The Magical Stranger (10 page)

Chapter Sixteen

T
here was a brief port call in Bahrain, but by late October the
Nimitz
had passed through the Strait of Hormuz and was back on station. On Halloween night, Tupper was back in his stateroom emailing the girls about their costumes when he got a call that his men were in trouble.

Earlier in the afternoon, Beav Zenter's Prowler had launched for a standard six-and-half-hour flight up to Afghanistan and back. All had gone well and they had dropped to about three hundred feet for their final approach to the boat. Beav murmured “dropping the gear,” flipped a switch, and then glanced at the gear gauge. It should have switched from a barber pole to a wheel symbol after a few seconds, but the left one remained a barber pole. Beav tried again but the landing gear on the left wing refused to drop. He aborted the landing and told the
Nimitz
he needed some time to troubleshoot.

Tupper was notified. He'd flown the same jet the day before and had landing-gear issues, but maintenance had promised him that everything had been fixed. He ran down ladders and hallways to the Carrier Air Traffic Control Center (CATCC, pronounced
cat-see
), a labyrinthine room that serves as the
Nimitz
's night-flying nerve center. The CATCC was kept cinema cool to protect its stacks of tracking devices and navigational computers. Tupper stepped into the room and saw officers from each squadron sitting on two rows of benches, a sort of Star Chamber for those in the sky. A large glass computer screen was illuminated with the numbers of each jet in the air. Once a plane landed, its number vanished from the screen. Soon, all that was left on the screen was Beav's Prowler. Vinnie was on the radio with the crew. Tupper took over.

He tried to remember quickly who was next to Beav in the Prowler. Vinnie told him Chicken was in the front seat, and he exhaled. Matt “Chicken” Choquette was his best ECMO, a rock star in the making. He was already legendary for reaching over and pushing the throttle to full power when a rookie pilot he was training almost plowed into a flight deck. If anyone was going to have a shitty night, Tupper was glad it was Chicken and Beav.

A tanker was launched and gave the Prowler more fuel and did a visual inspection of the jet. It was no joke: the wheels were not down. Beav took the Prowler up to 10,000 feet and began throwing it around, tilting the wings and dropping altitude quickly, the aerodynamic equivalent of kicking the vending machine in hopes your Twinkie will fall. Nothing worked.

The
Nimitz
had three options, none of them promising. The flight deck could rig a barricade of net and cables and let the Prowler do a controlled crash landing. But there could be a fire or the barricade might not hold. Another choice was to have Beav pull the jet parallel to the
Nimitz
so the crew could do a controlled ejection. Hopefully, the helos could pick them up within ten minutes. But it was a dark, moonless night. A lot could go wrong with an ejection—a parachute could not deploy or the force of the ejection might knock one of the crew unconscious so he drowned.

The third choice was safer if equally daunting: gas Beav's Prowler up and send it 650 miles southwest to Masirah Air Base in Oman. There were dangers in sending a bone-tired crew to a strange airfield in the middle of the night, but Masirah had a 10,000-foot runway with an arresting wire that could stop the Prowler in about 200 feet. That would forgive a lot. After a quick discussion, CAG sent Beav to Masirah.

Tupper stayed on the phone with Beav for the next thirty minutes. He told them this had happened to a buddy of his and suggested they try landing on the right side of the runway since once they hit pavement the lack of a left wheel would naturally drag them to the left. Beav and Chicken said they were on top of it.

The
Nimitz
launched Mongo Koss, a Hornet skipper, to fly with Beav to Masirah and help him figure out the airfield. After an hour, both planes drifted out of the
Nimitz
's radio range. The CATCC went silent. Tupper thought of Navy chaplains having to visit wives back on Whidbey. He said a silent prayer.

About an hour later, Beav and Chicken found Masirah and woke up the controller—battling a language barrier until he finally turned on the field's landing lights. They made a low pass, sussing out the field. Satisfied, they circled back around and prepared a final approach.

