No matter. This would bear investigating later, but for now she had achieved what she’d hoped for. Murmuring her thanks, she returned to her seat. At least for the moment, this particular crisis had been averted.
“What’s this?” Airman Smith asked. He stared at the shoulder patch and the oddly faded blue beret the chief had just handed him. “I brought my own gear. What color is this, anyway?”
The chief sighed. “Just take them, Smith. Sew the patch on your right shoulder, about where your crow would go if you put it on that side.” He stabbed a finger at a spot on Smith’s shoulder and dug into the muscle still sore from carrying tie down chains.
“I’m not wearing any stupid beret,” Trudeau announced.
“You guys would bitch if we assigned you to duty in a whorehouse,” the chief snapped. “You’re on a UN peacekeeping force, so you wear what they wear. Got it?” He turned away from them to the line of sailors queued up to receive their UN-issued gear.
Smith and Trudeau walked off slowly. Smith stared down at the blue felt beret in his hand. It wasn’t a color for a sailor accustomed to dreary khakis and whites, too bright for a real military uniform. He tried to imagine himself wearing it, glanced around at the rest of his troops to see what they looked like in it, and decided he didn’t like what he saw. No, he didn’t like it all — not one little bit.
“How are we supposed to sew these things on, anyway?” Trudeau grumbled. “Like I brought a sewing kit with me?”
“We go find the parariggers,” Smith said. “Just like always.” The division in charge of maintaining all the flight gear, including parachutes and ejection harnesses and cranials, was particularly adept at getting things sewed on. More than one junior sailor too broke to afford the prices the cleaners charged relied on their expertise.
“Okay, but where does the patch go?” Trudeau persisted. “Dungarees? Coveralls? Man, I hope it’s not the dress uniform. This will screw up the sleeve. I’ll have to buy a new set after we leave.”
Smith spotted a bunch of people walking by sporting the blue beret. A babble of foreign languages reached his ears, some vaguely familiar from high school classes and others completely beyond his understanding. Russian, maybe? That sounded like Chinese or something?
“So we wear the same uniform as the rest of those guys?” Smith said slowly. He shook his head, bothered in a way that he could not completely define. “I don’t know, Steve… doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. We’re here to take care of our birds, fly some missions. But we’re supposed to be on one unit?”
Trudeau shrugged. “I guess so.”
“I don’t know,” Smith repeated. He shoved the beret and patch into a pocket in his coveralls. “I don’t have time to do it now anyway. It’ll have to wait.”
Four hours before, the chief had come to them while they were hiding in the chain locker and told them they were on the team going ashore. “And it’s not like we have much time,” he had snapped. “So get your asses in gear and get turning. The COD leaves in two hours.”
“What do we take, chief?” Smith asked.
“Hell if I know,” the chief muttered, more to himself than in answer to the question. “You start sending birds ashore, and who the hell knows where we’ll wind up? Spare parts, lubricants, hydraulic fluid — and the one thing we’re going to need the most is whatever we forget to take.” He glanced over the two young airmen. “You don’t have to worry about that — the lieutenant says they got a spare parts depot ashore for their own Tomcats. Supposed to be interchangeable with everything on our birds.”
Smith and Trudeau exchanged a telling glance. They had heard that particular line before from the more senior sailors in the squadron, and knew that it never worked out the way it was supposed to. Now, staring at the throng of foreign military men, he was even less convinced that his bird would get the proper care while ashore.
“So what do you think all this is about?” Trudeau asked.
“I mean, it’s great be off the ship for a while, not to mention the liberty. But sort of weird to be flying here, you know?”
Smith nodded. “I don’t know. I haven’t heard anything about the missions. Not specifically.”
Trudeau shrugged. “Yeah, well, our job is to keep the birds flying, isn’t it?” As Smith walked back to the flight line, one question kept bothering him. Was that all his job was? To keep the birds flying? That was why he was in a uniform?
“I joined the Navy, dammit,” he said, as they started across the tarmac to locate their birds. “The Navy, and not the United Nations.”
“Life in a blue suit, shipmate,” Trudeau answered.
“Is it?” Smith asked.
For once, Trudeau had no ready answer. And neither did Smith.
“These damned things don’t fit,” Trudeau complained as he stuffed the O-rings into a pocket of his coveralls. “Interchangeable, they said. Right.” For all the good the consumables were doing, he might as well have tossed them on the ground, but no good airmen ever intentionally fouled his own deck.
“None of this is any good,” Smith said. “And I’m going to do something about it.” The indignation over the blue patch on his shoulder had been building throughout the day, and now, faced with another unworkable aspect of this peacekeeping mission, it was too much. He stormed into the line shack and pulled his beret out of his coverall pocket. “Not going to wear it, Chief,” he said. “I’m not in the United Nations. I’m in the United States Navy. I’m just an airman, but I know that much.”
Much to his surprise, the chief had no immediate reaction. Smith had been prepared for an ass chewing, coupled with some new profanities Chief had not yet used on them. But this silence, that was something new.
“Sit down, Smith,” the chief said finally. He pointed to the battered wooden chair in front of his desk. “You and I need to talk.”
Smith sat, feeling definitely uncomfortable. This wasn’t what it was supposed to be like it all. Nothing took the impetus out of righteous indignation like reason.
Outside he could hear the noise of four different types of aircraft engines turning. The flight schedule this afternoon was an unholy mess, and the tower crew had finally settled for simply spacing fighters and attack aircraft at thirty-second intervals within a twenty-minute window allotted to each aircraft type. The end result was that no one knew exactly who was airborne and who wasn’t until the entire twenty-minute window had expired.
The problem was further complicated by the fact that many of the flight line workers didn’t speak much English. So far, they’d been able to resort to the universal hand signals all international airports used. But that didn’t do much for getting the right O-rings for a bird. Not with half the wrenches measured in centimeters and the other half in inches. “The sleeve patch, is that it?” the chief asked. There was something oddly reserved in his voice that worried Smith.
He shook his head. “It’s not the uniform, Chief. I guess I sound out of line, but it’s the whole idea. I mean what we’re doing here. This isn’t our fight.”
“Don’t you think a lot of people all up the chain of command, including the president, have thought about that?” the chief shot back.
Smith nodded. “Yes, Chief, I do. But I think they came up with the wrong answer.”
“You do?”
“Yes, Chief.”
The chief studied him in silence for a few moments, then let out a heavy sigh. “You follow orders, son. That’s all there is to it. This isn’t your call.”
“I think it is.” Smith’s earlier uneasiness was fading.