Time Flying (32 page)

In the other timeline, I got to spend my life with Molly, but Amanda was dead. In this one, my life with Amanda still lies ahead, but I will be sentenced to feel the loss of Molly every day.

At that moment, I realized I was tired of the war. I wanted to go home and start the rest of my life with Amanda, looking forward to seeing Molly again when my stay in this timeline ends, but dreading the day, too, knowing I'll be returning to a world in which Amanda died in 1978.

THIRTEEN

Crash

I'd like to be able to say I had a premonition, a dream, or even just “a bad feeling about this,” but if I did, I would be lying. The mission Pat and I flew that night, two days after Jefferson Campbell's death on the ship and Molly’s death in Saudi Arabia, started out like all the others. I had no inkling when I slipped into the comfortable, leather chair in VA-145's briefing room, that it would be the last time I would ever do so, or the notes I took during the brief about SAM sites, landmarks, sortie times, tanker call-signs, recovery details and the dozens of other bits of information we needed to have before
Ranger
's catapult shot us off the end of her deck, would later be purposely burned to avoid falling into enemy hands.

The brief was unremarkable, another mission in a war seeming to last forever, even though I knew otherwise, having followed it all on CNN before.

CNN.

I stayed away from the television, since escaping the story of Molly’s tragic death in the SCUD attack was impossible. The whole thing numbed me, prompting Pat to get us removed from the flight schedule for a couple days. The fatigue building in all of us came in the form of a cloud enveloping the ship, creating a kind of detached, false environment that was our theater of battle, so I didn’t appear to be far off center. The real world lay somewhere outside the “bubble,” invisible to us, so convincing ourselves it was still there got harder and harder. In the next Gulf War, technology allowed combatants to talk to their loved ones on a regular basis. Hell, a soldier on patrol got emails from home seconds after they were sent. I'm not sure a Marine getting a text from his girlfriend breaking up with him just before he kicks a door looking for hidden weapons in a house in Baghdad is such a good thing.

In 1991, we didn't have to worry about such things. As much as flying in an airplane designed to wreak an enormous amount of havoc on the ground could be normal, this flight seemed to be.

Until the AA started.

Even though I had no premonitions about the mission, as soon as the tracers started coming up at us, this mission became something we hadn’t experienced before. The Iraqis had waited longer than normal before opening fire this time, and passed on firing at the HARM-carrying Intruders who had passed this way ahead of us. The HARMs, anti-radiation missiles designed to mercilessly punish any site emitting the kind of radar signals AA batteries used, were heaven-sent protectors. Like us, the Iraqis were learning to fight the war as they went along, and someone had the idea of lying low while the first wave flew through, and whacking the second. This mission didn't include HARM-armed Intruders loitering like heavily armed hall monitors, looking for AA radar to pop up, and ready to pounce on them when they did. In the after-action debriefs, I'm sure the decision from above to not have HARM support was criticized. I certainly would have voted “yes,” given the opportunity.

In fact,  I would have been the one to order the HARM carrying Intruders into battle, since I had planned this mission. As the war progressed, Commander Coleson began allowing his senior officers to plan and lead missions, and on this night, my opportunity had come. I picked the route to target, the timing, the makeup of the different flights. Tony Coleson and his RIO even flew the mission with us in Rustler 332, just off our right wing, behind and below us.

So, in the case of this mission, the strategy employed by the Iraqi AA teams worked for them. The first stream of tracers came up at us, and were much closer than I'd experienced before. This time, only a couple of seconds passed before the tracer arc bent toward us, or more accurately, bent toward where we were going to be, and they started impacting, flashes of light exploding as the AA cannon rounds hit our starboard wing, a mere six feet from where I was strapped in. Even though we always knew this could happen, I watched the sparks and small chunks of the wing spinning off into the night not quite believing what I was seeing. Over the intercom, I Pat yelled “MotherFUCKER! They hit us Richie. GOD DAMN!”

