It’s funny how the memory well can run dry, and then something comes along and primes the pump and there’s one story after another waiting to spill out of you. This one, like yesterday’s, is not my own, but told to me by the man to whom it happened. Another Marine captain, an instructor in the TA-4J training squadron in Meridian, Mississippi. Had a livid scar across his eyebrow, a white line that ran from atop his brow half way to his right ear.
I often wondered how he got it. One day, without prompting, he told me.
It was a night bombing hop out of Cubi Point Naval Air Station, south of Olongapo in the Philipines. He was dash-2 on a dark and drizzling night – a night maybe, where wisdom might have called for discretion as the better part of valor, but that was not our culture in those days. We didn’t scrub for darkness, and we didn’t scrub for weather if there was any way around it. Only non-hacks cancelled. They were Marine attack pilots. They were going flying.
It was a ten-second separation take-off, and he watched through the bulletproof glass in front of him as the taillight of his lead faded into the muggy darkness. Having waited the alloted time, he ran his engine up to mil, released the brakes and felt the familiar kick of the A-4F “SuperFox” engine behind him. Dark enough to be on and off the gauges on the go, backing up the runway edge lights as they flashed by with his AJB-3 gyro-compass. The little bomber’s nose got light at 120 knots, and at computed lift off speed he hauled back on the stick. Reluctantly, the heavy jet rotated to a take-off attitude, and up came the flaps as he transitioned to level flight above the harbor. After a moment to climb and gain some airspeed on course, he turned hard left to avoid mountainous terrain a mile or two ahead.
In the turn he strained over his left shoulder to re-acquire his lead’s tail light in the gloom, finally finding it, nearer than he had anticipated. He focused with all of his energy on setting the light in the proper quadrant of his forward glareshield, trying his best to be a good wingman and make a safe rendezvous. The sight picture looked strange – the lead’s tail light seemed to grow far too quickly, and – alarmed – he pulled the throttle back to idle and extended the speedbrakes in anticipation of an under-run. Still the light loomed ever closer, and he wrapped the jet up in a hard, belly-up turn, trying to shred airspeed as best he could – trying to avoid a collision. The last thing he distinctly recalled hearing before he struck the water’s surface at a 150 knots was the wheedling cry of the radar altimeter – which, given his intended altitude, didn’t make any sense.
There was a single bright flash of pain, and then down came the darkness like a falling curtain, and the darkness lasted an indeterminate time.
When he awoke, it was in slow stages and he felt pain in several places. He did not know where he was or how he had come to be there, only that he was heavily seated in a cramped space and restrained around the shoulders and hips. Something warm flowed across his face while a cool wetness rose around his legs, climbing to mid thigh. The snoring sound of his oxygen mask was loud in his ears, but louder still was the voice of Ray, his roomate, “It’s time to wake up, Mark. It’s time to go.”
“Tired,” he tried to reply through thickened lips, adding, “hurts.”
“I know, but you’ve got to try, you’ve got to get up, we’ve got to go,” and now he felt his roomate shaking him, slapping him around and he raised his arms in protest even as he came more fully awake and aware of his surroundings.
He was seated in the cockpit of his A-4F SuperFox, at the bottom of Subic Bay. He had cracked his head against the eight-day clock on impact – the light he had been attempting to rendezvous on was not his lead’s tail light but instead a navigational buoy in the harbor – the warmth across his face was blood, one of his legs was broken and the fingers of his left hand were smashed. The pain washed over him with panic following close behind – the water around his legs was rising. For a moment he considered pulling the ejection handle, even reached up for it, but his roomate shouted at him, “NO!” and he realized that Ray was right. The canopy would never clear under the water pressure, if he didn’t break his neck when he slammed into it, he’d burn to death when the seat’s rocket motor initiated in the enclosed cockpit.
“The knife. Use your K-bar,” Ray said in a conversational voice, and for the first time Mark felt a moment of scratching doubt at how his roomate had come to be with him in the cramped cockpit of a single-seat attack jet that was underwater.
He pushed these thoughts aside and retrived the rugged Marine knife from its position on his survival vest, turning it end over to hammer against his canopy above him, to break it so that he could swim away and even as he started to strike at it with all his desperate strength he heard Ray’s voice as if in a receding whisper, “Your harness. Release your harness first,” and he admitted that to be a good idea. He relased the Koch fittings that had restrained him in the seat and even as the water rose around his chest he hammered at the plexiglass above him with everything he had and there was a hole! And water rushed through like a spigot and it was cold but he kept on hammering until the canopy gave way in chunks and the spigot became a torrent pressing down on him and he felt Ray pulling him roughly up by the shoulders – he’d come back! – felt Ray pull him out of the cockpit, cutting his left arm on the plexiglass as he came out and Mark felt a flash of resentment at this new assault but then he was rising up through the black water, his life preserver automatically inflating as the salt water hit his FLU-8P actuators and he was trying to remember to keep exhaling as he ascended, keep exhaling because you didn’t want to hold the pressurized air in and cause an embolism, not after all that.
