I had not yet seen my first fly-off, when all of the most senior officers flew the 12 jets back to the beach. Had never seen the ready room slowly fill with sailors and petty officers that had no official reason to be there, and no official authority willing to object to their presence. Had not yet thought through the longing that presence reflected as they filtered slowly in, sat in the pilots’ chairs, and watched the ship’s TV until the carrier entered the inner roads in San Diego harbor. How very different their own experience of the Navy was because of our differing stations in life.

As an enlisted man in the all-officer ready room environment, Locastro could not be a part of us. But he had seen it all, been on the periphery of the fraternity, seen our  highs and lows, heard things he probably ought not to have heard, things he almost certainly shared with his messmates, things that quickly made their way around the ship. He had seen how different our lives were than his own. I guess a part of the attitude wore off on him.

He was rail thin in a white flight deck jersey and blue bell-bottomed dungarees, with the same jail-house pallor that those of us who spent minimal flight deck time would wear eventually, but which I – recently arrived from California and still tanned – viewed at first as a sign of ill-health. His face still bore the scars of a vicious case of childhood acne beneath greasy brown hair that floppped across his brow. I don’t remember his first name, or anything else about him.

As the new guy joining a squadron that was already fully worked up for deployment, I had a lot to learn. Particularly how to land the damn jet safely at night, with everything moving around and no references to the horizon – the haze is cruel in the North Arabian Sea in the summer time. My name took up the lowest spot on the squadron “greenie board“, where each and every landing grade was annotated with the wire caught, and a color code: Green for an above average landing, yellow for a “fair” pass, orange for a wave-off or bolter, brown for a “no-grade” and red for a “cut” pass.

In time I would become an accomplished carrier aviator,  long green streaks would follow my name on the greenie board and I would be awarded honors and accolades at the air wing celebrations that ended each interval on the line. But that time had not yet come, and the green and yellow squares were everywhere interspersed with brown blocks, no-grade passes. “Turds” they were called. The number “1″, for the one wire, the arresting cable closest to the stern, was often almost hidden under that dark brown stain. Almost.

I was a deck spotter, and a poor one at that. Especially at night. It was personally very frustrating, and I was letting the team down – squadrons compete  among each other for excellence as much as the pilots within the squadrons do, if not more. There were frowns and lifted eye-brows, the quiet exchange of meaningful glances. An almost audible note of things shivering in the balance, opinions being formed that might eventually lead to A Decision.

I’d walk up to the roof to man up my jet, and if the machine was parked aft on the fantail, I’d routinely kick the one wire with my flight boot, saying to it, “Not tonight, you hard-hearted bitch.” The braided steel cable would always shrug my insults off indifferently, bouncing back into position atop the fiddle bow. It could afford to wait patiently, wait and see. It would be there for me if I chose it.

On one particular night I did indeed choose the one-wire, albeit against my will. My tailhook leaving a deeply incriminatory trail of sparks half-way from the round down to the cable. Another turd for the greenie board on a dark, horizonless night. The yellow-shirted flight deck director waiting for me all the way up at my 12:30 position, rather than at one to two o’clock. The shame of knowing. The anticipation of the needle from my squadron mates.

But when the needle came, it was from an unexpected source. YNSN Locastro was sitting in his duty chair when I entered the ready room,  having already debriefed my flight in the ship’s intelligence center and shrugged off my g-suit and harness in the paraloft. He sat there with a goofy smile on his face, and said the words he’d so often heard the pilots exchange on such occasions: “You fell out of the sky like a turd coming off a tall moose!”

It was too much. I strode across the small space angrily, flushed, an accusatory finger in his blanching face: “When you’ve done it once – just once! – then you’ll have earned the right to give me shit.” Feeling, in the moment, fully justified. Being, ever after, slightly ashamed of myself. Seaman Locastro had indeed crossed a line, but both of us knew he would never have the opportunity to land a fighter aboard a carrier deck. I’d allowed my personal feelings of anger and self-doubt to exhale upon a subordinate who could not answer them, and who had not earned them. He had abused his familiarity, but I had abused my authority. Mine was the greater crime.

Just as I would learn to be a better pilot in time, so too would I learn to be a better officer. I would learn to better keep my temper, deflect familiarities with subtlety, honor those who served as best they could. It was not that I never got angry at a subordinate, never chastised anyone, never raised my voice – I did. But in the future, my ire would be official rather than personal. I owed them that.

Seaman Locastro is now probably in his late 30’s or early 40’s, and I doubt that he remembers me. But I remember him.