The fiery tracers and sparks from the AA fire hitting our wing drew my eyes outside Rustler 314 and over to the blinking lights of the nearby Intruder. The light briefly illuminated inside its cockpit, the helmeted and visored Tony Coleson, piloting the aircraft, looking my way, just as Rustler 332 exploded. My body, already so jacked up on adrenaline, witnessing Coleson's Intruder vanish in a fireball didn't register as anything but a curiosity at first. Even though my absence of emotion probably only lasted a tiny fraction of a second, realization of what had just happened seemed to take forever to seep in. Then, the massive, dense steel door of grief flattened me, and I was in Hell.

I tore my eyes away from the fireball, disappearing behind us in the night and looked at Pat. He had his helmet visor flipped down like Coleson had, quickly, but not frantically, flipping switches, and pulling levers, shutting off fuel from the fuel tanks, and extending the Intruder's speed brakes, to slow the aircraft down a little. Seared into my mind's eye, is the memory of Pat Maney, all-business, yet with the tiniest smile on his face, turning to me and saying, “Time to go, Richie.” I was scared shitless, but here was my best friend, looking upon saving both our lives as something he did every day. I had no way knowing whether he had seen the other Intruder explode.

Rustler 314 was dying. The “up-gripes” on the aircraft log, the intermittently failing tail hook secured light, the very slowly leaking seal in the hydraulic line that every 4 or 5 days made the nose steering a little sluggish, and the canopy support that was bent and sometimes required three attempts to properly close would never be fixed. They were now all irrelevant.

In the nanoseconds following Pat's informing me we had to leave the aircraft, I reached out, grabbed the photo of Amanda and the boys from its spot to the right of the boot, and ducked my head, pulling my shoulders in, making myself as small as possible as Pat reached behind his head with both hands and pulled the loops firing both of our ejector seats.

In my 9 years in the Navy, I had a good friend, an F-14 RIO who had bailed out twice. Once when their bird's tail hook failed and the Tomcat slid off the bow of the carrier after landing, and a second time after a catastrophic engine failure minutes after taking off from Miramar Naval Air Station. Pete Minch always said bailing out was “no big deal,” but admitted his ejections were all at low altitude, low airspeed. All modern ejection systems are “zero-zero,” meaning the aircraft doesn't need to be going fast, nor at a certain minimum altitude to work, like older ejection systems required. Another friend, who had bailed out of an F-18 Hornet, however, did so at cruise airspeed and at altitude, and he told a different tale. Paul Zimmer, who looked down mid-flight one day to find a fire had started behind the instrument panel of his single-seat fighter-bomber, did what he had been trained to do, and punched out immediately. Paul's take? “The only thing that would have been worse than ejecting at altitude and cruise would have been NOT ejecting.”

The ejection system on an A-6E Intruder is well designed, with redundancies making a failure almost impossible. Both the pilot and B/N have ejection loops behind their headrest, and it's a simple matter to reach up and pull both of them to your crotch, triggering the system. The system is designed to eject both crew members if either pulls the handle, unless a certain switch is activated by the pilot, only causing the B/N to eject. There would have been no reason for Pat to activate the ejection-selector switch, so I knew I'd be outside the aircraft a fraction of a second after Pat pulled the loops.

Which he did.

I will never again be in an airplane as launches from an aircraft carrier, because the lifetime in which I did those kinds of things is over. But, if I were to get one more cat shot, compared to the ejection over Iraq, a cat shot would be like riding a kiddie roller coaster at a carnival. You know, the big green dragon that goes around in a circle, gently rolling up and down little hills?

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that being launched from our dying Intruder through the ignition of a number of C4 charges directly underneath our seats would be violent. When you think about it, ejecting from an aircraft means you are abandoning the jet, so any damage done by the ejection system is unimportant. Loud and violent, but what you do when there is absolutely no other choice.

I had no idea if Pat's ejection charges went off, as I was in my own deafening world, after a couple seconds that seemed like hours, the sound and fury of the ejection having abated a little, I realized I must be under the canopy of my parachute. I flipped my helmet visor up and craned my neck to observe the chute spread above me. I looked around to try and find Pat, but he was nowhere to be seen. Nor was the ground visible yet, since we had bailed out over the desert on a night with almost no moon. There was every chance I wouldn’t be able to see the ground until I hit.

