When we were less than a quarter mile away, I could finally see the carrier. At 150 miles per hour, I had about five seconds to make corrections to line up the airplane with the centerline and adjust our altitude and speed to land in the right spot on the flight deck, right before the third arresting cable. We touched down. As usual, I went to full power, always necessary in case the landing wasn’t successful and I would have to take off again instantly. I expected to feel the comforting pull of the arresting wire bringing us to a stop—but it never came.
“Bolter, bolter, bolter…hook skip,” called the landing signal officer, the LSO. To bolter means to fail to catch the arresting wire with the airplane’s tailhook. We had to immediately accelerate at full throttle in order to take off again and circle around for another attempt. Off we went back into the sandy darkness of the sky. I was frustrated because I hadn’t done anything wrong—I was just unlucky. The hook had skipped over the wires. We came in again, only to experience another bolter. We came around again. Another bolter. We came around again. Now we got a wave-off, meaning our approach was so ugly they wouldn’t let me try to land for fear I’d crash. Now I was seriously getting angry with myself and nervous.
The visibility was not improving, and we were running out of gas. We went around a number of times more, which only resulted in more bolters—wave-offs because we were too close to the airplane in front of us and wave-offs for performance (in other words, shitty flying on my part). Eventually we were “trick or treat,” which means we either had to land this time or go get more gas. I boltered again. We were off to the tanker.
The tanker was an A-6 Intruder configured with external fuel tanks that circles overhead at three thousand feet, ready to refuel airplanes. Finding the tanker was a challenge in itself, because we were still engulfed in the sandstorm. We did a radar-only rendezvous, which was very risky, with Mooch calling out range, bearing, and closure as we approached. Once I was within twenty-five feet or so, I was able to see the tanker and join up on its wing. I extended my refueling probe, but the bumpiness of the air and the fact that I had gone around so many times in attempts to land on the ship had me thoroughly unsettled. It took me multiple attempts to make contact, during which I tried not to think about what would happen if we couldn’t refuel: we would have to eject or take our chances with the barricade (a net rigged on the deck to catch the airplane), both very dangerous. Once I finally did make contact with the tanker and refueled, I headed back toward the ship.
Then I boltered, and boltered again. I am going to do this for the rest of my life, I thought. Eventually I put the airplane down on the deck in the right spot and felt the relief of the arresting cable’s tug as we came to an abrupt stop. As I taxied forward to be chained down, I noticed that my right leg was shaking uncontrollably from the adrenaline surging through my system after all those attempts and close calls. Mooch and I made our way off the flight deck, down the dimly lit corridors smelling of jet fuel, down the ladder, and into our brightly lit ready room. The pilots burst into applause when we walked in. They’d been watching our misadventures on a monitor the whole time.
“Welcome back to Ike. We never thought we were going to see you fellas again.”
It had been my first real “night in the barrel,” and I had survived it. (There’s an expression among naval aviators based on a bawdy old joke about a pilot finding sexual relief via a barrel, only to discover that his turn in the barrel was coming up.)
I laughed and accepted their congratulations.
“There are those who have,” I said, “and those who will.”
—
MY SECOND MEMORABLE bad night flying was in the Persian Gulf, on a night that was brilliantly clear at first. The moon was bright, what we called a commander’s moon because the air wing’s commanding officers would take advantage of it to log their night landings under easier conditions. My RIO Chuck Woodard (call sign “Gunny”) and I launched that night to protect Ike and its battlegroup from the Iranian air force. After about an hour, the carrier’s air traffic control told us we could return to the ship early. We had plenty of fuel, since we were coming back sooner than planned, so for fun, and to expedite our return, I lit the afterburner and we went supersonic. We were approaching the marshal point, an imaginary point twenty miles behind the ship where supersonic speed was not recommended. Normally I wouldn’t have been going that fast, but it was such a clear night it seemed safe.
I immediately sensed I was getting behind the airplane. Even though it was clear at altitude, a layer of fog had rolled in below us, and by the time we descended through five thousand feet above the water, I was having a hard time keeping up. I started feeling rattled, sweating with my heart pounding. I was having a “helmet fire.” Everything was happening too fast. I felt completely overwhelmed.
My altimeter alarm went off to warn me we were passing below five thousand feet; then it went off again to warn me we were getting even lower. It was a distraction, so I made the almost-fatal error of turning it off.
The next thing I heard was Gunny shouting, “Pull up!” Without thinking, I immediately pulled back hard on the stick, simultaneously looking over at the altimeter and vertical speed indicator. We were at eight hundred feet, dropping at four thousand feet per minute. About twelve seconds later, we would have flown into the water, becoming one of the many planes that never return to the ship. No one would have had a clue as to what had gone wrong.
With much difficulty, Gunny and I were able to gather our wits and land safely. We proceeded to my stateroom, where we cracked open a bottle of whiskey to calm our nerves and celebrate cheating death.
Leslie met me when I returned from that cruise, and I was thrilled to see her. While I had been gone, I had been deprived of so many things—the people I cared about, beer, decent food, privacy—and it was great to get them all back again. I would have the chance to experience that kind of deprivation again.
—
MY WEDDING DATE WAS set for April 25, 1992, a month after I returned from the cruise. That morning when I got up and started going through the process of getting ready—taking a shower, shaving, packing my bag for the honeymoon—a strange feeling of dread loomed over me. I kept poking at it in my mind, the way your tongue keeps going to a sore tooth. This was supposed to be as happy a day as any, like the day I landed on the aircraft carrier, or the day I got my wings, or the day I graduated from college. But all I felt was this strange foreboding.
All of a sudden, as I was knotting my tie, I realized I didn’t want to get married.