Beav told his crew this might be the time to get right with God. They quickly briefed over what to do if the landing went south. The Prowler was a tank of a plane that didn't have a record of flipping even on crash landing. Everyone decided if the Prowler hit a truck or a shed they were going to stick with the bird and ride it out.

A minute later, the Prowler landed on its right wheel, bouncing a bit, before listing to the left and grinding to a stop—sparks flying—a mile down the runway. They were safe.

About an hour later, Mongo's Hornet came back to the
Nimitz
with the good news. A quick cheer went up in the CATCC. CAG came over to Tupper and shook his hand. He told him that Tupper and Beav's coordination of the emergency had been flawless, much better than a Hornet squadron in a similar situation. Tupper said thank you.

He went back to the ready room and high-fived some of his men. He then walked to CAG's stateroom and called Beth. (CAG had the best phone line on the boat.) He wanted her to tell all the wives that there had been an accident but everyone was okay. But he got Brenna instead. His oldest daughter listened carefully and took down the names of the aviators involved. She double-checked the spelling and told her father she'd make sure her mother got the information right away. Tupper hung up the phone and took a deep breath. Somehow his men were safe and his daughter was now a young woman. He wasn't sure how it all had happened.

C
rapper Crane seemed like an unlikely candidate to screw up Tupper's command tour beyond all recognition. He had a soft smile and kind eyes and his Navy career had been a series of horseshoes found in beds of four-leaf clover. Crane was commissioned a naval aviator in 1997, and his career became a series of diminished dreams. He wanted to fly Tomcats; he got Prowlers. He wanted to be a pilot; the Navy slid him over to ECMO. He handled the disappointments gracefully—there were some side benefits to being off the fast track. He was assigned to VAQ-134, the first Prowler squadron that went expeditionary, aka land-based. There was no JO jungle—an eight-bunk, fart-filled room on a carrier housing junior officers—for Crapper. Instead, he flew missions enforcing the no-fly zone over Iraq for six months from Incirlik, Turkey, a gig so lush that when the CO said a flight crew could go home to Whidbey a month early, no one volunteered.

Crane was then accepted into the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, to earn a master's in aeronautical engineering. But the month before he was supposed to start, NPS eliminated the aeronautical engineering major. The Navy felt bad, so they sent Crane off to an air force program at Ohio State University, an hour from his boyhood home.

His luck didn't end there. After graduating, he was sent to NAS Point Mugu in southern California, where he helped design new jamming pods for the Prowler. The great thing about the Point Mugu job was that few in his department had a Prowler security clearance. Crapper worked in a building separate from his bosses. He enjoyed five years of shore duty while the rest of the post-9/11 Navy did cruise after cruise.

Even the backwater job broke his way. Most of the eggheads in his department were getting out to take lucrative jobs in aero defense fields, so when it came time for his fitness report, Crapper was competing against no one. He was promoted to lieutenant commander and made department head.

And that's where Crapper's gravy train left the rails and plunged into a canyon, taking innocents with him. His first misfortune was being assigned to Doogie's squadron. The Black Ravens were on the
Nimitz
when Crane joined, and Doogie and Tupper were baffled when they learned that Crapper had no experience flying around the boat at night and no experience managing sailors.

Tupper watched Crane bumble his way through a tour as safety officer. A department head's job is to make sure the work gets done and, hopefully, foster leadership skills in his men and women. Sometimes, you had to drop the hammer on sailors underperforming and cajole or scare them into doing better. Crapper would do the exact opposite. He'd show up outside Tupper's office pleading the case of a chronically late sailor or other screwup and write Doogie memos pleading for leniency. Doogie responded by writing WTF in red ink all over the page.

