Officers could eat dinner in either of the two wardrooms aboard — the formal wardroom on the main deck, right beside Ready Four, where uniforms were required, or in the dirty-shirt wardroom up forward in the 0–3 level between the bow catapults where flight suits and flight deck jerseys were acceptable. In practice the formal wardroom was the turf of the ship’s company officers who were not aviators, invaded only occasionally by aviation personnel on their best behavior. Here in the evening after dinner a movie was shown, one watched with proper decorum by congressionally certified gentlemen.
The aviators congregated in their ready rooms for their evening movies, here to whistle, shout, offer ribald suggestions to the characters, moan lustily at the female lead, and throw popcorn at the screen and each other. If a flyer didn’t like the movie in his ready room, he could always wander off to another squadron’s, where he would be welcome if he could find a seat.
And in the late evening somewhere in the junior officers’ staterooms there was a card game under way, usually nickel-dime-quarter poker because no one had much money. Although alcohol was officially outlawed aboard ship, at a card game a thirsty fellow could usually find a drink. Or several. As long as one didn’t appear in any of the ship’s common spaces drunk or smelling of liquor, no one seemed to care very much.
Of course, a junior officer could skip the movie and card game and retire to his stateroom to listen to music or write letters. Since a lot of the junior officers were very much in love, a lot of them did this almost every night, Jake Grafton among them. Of course the lonely lovers had roommates, which sometimes presented problems.
“It’s so damned unfair,” the Real McCoy lamented. “I could get more information about the markets if I were sitting in a mud hut in some squalid village in the middle of India. Anywhere but here.” He turned his woeful gaze on his roommate. “There are telephones everywhere on this planet except here. Everywhere.”
Jake Grafton tried to look sympathetic. He did reasonably well, he thought.
“It’s the not knowing,” the LSO continued. “I bought solid companies, with solid prospects, nothing speculative. But I am just completely cut off. Condemned to the outer darkness.” He gestured futilely. “It’s maddening.”
“Maybe you should put your investments in a trust or something. Give someone a power of attorney.”
“Who? Anyone who can do as well as I have in the market is doing it, not fooling around with someone else’s portfolio for a fee.”
“We’ll be in Hawaii in a week. I’ll bet you’ll find that you’re doing great.”
The Real McCoy groaned and glanced at Jake Grafton with a look that told him he was hopeless. The LSO took a deep breath, then exhaled slowly. He looked so forlorn that Jake decided to try to get him talking.
A question. He should ask a question. After thinking about it for a moment, Jake said, “Hey, what’s the difference between stocks and shares? In the newspapers they talk about stockholders and shareholders and—”
He stopped because the Real gave him a withering look and stomped for the door. He slammed it shut behind him.
Dear Callie,
We are three days out of San Francisco on our way to Pearl Harbor. We are making about twenty knots. We tried to go faster but the escorts were taking a pounding in heavy swells, so we slowed down. The swells are being kicked up by a typhoon about fifteen hundred miles to the southwest. I got requalified on carrier landings, day and night, the first day out of port, but we haven’t flown since.
My bombardier-navigator is a guy named Flap Le Beau. He’s from Brooklyn and has been in the Marines for ten years. I’m still trying to figure him out. He appears to be a good BN and a fine officer. He wasn’t too sure about me the first time we flew together and gave me a lot of gas to see if I could take it. What he didn’t know is that I’ve learned to take gas from experts, so his little performance was just a minor irritation. I think he’s a pretty neat guy, so I was lucky there. I think you’d like him too.
My roommate is a character, fellow called the Real McCoy. He is in a tizzy worrying about what is happening in the stock market while we are out of touch. He’s made a lot of money in stocks and wants to make a lot more. If I knew anything about stocks I would too, but I don’t. I couldn’t make easy money if I owned the mint.
The skipper is a lieutenant colonel — same rank as a commander — named Richard Haldane. Don’t know where he is from but he doesn’t have an accent like I do. Neither does Flap, for that matter.
Jake didn’t know he had an accent until Callie told him he did. She was a linguist, with a trained ear. Since she made that remark he was listening more carefully to how other people talked. Just now he said a few words to see if he could detect some flaw in his pronunciation. “My name is Jake Grafton. I work for the government and am here to save you.”
Nope.
She wouldn’t kid about a thing like that, would she?
Colonel Haldane has me giving lectures to the flight crews on flight operations around the ship. It’s easy and sort of fun. It used to be that I didn’t like standing in front of a crowd and saying anything, but now I don’t mind it if I know the material I am going to talk about. I must have a little ham in me.
The colonel also has me doing some research on how to attack Soviet ships, just in case we ever have to. The research is difficult, especially when you realize that if the necessity ever arises, a lot of American lives are going to depend on how well you did your homework.
As I mentioned, the first day out of port I got requalified day and night. The day traps went okay, but the night ones were something else. On the fourth one I had an in-flight engagement, which means I caught a wire during a wave-off and the plane fell about four feet to the deck. The impact almost destroyed the airplane. It appears to have survived with only damage to the avionics, which is the electronic gear. Why a wheel didn’t come off I’ll never know.
Everyone says the in-flight wasn’t my fault, but in a way it was. The LSO gave me a wave-off too late, and I shouldn’t have rotated as much as I did when I poured the power to her. It’s a technique thing. I did it by the book and got bitten, yet if I had deviated from approved wave-off procedure in this particular case, things would have probably worked out better.
All you can do is hope that when the challenge comes, you will do the right thing through instinct, training, or experience, or some combination of these. The one thing you know is that when the crunch comes you won’t have time to think about how you should handle it. The hard, inescapable reality is that anyone who flies may die in an airplane.
I suppose I have accepted this reality on some level. Still, the in-flight shook me up pretty good. As the airplane decelerated, still in the air, we were thrown forward into the straps that hold us to the seat. At moments like that every perception is crystal clear, every thought arrives like a bell ringing.
You are so totally alive that the events of seconds seem to happen so slowly that later you can recall every nuance. As I felt the plane decelerating, I knew what had happened.
In-flight!
I could feel her slowing, saw the needle of the angle-of-attack gauge swing toward a stall, saw the engine RPM still winding up…and knew that we were in for it. For an instant there we hung suspended above the deck. Then we fell.
The jolt of falling about four feet stunned me. I knew exactly what had happened, yet I didn’t know whether or not we were safely arrested. I couldn’t see too well. I didn’t know if the hook had held, or if the cross-deck pennant had held together. Or if the airplane was in one piece — if the fuel tank had ruptured we were only seconds away from blowing up.