are very automated and Germanic over there, and the web-site is not particularly user-friendly, though I have noticed a trend in the auto business that your car maintenance history is online- no reason to keep those thick sheaves of paper records in a folder anymore.

They were bugging me to get the inspection- this new wired age is something else- but I also realized the inspection does not expire until September, and rushing over to change the oil and get the inspection should wait until September to stretch out the next year, and then I looked at the mileage and saw I have put less than a thousand miles on the car since the Spring oil change, and then I read a long post from a pal out West about the coming Snowmageddon winter on the East Coast due to the La Nina conditions in the Pacific.

Then I thought that I am not going to drive in the winter, and if I am thinking about retiring in the next few years, and then I thought, WTF, what am I keeping an inventory of cool exotic cars for anyway?

Isn’t that crazy ’91 hot-rod Sylcone pickup truck enough? That is parked in the garage down at the farm and I haven’t even started it this season. I wondered whether it was time for a new ride, something practical but grimly efficient as a Panzerkampfwagen.

(German panzer styling. Photo M-B.)

The dealer has a certified 2010 GLK-350 4Matic SUV with all the bells and whistles on it- 19K on the odometer- for $32K- and I found a 1.9% offer for a car loan from my credit union. Maybe I will swing by this weekend and look at swapping out the Hubris vibe for that of a Panzer and thought about swapping the flashy convertible for something that works in the snow and rain. It may not do 140 clicks on the autobahn, but I am pretty much done with that, too, plus the tiny trunk is constricting.

The SUV can haul crap, and with whatever is coming, that might be a good thing. Plus, the Hubrismobile is an ‘04 model, and that is getting on toward a decade old. Plus the 2014 models are all going to have that automated tracking stuff on them by Federal mandate and I am not interested.

(The Bluesmobile at the Brandy Station battlefield. Photo Socotra.)

That was one of the things I was thinking of as I got in the Bluesmobile and headed over to Willow for the business meeting. I love that old Ford police car. It is bedraggled, low-maintenance, and thoroughly efficient in an old-school way.

It is Restaurant Week, so we sat outside and let the civilians fill the place up. John-with-an-H is hanging out at Screwtop these days, and Old Jim is boycotting the place based on grounds of personal integrity. Jon-without, minus the lovely Bea, cruised by, the only regular who still is.

We enjoyed some happy hour white and my business associates drank a bottle of red with one of Kate Jansen’s superb signature flatbread pizzas.

I looked at the watch and felt bad that the hour-long swim kinda got lost in the noise.

Plus, there was one last summer thing to take care of. Johanna, the Polish Lifeguard, was sitting in at the pool for Konrad, this year’s regular, who is in New York or something immersing his tanned, chiseled body in the American Experience before going back to Mittleurope for school in the Fall.

Johanna was our regular guard three years ago, and I wanted to say goodbye, since she is taking off next week for university back home and I may not see her again in this life. I had a little bottle of Absolut Vodka in the freezer, and I dropped that off with her once I got back from Willow in the growing darkness. She is Polish, after all, and the vodka was welcome.

I can feel the season changing. It is dark now long before the gate clangs closed for the day. I sat at the Guard’s table since there was no one there and I took a cocktail down in a thermal mug, just like old times, and smoked right there.

We chatted for a while, I took a plunge, and luxuriated in the cool water. I did not swim for an hour- not even close, but I wanted Johanna to be able to close up early if she wanted and gave her a kiss on the cheek and wished her a most pleasant life if I don’t see her again.

A little seasonal pre-melancholy as we move the deck chairs toward Autumn. Another step back toward normalcy after the surgery, and another change of seasons. I slept like a log, but had a disquieting dream about German SUVs.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Gonzo Epilogue

On Gonzo Station, Part Ten

OK, I lied. This is even stranger than I thought. As it turns out, the original version of the Air Show story was buried in a binder in the archives. This will be the dance-off for this story, which is very much “TBD” as we wait to see if Syria, Iran, Israel and Saudi Arabia contribute to an October Surprise that could influence the US Presidential election. That would be the continuation of what is now a long story, one that has stumbled forward long enough that my sons in the business are now eligible to be part of the fight. I am not going to tell the story of EAGLE CLAW, the rescue attempt to spring the hostages from the Iranian students. It was the first real Special Operations Command operation that Dean-the-Dream helped to plan, and which went so horribly awry on 24 April 1980.

Midway was in dry dock in Yokosuka and I was long gone. In fact, I had made it back to America and was headed west again through San Francisco for my next duty station in sunny Seoul, Republic of South Korea. The news hit me pretty hard, but I got on the airplane to the Peninsula anyway.

That was a long time ago. The word is that someone is going to do something again just as bold in concept at EAGLE CLAW. I don’t know if it will happen, or whether it will be the October Surprise that people have been talking about as a wild card in the election. I guess we will see, won’t we?

As always, archaic terms should be read in the context of their times and are retained only for historical accuracy.

THE GREAT GONZO AIR SHOW

It was incredible. The last brief had gone down. For me, anyway.

Call it a crisis. I talked about how fucked up oil Minister Moinfar is, His disastrous policies and the inescapable ruin of Iran’s key industry.

I waxed long and persuasive on the possibilities of Bani Sadr. His motivations and his relations with us. . . the Great Satan.

I slipped in another arch reference to the latest in the series of atrocities in Afghanistan: the Russians who sat in their APCs and watched the loyal Afghan troops mowed down by the rebels.

Muffled shouts from inside the vehicles: “Long live the Socialist Revolution! Be proud to die for the New Model Revolution, cause we ain’t!” I noted to the captive audience wearing green smelly Nomex zoom bags and flight boots.

Oh, I was glib and funny, heavy on the irony as Ghotbzadeh assailed the Canadians for violating International Law in smuggling the six yanks out of Tehran. How do you smuggle Americans out of a hostile Muslim nation, I said? “It’s easy, You just teach them to say, “HI, I‘m from Windsor Ontario, eh …”

I covered the negligible operational stuff; 25 nautical mile closest point of approach to Iran, be cool, watch the meaconing, jamming and intrusion.

“India,” I said gravely, “means Mode IV if you are around Texas today. The ROE is exactly as it was graven upon the stone and brought down from the mountain by the Staff, and shouted, by we, it’s prophets through these last 80 days! And other than that, if there are no questions, Gentlemen, that is all l’ve got.

For once and for all.

Call it a Crisis, gentlemen, we’re outta here.

I covered my notes and the day was done. The briefing mantle slipped from my shoulders. No longer was I going to be the Voice of the World, the theoretically infallible speaker of the dooms and shouting about the huddled masses and their hostages, dancing in weird cadence. I am going to turn it over to Grits, that handsome, balding mountain of a man who will fill this vacuum.

Dean-the-Dream, the other half of the whirling circle of briefs, is history even as I write. He was a lucky one and flew off a couple weeks ago. All that terror and loathing, the tingle at the bottom of your guts that felt either like the spiders of amphetamines, or the realization that it was all real and going to come down on you in great brown glops.

So serious about facing our own weapons in the hands of the Islamic Republic: the improved Hawk missile- the dread I-HAWK- and the F-14 Tomcats- not to mention the awesome thrust of the Harpoon anti-ship missile popping up from the racing La Combatante patrol boats and hurtling toward Midway’s 02 level, and all those stereos and gimcracks we own.

All that I own. Fuck it, Gentlemen. We are gone.

One last evolution to perform is the Airshow. The Great Gonzo Station Airshow.

For the troops, to let the Snipes crawl up the long metal ladders from where the hunched demons whirl and steam floods like the white shroud of hell. So they can see why we were here for so long, and to so little purpose. A last evolution for the Voice of Airwing FIVE, to wit, me, to climb to the tower and sit in the Air Boss’s chair, and speak sweet platitudes from the I5 MC to the shutterbugs below.

No practice for this one.  Just load up the Mk 82s and go for it, Same script as usual, Part of the daily air plan, no sweat, Just do it, and off we go.

I get up early and listen to the brief. “Remember, more people have been killed in Airshows than in Combat. Be careful. If it doesn’t feel good, just don’t do it.

“Remember! Safety of Flight is paramount.” That line is one of my get-out-of-jail-free cards in the briefings. I am glad these briefs aren’t televised or recorded on video-tape.

The aircrews shuffle out. “Ya think the VT fuzing on the bombs is going to work?”

“Sure, why not?”

“Who is the spare and who is the Go? Give me your names so I can put it out on the P.A.” They tell me and I copy them down industriously. It doesn’t matter who is actually in the airplane, just so long as I have got the right number of names.

The weather is dog-shit. There is sand blowing from Iran. It blows so hard that there are discernible tracks on the flight deck as the aircraft pass.

Sand adheres to the paint finish on the birds. The horizon is not there. You can see up, but anything else vanishes into a haze blue at less than five nm. The Soviet IL—38s are in- bound again. Nimitz has got the intercept responsibility. It is starting out just fine.

WEAX just below min, the Soviets coming in the middle of it, We have been here too long. Suppose the unthinkable happened today, the last day? Jesus!

It is cold outside. The north wind has brought the chill of the Iranian winter with the sand. The sea is choppy and white capped. The deck is moving around. It is not like situation normal. The steps to Primary Flight Control are steep, and the long stint from not running leaves me breathless. The Air Boss and the Mini-Boss are hunched behind the console, looking down as the airplanes light the fires and prepare to go do it. It is surreal.

The Mk 82 500-lb bombs look gay with the varicolored tips, The A-6 Intruders seem as though they will never fly. Just two of the bug-eyed things can carry 22 of the MK-82s apiece. It is absurd that they will fold the improbable little hinged wings down and be hurled from the safety of the ship and not have them scatter everyone with glowing white hot death.

The Boss is in his element, Speakers are crackling around him, phones are ringing, the C.O. is buzzing. He grasps the I5 MC and screams for the Flight Deck Crew to get into complete Flight Deck Uniforms. I shuffle the script in my hands. The Il-38s are coming in fast.