Tupper spent an exorbitant amount of time trying to figure Crapper out during his XO tour. They both owned Harleys, and Tupper invited Crapper to ride with him from Whidbey to Reno for 2008's Tailhook Convention, the annual gathering of naval aviators. They drove through the Cascades, waited out rain storms in underpasses, and drank whiskey past midnight. Three days and 1,600 miles later, Tupper thought he had a handle on Crapper. He was a smart and decent guy—just not someone cut out for military leadership. No one had mentored Crapper, so how could he know how to lead men? Everyone else had cut him slack and now Crapper was hanging himself. But Tupper decided Crapper was essentially harmless, he just had to surround him with good people and keep an eye on him. If everyone else in the squadron was tough and tight, they could carry Crapper.

Tupper knew he had underestimated the problem after the cut-and-paste incident. Crapper had moved on to admin department head. He was writing a fitness report for a sailor up for a promotion but was having trouble downloading the form from the chronically frozen Navy computer system. Frustrated, he took a picture on his computer of the form, converted it into a pdf, printed it out, and typed in the information.

He gave Tupper the fit rep and Tupper did a double take. The words and fonts didn't match up. It looked like a ransom note written with words cut out of a newspaper. Tupper tried not to lose it. Did his department head really think they could send this into the Bureau of Naval Personnel?

“Doug, we can't send this in.”

“Why, skipper? All the information is there.”

“Doug, get the hell outta my sight. I can't talk to you right now.”

Crapper's face crumpled. A few days later, Tupper fired him as admin officer. He reassigned him back to safety, a semi-bullshit job where you made sure everyone wore a helmet on the flight deck and didn't drive drunk when back on Whidbey. The only real responsibility he had was writing an accident report if the Black Ravens had an accident involving one of its planes. Fortunately for Tupper, VAQ-135 hadn't had a mishap in a decade.

Then came Oman. At first, it was a triumphant moment. Beav and the crew returned to the
Nimitz
to hugs and jokes. Tupper sent a maintenance crew out to fix the Prowler. On board, Crapper began writing the accident report. Navy mishaps are ranked as either class Alpha, Bravo, or Charlie in descending order of damage. If an accident is ruled an Alpha or a Bravo, the flight crew is grounded until a full report is reviewed by senior command. It's up to the safety officer to get a damage estimate from the maintenance crew repairing the plane and make a call on the accident's classification. Tupper asked Crapper where the Oman incident fell and he confidently answered, “Definitely a class Charlie.”

Beav, Chicken, and the rest of the crew were cleared to fly. Meanwhile, Crapper dragged his feet on the safety report. Tupper started getting a bad feeling in his gut. A few days later, Crapper came down to Tupper's stateroom with some bad news. The evaluation of the Prowler's damage had just come in from Oman. Upon further review, the accident was definitely a class Bravo.

The veins on Tupper's head started to throb. Now he would have to tell CAG that Black Ravens were flying who had no business flying. CAG's response was typical. He barked at Tupper.

“How the hell do you not know that? You really have a shitty safety officer.”

“Yes, sir.”

Tupper started the painful process of getting Beav and his crew waivers from fleet command for flying when they shouldn't be. On a whim, Tupper ran the numbers on the accident. Turned out, Crapper had done the math wrong. The accident was actually, still, a class Charlie. Tupper had humiliated himself with CAG and the Navy brass for no reason. He had to make another call to CAG telling him everything was okay.

Tupper wrote an official letter of reprimand for Crapper that would have ended his career if he had submitted it, but he kept it on his laptop. A few weeks later, Crapper finished the accident report. Tupper read it with admiration; it was a magnum opus, the most thorough investigation of a class Charlie mishap he'd ever read. But by then it didn't matter. Tupper joked that the Gutenberg Bible published in the twenty-first century goes out with a whisper.

By then, Tupper had fired Crapper again. Crapper would have no further responsibility for the rest of the cruise except to fly and compile the standard cruise video that would serve as a memento for the Black Ravens at the end of the deployment. (Three years later, the squadron was still waiting on the cruise video.)

Tupper was furious at Crapper, but he was angrier with himself. He'd put his fate in the hands of someone else.

Chapter Seventeen

M
y sophomore year, Gordie told me about an after-school scam called Model UN. Four or five nerd students picked a country—any would do—you researched the country, and then in the spring you'd go to a fancy-pants hotel and pretend you were that country at the United Nations.

