The XO braces himself
in the ejection seat with his right arm locked on the canopy bow towel rack,
left arm braced against the rail, holding the engines at full power. He puts his
head back against the seat, peeks to his left at the deck-edge cat operator and
catches him just as he fires the catapult. The XO bites down on a scream of
mingled primal joy and physical strain as jet bounces up and down the long
catapult stroke. His body is pressed against the seat by the g-forces as even
his eyeballs flatten, making the flight instruments in the HUD momentarily
unreadable. But after a long moment, it is over and his heavily laden fighter
wallows, rather than springs into the air on this hot day in an Arabian Gulf
summer. Airborne, by God.
A clearing turn follows (gently, now: gently
– heavy and hot and low as we are) then straight ahead at 500 feet until
clear of the overhead pattern. There’s no one waiting to land of course,
this is the first “real” launch of the day, but there’s only
one right way to do this, and in this case it actually is the “Navy
way.” He thumbs the radar into search while idly looking around for
sea-based traffic. A few scattered dhows here and there, and a massive oil
tanker hull up on the horizon. Inbound to Bushehr, most likely. Clear of the
pattern finally, and throttles to military power, capture best climb airspeed
and there… raise the nose for the climb to the tanker. No traffic
anywhere: It's good to be the first
airborne.
Back on the flight deck,
the launch continues. The FA-18 strike fighters first, then the E-2 Hawkeye and
finally the EA-6B Prowler. The E-2 is slower than the fighters of course, but
doesn't need to tank, can't tank in fact - and isn't going to go "in-country,"
so it hasn't got as far to go. The Prowler won't need as much gas, not right
away.
One of the FA-18E’s is
tanker configured, he'll remain overhead as a backstop for the recovery - just
in case. A squadron mate joins him overhead the ship at angels six to ensure
that his refueling package works properly prior to proceeding on mission to the
USAF tanker track. Satisfied, the tanker pilot reports “Sweet” to
the carrier air traffic control center, then settles back into his seat for what
promises to be a very boring hour and a half. The tanker pilot reflects that, in
a Hollywood movie, he would at this point plug in an iPod and rock n’ roll
his way to Bagdhad, escaping death a dozen different ways and saving the girl at
the end. It isn’t a movie though, and they also serve who wait overhead to
pass gas, so he checks around for traffic carefully before turning the jet over
to the autopilot, loosens his O2 mask to let it dangle by one strap and starts a
letter home to his wife. Before he puts pen to paper on the kneeboard strapped
to his thigh, he first reaches into his g-suit pocket to retrieve the last
letter he got from her. Before he writes back, he’d like to read it one
more time. He’s one of the few guys who still writes paper letters home,
he’s old fashioned that way. While an email is a great way to share data,
he believes it’s a poor media to share emotions in, nothing but ephemera,
these pixels on a computer screen. There’s nothing like a handwritten
letter, a tangible thing you can hold in your hand. His wife writes back from
time to time, above and beyond the emails she sends on a near-daily basis.
Her letters sometimes arrive in
clumps of two’s and three’s after weeks of no mail, and when they
arrive in that fashion he always intends to save them, to ration them out over
time in some private space, alone and apart from all the world. To try and make
them last. He never manages to do so though, like all the other pilots, he pulls
them greedily from his mailbox in the ready room, walks to a corner away from
everyone else and quickly devours them one by one until all newness is gone from
them. She numbers the letters, just the way he’d asked her to after their
first deployment together, because often the letters don’t arrive in order
and he used to get confused. Sometimes the third letter of the week would arrive
first and when they weren't numbered she'd make assumptions about things the
things she thinks he should know and he struggle to fill the gaps. Now when her
letters come out of sequence, he now knows to suspend his curiosity, that
eventually, as he re-reads the letters again and again in the quiet of his
stateroom, aligning them in the order numbered on the envelope flap, they will
unfold for him gradually and gratefully like a wrapped birthday present. He
re-reads the letters as well to try to feel her physical presence: Trying to
feel her hand on the pen, imagine her forearm across the paper, the coolness of
the dining room table, itself sitting in a house whose details he increasingly
strains to accurately remember.
And
at that very moment, half the world away she wakes up early, rubs her eyes, gets
out of bed and pads into the kitchen for a cup of coffee before going into the
family room, where the computer sleeps. She likes to get up early, before the
children wake up. They are still young, and have not yet learned how to sleep in
on a summer morning, a fact that she regrets but does not resent. She wants to
read what he has written in his email overnight – while he always
complains that everything is the same and that there is nothing new to report,
yet he will somewhere tell her that he loves her like no other, and aches for
her and that this will all be over soon, not too much longer now. The early
morning is her private time alone with her absent husband and if she can get it
all done before the kids get up, she’ll have time to wipe her eyes and
wash her face and the kids won’t ask her why she’s so sad, because
that never makes it any better.
She
thinks of him, and marvels at the recollection of how strongly his memories are
tied to scents, the everyday domestic smells. She loves the way that he’ll
run his hand through her hair and then hold it to his face, breathing deep, and
then sometimes she remembers, her cheeks tingeing red, his breathing deep will
turn to breathing hard. Sometimes after they are done he tells her that her own
scent reminds him of the way the air smells just before a thunderstorm, the
instant before the first thunderclap. Although she has never known quite what to
make of that, the way he says it pleases her inside, and she smiles ruefully at
the thought, contrasted against the distance.
She decides that today she will
write a letter, and moves into the dining room to do so. Just as he had
envisioned on the other side of the world. She writes to him about the dream
that she had of the two of them together last night. She fills it with the kind
of details that would have mortified her mother, and that she’d be
embarrassed to put into an email – she knows that he reads his email on
one of the two machines in the public space of the squadron ready room, and
someone might accidentally glimpse a bit of it over his shoulder, so she saves
such details for her letters.
Because
she knows how strongly he reacts to smells, she always puts a bit of her perfume
on the letter before she sends it to him, hoping to remind him more closely of
her. When he writes back, he lies and tells her that he loves the way her
letters smell, and how they remind him of her – he has to lie, because in
truth all the scented letters from all the different wives and girlfriends are
smashed together in a canvas mail bag for so long that by the time they reach
the ship, all of them smell exactly the same. But he cannot think of a reason
why she would need to know that, and he considers this lie, at least, to be
forgivable.
So halfway round the
world he checks outside for traffic once again before bowing his head and
beginning to re-read her last letter. Trying to feel her in its tangible
presence, imagining her arm across the dining room table, holding down a pad of
stationary as she writes him one of her maddeningly enchanting letters. In that
exact moment, sixteen time zones and half the world away, she is doing precisely
that, with an impish half-smile in her face and feeling an internal glow of
warmth from the graphic memory she is relating. Down the hall two children
slumber, temporarily fatherless, dreaming children’s
dreams.
For each interrupted couple
on a six-month deployment there are tens, perhaps hundreds of such moments of
unlikely synchronicity, and the true tragedy is that each will pass unnoticed
and therefore unlamented into the endlessly unfolding wale of indifferent
time.
Twenty miles away from the
overhead tanker pilot, the squadron XO acquires a radar lock on the USAF tanker
orbiting in its track, analyzes the target angle and maneuvers to intercept
heading for a stern
conversion...
"Sign on, young man, and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me." - John Paul Jones
"Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature" --George Bernard Shaw, "Ceasar and Cleopatra"
"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."--Friederich Nietzsche