One of the cats goes down with a fully loaded A-6 on it. It is something to do with the accumulator, which in turn has a relationship with the steam that drives the catapults from the bowels of the ship.

This is all so complex I am amazed it works so well.

Will the cat come back up in time for the launch? How much gas is in the air? No one seems to know.

CAG Ops turns to me and says “It looks like a great airshow. They will have to suspend the launch because the Russians will fly through the pattern, the starboard cat will stay down, and the weather will get worse.” He smiles his lean smile.

I clear my threat and light up another smoke.

The IL-38s appear out of the haze and fly across the stern, “Where are the F-14s? Did anyone see an F-14?” CAG Ops and I walk out on the Boss’s patio and watch the Russians disappear again into the sand cloud. I catch a wing flash somewhere above them.

“Looks like they are there, all right, but they sure gave the Rooskies some nice shots of Midway without a US Navy airplane in them.”

“Wonder what the Russian Photo Interpreters will think when they see all those MK-82s hung on the racks?“  We go back inside the island. The Launch is going on. The Intruder still sits on the starboard cat, but the C-2A has gone away and the E-2B is up and cooling down his system. The A—7s are lined up behind the JBDs waiting to go. Heavy shots for the bombers today. The Intruders will be going off at 57,000 pounds. Heavy.

At last they are all gone, and the starboard cat and the recalcitrant accumulator is working happily. The crowds are beginning to come up from below for the show.

Navy legend has it that on Ground Hog’s Day, if the Snipe sees his shadow, it means another six weeks on station. It is not a funny joke, but it provokes nervous titters of laughter from the seasoned killers. The IL-38’s come back, this time with the Tomcats stepped up on their wings as God and AIRPAC meant it to be.

They turn their wings in towards the ship in true airshow fashion. I am tempted to announce them, very professional in my disc-jockey voice: “And there you see it, gentlemen, the First event of the Gonzo Airshow, comes courtesy of Air Detachment  Bravo, out of Aden, and a part of Soviet Long Range  Aviation Squadron 27. The Pilot in command for today’s flyby is Flight Lt. Sergie Yomomasov, and his co-pilot is Ivan Belinko.”

I’m short, but I’m not that short. Larry, the departed CAG AI, had the same sort of situation when he was The Voice of the flight demonstration. The Sultan of Oman brought his Jaguars out to Play, and they roared past the ship with the Saudi Admirals waiting on the island catwalk.

C’est la vie, in the airshow business.

I get the Boss’s seat with four minutes to push. The monolog begins with 30 seconds to go, I smoke another cigarette in exactly three minutes, CAG Ops gives the count down on button six. The fighters finish tanking and check in. Time to roll. I push down the mike button and we’re off to the races.

There is a long introductory phase where I talk from the script about all the many splendored facets of Airwing FIVE and Midway team. I race through it a half the time, CAG Ops   tells me to slow it down.

The introductory shock is over and the show resumes a more sedate pace. I am just reaching the intro for Event One, when Event Three, Two and One motor by at fifteen second intervals, The Eagles of Attack Squadron 115 come by first in a diamond, with the KA-6D tanker in stately pursuit. The drogue is hanging thirty feet in front of the probe from the EA-6A. The A-7s of the Ravens and Phantom fighter fly-by diamond is seconds behind.

Now that the show is off to being really fucked up, I relax. There is nothing I can do about it now, and I actually start to have fun.

The low speed/high speed phantoms are the responsibility of the World Famous Fighting Switchboxes of VF-151 this time. Rocket Robinson comes by with his hook, flaps and gear down. The nose is pitched up at about 30 units. He is just hanging in space.

The object is to then have Fox, the new XO, come by abeam at about warp eight, and overtake him exactly abeam the island to demonstrate the high and low speed properties of the F-4 weapon system. Not a sign of the XO. I just keep talking. Rick motors on down the line of ships and finally cleans up his airplane and goes away. The XO is still in the haze behind the procession, but suddenly breaks out, clean configured without the standard center-line drop tank so he can cook.

It is the first time I ever saw a Phantom get shot off the bow in Military power rather than zone six afterburner. First time I ever saw a Phantom go off in Military Power on the cat-shot instead of full burner.

He will have a tanker waiting for him when he climbs up off the pass, and I hope he hits it first pass.

The XO grows from a speck to a real aircraft, booming along, 650 knots, then 700, and BOOM he leaves transonic and shatters the sound barrier abeam. No slow man was there to demonstrate the relative speed differential, but still great.

There is no humidity to speak of, unusual, so the shock cone does not appear visible. Then up he goes supersonic, twisting around and around, the plumes of his open fuel dumps making a delicate sugar candy twirl as he vanishes upward, out of the ken of the deck-bound hoi-paloi.

Then the bombs. The bombs are always the high point. The smoke markers are dropped by the Champs of VA-56, and they put them about four hundred yards to starboard. Very close.

Buzz, the Eagle’s C.O., is on the box before the smoke is off the water. The phone in front of me buzzes urgently. The Boss reaches over me and answers: “Yes Sir?”

“Double that,” sez Midway’s skipper Hoagie Carmichael, and the word is passed out on button six, If the bombs fell that close there would be shrapnel on the flight deck.

The A-7s come around with eight bombs apiece. The VT fuzing is haywire. Two airbursts.

A nice string of hits exactly double the distance as the smoke. The airbursts might have killed the aircrews if they were low enough. Now, they are just pretty pyrotechnics. The blast from a 500 pounder is an orange flash, and a gray cloud. At eight hundred yards the sound does not reach us for seconds, and it is all like a silent movie. Then the great sound washes over the ship, and the concussion hits with a palpable wall of air.

The second string on the smokes is a dud.

Then the A-6s run in. They are strapped down with 22 x 500 pounders each. The splashes make a neat line parallel to the ship. The linked crumps of the weapons going off is quite nearly orgasmic. Over four tons of high explosives say goodbye to the Gonzo. Outside the displaced air is enough to move you back in your tracks. Usually, there is cheering.

CAG Ops cancels the strafing. That is too bad. I was looking forward to the sound of the fart from hell, the sharp “blatt” of the M-6I Vulcan electric cannon, but there is not enough time today. In the last airshow the eager pilots nearly put the deadly hose right across the stern of the ship. It is not to be, today.

I flash on the stories about the USS Ranger Airshow that has gone down in history: A demonstration of the AIM-9L Sidewinder air-to-air missile goes awry and accidentally shoots down the photo helo.

I can imagine only too well the announcer’s conundrum. “And following the shoot-down of the helicopter, Ladies and Gentlemen, we will have the A-7s strafe the flight deck! Heads up!”

The simulated landing passes happen, and the unexpected tail wind blows the airplanes off schedule. Instead of waving it off, the RF-4 of the Cadavers has to take it around the starboard side of the ship, “It’s cool folks, he’s just demonstrating the ability of photo recon to go both ways…”

The big diamond fly-by, as they parade by in elegant formation.  Grace at two hundred knots. The airshow flies into history. “That concludes our Aerial Demonstration on the 8Ist day of our contingency deployment. The CVW·5/ USS Midway team invites you all to “say Gonzo!”

(The Air Boss sits to the left, the Mini to the right on CV-41).

I relinquish the mike to the Mini-Boss and stand over next to the green couch smoking a cigarette with Scotty, or Mr. Sluggo, his alter-ego, the Switchbox Maintenance Officer. The person you are talking to depends on how Night Check did with getting his jets up to meet the flight schedule. We both exhale for the first time in months.

It is all over now, all the labors and the three or four hundred sweating briefs, and the mountains of sinister messages of blood and terror and instability. Are the Soviets moving today? What’s new, Vic?

No more: “First brief at 0300 tomorrow.”  Better get some sleep, forget the endless line of paper coffee cups stretching to infinity, the hundreds of crumpled cigarette packs. Done and done.

Man, I am tired but my nerves are still twitching in random flashes.
It occurs to me our Flight Surgeon Doc Fogelman is probably hanging out in Sick Bay. With all our work done, I wander on down to ask him a purely hypothetical question.

“Hey, Doc,” I say when I see him. “What is a common industrial injury that has no apparent symptoms except acute pain and can be medicated successfully?

Doc Fogelman screwed up his brows. “Well, lower back pain is common, and something that we can dispense a few Percocet for,” he said.

I thought about the transit to Subic and a week to sleep, if I could. “You know, Doc,” I said. “That is funny. My back is killing me.”

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Exit, Stage Right

On Gonzo Station, Part Nine

(Marine VMF-P3 RF-4, VF-151 Switchbox F-4 and VF-161 Rock River F-4- the three flavors of Phantoms on Ma Midway, 1980. Navy photo.)

 

Maybe things will come out all right. It is hard to say. One thing seems to be true: we are going to get to leave and go, if not home, to another place. The plotting has begun about what to do with the paychecks that have piled up since we left Mombasa months ago.

 

There is so much pent-up cash on the boat that the A-6 Intruder guys of VA-115 are talking about “buying” a bar in Olongapo for the week we are in port. The married guys are going to have the wives come down from Yoko to meet us in the P.I., as Midway gets some vital and long overdue voyage repairs before we head north again to Japan and our home port.

 

Coral Sea has been directed to meet us and take on the big Sea Stallion helicopters and that tippy-top secret stuff Dean “The Dream” Whetstine has been working on behind the curtains that they pull around the planning table.

 

A couple of the indicators that looked grave have not thus far panned out. Tito, for example, still hangs on by a thread, the gangrene crawling up his left leg. Yet he obstinately tells his doctors he will not allow them to remove it. He apparently has more clout than the poor old woman back home, who lost her battle in the courts to keep hers.

 

The Yugoslavs appear to be organizing to make a Soviet Adventure there as difficult as possible. Some of the Divisions on alert appear to be bound not for southern climes in Central Europe, but as reinforcements for the effort in Afghanistan. There is talk that the conquest and incorporation will take a generation.

(LTJG Socotra in Midway’s Mission Planning spaces. Photo Socotra.)