I also remember YN2 Joe Theis, and his running mate, PN3 Boudreaux. When I was the squadron personnel officer, they were in my small shop, doing the important but unglamorous work of ensuring that the peoples’ service records were properly maintained, that they were paid and advanced on time, that their awards were properly documented. Not so very much younger than me, in retrospect, but seeming like kids at the time. Easy men to lead, and fun to be around. Good sailors.

We had them to dinner one night at home, the Hobbit served a nice meal. There might even have been a bottle of wine shared. We put work aside and talked easily about life, and the news of the day while staying well within the bounds of a naval discipline that eschews undue familiarity. It’s a warm memory still.

Joe stumbled across the blog a few years back, wrote a lovely note. He’d left the service, went to college, got married, started a family. Owns his own business now, I believe. He said that I had been one of the most important influences in his young life, that I had made a difference in everything that happened after. He thanked me, and I thanked him back for his service, the memories he evoked, and the kindness he had shared by contacting me.

You never really know the difference you can make in a young person’s life. The small gestures, the casual conversations. If Joe Theis can thank me for being the leader he needed, I suppose I owe a debt of gratitude to YNSN Locastro for helping me become that leader. A debt I can perhaps partially repay with this long-deferred apology.

Pete. That was his first name.

The first book fell open to the last page, where there stands a testimony to equipment issued by a grateful and expectant nation: BOOTS, Flying, 9 1/2R not to mention a pair of GLOVES, Summer. Also a HELMET, Protective (less liner) and JACKET, Leather, Intermediate. A few months later there was a MASK, Face, oxygen in size “long” to go with the MICROPHONE, oxygen mask, cord, plug, Type ANB-M-C1. Which in turn replaced the MICROPHONE, boom, cord, plug, harness, Type-5A/UR. Knives, both “SURV” and “SHROUD.”

I still have those knives.

The SCARF block went forever unfilled.

I remember sleeping in that first flightsuit (SUIT, Summer, Flying) the night I brought it home, itself stiff and still smelling of the fire retardant chemical the Navy had paid so much for. Telling the Hobbit that it was perfectly comfortable, like pajamas almost. Stretching the truth to breaking point, but after a few launderings both the stiffness and the fire retardant were washed away. We all wore the standard issue GLASSES, Sun for the better part of a week or so before deciding that, taken as a whole, we all looked a little too dorkish in them. Not to mention the fact that the instructor pilots were all wearing Wayfarers and Revos. We learned early on that, even if we had no idea what we were doing, it was very important to at least look and sound cool while doing it.

They had once been dear to me, line after line of cryptically written entries that made up a professional life. The first official entry was May 1983, the aircraft was a T-34C, the flight length 1.6 hours, half of that given over to my first flight instructor, Lieutenant Doug Seward. A flight purpose code of 1D1 – Day Visual, Student aviator training, Fundamentals.

He was a good guy, flew A-6s in the fleet if I recall, and in the best traditions of the service I mercilessly skewered him at the “tie cutting” that celebrated my 19 July 1983 first solo. Felt bad about it afterward. The skewering that is, not the solo.

That flight was my second of the day, flown just after my check ride with a grim faced Marine major whose last name was “Wehrle,” and I remember little about him but for his high and tight haircut, obligatory granite jaw and the fact that he never said anything to me throughout the entire flight apart from terse instructions to begin or conclude the next maneuver.

Never said a word after shutting down the aircraft either. Walked in silence from the flight line to the debriefing space. Filled out the grade sheet while I sat waiting on a chair across the room. Hearing the hall clock tick, a bead of sweat trickling down my back. The buzzing of a fly. Finally handed it to me at last, still silent: Straight ruler-job, averages up and down the page, with that critical “safe for solo” up-check at the end. Any questions?

No, sir. No questions at all.

You’ve got an hour to prepare for your next flight. Brief the SDO before you walk. Don’t make me look bad.

Yes, sir. I mean, No, sir.

The names run on and on after that, but I still remember all their faces. The recently divorced Marine major with the harsh laugh and the reputation for aggressive flat hatting who so concerned me as a T-2 student that I actually made out my will before flying with him. The terminal lieutenant commander in T-34s who killed himself, taking one of my best buds with him, showing off for his friends on a cross country. And all the rest of them in between.

Some of them made general or admiral, some of them made it to the airlines, some of them didn’t make it all. And as an instructor, the names kept coming in the remarks boxes, all in the delicious cadences of our conjoined culture. Smith and Jones of course, but Pavack and Papez, too. Vanasupa, Bianchi and Glackin. Bright-eyed kids that I taught how to wear an oxygen mask and fly a tubine jet who are now air wing commanders or airline captains.

