“We’ll take him aboard.” The captain leaned over and flipped a few switches on the intercom. “This is the captain. Clear the landing area. Make a ready deck. We have an emergency inbound.”
Within seconds the flight deck became organized bedlam. Arming and fueling activities ceased, and the handlers began respotting aircraft forward on the bow, clear of the landing area on the angled deck.
Minutes after the order was given, the carrier’s landing area was empty and the ship had turned into the wind. The duty search-and-rescue helicopter, the Angel, to up a holding pattern off the starboard side. The crash crew, wearing asbestos suits, started the engine of the flight-deck fire truck. A doctor and a team of corpsmen appeared from deep within the ship and huddled beside the island, the ship’s superstructure.
Grafton’s roommate, Sammy Lundeen, was smoking a cigar in the A-6 squadron’s ready room when the news came over the intercom mounted on the wall of the duty officer’s desk. The squadron skipper, Commander Frank Camparelli, put down his newspaper as he listened to the squawk box. Lundeen drew his cigar from his mouth and fixed his eyes on the metal intercom.
“Sam, you go up to the LSO’s platform and standby on the radio.”
Camparelli looked at the duty officer. “Hardesty, I’m going to CATCC. Get the executive officer and tell him to come to the ready room and stand by here.”
Commander Camparelli strode out of the room headed for the Carrier Air Traffic Control Center Sammy Lundeen right behind on his way to the landing signal officer’s platform.
Lundeen’s cigar smoldered on the deck where he had dropped it.
“How badly is the BN hit?” the air operations officer asked the strike controller over a hot-line telephone.
In the next compartment the controller, focusing on a small green dot moving slowly toward the center of the radar screen, stepped on his microphone switch.
“Devil Five Oh Five, Wagon Train Strike. State nature and extent of BN injuries, over.”
Jake Grafton’s voice came over the public-address system in the control center. “Strike, Five Oh Five, I think my bombardier’s been shot in the neck. It’s hard to tell. He’s unconscious now. I want a Charlie on arrival.”
“Devil Five Oh Five, Strike. Your signal is Charlie on arrival.” Charlie was the command to land.
“Roger that.”
“Five Oh Five, switch to Approach on button three, and squawk One Three Zero Zero, over.”
“Switching and squawking.”
At the next radar console the approach controller noted the blip on his screen that had blossomed with the new IFF code. When the pilot checked in on the new frequency, the controller gave him landing instructions.
The air ops boss turned to the A-6 skipper who had just entered the compartment. “Frank, looks like your boy must be hit pretty badly. He should be at the ramp in six or seven minutes.”
Commander Camparelli nodded and sat down in an empty chair beside the boss’s chair. The room they sat in was lit entirely by dim red light. On the opposite wall a plexiglass status board seven feet high and twenty feet long listed every sortie the ship had airborne and all the sorties waiting on deck to be launched. Four enlisted men wearing sound-powered telephone headsets stood behind the transparent board and kept its information current by writing backwards on the board with yellow greasepencils. A black curtain behind them and the red light made the men almost invisible and caused the yellow letters to glow.
Commander Camparelli stared at the board. “505, Grafton, 9.0,” it read.
Camparelli’s thoughts began to drift. Grafton and McPherson. Morgan’s married to that dark-haired stewardess with United and has a two-year-old boy. Christ, he thought, I hope I don’t have to write and tell her she’s a widow.
“What kind of pilot is this Grafton?” the air ops boss asked.
“He’s on his first tour, second cruise over here. Steady,” said Camparelli. He added, “Good driver,” but the ops officer had already turned away, trying to sort out what flights could be launched after Grafton had been recovered.
Frank Camparelli breathed deeply and tried to relax. Twenty years of fast planes, stormy nights, and pitching decks had given him a more than casual acquaintance with violent death. And he had found a way to live with it. Eyes open, half listening to the hushed voices around him, he began to pray.
The wind on the landing signal officer’s platform tore at Sammy Lundeen’s hair and clothing and roared in his ears as he stood on the lonesome perch jutting out from the port side of the landing area. He saw the Angel, the rescue helicopter, circling at 300 or 400 feet off the starboard side. Looking aft he could see the ship’s phosphorescent wake and the running lights of the plane guard destroyer bobbing along a mile astern waiting to rescue aircrews who ejected on final approach to the ship-if the chopper couldn’t find them and if the destroyer crew could. Too many ifs. Small clusters of lights several miles away on either beam revealed the presence of two more destroyers.
“Here’SARadio, Lundeen.” The landing signal officer on duty tonight, Lieutenant Sonny Bob Battle handed him a radio transceiver, which looked like a telephone, and then turned to the sound-power telephone operator, an enlisted airman called a “talker.”
“Where is he?” Battles asked.
The talker spoke into the large microphone held by a harness on his chest.
“Twelve miles out, sir. Level twelve hundred feet.”
“What freq?”
“Button three.”
The LSO bent and twirled the radio channelization knob on the large control console mounted level with the deck edge. He and Lundeen held their radio transceivers up to their ears and heard the approach controller talking.
“Five Oh Five, hold your gear until eight miles.”
“Wilco.” Jake sounded tired.
The LSO was an A-7 pilot, but like most aviators who acquire the special designation of landing signal officer, he was qualified to “wave” aboard all the types of aircraft the ship carried. He was prepared to talk a pilot aboard using only his eyes and the experience he had acquired observing more than ten thousand carrier approaches and almost as many simulated approaches at runways ashore. He had various sensors arrayed in a panel at his feet, but he rarely had time to glance at them.
“Who’s driving Five Oh Five, Sam?”
“Grafton.”
“Flies with McPherson?”
“Yeah.”
Sonny Bob nodded. Both men heard Grafton give his gear-down call.
The approach controller started Devil 505 descending on the glide slope. “Five Oh Five, call your needles.”
“Up and right.”
“Concur.” A computer aboard ship located the A-6 and provided a glide slope and azimuth display on an instrument in the cockpit. But Jake would have to fly the jet down the glide slope and land it manually, a task that was as nerve-racking and demanding as any aviation had to offer.
On the LSO’s platform Battles and Lundeen searched the darkness.
The LSO keyed his mike. “Lights. Jake Grafton had forgotten to turn on the aircraft’s exterior lights when he crossed the VietNamese coast line on his way out to sea. Now the lights came on, making Devil 505 visible. Lundeen thought that if Jake had forgotten the lights perhaps he had also failed to safe the weapons-release circuits. “Check your master armament switch,” he told Jake. He heard two clicks of the mike in reply, a pilot’s way of responding when he was too busy to speak.
“Green deck,” the telephone operator shouted.
“Roger green deck,” Battles replied. The landing area was now clear and the arresting gear set to receive an A-6.
The Intruder moved up and down on the glide path and shifted left of the center line, to Battles’s right. The LSO keyed the mike. “Paddles has you now, Five O Five. Watch your lineup.”
The A-6 turned toward the centerline, where it should be.
“Just settle down and keep it coming. How do you feel?”