 

I had material to talk about from the podium in Mission Planning on the 20th: Arafat’s new trip to “Congratulate Khomeini on the success of the Revolution,” and to plead for the release of the hostages. He has much at stake in gaining the credibility of the West, and the States in particular. He has been turned down in his attempts to see the Imam before, right after the hostage taking. He is attempting another bid in the wake of the Presidential election.

 

That little circus has had an exciting parade through the Intel briefs. The field of candidates at 106: including by Khomeini’s own account, persons of no brains and outright perversion. Leading lights were a man who advocated mass hypnosis to cure the national crisis, and a man who claimed he was particularly suited for high rank because his wife had tortured him for ten years. The Imam’s man, meek little Dr. Farsi, was thrown out of the race late in the game because he was not technically an Iranian citizen.

 

It is typical of the Imam’s staff work throughout the affair. Bani Sadr, the ex-foreign minister, looks to be the logical choice. If, and when, Yassir Ararfat makes his pilgrimage to Qom, he may be assisted by a new President who has advocated a more moderate line. On the other hand, there is no guarantee that the alleged Students will accept anything less than the original terms.

 

They want the Shah in exchange for the release of the hostages, and no substitute will do.

There is, of course, no guarantee that even the Shah’s return would secure the release of all the hostages. They will doubtless- hold out on the “real spies” to exact further concessions from Uncle Sugar. Fat chance.

 

But the Afghan situation had me nearly in hysterics. The Russians are described by several sources as being shocked and dismayed by the reception they have received by the crazy tribesmen. There are reports of a Fort Michilimackinac-style massacre by Afghans against Soviet troops  watching a staged sporting event. In colonial Michigan, Indian women smuggled weapons in under their blankets to toss to their men who were demonstrating a game of lacrosse that turned deadly for the Brits. Same deal yesterday, the locals turning against the occupiers.

 

Bombs seem to be the way to express disapproval of the Soviet presence. They are going off daily in the capital of Kabul. The Afghan army is deserting wholesale, and two regiments have taken up positions overlooking the major airhead of the Occupying Forces. It should make air operations colorful in the weeks to come. Even the Soviet troops are said not to be getting enough to eat.

 

It was a great day to be briefing the chaos. It almost makes me want to stick around the show, rather than get out of the Navy and be a civilian again.

 

Still, this thing has only been going on for three-and-a-half weeks, and the story is not told yet by any means. Maybe it will slow them down long enough for us to regroup our thin lines and get ready for the storm to come.

 

A powerful and heady rumor has been sweeping the boat: the great powers have determined that we could be relieved by Coral Sea south of India, rather than waiting for them here on the Gonzo. We would meet up somewhere in the Laccadive Sea and do our turn-over there.

 

That would enable us to pull chocks on the first of February, and get to Subic by the tenth. It appears to be a good rumor, although I did not get it on the Mess Decks from the second butter-cutter and thus be able to ensure its reliability.

 

That would make this only an 88-day at-sea period. Well, maybe we can pass up the century mark on this one.

 

The Air Wing Five Commander stopped by the Ready Room tonight and his eyes were wistful as he began to describe the in-port to come. O, Subic! The sailors wax lyrical at the prospect. The adult Disneyland of Asia; where anything may be bought for a song, or at least it’s equivalent in hard currency. The ship pulls into Alava Pier; first drinks over at the Subic 0 Club. Later to NAS Cubi Point for BOQ bartender Romie’s Cubi Specials to wash down the Cubi Dogs.

 

Temperatures in the 80s and humid. The fantastic greenery. Monkey racing out of the trees to steal golf-balls from the links. The warm musty smell of the jungle, and the penetrating fecund aroma of Shit River, walking across the bridge to the gate and the sound of the little women tapping pesos against the Plexiglas windows of the money-changing stands.

 

Olongapo is the belt buckle and Tee shirt capital of the world. Cocktails and cold San Miguel, nature’s laxative, and gorgeous women of all descriptions. Noise and laughter and jeepneys; women, and women, and yet more women. The depths of human abasement have yet to be fully plumbed. But I’m ready to try.

 

Before, it was something to speak of wistfully. Now, it is reaching out it’s luscious brown arms and crying “Come to me, Sailor, What sheeep you on? Benictican Cab you come in please?”

(Olongapo bar scene to come. Ahhh.)

 

The endless bunkroom poker games are going to take on a new and weighty significance. Each dollar of the private hoards is going to start becoming real again.

 

There will be things to buy, for a change, and the green checks will serve another purpose than simply marking off neat fifteen-day periods. I have get to conserve, and yet I know that is impossible. When Subic fever strikes there is no cure but to drown in it. Wallow, if you will. Kill the hangover will a fresh batch of liquid reinforcements. Banish forever the curse of celibacy, and of the single largest drinking problem we have ever faced: there just ain’t no booze!

 

But in the meantime there are a few devilish little weeks to pass here. The specter of War still lurks, although the Horsemen face the Goddess of the coming debauch. I know we will not be safe until the engines are disassembled, and the dry-dock gates clang closed behind us in Japan. But there is Hope now, which had got lost in the endless gray circling in the blue water. Hope for at least a respite.

 

Too soon to even dream of the fabled land of Amerika-Jima, where the great cars and burgers and White Women reside. Perhaps it is even the land of myth, untouchable to the mortal. Yet a man may aspire to the mystery; to see with his own eyes the fog of little cat’s feet off the Bay, and visit Tony Bennett’s heart upon the sacred hills. You just never know.

 

The rumor is looking good. Jeeze! I can’t imagine being somewhere other than here. This seems immutable. Just us and the trash-bags, floating endlessly in the vastness of the ocean east of Oman and south of Iran. Menacing, certainly, ominous to a fault, but mostly floating amid the jetsam of our trash.

 

It was not a good day for the Russians. They appear to be shocked and dismayed by the reception they are getting from the Afghanis. I suppose they have heard the Big Lie so long that they believe it themselves. All that “Onward March of World Socialism” bullshit. I never really thought anyone could take it seriously. But apparently they do. Or should I say did.

 

Two Soviet Officers the other day were cruising the streets of Kabul, looking for whores. It sorta made me warm up to the poor Socialist chumps, Anyway, they met an Afghani pimp who lured them into the seedy section of Old Kabul and slit their throats and then decapitated them. The heads were displayed for the residents of the district before the Soviets found out.

 

Makes you realize that there is such a thing as bad head, after all.

 

The Russians who showed up wearing Soviet Uniforms just after the invasion are now wearing Afghan uniforms. It is also reported that they are showing a certain reluctance to go into the native Bazaars these days. Wonder why?

 

Decapitation was big in the news today. Reuters reported that a West Bank Arab showed up at his local Police Station with his sister’s head, which he claimed to have removed “in accordance with Khomeini’s Law, which is the Law of Islam” since his sister had slept with a man. Whew.

 

The thing in Afghanistan is sure to take a generation to clean up at least. Whole villages are rising against the Soviets.

 

It must be terrifying for them. In one case, hundreds of the villagers attacked them and butchered 36 Russians. The rebels lost 236; nearly two hundred and fifty additional martyrs to the cause of liberty. I’m rooting for the Afghanis all the way.

 

I can’t wait to get home and see what the old New Left is saying now. Their beloved North Vietnamese are threatening Thailand, and butchering the Kampucheans in a war of aggression now that we are gone. Or is it liberation? I can’t tell about the Khmer Rouge.

 

The Soviets are running roughshod over the poor defenseless Barbarians who will not see the right way forward with the vanguard party of the proletariat. It is enough to make a poor JO chortle. I wonder, though, was there a young Soviet officer who was getting the same kicks out of Vietnam? The parallels are so many, and I can’t evaluate which ones are right.

 

As we turn our attention to the exit-stage-right from Gonzo Station, the Captain came up on the One-MC this morning and said there was entirely too much ‘grab-assing’ going on. By which he meant that a rash of fistfights has broken out. Can’t say as I blame the troops.

 

There are two enlisted guys in our work-space I would delight in heaving overboard. Three, maybe.  One of them in particular is so loud and obstreperous that he literally makes the Planning Spaces echo and seethe with tension.

 

Any other situation you could ignore it, or laugh it off, or at least get away from it. Here, in this environment, there is no escape. You just live with what aggravates you day in and day out, until it hits flash point. We teetered on the edge of that, but I am amazed by how well the Midway Magic crew has handled this whole thing.

 

If I was living in the teeming berthing spaces, jammed in with a Shoe horn, without space to beat off, or even be alone, or do anything without the active participation of ninety other guys, I’m sure I would flip myself.

 

Only a matter of a few weeks and this is all over- at least for us. Then Nimitz and Coral Sea are on their own.

(USS Midway in the Northern Arabian Sea, 1980. Navy photo).

 

(Gentle Readers: Thanks for bearing with me. There is more of this curious onion-skin manuscript, but it has been in the archives a long time, and it is time to move on. The more that things have changed, the more they appear to have remained the same. LTJG Socotra was wrong in his assessment of the Soviet Threat. The Communists did not make it to the new millennium: the Iranians did, and are, if anything, more problematic than ever. USS Midway was decommissioned at NAS North Island on 11 April 1992, and after a decade in the Inactive Ship Maintenance Facility, Bremerton, WA, was towed to San Diego, CA, for use as a museum and memorial. Opened to the public on 7 June 2004, the museum doubled attendance projections by welcoming 879,281 guests aboard in its first year of operations. Visitors may tour the ship’s flight deck, hangar bay, mess hall, bridge, primary flight control area, enlisted and junior officer quarters, sickbay, and portions of the engine rooms. There are currently no plans to open the Mission Planning spaces to the public, but they should. A lot of really weird stuff went on there behind the Green Door.)

 

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

 

 

 

POSSUB

On Gonzo Station, Part Eight

Editor’s note: It is back to work week, which accounts for my failure to digitize these ancient notes. It is January, 1980, in the Northern Arabian Sea. There might be something going on we do not understand. Or not. But the paperwork has to be perfect.