As dangerous as a nighttime ejection over water is, it's preferable to one over land, since the ocean is, for the most part, an even surface. Land however, is unpredictable. Rocks, big and small are everywhere, and a 180 pound flyer, wearing 50 pounds of equipment hitting a small formation of jagged rocks can be devastating, resulting in at the very least, broken bones, and at worst, a broken back or neck or cracked skull.

The ejection system includes a survival pack attached to the seat with a 10 foot long nylon cord, and hits the ground just ahead of the crew member. The time it takes to fall 10 feet is quick, and the common wisdom is that the warning you get when your survival pack hit the ground is no help at all, but having ejected, I'm not sure that's true. I think I did hear the pack hit the ground, and then wasn't surprised when I landed a quarter second later. The parachute collapsed, dragging me a couple feet across rough, but fairly level ground, before I was able to roll over and get control of myself and the chute. I gathered the canopy and lines in, hand over hand, like training taught us, to keep the chute from unfurling. 

But where was Pat?

I couldn't even begin to get my bearings right away, the ejection had scrambled my sense of direction, and what little sliver of moon in the sky had already set, leaving the desert black and deep a dark as I'd ever seen in my life.

Even though we'd been traveling fast when we ejected, we should have landed fairly close together, I reasoned, until an icy cold feeling swelled in my stomach.

Unless Pat's ejection seat had failed.

Shit, I thought, as I scanned the horizon in the direction I thought Rustler 314 would have descended and crashed, but could see no evidence of it. I don't know if I would have witnessed the explosion if after we ejected, the aircraft had blown up like 332 had, but the possibility existed, since I witnessed the anti-aircraft cannon fire shredding the wing on my side of the airplane. Both wings were almost full of fuel when we the AA shot us down.

The cold, leaden lump in my gut threatened to swell into a full-scale panic, when I heard something that didn't belong in the desert. I crouched, and drew out the Beretta 9 millimeter pistol from the chest holster I wore, and the sound repeated.

“Richie!” A voice hissed.

Pat. He was safe and close. Thank God.

Pat hadn't been as lucky as me on the bailout. He had hit a level, mostly rock-free patch of desert like I had, but he hadn't been able to secure his chute yet, since his right arm hung at an odd angle. His right shoulder had been dislocated, not when he hit the ground, but in the second after ejection, when he hit the stream of air we'd been traveling through, shielded by Rustler 314 until the moment when we parted ways with our dying airplane. That stream of air had gotten under Pat's right arm causing it to flail wildly in the wind, forcing it away from his body so violently his shoulder dislocated. Not an uncommon injury on bailout, but in our situation, one that could prove to be a problem. We were in “Indian Country,” behind enemy lines, without any rescue coming until morning, several hours from now.

For a dry, arid place, the Iraqi desert was cold at night. The stars, brilliant and brighter than I'd ever seen in my life, almost cast shadows. Of course, Pat and I, hiding among a collection of rocks and boulders would have preferred a lot more darkness, since Republican Guard troops must be looking for us. A couple times in the night we heard them, the lights from their vehicles and flashlights occasionally visible. Waiting for the sunrise and rescue in the form of a Sea Stallion helicopter, and maybe even some A-6 and Hornet attack support to keep the Hadjis' heads down seemed to take forever.

Ranger
knew where we were, and we'd gone through the GPS location ID, as well as the security protocols convincing the Intelligence team of our identity. The protocols to vet stranded flyers were serious, to avoid the enemy’s using our equipment to lure in unsuspecting rescue teams. I’d sent the “Comanches Close” message, so I expected our cavalry would include some heavy guns, perhaps even a SEAL team for extraction.

Once
Ranger
had determined we were well clear of our aircraft after our bailout, a quick follow-on raid had dropped on the location from which Rustler 314’s transponder was squawking, breaking the Intruder into even smaller pieces. I reached into my thigh pocket, feeling the reassuring texture of the photo of Amanda and the boys I had grabbed before the canopy above my head exploded, away from the aircraft, the seat rockets firing, launching me from our dying Intruder. If I hadn't been so quick, I could have lost an arm. The irony being Pat had pulled the ejection handles, kicking us both out of the aircraft, but was the who suffered a dislocated shoulder as his right arm flailed out and got caught in the slipstream of air rushing past him in the seconds after our ejection.