“if there is something, you had better let me know. I have to know what the hell is going on in these airplanes. I have sixteen planes and eighteen crews to worry about and I don’t like to lose people or machines.”
Jake swallowed. “Skipper, that hop was as straightforward as they come. No fuck-ups. The gomers just got lucky.”
Camparelli lit a cigarette. His cropped hair showed flecks of gray, and crow’s-feet radiated from the corners of his eyes. Like most aviators he had a deeply tanned face, but his arms, routinely encased in a fire-proof flight suit, were white. In the center of his forehead was a prominent scar, a souvenir from his younger days when he had belly-landed an A-1 Skyraider and smashed his head on the gunsight. “No fuck-ups? The doctor tells me you pressed so hard on McPherson’s neck you damaged the tissue. And at the same time you were motoring around over the treetops with your left hand trying to stay in the air. Bet that little trip resembled a roller-coaster ride.” He blew smoke in Grafton’s face. “The only way you could have stopped the bleeding would have been to stuff a finger in the bullet hole and seal off that artery. Then McPherson would have died from brain damage due to oxygen starvation.”
Camparelli leaned forward in his chair, put his elbows on his knees, and looked into Grafton’s eyes. “I know you didn’t know how badly he was hit, but you could have smacked in while you were playing doctor. Then you and McPherson would both have one of those little farms with the stones and flowers. Of course, you wouldn’t be there. You two would be splattered across a half mile or so of rice paddies. Your intentions were good, but I’m here to tell you that no matter what the circumstance, sound judgment is the only damn thing on God’s green earth that’s going to keep you alive long enough to die in bed. And even that may not be enough.”
Camparelli drummed on the table with his fingers His voice dropped. “There is no such thing as luck. You think you’re lucky and that’ll carry you through you’re living on borrowed time.” He was talking to himself. “The luckiest men I ever met are all dead now. They thought they were surrounded with a golden halo Of good fortune, a magic shield that couldn’t be pierced.” He looked at Grafton. “And they are dead!” He pronounced the last sentence slowly, to emphasize each word.
“I know, sir, you’re right, but what bothers me” Jake’s respect for Camparelli warred with his anger over McPherson’s death, “is why in hell we keep getting men killed and planes chewed up over garbage targets? A ’suspected truck park,” for God’s sake? “A good man’s life in exchange for some beat-up trucks? If they were there, which is not very damned likely. There’s got to be some better targets in gomer country. Why can’t we bomb something that makes a difference?”
The Old Man leaned back in his chair. “There is nothing anyone aboard this ship can do about the targets. In this war the politicians and generals do the targeting, based on political considerations.” He pronounced “political” like a preacher using a cuss word He waved his hand, dismissing the subject of targets and the men responsible for them. “I don’t want you in the air unless you’re one hundred percent. I can’t spare any more bombardiers and I damn sure don’t want to lose an airplane. All you have to worry about is your ass and your bombardier’s, but I have eighteen aircrews I’m responsible for. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
He spoke more briskly. “And I don’t want anybody in these airplanes who thinks he’s John Wayne on a vengeance mission,” Jake Grafton said nothing.
“Okay, get some sleep. Take tonight off and write that letter. It’ll be tough but it’ll help get this behind you. “Yes, sir.” He stood hesitantly and watched the skipper pull a can of Coke from his refrigerator.
“Thanks, Skipper.”
“If you kill yourself, son, I’ll piss on your grave.
“I understand.”
The commander nodded absently and ripped the pull-top off the can.
“Get some sleep, Jake.”
As he walked toward his own stateroom, Jake decided that Frank Camparelli was all right. He could tell a man to go to hell and make him happy to be on his way.
Jake and Sammy were drinking. Earlier the squadron flight surgeon had stopped by and delivered two airline bottles of twelve-year-old bourbon. He made a point of delivering medicinal whiskey whenever he heard of a particularly harrowing flight.
“Real sorry about McPherson,” he had said, handing over the bottles. Then he had added, “But these things happen.”
Grafton had at that instant loathed the man. “Yeah, that’s the breaks of naval air.”
Jake saw that the sarcasm had registered on the doctor, who was known among the airmen as Mad Jack the Jungle Quack in honor of the tour he had recently completed with the marines in South Vietnam that had left his arms red and inflamed from a tropical skin disease, one that his patients fervently hoped was not contagious.
“No offense. I’m sorry.” He gazed distractedly around the little stateroom at the rumpled flight suits hanging from hooks, the flight boots lying in the corner and the papers strewn about the two desks. In his mid-thirties, with a roll of fat around his middle, the doctor seemed out of place among the pilots.
As he departed Mad Jack had paused. “If you want to talk or visit …”
Grafton had shown no response. So now the two pilots had settled down to business They had finished off the airline bottles, and Jake was working on a bottle of bourbon while Lundeen, who had to fly in eight or ten hours, sipped a can of Coke. Lundeen kept the bottle sequestered in his small desk safe, which the navy provided for the storage of classified documents. Unlike the skipper, they had no refrigerator, so there was no ice. After the first drink, Jake had dispensed with the water.
Jake watched his friend tip his can of Coke. Lundeen was almost six feet, four inches tall, near the limit for a pilot, and had a great deal of upper body strength and smooth, quick movements. He had been a tight end in college but was too small for the pros. In the compact stateroom he looked huge. Besides flying, he also acted as the squadron’s personnel officer, supervising a chief and five clerks. The only portion of his administrative duties that he did not visibly detest was his work as awards officer. He drafted the citations and recommendations for medals and gave them to the XO Harve Wilson, to approve and forward up the chain of command- Lundeen kept a thesaurus on his desk that he referred to constantly as he drafted the award citations He would gleefully read his better efforts to Jake as proof positive that the military in general and the navy in particular were “all fucked up.”
“How’d you guys do tonight?” Sammy asked, for he knew Morgan had been hit after the bomb run.
“Well, you know how hard it is to tell at night. No secondary explosions.
But Morg had a ground lock with the track radar and the system was tight. If we missed, it sure as hell wasn’t for lack of trying. Of course, what we hit was probably just a couple acres of forest that some jackass thought we ought to drop a few bombs into.”
“The toothpick hypothesis,” Sammy said. “After we turn all the big trees into toothpicks, they’ll have to surrender.”
“Damn, I wish we had some decent targets! There has to be something in North Vietnam that’s worth the trip. Morgan gets zapped and we don’t have a goddamn thing to show for it, not even a secondary explosion.”
Jake splashed more bourbon into his glass. “And the skipper says there’s nothing we can do about it.” He got up and paced the small room. He knew the targets were assigned daily on a master “frag” list.
The strike orders were further fragmented into a group of targets for each squadron. This chore was handled by the Strike Ops Department, which matched the targets to the capabilities of the various aircraft and the number of aircraft each squadron had available, and gave each target a mission number. The target lists then went to the schedules officer of each squadron, who, after consulting with the squadron operations officer and perhaps its skipper, assigned a crew to each mission.
The flight schedule was printed and shoved under the door of every crewman at least three, preferably four, hours before the first launch of the day. After consulting the schedule, the A-6 pilots and bombardiers went to the mission Planning section of the ship’s Intelligence Center where coded mission numbers were matched with photographs, map coordinates, and, available, radar photography of the intended target This information was compiled for each mission by the squadron’s air intelligence officers, nonfliers who specialized in this field.
Surrounded by all the data they could get, the bombardier-navigators planned the flight, usually with their pilots watching over their shoulders.
The Bns would choose a route that would avoid the worst known enemy defenses, select navigation checkpoint measure headings and distances, and calculate the flight time for each leg of their route. They would