(I wish our picture had been as clear as this one, taken of a surfaced ECHO-2 SSGN in the Barents Sea. Then I wonder what we would have done?)

For multiple examples of just how cheap the whole human experience turns out to be, come down to Mission Planning and plow through the overnight reports, both classified Secret-level and the unclas press accounts. This particular morning I flipped over the cardboard cover we made for the Secret/GENSER (General Service) message traffic. I had stenciled on the words: “Dangerous Unevaluated Intelligence- Not for Air Crew Use” to ensure that the pilots and Flight Officers would be tempted to learn exactly what was going on around us.

There were reports that 4l were dead and 110 injured in a riot near the Iranian coastal town of Bandar Langeh on the Persian Gulf.

Three were killed in a scuffle in Tabriz. 14,000 Kurds went AWOL from the Iranian army, and pilfered as they went. They liberated 60 Chieftain tanks, presumably to intimidate potential pursuit.

In Afghanistan, the fighting was reported heavy in the South, East, and North East provinces. Casualties for the occupying Soviet Red Army were between 250 and 9,600, take your pick. The State Department is claiming over 100,000 Soviet troops are in-country now. The bottom line is great, for a spectator sport. Both sides say “No prisoners.”

To fight the hill-tribesmen in their own mountains! What a challenge!

It is an incredible task, even for the splendidly-equipped Red Army. Their machines designed to roll once more over the flat land of Germany, blitzing through the Fulda Gap and over the Rhine and dashing for the Channel.
To sit inside one of the monster vehicles, looking up at the jagged granite peaks, wondering which ones conceal the savage, hash-smoking Afghan guerrillas. Like Kipling said: “Thrice he heard the breech-bolt snick, though never a soul was seen…”

I hope they get their asses handed to them in pails.

The student madness continues unabated in Tehran. They are going to try LCOL Roeder for espionage. He is from Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, according to the AP.  His dreadful war crimes include 148 missions over Vietnam, and is therefore one of the “savage and vicious elements sent to Iran in guise of diplomats.”

Of course the Vietnamese will be invited to the trials, to get their licks in that they could not from the ground ten years ago. You have to love theatre of the absurd.

Retreating further into the amphetamine paranoia, the student occupiers also claim to have unearthed another Spy Nest. This one is down the street at their own Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. When the students staged their attack, US Charge d’Affaires Bruce Laingen, DCM Victor Thomseth and Security Officer Mike Howland were at the Iranian Foreign Ministry, where they were transformed into “semi-hostages.”

The militants are demanding they be turned over to them to join their comrades in captivity.

I want to kill them now more than ever. The worms. But that is the ostensible reason we are here in this place, circling endlessly.

Ah, but the Admiral. Now that we lost an airplane, and started out the New Year of 1980 auspiciously with two Foreign Object Damage incidents (FODs), it appears that he wanted to address the assembled Gators in the halls of World Famous Ready Room Two. He came down to buck us up and give us some food for thought. In fact, his unscripted remarks were a veritable Whopper of cogitation pills. There were several topics of extreme interest, but I should begin with the fact that you don’t make two stars in today’s Action Navy without some potent ju-ju.

The Admiral has a lot going for him. He is whipcord-lean, a fighter jock back in the bad old days, and had done his tours in D.C., and been an Airwing Commander (CAG) and the Charlie Oscar of his very own birdfarm. He has a polished manner and an easy delivery. What it must mean to him, to cruise into rooms and hear: “Gentlemen, the Admiral.”

Some guys come into a room and you know that the courtesy is almost an intrusion into what they are doing; they are eager to get on with the meetings, or the lecture, or whatever little task has deflected them from the important business for which they earn their pay. But this man seems to glory in it. Not that I begrudge him his respect.  But he comes into the Ready Room and nearly walks the length of the central aisle before he utters the negligent “As you were, Gentlemen, as you were.”

It is a studied gesture, like the carefully negligent pose behind the podium. You can always tell a fighter pilot, as the saying goes. You just can’t tell him very much.

“Sometimes wish I was still down here, instead of back in the chair down the hall,” he says with practiced nonchalance. Sure.

The man wishes he were still just a Gator, instead of fighting the career battle of his life with the Flag Continuation Board coming up. His address contributes to the unease I have felt all along, which is not a little like looking behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz and finding out that Dorothy was right all along.

The Admiral’s delivery is impeccable His uniform is crisp. His silver hair is perfectly cut, and he is not wearing wash khakis or color-coded flight deck jersey. He looks and speaks as the very model of the dynamic leader.

But when the questions begin, he begins to wander. He betrays a certain glibness of content that starts as a disquieting note, and goes on to terrify. For example, he says he believes it is possible to strike the Soviets tactically and not have the confrontation escalate immediately out of control. He dodges questions about Soviet intentions, saying he doesn’t have the information.

Yet I know that he has at least as much as any LTJG who reads the Secret-level message boards down in Planning. Later, on his morale-boosting tour of the Ready Rooms, he tells the Rock Rivers of VF-161 s that “there are no submarines up here; they are all south of Socotra Island and we know where each one of them is.”

O.K. But no not so fast, Sir. Last week the Marine photo-Phantom RF-4 was taking some Infra-Red images of USS Parsons. The Marines left the IR cameras on, and the Photo Interpreters got to pour over a mile or so of film of the empty ocean after the recovery. They were scrolling through it pretty quickly until they got to a very curious image, which seemed to show something very interesting to anyone concerned with the integrity of the floating steel fortress where we live.

The image on the film is something that strongly resembles a Russian Echo II-class submarine, at least to the eyes of the Photo Interpreters. When I saw it, I could identify the eight missiles, still warm from being exposed to the sun when the boat was on the surface. The image was convincing and riveted my attention. This was huge. If there was an un-located and unidentified Soviet guided missile boat running around, we had a major intelligence failure. It was also a problem on a couple more levels.

First, an Echo-II SSGN carries eight P-6 (SS-N-3a “Shaddock-A”) anti-ship cruise missiles, mounted in pairs above the pressure hull. The missile could be armed with either a 2,200-pound high explosive warhead, or a 200 or 350 kiloton nuke .

This would be arriving at a speed of about 1.2 Mach from a maximum range of 220 miles. The circular error probability was not the strong suit of the missile, and really was pretty about crappy for conventional explosives but perfect for nukes. In order to more effectively kill us, the P-6 featured a radar homing seeker, just in case.

(ECHO-2 SSGN with tubes elevated to launch position).

To fire the missiles, the sub has to surface and elevate the launchers to about thirty degrees. My publications suggested that this was not exactly a ripple-fire event, since it could take thirty minutes to fire all eight missiles, though that was sort of beside the point. If the first one got in our general direction, that would be all she wrote and my stereo would get wet.

So here is the ambiguity of this. I thought if you detected a submarine, you ought to alert the system. There are procedures in place to do it. Instead, the Flag Staff waffled when we raced up to tell them what we thought we had found.

We got denial. See, the System says they have everything under control. There are no phantom Soviet missile boats steaming around the Indian Ocean with contingency nukes on their missiles. If Midway reports a submarine that the System does not acknowledge, we could be left open to ridicule from the shore, since the Shore is always right, and the Fleet is always wrong. One has to pick the issues you are going to raise with the Shore.

I thought it was straightforward and a cool detection, if valid, and the idea that there was a missile boat in a contingency to kill all of us made perfect sense, what with what was going on up North, in Afghanistan and Iran. Of course the Soviets would want to be able to take us out if we attempted to intervene in the Afghan thing. Maybe if we decided to act on Iran, too.

The Staff waffled for about two hours. This is on matter that should have been reported up the chain in minutes. They fail to issue instructions for one of the small boys to mosey over and go active on the sonar and ping the crap out of whatever was there.

The OPREP message finally goes out with the weasel-word “POSSUB,” or ‘possible submarine’ along with the routine ship-sighting message traffic. No other action is taken; no ASW assets are directed to the Datum. No further investigation is conducted. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up when I think about it. But the Shore says there can’t be anything out there ready to lob a nuke at us.

On the other hand, the administrivia counts. Everything must be perfect before it leaves the ship. His Chief of Staff and Flag Intel officer massage the message into hamburger for a couple hours, trying to get the nuance correct. They adjust the date time group of the message so it is compliant with reporting standards. Everything coming from this Staff, and the Ship it rides must be perfect.

Good God, man, we are talking careers here. And we know where all the subs are.

(Possibly the only image ever conceived that features the famed F-4 Phantom fighter in its tertiary ASW mission).

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Personal Friends of Mine

 

On Gonzo Station, Part Seven

(T.R. Brown and his Radar Intercept Officer Frank “Personal Friend of Mine (P-FOM)” prepare for a ten second flight. Photo USN.)

 

It was the usual day. Up two hours before two hours before launch to prepare the first four of eight cyclic event briefings. An early chat with Strike Ops and CIC to see what external factors might impact the air plan, then scan the reams of traffic about what the Iranians were up to, where the Russians were, and what might be happening someplace beyond the steel confines of the ship.

 

I was off in time for late chow in the Dirty Shirt, and then with not much else on my mind, decided to get some exercise and do my zen thing in front of one of the elevators and look at where the horizon merged into the brown haze of sand.

 

I cruised down to the hangar bay to skip some rope. I preferred that to trying to jog around the clustered airplanes and those gigantic Sea Stallion helicopters that had mysteriously appeared one night. Obviously there was no running on deck while we were at flight quarters, so the rope made a lot of sense. It is a hopeless battle to try and stay in shape out here, but a few hundred skips might- help me sleep better, anyway. I arrived in my plush at-sea bunkroom (World Famous BK-4) to discover we had been defiled by the lickspittle running dog lackeys of the Damage Control Assistant.

 

They had crashed into the sanctity of our little haven and stolen our extension cord.

 

No much, you say? Hah!