Later, after Hornet training was complete the remarks boxes contain no other names, just airfield identifiers. NLC/NLC – Lemoore to Lemoore. NQX – NQX: Key West to Key West. Fallon to Fallon. Cross-countries too. My sisters lived in Virginia, so there were a number of trips that ended up at Andrews Air Force Base. Other cities came and went, Chicago, Denver, Boston, Philadelphia, Dallas, San Diego, Atlanta. Lubbock.

Good people and good dove hunting in Lubbock, even if not much else. Since there was bird shooting to be had, LTJG Dave Dunaway – a classmate of mine, an eager shooter and a Texan to boot – shanghaid some poor kid from Rockville, Maryand, I think it was, to go along with me and my student, whose people “had some land” out Lubbock way. Dave’s student was the kind of kid that wore the collar turned up on his pink polo shirt, he had never shot a gun before and missed everything he pointed at except for one poor bobwhite quail that got up right in front of him. Brought him straight down with beaming pride and evident self-satisfaction, only to face the leadenly heavy, if silent, disapprobation that could only be imposed by five or six, dusty, bone dry Texans on a man who would stoop to shoot a bobwhite quail out of season. And that bird a hen.

I remember how Dave had laughed at me on Friday evening for bringing along my JACKET, Leather, Intermediate to West Texas in September. I remember laughing back at him on Sunday morning, when the temperature had dropped to freezing and we had to deice the airplanes. Him shivering in a thin, borrowed sweatshirt, and probably would have worn a SCARF too, if anybody had one.

First guy to make admiral in our class.

I remember all the intermediate stops along the way on every cross country – places represented nothing more than pit stops at best, and an opportunity for middle of nowhere to break downs at worst – nervously tapping our feet, silently urging the fueling crews to hurry, wanting to get going again, to get there. Wherever “there” might be.

Places I’d mostly never been to before, and mostly have never been to since. Just went because we could, because the student had family there, or because we’d never been.

In the month of February, 1999, when all the world was at peace because George W. Bush was still only governor of Texas there is this entry:

It’s written in green ink to stand out, which makes sense when you decipher the flight purpose code: “6″ stands for a combat flight, “T” is for “Attack, non-ASC targets”, and “1″ is for a pre-planned target. Which, scanning all the way to the right, was a sea-launched cruise missile site that had been making things awkward for coalition naval forces trying to prevent Saddam from smuggling oil out of country outside the UN’s “Oil for Peace” auspices.

I planned and led that strike. We came from out of the sun, shacked four out of four DMPIs with laser-guided ordnance, the secondaries were beautiful, nobody laid a glove on us, and the strike made the front page of the New York Times the next day, albeit below the fold.

My 15 seconds.

A few years back I was running late on the motorcycle for an FAA check ride when my luggage bag came off, bumping and rolling almost to the side of Highway 5 before getting hit square on by a Volvo station wagon that never stopped. Everything inside that bag – my logbooks, medical, certificates, my entire professional existence (not to mention Jeppesen approach plates and charts) – exploded into a veritable snowstorm of paper there on the roadside. I almost got greased by a careening Oldsmobile trying to pull over. Gave it up and took the next exit, the clock still ticking. Miraculously found it all, or least all the important stuff. The approach plate into Chino went missing, unlamented. Made it to the airport with about 5 minutes to spare, right there on the inner boundary of acceptable naval promptitude. Waited another 45 minutes for the examiner to show up.

Those four, battered books had once seemed so important to me. So much tied up in them. Mementos of friends come and gone, of experiences good and awful, a lengthening tale of professional experience and future potential. I watched them grow day after day, week after week, year after year with quiet pride.

And now it’s lunch time. Time to put all that away again.

The rules and regulations intended to minimize the drama attendant to landing at a faraway place are legion. Routes and fuel requirements are planned down to a gnat’s eyelash and winds and weather are factored in as best they can be, but old King Chaos is a merry old soul, and he will have his play at the dice. To have an IFR license is to be offered multiple opportunities over the years to demonstrate both skill and judgment. Good judgment comes from experience of course, and experience – especially for single seat aviators – is often the bastard child of bad judgment.

One of the reasons that I never went the commercial route myself after retirement was that I was never an especial fan of just. Going somewhere. If there wasn’t a target to be bombed in the middle of the hop, or a brawl to be had with an adversary or four, or even the primal thrill of watching the landscape zoom by at 200 feet above the ground and 500 knots, well: Then it was just a cross-country. And if the risks of a cross-country flight aren’t particularly high, the rewards are vanishingly small – navigating to a distant field and landing the jet in one piece once there is considered such a core competency that failure to do so successfully is a professional death knell.