When he got to the surface, the IP told me, Ray was gone. Which only made sense, he said, staring me in the eye as if daring me to question him, or begging me to explain it because, he said, even if somehow the laws of physical space and probability had been overcome, his roomate had died in a fiery crash off-target during a practice bombing mission the week before.
That was the story he told me. Other Marine instructors verified that this had been the only story he had ever told, and that the outer details were undoubtedly true – he had become disoriented during a rendezvous on a filthy night, and flown into the water. His roomate, with whom he had been particularly close, even by the standards of the service, had indeed died the week before.
“But what about the roomate, down in the cockpit,” I asked. “Do you believe any of that’s true?”
They grimaced a bit, exchanged glances and shook their heads a little, before finally replying, “He thinks it is.”
Nice that the memory has been primed, I’ll bet we even end up with somemore Lex adventures. Amazing that anyone could live thru something like that. The mind is a mysterious thing, isn’t it?
Lex, this one gave me shivers. Another great telling to add to your future book.
And yes, I believe his room mate was there with him…why shouldn’t he?
And who among us would want to be the one to say exactly how far Semper Fidelis goes? Thanks, Lex, a lot of real stupid has been happening at work and this one, along with the end of that video link I sent you helped me to put the day in perspective.
Wonderful story, and well told.
I think that is the first Ghost/Aviation story that I’ve heard.
Shipmates,
It simply shows, once more, how love transcends all…….
There is a bond that forms between those warriors who share common experiences. It is one that many women will never understand, because it is love, but a different kind of love, a love almost like that of a child.
It is the love that will cause a man to leave the warmth of his home, his wife’s embrace, because a shipmate asked for help. Didn’t matter that they hadn’t actually seen each other in 10 years or so. Didn’t matter that one was wealthy and the other, not so much.
What mattered was that, back in the longago, in the faraway, the one had stood by the other through a dark and frightening time, not leaving until the light returned and the sound of rotors washed away the fear of the all-alone.
The one had not had to stay with the other. No page-writ rule required that much of him. Yet there he stayed, because he was his friend, and because he stayed, and helped hold back the darkness, both rode the thumping angel back to the good place.
We all have such friends. Free born men most always do. It comes from lands where graven walls speak of “Duty, Honour, Country”… and those who read them understand what lies behind them, what no dictionary can ever fully explain.
Respects,
Spooky. Not just for the obvious reason but because – I hate to keep referencing the same thing but you ever have those times where that seems to happen – I was reading this (unnamed) book today and the FAC pilot got very upset when he realized he had called the bombers in on a trap which had resulted in them being shot at and one back seater seriously hurt. He kinds of loses it as he’s flying back to base, flies into a thunderstorm because he’s lost in his head. His aircraft is damaged, altitude way too high, it sounds like he’s pretty well comatose when all of a sudden the voice of a friend (former pilot who had died in a plane when he was a back seater) starts telling him to breath and fly the plane. And won’t stop bugging him. So he finally gets the oxygen hose, wakes up and gets on with the flying part.
Common phenomena?
I’m with Byron on this – why wouldn’t the roommate have been there. They were close and probably understood each other better than their own families. Makes sense to me that the roommate would stay around to watch over his buddy.
If he believes it that is good enough. His friend, after all, saved his life.
I am not sure that I would recommend your planned foray, doorkeeper. Remember my previous comments as to how everyone should be forced to frequent a blog a little to the left or a little to the right of their current persuasion? Please don’t stray too far (left) afield, I wouldn’t want to see you get hurt. A comment on the (too far left) afield, not on you.
Sorry, THAT was meant to go somewhere else. Let me try again.
One of da best yet, again. Glad that one didn’t slip away…
Imagine the G’s that guy hit at. 1000 times worse than being blindsided by Erlacher. Surviving that WOULD take divine intervention.
Had a friend who ejected on deck as a fireball engulfed him from behind clearing the foul line. He swears he felt a hand on his back and a voice telling him to pull..
After that he can describe what happened in 40 microsecond bits of info all the way into the helo.
What’s that about God and foxholes?
b2
What was it they taught us, never fly IFR and VFR at the same time. There is a reason…
Wow. Wonderful story. And wonderfully told, of course. Gave me chills… but not of fear…
There is a phenomenon that several survivors of extreme danger have reported very similar to this– I read about it in the book “Deep Survival”.( linky) The survivors all (separately) called it something like “the voice” . Speculation is it is the higher brain cortex playing “let’s not let the amygdyla know we’re in deep doo-doo so it won’t freak out and get us killed” . The human mind is a strange and wonderous thing…
BadCat,
Higher Brain Cortex. What’s that?