 

What is a man to do, trapped on the Gonzo, with but one electrical outlet in a shoebox-sized compartment to accommodate four junior officers? I mean, Midway is an old ship and sailors back in 1945 did not have much in the way of personal electronics, so we had to have our workarounds, which made the Blackshoes of the engineering department borderline nuts.

 

Whoever had been in the BK had not physically sliced the cords to the typewriter or the stereo, but they may as well have.

 

I vented my rage in a long scream that pried the thin-non-structural aluminum bulkhead and echoed through Officer’s Country. I dialed Damage Control to make an obscene phone call to the Ensign who had carried out the vile commands of his superiors, determined at any cost to save us from electrical shock. The Ensign was not at my post, and my attempt to assuage my anger was foiled.

 

Maybe that is the worst of the Mary; the fact than when you live onboard, nothing is yours. Ho privacy, no silence, no territorial integrity to defend. After a couple of years it gets old, and they will never grant the monies to allow you to live elsewhere, or at least not in the non-stop adventure of the Overseas Family Residency Program.

 

The only way to work off my anger was to jump the stupid rope in the madness of the activity in the hangar bay. A thousand jobs were proceeding: yellow gear was torn apart, airplanes were being moved, the flow of hundreds of people in dirty working dungarees back and forth under the sharp supersonic airfoils. Tie down chains snaking everywhere, fuel dripping from the dump-masts. I found an open area in front of El-3, and began the monotonous twirling of the rope. The sun shone bright on a Kotlin-class Soviet DD, and a Knox class (in fact the Knox herself) hull down on the blue horizon, I managed to anesthetize my frustration in as little as fifteen minutes

 

The ship began to heel to port as we came into the wind for the next launch and recovery cycle. The blue panorama out the elevator door began to wheel, and Bainbridge came into view, I folded my rope up Into a little bundle and walked back forward to take a luke-warm shower and read for a while.

 

I had just smoked my first post-work-out Winston when the room began to shake and vibrate. It is a fascinating experience the first couple times you experience it. Very much more impressive than the earthquakes in Japan; things fall off desks. After a while you learn to stop writing as the thunder suddenly grows and the hold-back breaks and the airplane is accelerated from zero to 150 kts in a space of three hundred feet.

 

(VF-151 Phantom leaves Midway on a one-way flight. Photo USN.)

 

The jet is hurled off the front end, almost flying, and the catapult shuttle slams into the water-break. The vibration can be felt a thousand feet away. When you live three feet below the cats you come to an accommodation with the snarling and shaking and banging. You even learn to sleep through it. But you never learn to like it.

 

Three or four of the planes had launched. The roar of two J-79s indicated there was a Phantom on the cat, either one of ours or the Rock Rivers of VF-161. The hold-back separated and I heard the F-4 roar down the cat-track just a few feet away. Then the steam shuttle- the big piston- bashed the water-break, and the rattle of the retrieval commenced to bring it back in battery.

 

That had no more than started and I was lighting up another cigarette when a high-pitched voice yelled something over the 1-MC.

 

It sounded a bit like “Man Overboard,”only really excited, I couldn’t really tell over the welcome blast of the ventilator above me. We had stuffed rolled t-shirts into the line forward of us, and snaked out the ones the bunkroom upstream from us, so for the moment we had plenty of cool air. I went over and opened up the door to catch the second rendition of the announcement. The only time I have heard someone so flipped out was a year or so ago when we had the big fire at the pier in Yoko.

 

“Fire in the uptakes!” was the announcement that time. This did not appear to reflect imminent peril, like the sharp repetitive beeps of the collision alarm. I figured someone-might have got blown over the side by a jet exhaust. The second chorus didn’t help for clarity, so I got on the phone to the Ready Room in case it was a man overboard. I got Tracker on the line, and he sounded very cool.

 

“Tracker,” I said quickly, “Did we just have a man overboard?” It was a key question. We were timed in our response to the Duty Officer in a drill situation, and if it was real, they wanted a body count pronto to identify the missing.

 

“Nah” replied the trusty duty officer, personal representative of’ the Commanding Officer. “We got a plane in the water. T.R. and PFOM are in it.”

 

“Holy shit! ” I replied cleverly. “No wonder the guy on the bridge sounded so uptight!” I began to throw on parts of my uniform and headed for the door. I broke for the port catwalk, and ran stumbling over the coiled fuel hoses. A flight deck PO was waving everyone back down below, I knew that clutter was the last thing they needed and slipped back down the hatch and raced for the hangar bay. I ducked through a hatch and went out on the forward BPDMS platform.

 

I could see the helo in a hover about a quarter of a mile away. They seemed to be taking an awful long time at what they were doing, It was impossible to tell what was going on, except that the CIWS BPDMS crew was really excited. “Really cool, Man,” said one of them “I never thought I would get to see one of those.”

 

I decided to head-on up to the ready room and find out what they knew, All I could gather out on the sponson was that one of the guys nearly plowed into the side of the ship, and may have gotten sucked under. I thought about T.R., of the ironic hazel eyes and quick wit. His “Doctrine of Invisibility” had become gospel for all fighter drunks.

 

According to T.R., one could gauge just how one was doing at a party by the stages of the skin’s permeability to light. Naturally one started out opaque, gradually transitioning to a certain translucent quality, and finally arriving at total invisibility. Once achieved, the invisible person could do no wrong, because after all, he was invisible, wasn’t he?

 

A classic example may assist the reader. One late and drunken evening we were smashing the giant ice sculpture from the change-of-command ceremony on the patio of the Atsugi Officer’s club. I asked T.R. what he and his wife Paula were going to do later. T.R. looked at me with those innocent eyes and replied that they were going to go home and fuck. Paula appeared ready to slug him, since such a declaration, even at at fighter brawl, could have provoked embarrassment.

 

Thankfully, T.R was doctrinally completely invisible at the time, and no one could possibly take offense at a remark from someone who wasn’t, strictly speaking,

even there.

 

It would have been a useful aspect to apply to the mishap, but this was visible in the extreme.

 

As we reconstructed the event later- from the plat monitor and a beautiful still photo sequence- it was indeed remarkable. The airplane shot down the cat and lumbered into the air. The stabilator refused to program from leading edge down, and the Phantom jerked straight up into the air. A heartbeat later, the rear canopy flew off, and PFOM (“Personal Friend of Mine,” which is another story) shot out into the air.

 

By this time the airplane was almost in level flight, but it may have been because it was completely stalled. In about four tenths of a second the front canopy went away and another body blew out of the cockpit, arcing up and away because of the strange starboard settle to the airframe. Three or four seconds later the Phantom, engines roaring but out of airspeed, impacted the blue with a tremendous waterspout, the center-line tank and stores following along behind.

 

T.R. had been working the emergency procedures till the moment the command eject initiated by PFOM took him away from his job.

 

It was about ten seconds of excitement, start to finish.

 

They say that the worst part of any ejection (so long as the seat goes up the rail on its little rocket motor and the chute blossoms- the Martin-Baker ejection system is supposed to enable users to punch out and live even while on the deck) is what happens after you get your feet wet. The Naval Safety Center calls any ejection successful if you separate from the host aircraft successfully.

 

If you do not detach from the seat pan after water impact, or stay attached to the chute, the shourd lines are waiting to snake around your boots and carry you down, down down.

 

Splash Nash got his call-sign from just such an event, and was the local authority on the matter. When he hit the water the shrouds grabbed him, and even his fully inflated LPA (Mae West) could barely keep his helmeted head above water. His advise was to get rid of the chute as soon as possible, and everyone took his advise to heart.

 

Splash was lucky to survive. So many things to go wrong, and so little time to think.

Tracker said that PFOM had blown down the side of the ship. On his way, he passed bout ten feet of the bow, and actually bounced off the forward side of the massive gray hull. PFOM had actually listened during the All-Officers Meeting (AOM) when Splash gave his picture on the treacherous shroud lines, and had internalized the message. To avoid the possibility of getting fouled in the lines of his chute, he reached up to hit the Koch quick release fittings on his harness just as he was descending past the level of the flight deck. He plunged the last thirty feet into the water. As Midway’s massive stern passed by, the turbulence generated by the four huge brass screws sucked him under.

 

No one could tell for a while if he had been turned to mincemeat for several seconds until the LPA did its thing and his helmet popped up in the wake astern.

 

By the time the ejection sequence got to T.R., the aircraft had pitched forward and to starboard. The ejection thrust him nearly a quarter mile from the boat. He did not hit the Koch fittings early. The horizon is a tricky was to try to judge descent, and he preferred to hit the water rather than plunging a hundred or more feet down into the drink. People have died that way.

 

Early release or late, both methods have their proponents, and in this case, both worked. T.R. and PFOM were each able to expound on the matter at some length later, since they may have been wet but both were alive and in the helo by the time I got to the Ready Room.

You could hear the gust of wind as dozens of lungs exhaled at the news, and we could see on the plat monitor both guys climb down out of the SH-3 and head for the mandatory medical exam.

 

Thank God. Then it was time for the paperwork. In the end, the Accident Investigation Board decided it was something like a flashlight left in the tail of the jet that had jammed the controls right after T.R. had swept the stick in preparation for the cat-shot. Recommendations for tool security and accountability were made.

 

Sometimes things go so well and so smoothly for so long that you begin to forget how horribly unforgiving the whole adventure really is. Ground-pounders like me are essentially office workers, even this far from shore. We work under the florescent lights and have time to quibble over earth-shattering issues like extension cords and battles with the ship’s Damage Control Assistant. Then, sometimes reality jumps on you with both boots and you are looking out under the blazing sun to see if there are going to snare your friends, or whether the unthinkable has just occurred.

 

Poor Kitty Hawk. Eight dead so far. And we aren’t near out of this thing yet.