Long hours in the great high up, usually on the weekend after a work week. The sense of being pasted in the sky, sadly watching the numbers on the fuel display click down. Timing your decent to maximize available gas, one last check of the arrival weather, weighing the time/distance/weather at the alternate airport before committing to the approach for landing. Then do it again and again until eventually you’re right back where you started from, best case. Hope you enjoyed the weekend, see you at work tomorrow.

The cross-country pilot is required to preserve enough fuel to make an approach at his destination – so long as destination weather is within limits – and then perform a missed approach, full power climb out, and then cruise at best range for an approach to his alternate airfield. Plus 20 minutes of holding time, just in case. Depending on the weather at the intended destination, the Navy imposes additional weather constraints against the alternate airfield: If you’re filing into a destination that’s well and truly clobbered, your alternate must both be close enough to actually get to (with a reserve) and yet far enough away that it remains uninfluenced by the destination’s weather pattern. This can be harder than it sounds.

I flew a lot of cross-countries as a young man, gained a lot of experience – some of it the hard way. I learned that two things you never wanted to mess with were a little too much weather or a little not enough gas. I learned also that where the two intersect is where the jolly King Chaos keeps his court. After a while the novelty of carousing in a foreign ville wore as thin as the blankets in the BOQs we used to sleep at, and I settled into a routine of flying a cross-country only when I had to. In preference to riding in the tube of some wet-behind-the-ears reservist or bus driver, maybe.

As my time at the helm of the squadron I had the honor to command came to a close, I determined to take one last cross-country from NAS Lemoore, California, to NAS Key West, Florida, the home of some of my best flying memories as well as one particularly awful one. Five junior officers elected to accompany me on what was to be a long weekend: Flew there Thursday in three legs, three BFM flights a day Friday and Saturday, followed by three long legs to return to base in California on Sunday. A dozen or so volunteers among the maintenance cohort were solicited – we had to turn folks away – and sent forward with a minimal pack-up kit in case anything broke.

BFM is daylight work, so there must needs refreshments at days’ end, broken up by light exercise. Walking about, mostly. Duval Street providing an excellent playing surface. It’s thirsty work, bending a fighter around the blue. Not to mention all that walking about.

You could have almost called it a “mini-detachment,” except for the fact that a detachment to NAS Key West comes with a certain amount of bended-knee permission seeking and paperwork. There are formalities to observe and other administrative trivia – overhead your correspondent, in his wisdom, considered excessive. The ops folks at Key West would get their noses out of joint of course when presented with our fait accompli, but by the time the shore duty layabouts had bestirred themselves to actual concerted action we’d be on our merry. Which, what were they going to do, cut my hair and send me to sea?

Sometimes it’s better to beg forgiveness.

I will leave for another time the who-shot-who, debriefs and subsequent debaucheries out in town, adding only that many years in the game had taught your humble scribe the wisdom of moderation on a Saturday evening, the better for to boldly pursue a western sun that recedes but never quite sinks all the way to the horizon on the trip back home.

It was wintertime, which mean two things to a Lemoore-based aviator: Stiff headwinds all the way home, what with the jet stream bending south, and better than even odds of a “Tule” fog if the conditions were right in the San Joaquin valley. The winds meant that fuel would be a factor all the way home, and the fog meant that we’d be making our approach in the august presence of King Chaos, and subject to his whims.

On our final leg we crossed over NAS China Lake in the Owens Valley east of the Sierra Nevadas just as the sun was starting to get away from us at last in the west. The mountains were casting long shadows over the valley, and the very earth beneath us had an air of settling in for the night. I dialed up the local weather station, where the duty forecaster confirmed that there was a fog forming at Lemoore. It was currently 400 feet overcast with a mile visibility, with conditions deteriorating.

Four hundred and one wasn’t so bad: Our precision approach minimums were 200 feet and a half mile vis, conditions we’d all practiced a hundred times in the simulator. Child’s play when you just know you’re going to break out in time to land. In a simulator.

