It all used to be an abstract sort of nightmare to me. Crashes happened, accidents in training, but they were at other airfields. Ross knew some guys who died, but he didn’t know them well. I watched the news coverage, read their official bios, and looked at their squadron photos—Ross’s latest official photo sat in a small frame on Sam’s dresser so we could say good night to it when he was away—and prayed for their families. They were like shock waves, impacts that rocked us but didn’t touch us.
I used to do a terrifying sort of math in the time between when I knew there had been an “incident” and when I finally got the official story about what had happened and to whom. I thought of Ross, but only briefly. I can’t explain it, but it’s something like checking to see if your leg’s still there—you do it once, just because, but you never expect to find it missing because surely you would have felt it already. Then I would think of all the pilots I knew whose schedules put them in range of the current disaster and I would methodically eliminate each one from the target zone by imagining them as I last saw them, imagining their families, and imagining some point in the future that they had to be around for—the next cookout, the next squadron costume party, the next little kid birthday party. If I imagined hard enough, somehow someone I knew wouldn’t end up in the final version of the equation. It always worked, but it was an awful way to be thankful.
Then on March 6, 2012, the morning after I’d walked into my OB’s office and asked for help, I saw a jet plow into the earth two hundred yards from my car as Sam and I were heading to the base clinic for a doctor’s appointment for Sam’s cough. Everything about the day was off, including the fact that I was running early for the appointment. Spring had arrived and the day before was sunny and clear, as it would be the very next day, but on that particular morning snow and ice pellets shot horizontally across the road in a brutal wind that buffeted my car and made me tighten my grip on the steering wheel. Sam, sixteen months old, babbled and kicked restlessly in his backward-facing car seat.
At a little before 9:15 in the morning, I turned onto the road that led to the base. A runway ran alongside the road at a roughly forty-five-degree angle. Right after I made the turn, a jet swooped in above me, much too low. It pointed its tail right at me as it skidded into a turn to the south to face the runway. The wind was coming strong from the north and blowing snow and dirt across the road, so I knew the pilot was fighting it, that it was shoving him down from behind. The jet was small, with one fin and a single exhaust nozzle. That’s how I knew it wasn’t Ross, though he was scheduled to fly later that morning. These are all things I knew right then, but as the jet made the turn and we started moving together in the same direction, his back end started to sink. He was still going too fast, and the snow and wind were coming down in between us. I had never seen anybody come in for a landing at this particular runway, so I was unsure as I watched through the driver’s side window where the runway started or how close the jet was to reaching it.
It looked like a hand was shoving him down and I knew he was too fast and too low and I started to say “oh, no.” His engines roared as he tried to add power, and then his back right end hit and there was a flash of orange as it caught fire. I started to scream. A wall of dirt and smoke went up and we both kept going, moving in the same direction like we were locked together somehow in this thing that couldn’t be happening. I put on the brakes and heard myself saying, No, no, no, and Oh God oh God somebody help him get out get out get out, and then God help him, God please help him.
The mind knows things before we want it to.
I never saw a seat eject, and as we both came to a stop, I saw him clearly again, just past trees that were winter bare. The cockpit was on fire and the flames were at least ten feet tall, the only color in a landscape of white static and black tree trunks. All the fire went to the front of the plane and I remember wondering why that was so, why it wasn’t only the back end where it had hit the ground.