 

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

 

 

BOHICA

On Gonzo Station, Part Six

 

Gentle Readers, Doctor Hayes, current minion of Papa Doc Anderson, freed me from captivity at Walter Reed Medical Center yesterday. “You are not completely healed, but there is nothing further that we can do for you here in the Cast Clinic. The rest you have to do yourself. Papa Doc said 84 days to recuperate. We got it done in 76. Let’s take a look at Christmas of 1979, which features your Midway roustabouts and Indian Ocean Rangers confronting the Iranian hostage-takers and the Adventures of the Soviets in the Great Game. 

 

(Soviet IL-38 May overflies Midway Maru (CV-41) in 1979 while under escort by Navy fighters. Photo USN.)

 

CHRISTMAS, 1979

 

The crisis played itself out over the holidays and got weirder, if that was possible.

 

The Navy tried their best for us. They brought out little shoeboxes from the families back in Nagishi Heights Housing Area back in Japan filled with baked goods and gimcracks.

 

For some reason best known to themselves, they wouldn’t allow them to be sent to the single guys, but c’est la vie, you can only eat so many stale Christmas cookies anyway. The popular hit was the rum cake that almost collapsed in the basic liquid ingredient.

 

They even arraigned for the shipment to arrive on Christmas Eve, and it coincided with a massive letter-mail delivery that brought an astonishing effusion of greetings and support from the States. It was comfort for a generally depressing time.

 

The Iranians continued the little carrot & donkey ploys they have become so adept at. They invited the delegation of clergy- men from the States to minister to the spiritual needs of the captives- remember, Khomeini is a holy guy- and of course that jerk William Sloan Coffin was included. I didn’t like his sanctimonious prattle during the Vietnam War, and his initial pronouncements from Tehran reduced me to slavering rage.

 

“Mr. Coffin, do you think this visit will be used to further Iranian propaganda?”

 

“Well, I don’t mind being used in a good cause….” Jesus! At least he is an honest tool.

 

NBC had joined in the media spectacle, providing the Followers of the Line of the Imam with a free, uncut forum for the students to expound their views to the States. It was starting to cloy a bit, but the networks are only the creatures of popular demand, I suppose, and the news was anything but exciting. I could feel us drifting off page one back home, even though all the media we could get was at least days old, if not weeks.

 

Newsweek came out with a pretty analysis of the situation and had a marvelous color picture of Midway (CV-41) labeled “Kitty Hawk Underway.”

 

Fear and Loathing on Gonzo Station.

 

It was during the mid-Christmas period that we began to get inklings of other events in the wind. Evidence was beginning to pile up of a massive Soviet buildup on the Afghan border. The Muslim insurgents had made steady gains against the Amin regime, which had so recently taken over where the Soviet-backed Taraki government had failed.

 

An odd pressure has been exerted by the Soviets to go ahead and make a military move against the Iranians. “Go hit them” they said, “Don’t pay any attention to our public pronouncements.” It seems sort of tit-for-tat: they encouraging us to act in order to justify action of their own.

 

We will acquiesce to anything but a permanent military occupation of Afghanistan. During the early phase of this evolution I was all in favor of a strike of some sort to assuage our impotence over the situation. We were getting bizarre indications from the Indians, too. New Delhi had publicly condemned the taking of the hostages, privately told the Iranians they supported them, and also told the U.S. that they wanted us to make a military move. It was all very strange.

 

In the heat of the moment, I could only agree the crisis makes for unlikely bedfellows.

 

Frank Oxsen, one of the two VA-155 A-6 Air Intel guys, was in his element in MSI. He was the first to come out with a wild assessment that had the Soviets moving in force against the Pakistanis, It sounded incredible, but he had some good facts to back It up. Curiouser and curiouser. What were the Soviets up to? We pondered the matter over coffee and cigarettes each morning before the cyclical briefs began.

 

Frank freely admits he is a paranoid type, but also adds the corollary “just because you are paranoid it doesn’t mean they are not out to get you.”

 

I had to take it very much to heart, after all, my private timetable had the Soviets on the move for a major confrontation in the early ’80s, and the longer I was in Asia, the more it seemed like the first target would be the Indian Ocean area, the path to a warm-water port that was the essence of The Great Game. Their consistent moves In Africa, flanking the oil lines. The reinforcement of the Malagasy Republic: the odd port visits to the Seychelles in the Spring, and the dramatic transit of the helicopter carrier Minsk (CVHG-117) escorted by two KARA-class cruisers, Petropavlovsk and Tashkent, along with  amphibious assault ship Ivan Rogov (LPD 132), and the T-AOR Boris Butoma.

 

(Soviet CVHG-117 Minsk, a Kiev-class helicopter cruiser, transits the Indian Ocean. A YAK-38 Forger VSTOL fighter is spotted near the ramp. Photo USN).

 

Still, with all the fanfare about Hanoi’s big New Year’s offensive to wipe out the last of Pol Pot’s boys in Kampuchea, and my visceral concern for the ladies of Patpong Road in Thailand, I had thought the pressure might come in the Far East.

 

I had to admit that the events, when they began to play, were stunning. It was the Great Game after all, nothing new under the sun. The Soviets were classic. A violent coup left Amir colder than a Mackerel, with his son and his mother joining him in the funeral pyre. The assault on Radio Afghanistan followed, with broadcast of a pre-recorded broadcast of Karmel’s conciliatory take-over address as soon as the studios were occupied.

 

Evidence that the same broadcast was being played from clandestine stations in the Soviet Union came in, just in case the action at the radio station was held up. Within minutes, the troops began rolling out of the bivouac areas around the International Airport in Kabul to key points in the city. According to Frank, about 80% of the entire Soviet airlift capability was being utilized to bring in more. It wasn’t Pakistan, not just yet, but it was the largest military action by the Soviets since Czechoslovakia in 1968,

 

It was great. The propaganda that began to flow was outstanding, and it made me long that we had such an asset at our command. Immediately, Amin became a puppet of the CIA; the incursion was aimed at “outside forces” trained by the U.S. in Pakistan; adventure-was completely-in accord with Article 51 of the UN Charter and Article 6 of the Afghan-Soviet Friendship Treaty.

 

That, and the entire evolution was provoked by U.S. Warships, conducting training operations in international waters off Iran. In other words, us. 

 

You have to stand back and be amazed by the Soviets. The Cold War has not ended for them, and a case can be made that the hot war never did either.

 

The bald-faced effrontery of the rhetoric was nothing short of superb.

 

The Iranian reaction to it ell was just as delicious. Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, the Foreign Minister was utterly sublime. Examine this bit of pretzel logic for a moment: the Soviet Intervention “…hurts the struggle against U.S. Imperialism.” Dig it, the largest Asian atheist power moves armored divisions against a contiguous neighbor, whose Muslim guerillas the Iranians have supported with food, shelter and weapons, and it “Hurts the struggle against U.S. Imperialism.”

 

I said it over and over during the cvclical air ops briefs: Something was seriously wacko with the Iranians at the leadership level. Or was it more than that?

 

Thinking it through, I was struck one morning in the shower (it was early, and no one was around, so I was consciously wasting hot water) by the notion that had run though my mind before. The Soviets were running the show in Iran, too, Marxist students, professing a conservative religious line, were part of the group at the Embassy, The Students had sent apologies to the Soviets when Afghan students had the temerity to assault the Russian Embassy in Tehran, and rip down the Hammer and Sickle,

 

Advisors around Khomeini were known to have KGB links. The Russians wanted us to make a military move against Iran. The whole hostage taking was orchestrated to radicalize the Iranian Revolution, and to force the Great Satan (that’s us, fans) to make the first move against a Muslim nation,

 

I very nearly dropped the soap, which despite my fondness for my shipmates is not anything you want to do if you have been this long at sea.

 

Running over one of the morning briefs I gleaned the following interesting notes. The Governor of Kandahar Province had received a note from the rebels demanding that he join them against the foreigners- Ferengi– who had invaded the homeland. He locked up his desk and turned over the government to them.

 

Rumors are that the Soviets were planning at least ten garrisons for Afghanistan, with a Division sized unit at each. That would amount to over a hundred thousand deployed combat troops. They are going to reach Vietnam-sized proportions in a hurry. They had occupied Jalalabad, a strategic city in the Kyber Pass and were moving down towards the Pakistani border.

 

The troops they had used for this operation were primarily from the Asian SSRs, and the Soviets were counting on the fact that this would alleviate some of the traditional xenophobic reaction of the Afghanis to ferengi of any stripe. They had even instructed the troops to go down to the Bazaar and speak the local Pashtun language. Better yet, they sought to eliminate the financial base of the rebels by changing the currency.

 

Henceforth, all assets were frozen, and the new currency was going to be the Ruble. God almighty, any illusions that this was going to be a short stay went up the chimney.

 

The only thing that made me smile about the whole thing was the suspicion that one hash smoking hill-tribesman with an AK-47 was better prepared to deal with the snows of winter than a Motorized Rifle Division. The fact that no one since Alexander the Great had been successful in bringing the country underfoot may also apply. I believe that the Soviets have bit off more than they are going to be able to chew on this one; and I hope that the Muslim world will take note of the Bear and his avaricious eating habits. At least some of them have anyway.

 

Gold closed on the London Exchange at $635 an ounce. It makes me weep that I didn’t

buy Thai gold bhat chains at a paltry $200 an ounce last year in Bangkok. Jewelry you can spend on the way to the airport to get out of town ahead of the tanks.

 

But what is it the good old United States is supposed to do about this one?

 

Our delay in the Iranian crisis was a two edged sword. I was glad that our delay- hesitation- in the Iranian crisis made the Soviets take the first move in Afghanistan. Things are out in the open now, I suppose, though, that perhaps a junior British intelligence officer of the Indian Army might have felt very much the same way in 1933 or so.

 

I was talking to one of the Flag guys about the situation, and we could come up with no answers except the unpleasant ones. It seems like a bad LSD flashback from the old days. Disoriented and helpless; an inestimably odd feeling on a weapons platform that carries enough Silver Bullets to lay waste to the entire nation of Iran,

 

There have been casualties here already, though they are peacetime deaths, of course. “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori“ right? Kitty Hawk has lost eight air-crew already. I mentioned the four guys who died in the EA-6B down by Diego Garcia. They had lost two before ever arriving in the Indian Ocean. Last week they lost two more in an A-6.