N
Higher Brain Cortex. What?
Higher Brain Cortex. What’s that?
Is anybody surprised…?
Higher Brain Cortex may not be what the brain doctors call it, but what I *meant* was the higher order, rational, observational corpus callosum-type thinking (more recent on the evolutionary scale of things) as opposed to the gibbering, fight-or-flight, emotional thinking of the amygdyla. The book explains it better … The Voice ™ tends to be very cold and rational, focused on survival and not your feelings of the moment–exactly as described in the story above.
That is a great story. I am sure the dead friend was there with the Marine because it reminds me of something that happened with my grandmas. One lived with my parents. The other lived with my uncle. I stayed at my parents house watching my grandma while my parents were out of town one week. One morning my grandma said she had a dream about my other grandma. In the dream, the other grandma waved goodbye and said she had to go. Later that day, I heard from my Uncle that the grandma staying with him had passed.
Lex corroborated:
From a retired Intruder driver with his own E-story to tell-
“Mark S (rest deleted). I went through Beeville with this guy. Good dude.”
b2
Common phenomena? D@mn right it is.
BCR points out the higher brain functions that preserve lives with a coldly unemotional response to the situation. That function is in all of us, but it is more easily accessed in those who have trained for and experienced previously the same or similar hazards that they now find themselves in. Training takes over and the emotional part of the brain that would normally be freaking out about now “takes a rain check”, allowing the past training to be rapidly accessed by the higher brain, almost like rummaging through a file folder. Time distortion is very common, as if everything is happening in slow motion, while one’s own responses and choices feel accelerated –as if you had all the time in the world. Afterwards, there are often blank parts of memory and unaccounted for minutes of “normal” clock time as we know it.
What would be wierd in my mind was if the roommate *wasn’t* there. If you were the roommate, where else would you be? Whatever the number of seats in the aircraft, I don’t believe anyone flies alone.
Personally, I believe the roomate was there. Been there. Had that happen to me. Didn’t understand what it all meant at the time. Also, in life we exist in the constraints of the living universe. This includes existing in time. What happens when one steps out of time? That part of us that is spirit has that link to the Infinite since we are created in His Image. When those incidents occur where we experience compressed time but recall things with much with vivid detail, isn’t it plausible that we “move out of time” with that part of us that can, our minds? Perhaps it is a glimpse of the other side of death where there is no time. When you step out of time you have all the time in the world. Just a thought.
And CPT J, that is a roger. No one flys alone.
I believe his friend was with him.
There are more things in heaven and earth…
My wife got rear-ended once by a drag-racing kid. Rolled into concrete median barrier, then rolled clear off the road upside down into swamp, at night, some distance from road. Fast-moving rescue to pull her from car. She doesn’t remember much, by choice.
One of the rescuers at the scene was very concerned about “the other woman” he saw getting out of the car. Very insistent about it. My wife had been driving–physically–alone.
Car: “photo total” Clearly not worth repairing. [estimate of impact was > 50 MPH relative speed]
Wife: Seatbelt bruises and mental trauma.
Unborn son: Unhurt. Name changed after this from “Curtis” to “Gabriel”
I’ll accept that Marine’s story at face value.
No doubt that flying involves the supernatural.
There is no other explanation as to how/why those things get into the air.
Shit Lex, I could become a regular around here. S/F
Welcome to the madhouse
Anyone recall a WWII era movie entitled ‘A Guy Named Joe’ with Spencer Tracy and Van Johnson?
In answer to BadBob in #11,
The saying is “There are no atheist’s in foxhole’s.”
Boy, It sure got all Existential in here.
I sure hope the flight surgeon didn’t wanna lock him up for “hearing voices.” I mean, lookit what happened to Joan of Arc.
FWIW, I think the latest thinking in neuroscience is that most people “hear voices”, as in internal thought dialogue, but most recognize it as part of own brain happenings.
That has nothing to say about something like this, though, where the voice was “external” and saved the guy’s life.
Another Robert Graves quote: “Ghosts were a common sight in France that year.”
Odd that this same thing happened to two separate Marine A-4s. I deployed to Iwakuni twice on unit rotation as an A-4M driver and both times we relieved VMA-211. On one of those pumps, we got there not too long after a 211 pilot had flown into the water while trying to rendezvous on his lead in bad weather at night. They were returning from Okinawa and got separated in the clouds as they were on approach…Dash 2 saw Lead’s lights and joined up on a buoy in the water short of Iwakuni. I didn’t get to talk to the guy before he left for home, can’t remember his name or if it was 1980 or 1981, but I did see the airplane they had fished up off the bottom. Never heard the story of his escape from the plane; it was still a mystery last I knew.