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Going from the general to the specific. As a young LSO in training, in the summer of 1987, I decided to stroll up to the platform, in order to watch the last recovery. It wasn’t my team’s night to “wave,” but the more experience you get the better you are, and it showed motivation [...]  ‘m not sure where the term comes from. I just know that every carrier pilot knows what it means. And nearly everyone who hasn’t had a “night in the barrel” lives in fear of the night that the bill comes due. And everyone that has, understands… In the summer of 1987 I was deployed [...] I got an email recently from an occasional correspondent – someone whose opinions I would likely often disagree with, but who has always had the courtesy to correspond with me even on controversial issues on the basis of mutual respect. And he asks, both literally and figuratively, if I think we can win the [...] This is maybe the hardest thing to write about. I’ve lost a lot of friends along the way – dozens, when I count it up – and I mourn them all deeply. There were things they never got to do, smiles and laughter and lovemaking they missed, children grown to full flower that they [...] I don’t get it, myself. Motion sickness, that is. Neither from the sea, nor from the air. Pilots generally don’t – If the gentle heave and swell of an 80,000 ton aircraft carrier puts you ’round the bend and over the bowl, you’re going to have a hard time flying a 20 ton fighter [...] One of the very first things that a midshipman receives, once he’s started on his path to a commission, is a small pamphlet entitled, “The Message to Garcia.” It’s a brief, almost ridiculously simplistic tract, first published in 1899, that nevertheless helps to capture who we are as an organization – and the virtues [...] Not quite the same thing as a mid-life crisis… But it will do. So. I’m at the 23 year mark in the Navy this spring. Having just made captain last summer, I must spend three years (two, with a waiver) as a captain to retire at that grade. Which will neatly mesh with the [...] Which is a sea story, combining a few of the exquisite luxuries of shipboard life, with some elemental discussion of the steam cycle. Because I don’t think it’s been done, before. The first thing you have to understand is that Guilt is the flip side of Duty. And in the Navy we understand both [...] |
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