 

A squadron skipper was involved in the mishap, thought that is sort of a tame word for the accident. We have heard a cat malfunction was involved; a couple of the enlisted guys were on the Kitty when they showed the video-tape of the evolution. In any event, they got out of the jet but died anyway as they came down in the drink.

 

That makes Bucks and Chief who lost one of our Phantoms off the cat the only successful ejections in the Indian Ocean in 1979. The thought of losing that many guys on a seven-month cruise is almost unbelievable here. Corporate memory barely lingers back to our last fatality, knock on steel bulkhead.

 

It is a business with some inherent dangers built-in, but I can’t help thinking that a permanent bunch of Asiatics such as ourselves have more resilience to the frequent “bad deals” of the forward-deployed Overseas Family Residency Program (OFRP).

 

Spirits were subdued over the holidays, but it was still very much business as usual. There is a level of professionalism that is difficult to duplicate in any other environment. Mixed with a certain fatalism, naturally, as we always know that if there is a bum deal, we will get to it first,, and get back last. Nothing personal, you understand just part of the business.

 

Bend over, here it comes again. BOHICA.

 

At 1603 on the Seventh of January we had a stunning example of precisely what I am talking about. It was our 56th day on The Gonzo, and things were going along just like usual.

 

Loud noises, tremendous hangings and smashings radiated through the ship. One catapult was down for something or other, and A-7Es were parked along the forward stretch of the port cat track. The flight schedule had been adjusted with the delicacy for which Strike Ops is noted. I was not briefing on that particular day; I was in the Planning spaces to catch up on the shrewd political analysis of my compatriot, Dean “The Dream” Whetstine.

 

The news was about usual. Iraqi Naval units looked like they were going to deploy and maybe assault a couple islands contest with the Iranians. Heavy fighting continued in Afghanistan; in the west of the country the Soviets were building with ominous force near the Iranian border. The Soviet generals, perhaps with the Order of Lenin dancing before their eyes, were calling for more reinforcements. It sounded so much like Vietnam I had to laugh. “Just another hundred thousand troops and we will have this one licked!”

 

Or, as the Admiral says,  “Just another couple of cycles of air operations today and we will really past those characters,” Plus ca chang and all that shit.

 

(Soviet MI-24 HIND Gunships engage Afghan targets, 1979.)

 

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

 

 

Double Action

On Gonzo Station Part Five

(USS Nimitz All-Nuclear Task Group transits Gibraltar en route the Indian Ocean at best speed, December, 1979. They say when the group turned the corner at the Cape of Good Hope the carrier was throwing a rooster-tale. Photo USN).

Gentle Readers, this is a Walter Reed Day, and I am hoping for an up-check from the Orthopods in the Bone and Cast clinic. I will keep you posted. Meanwhile, the merry band of OFRP pirates continue to orbit endlessly in the Northern Arabian Sea. It is approaching Christmas of 1979.

22 December 1979

In point of fact, it is tougher than human endurance sometimes. I overstate the matter by a bit, but bear with me.

On the 22nd of December we got confirmation that a weird proposal from Lantfleet had been approved, and that the brand-spanking new USS Nimitz- “Numbnuts,” we call her-  would be directed to pull the rods out of her Westinghouse reactors and steam like hell around Africa to relieve Kitty Hawk on Station at the Gonzo-rama,

With her she would bring two nuclear escorts, and she would be authorized a whopping 20 knots Speed of Advance (SOA). We knew it the day before, but Vinnie the Maximum Spook swore us to silence on the matter.

The implications from this tended to be fairly parochial. Naturally, Midway is like a union hire- first on and last off. The plan is to get Kitty Hawk back to cover the Korean Contingency, and let the Coral Sea pop out and relieve us. Fine and dandy.

The only sobering note is that Numbnuts can’t be here before about the 23rd of January, and after cross-decking the staff and some airplanes, that wouldn’t let the Hawk get anywhere out of the Indian Ocean for at least ten days. Then, allowing for poor old Coral Maru to get here would tack on another couple weeks, and there we are with the same amount of blue water to cover just to get to Subic Bay.

We all could do the math. That translates to something very much resembling the month of March before we see land again.

Oh, no big deal. At that rate, we would equal the post World War II record for at-sea days on the 28th of Jan, and forge on ahead to smash the record decisively by nearly 30 days. When you consider that 30 slow days in the slammer is about what you get for an encore drunk driving rap back home it makes you wonder. The record, incidentally, (at least by one reckoning, and we concede there are several dubious claims to it) is 78 days, set by the Enterprise way back in ’64. Our attempt, should things go by the tentative program, would be something on the lines of 108 days. Just another attempt to demonstrate the combat readiness of the Navy’s finest airwing and ship.

God help us.

Which they are in the process of destroying. The Engineers are tearing their hair out now. The whole concept of the Midway deployment points out the glaring flaws in the ship construction policy that has dogged the Navy since the days of Whiz Kid McNamara, We were supposed to get an “incremental” maintenance program, which would be done by the industrious Japs in 20 day shots throughout the course of a busy year of Pacific deployments. The shortage of assets has thrown that Into a cocked hat.

Our contingency deployment earlier this year (24 hrs. notice for 18,000 miles of steaming) was of necessity unscheduled, and this one is about going to finish off some of the plant equipment. Two 10,000-gallon fresh water tanks currently stand unusable due to seepage of bilge water. Basic processes of corrosion are taking their toll in a thousand little spots; the flight deck is bare brown steel, and slipperier than a greaser’s hair. And all this only l/3rd of the way through the length of the deployment this promises to be.

I haven’t mentioned the fact that as crew dissatisfaction (read boredom, crankiness, and fatigue) some idiot will start chucking quarters down the intakes of the J-79 engines of our Phantom jets, and we will start finding ourselves out of the airplane business. It happened last time, and in even the best crews there are fuck-ups and dirtbags whose grasp of the big picture ends at the end of their crank.

All that sort of thing would end at the slightest hint of combat action, but even steel must rest sometimes. And the flesh is weak, God knows.

The other implications are subtle, and have ripples that spread far beyond our parochial little spot in the pond. Pulling Nimitz out of the Med would leave only one carrier there, and the very fundamentals of NATO quake at the thought. Our Sixth Fleet presence is the main opponent to the Soviets; that is a given in all strategic planning in that Theater.

The abrupt removal of the foremost of our assets there can only point up how spread out we are. Our NATO buddies (the self-same ones who are still going at the arms sales opportunities in Iran: to wit, the U.K., Italy, and our erstwhile comrade France) are going to have to consider this very carefully.

It Is already on the planning table in the Kremlin, I have no doubt. There are so many areas to test now. The Vietnamese are about to begin the great offensive in Kampuchea, which will include some scrimmaging in Thailand without a doubt. How are we to react to that one, with only one carrier in the South China Sea? The Soviets could out-gun us in our own home turf. Even five years ago the South China Sea was an American Lake.

Strange days.

Also in the news today was our Soviet Natya tattle-tale escort. She signaled our bridge, passed the message that she would exercise her ADMGs off to the southwest, away from Midway. Bridge takes that and passes to CIC.

Does anyone think to tell us in Mission Planning? Do the aircrews get it? Not a chance. An A-6 on the third event launch reports tracer fire from the Soviets. “Should I take him out?” Jesus!

(F-14 Tomcat wave-off on USS Kitty Hawk (CV-63). Photo USN).

Also, an early morning thrill as we go to Flight Quarters early for the recovery of a Kitty Hawk F-14 Tomcat. It would be the first Tomcat trap for Midway. LSOs to the platform! Kitty has a main engineering casualty and can’t get the knots up to take the Tomcat aboard; some kind of inflight hydraulic problem prevents the jet from getting flaps down and is going to come over the ramp fast.

The CAG comes up on the box and says there will be NO, repeat, NO painting of the Tomcat in CVW-5 colors. Stickers, OK, but no paint guys…. At length, perhaps out of consideration for such shenanigans, Kitty pours the coals to it for one last try and successfully traps the tomcat.

There was mild disappointment that we didn’t get to pull one out of the fire for them. Something different.

A rumor going around that the Hawk got the body of the missing Marine, presumed to have snuffed himself the other day. No positive news, I would have presumed him shark meat long ago, on his lonely swim towards Israel.

Biff McCole suggested that it might just have been one of the bags of trash which we have been depositing off the starboard sponson aft for the last month. An interesting thought. Reports have literally thousands of the things bobbing about in the oil-slicked waters. The bags are supposed to perforated so as to sink within a few hours, but I suspect that they will be drifting for months. Perhaps providing the Somalis with a new industry…..

The North Arabian Sea does not get the Jacques Cousteau award for environmental excellence. This has got to be one of the most fucked up neighborhoods of the World Ocean; the supertankers apparently purge their tanks on the way in to on-load more crude. Looking off the sponson at the horizon, the water has an evil oily tinge.

It does not boil along the hull like it does in the cleaner water down south. It just has an iridescent hue as it slides astern.

I received letters from Dad and Uncle Jim which both included words to the effect that this would be one of the most memorable times in my life. I wonder if it is always like that; that the participants are too close to the action to discern anything more than fatigue and dull longing to be elsewhere, and the legend actually lies elsewhere.

I was perusing the Navy Exchange catalog (one of the few things to do in a situation like this is to plan where the pay checks which lie un-cashed in drawer and desk will be spent. Cameras, watches, guns) and Ed Markham strolled by my stool in Mission Planning. A Marlboro smoldered in the aluminum butt kit next to me, and the double paper cup on the planning table had been filled so many times that morning that it was starting to leak vile dark fluid out of the bottom.

We discussed the relative merits of double action handguns, Ed casually mentioned that a single action had very nearly got his head blown off one time. His war story was a classic.