There wasn’t a cloud in the sky below us, and the visibility was unrestricted. It would have been the simplest thing in the world drop my six plane flight out of the Class A airspace and land at China Lake just as the sun set. One more night in some Q away from home wouldn’t weigh that much on top of all the others I’d spent through the years. It’d be a different matter entirely to push on to Lemoore, break the flight up for six individual approaches, find out that the field had gone below minimums after a fuel consuming approach, execute the published missed approach procedure, listen to ATC flail around creating six individual clearances for min-fuel diverts back to China Lake on a quiet Sunday evening and hope that all six aircraft could land uneventfully at a relatively unfamiliar field, surrounded on every side by mountains, after nightfall.

Pressing on for a missed approach at Lemoore would take me from direct leadership of the five FA-18 pilots literally under my wing – not to mention their irreplaceable craft – to being a high-speed cheerleader tossed on the winds of several fates outside of my control while yielding nothing in terms of overall responsibility for the outcome. I could almost hear the music playing in Chaos’ house, the squeak of the pipes, the jester’s taunts, the titterings of the court.

But just as the fans don’t go to the ball park to watch Reggie bunt, neither did we six cross the country from east to west to land short of our destination. We pressed on, and I dialed up the automated terminal information service at Lemoore: Landing runway 32L, altimeter three-double oh-two, sky condition overcast at three hundred feet, visibility three-quarters of a mile in fog. Lower than before, and probably going lower still.

Double your altitude plus ten miles is a good rule-of-thumb for an en route descent in an FA-18, so from twenty-thousand feet I requested a descent 50 miles away from the field. I had the fuel for an approach all the way to mins plus a mil-power climb and max range divert back to China Lake. That plus a five hundred pound buffer, if it came down to it. I kept in mind the fact that my wingmen – each of them at various experience levels, all of them far junior to me both in rank and total flying experience – would have used at least a couple hundred extra pounds of their own gas just staying in formation on the trip home. A quick poll on the aux radio confirmed that fact. I knew they would also use up more gas than I did as I broke the flight up for landing.  Working the math quickly, I calculated that none of them would be below “bingo” fuel if they had to divert. But a couple of them would not have much to spare and from the tension that a trained and attentive ear could hear in their voices it was clear that they had done the math for themselves, good lads that they were. There were those pipes squealing again, the cymbals and the tambourines. The mutterings of the court.

I wanted to be dirty – gear and flaps down for landing – no later than six miles from the field. Working the math backwards with two miles separation for each wingman once at approach speed I kissed off dash-six at 16 miles from the field, switching him off for his own single frequency approach. His speedbrake opened between the tails as he dropped soundlessly behind us, falling rapidly aft. Detached dash-five another 30 seconds later, and then four followed by three. The miles remaining to the airfield clicking down quickly in my HUD as I maintained cruise speed to help build separation. The fog bank coming up rapidly. “Two, detach.”

“Two.”

Into the goo at six miles and 2000 feet, a dense white blanket enveloping my craft, the speedbrake coming out, the sound of my approach controller in my headset, ILS needles dancing in the HUD, the bucking and wind noise of the gear and flap transition. Landing checklist complete. My own work to do chasing back thoughts of wingmen following dutifully behind me, their fates firmly lashed to my own. It’s suddenly darker in the cockpit and I race to turn down the several lighting rheostats so that my eyes can adjust. The radar altimeter shows me at a 1000 feet above the ground. Five hundred feet, still in the clouds. Three hundred feet – nothing, and the first moment of real concern, like a needle in my gut that had always been there but chose that moment to shift. Right hand tightening on the stick grip, left leading a dance on the throttles – at either two hundred feet or 1/2 mile, if the runway “environment” is not in sight, I’ll be committed to a missed approach and to destinies no longer of my own making. In a fog bank it is crucial to be at exactly 200 feet at the 1/2 mile missed approach point – any higher and you may not break out. Lower is out of the question.

At exactly two hundred feet and a half-mile from the field the veil is drawn and there are the rabbit sequencers leading to the landing threshold, the reassuring familiarity of the Fresnel lens on the left, the runway lights on either side. It’s just like the simulator, except of course, comprehensively different. A very few moments later the Hornet settles to the prepared surface with her heavy, customary authority and the runway remaining markers flash by. Test brakes – good brakes. Speedbrake coming out. The music fading in the background, Chaos having chosen for now to place his attentions elsewhere, with perhaps one wistful backward glance at my tail light receding in the darkness, down the active runway. Clear at Alpha, taxi to parking. Taxi as requested.

“It’s do-able,” I report back to my wingmen on the aux radio, each of them strung out a minute in trail for five minutes behind me. Each of them now lost in the darkness of his own private thoughts, knowing only that the skipper says that a landing is possible. Knowing that they’ve got work of their own to do.

We all had a laugh about if afterwards. That’s what you do.