It began:

“Well, I got shot down one time south of An Loc, see, and the Major who was in the right seat had his ankle trapped under the two armor seats that got unglued in the wreck. So, I moseyed down a ways to check things out. He got stuck for about 28hrs up there, but what I meant to say about double action pistols was this. I came on back up to the fuselage where the Major and this Second Lieutenant was. The Looie was dead naturally, and he didn’t care, But I came around the wreckage and there was this Gook. I could tell he was a communist because I didn’t know him, and also by the AK-47 slung barrel-down over his shoulder, I pulled out my Ruger Blackhawk.”

I asked Ed why he was carrying a hog-leg like that, when the standard survival weapon was a .38 Smith and Wesson.

He rolled his eyes toward the overhead. “They didn’t let us carry them issue, see, and I wanted to up-gun my survival gear. Of course, pilots are the worst people In the world when it comes to cleaning weapons, and I figured a revolver don’t have as many moving parts as those fancy semi-autos some of the guys carried. The Blackhawk was real wild west style. Well, I’ll tell you, I was startled when I pulled the trigger and nothing happened. I was putting my arm back down and I remembered you had to cock them things. Nearly got myself plumb wasted, I did. Gotta go man the alert. See ya.”

“Wait,” I said. “Did you shoot him?”

“Yeah. He got tangled up in the strap of his rifle. Thank goodness. Remember to cock the pistol, that is my motto.”

(Ruger Blackhawk .357 Single Action revolver. Photo Sturm-Ruger.)

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Haze Gray and Underway

December, 1979

I stood on the flight deck this morning to watch the sunrise. It was a sky like a watercolor painting by John Singleton Copley, and the wind was brisk. The pastel colors were perfect. The Marines were doing Jody Calls as they ran around the quarter-mile circuit on the flight deck. It was enough to call back the strange days under the Florida Sun with our beloved Drill Instructor, Staff Sergeant Ronald Mace, USMC, and the misery of marching on the Pensacola grinder by the seaplane ramps.

The representative of the Soviet Red Banner Indian Ocean Eskadra was about three miles in trail, the odd little bow-heavy silhouette of the Soviet Natya MSF- Fleet Minesweeper- grey on the grey oily water. He was around to provide target information in case someone wanted to whack us, which meant, of course, that the minesweeper would be the first to go if things got tense.

Plastic bags of trash floated off the starboard sponson aft.

Joggers and aircraft mechanics. The ship’s nav lights were still on. I was cool and collected in my flight-deck jersey. I wondered why my body had decided that one-thirty in the morning was a splendid time to be awake. I walked around the deck after the sun had risen far enough that there was no possible doubt as to fee fact that it was once again a fly day, The non-skid is totally gone from the landing area. The bare steel is oily and brown and very slippery.

I gave a portion of my numbed brain to an idle, dull hatred of the Iranians.

The situation today is as bad as the day before, and as bad as tomorrow. A ray of hope is the statement by Goat-ze-deh (the opportunistic Foreign Secretary who followed the erratic but easy to pronounce Bani Sadr) that he will release some of the hostages by Christmas. This is news to the Students, who claim that they are going to go ahead and try everyone for espionage.

Iran appears near to being on the brink of war with Iraq; heavy artillery has flown across the boarder already. The Soviets are conducting a massive buildup on the Afghani boarder, and in fact already have two airborne brigades deployed in country, I hold a dull hatred for them, too. Negotiations continue with the rebels in the province of Azerbaijan, who have rallied behind a more rational Ayatollah named Shariat Madari. Khomeini remains as crazy as a bedbug, I hate him with more than dull feeling, On him I would pull the trigger, and delight to see his ancient features writhe in agony,

And so a crisis goes on. No hope in sight, no way to pull the carriers off the line, because the situation is as bad as ever. Can’t be taken for a sign of weakness. And cannot act militarily for the same reasons we have not for the last month. Frustrating. Jesus.

The beat goes on out here. Larry Jensen, the Air Wing Intelligence Officer ,flew away on the US-3 yesterday. They bonged him away and minutes later the cat stroke put him light-years away from this steel island of repressed sexual longing. The latest Penthouse came aboard on one of the recent UNREPS and the pictorials had us squirming.

Are there such things as women, still? Or mail? Is anyone still out there, beyond the grey oval disk of the horizon?

Ah, I suppose we are spoiled here in the modern age, TV on the ship, the AP press-wire over satellite downlink; decent food (for institutional crap) and even the perpetual Space Invaders machine down in the wardroom lounge. Did you know that after ten racks of the little electronic critters it all goes back to zero again, and the score continues to mount?

That the elusive 500,000-point game has already been achieved, and that the tantalizing million point record can only be weeks away?

That there are dope dealers on the ship was a known fact. The MAA in a routine search turned up over fifteen of the little Skillcraft Uncle Sugar pipes made out of the Lighthouse For The Blind ball-point pens in our squadron Day Check Berthing?

The clicker end is unscrewed and a piece of foil twisted on to make a bowl.) I have heard rumors from those in a position to know that an ounce of dope is going for one hundred dollars. That there will be big money made by a few individuals is a known fact. I mean big bucks: the real stuff. Dealers who supply entire areas of Japan live right here with us on the ship, interesting. From noting sections of the ship’s POD, it would seem like the incidence of marijuana use on board the ship is ever increasing, c’est la Vie.

Numb. That is the only word for it. Sleep schedule all fucked up. I am getting fat. Can’t get the energy to work out. The Shah Is in Panama now, in a plush resort. A Senator in Minnesota has called for the return of the noted International criminal to the impartial hands of his former subjects for trial and eventual disposition.

I feel a dull hatred for him, too. I can only hope that The Senator’s constituents will have him shot, or not reelected, or whatever the worst thing is you can do to a political hack.

We had a flight deck cookout the other day. An Iranian P-3 came by to say hello, with a Kitty Hawk F-14 in trail. We munched burgers and got sunburns. My once vaunted Indian Ocean tan is peeling and fading. I can no longer dredge up the energy to do anything about it.

Maybe something will change tomorrow. It won’t rain or anything. Just give us something different.

Like today. First suicide of the trip. Hard to evaluate. It was a Marine Sergeant, so you have to take into account the fact that his death wish probably goes back beyond the day he put up his right hand and vowed to do it all ferr Uncle Sugar and the bigod Corps. He vanished from the flight deck clad in blue running shorts and white running shoes. They say he was up in Flight Deck control at one point and had described his desire to go to visit his brother in Israel, couched in mumblings and religious terms.

The Ship’s XO came up on the one-mc this morning and was inquiring for the whereabouts of the guy. Later, the Chaplain got on the horn (so odd to hear him before the ritual performance of the evening blessing that echoes through the spaces on the ship at 2155 each evening.)

This we took to be confirmation of the extraordinary nature of the search, that the chaplain was calling from the navigational bridge. The helo searched for him, in vain. There are bodacious sharks in these waters, and I expect that that is the last of that, save for the CACO call in some dusty town back in the World.

When you think about-it, this still is one of the healthiest populations around, Five thousand good Americans, all of an age where the bloom of youth is still on the downy cheek. And with all the heavy and dangerous machinery going bang and thump all the time, the JP-5 jet fuel in the water, and the murderous microwaves pumping through us all the time, it is remarkable that more are not squashed.

We have lost one or two in job related accidents (fewer, I would suspect, than what a comparable community loses in traffic accidents) and three or four in liberty-related mishaps.

Beer bottle upside the head for one guy, a good man, who stepped between two P.I. hookers. Felt fine till he got back to the ship and his bruised brain swole up and quit..

Another two in Pattaya Beach, Thailand, drugs and booze overdose. It is tough to go on Liberty out here; maybe tougher than just working. But there still was an eerie Veteran’s Day, or some such thing, when they commenced to firing off the saluting rifle up on the 0-8 level, and reading the List of the Midway Dead, their years and their names.

Down from the early war cruises off Vietnam, through the heat of the last great offensive, to our guys who died choking on vomitus ejectus in the small hours of the most beautiful nation of SE Asia late last year. We have more names, now.

And the Crisis. The conundrum. We are back to a training evolution. We are practicing the delivery tactics of the La Combatante class missile boats, which the Iranians have gone ahead and fitted out with the handful of Harpoons we were foolish enough to provide.

It is a ticklish problem.. What does one do when they make a head-in run towards engagement range? Do they become hostile by virtus of their course and heading? At what point can we end the charade and kill them?

It seems not to be my decision, and for that I am glad.

Don’t want no mach-plus  missiles coming through the bulkhead: not in world famous Bunkroom Two. No goddam place to swim to.

We are thrilling the fans with our presence. We have reliable reports (the source of which is neither here nor there) that the commercial pilots are beginning to call our portion of the Gulf of Oman the “Fighter Playground,” After getting snuck up on (due to our grave
mistake in trusting the Kitty’s judgment in what exactly constitutes a threat axis. What was that line from Animal House? “You fucked up. You trusted us”) by an Iranian P-3, we have put a PIRAZ ship up due north and have been intercepting the shit out of everything that flies down the airways, military or commercial.

With good reason, too. Although unsporting, certain unscrupulous people have been known to simulate all the IFF of airliners, then suddenly plunged off the scopes and secured all modes n’ codes for an inbound run on us. We had not been overflown without an escort in five years, and in our neck of the woods, that is no mean feat. We went perhaps a little overboard in our prosecution of the civilians, (“I just wanted to see what the co-pilot was wearing. Honest. I wasn’t really that close.”)

They reported such diverting and endearing tactics as high-speed over and under fly-bys.

Certainly enough to give a sane man with plenty on his mind, like what hotel he was going to stay in that night, and what his chances of scoring with the new little number serving the fish back in second class the shakes. Seeing cold blooded reality with two AIM-9s and a couple Aim-7s missiles strapped on flash by at Mach umpty-fratz would certainly call for a stiff drink.

That is life in the Fighter Playground. Up there is threat and thuder. The surface of the sea around us is now covered with the plastic bags that contain our trash.

You can see the sharks hit them in the wake astern.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com