Our principal signed off provided we found a teacher who would serve as our chaperone. Gordie and I immediately thought of Mr. Richardson, our pipe-smoking European history teacher. His thick glasses and droopy mustache made him look like a warlock. He found out Dad was a Navy pilot and exhorted me to look for old manuals in the basement and bring them in for him to copy and digest. I thought he was a god or a spy.

Mr. Richardson agreed to be our chaperone by simply arching the bushy brows that set off his dilated pupils. We picked Norway and did some cursory reading in encyclopedias and almanacs. They had icebergs and the band a-ha. That seemed like plenty of information. We needed some girls to balance out the delegation, so we drafted the Dodson sisters, some brainiac odd ducks who lived out near me in Flushing.

Mr. Dodson gave us a ride to the parking lot where a chartered bus waited to take us cross-state to the Kalamazoo Hilton for the four-day session. He was an auto exec and rattled on about the decline of the auto industry and how it was all Reagan's fault. I interrupted him, offering him an opinion from
National Review
that I'd recently started reading at school.

“Autoworkers make too much money. Twice as much as schoolteachers. Layoffs get rid of the lazy ones. American cars suck.”

Mr. Dodson shook his head.

“You are the most cynical fifteen-year-old that I've ever met.”

I went red. I didn't quite know what cynical meant, but I knew it wasn't a compliment. No one ever described Dad as a cynic.

We registered at the Hilton a few hours later. Mr. Richardson signed his name to the chaperone list with a flourish. He shook our hands and promptly left town. Mr. Dodson's words still stung. I went up to our room and began chugging vodka I had smuggled inside a shampoo bottle. I then staggered downstairs for a committee hearing. Next thing I remembered, the blue-blazer guys from Shaker Heights, Ohio, were screaming at me.

“Norway is voting out of character, out of character!”

Apparently, I'd cast a crucial vote making Norway a supporter of the Soviet police action in Afghanistan. I switched my vote but the Shaker Heights guys still eyed me suspiciously. The next three days went by in a blur. The conference threatened to throw us out because of Mr. Richardson's vanishing act, but we begged and told them Model UN participation was a crucial component to our Georgetown School of Foreign Service applications. The chaperones relented and we promptly thanked them by skipping out on a crucial General Assembly vote so we could go watch
Das Boot
, the first foreign film I'd ever seen.

The final night vanished with Gordie wooing a lass from the Romanian delegation while I passed out with my arms wrapped around our toilet. The bus ride home was torture, but I somehow convinced my mom that I had the flu. I lay in my bed that night cotton-mouthed and fuzzy-headed, knowing there was more to life than just Flushing, Michigan. I just had to find it.

But Mom seemed hell-bent on stopping it from happening. I started subscribing to the
New Yorker
and the
Village Voice
after hearing Gordie and his friends casually name-drop them at school. Mom complained about the mess they created. I started reading about film and built a Sunday around watching Peter Weir's
Gallipoli
on cable. It was a sunny day and Mom banged plates around muttering that I should be outside. Dinner hit the table about ten minutes before the Australians made their last, futile charge. She walked over and snapped off the television.

“It's dinnertime.”

I sat down at the table and glared at her. She slammed my steak down in front of me. My sisters stared at their plates. I seethed inside for a minute before exploding.

“Just because you're so unhappy doesn't mean you have to make everyone else unhappy.”

She slung a fork at me. It shattered my milk glass, white droplets drenching everyone. Mom stood up with her fists clenched.

“I thank God every day that your father is not here to see what you've become.”

She bolted to her room and slammed the door. This time, the sobbing lasted all night long. For days, she made us dinner and took care of Christine but did it in virtual silence. Once Christine was put to bed, she'd lock herself in her bedroom and we wouldn't see her until the next morning.

It got so bad Aunt Nancy drove over one Sunday. I was mowing the lawn when Nancy burst out of the house and grabbed me by my collar.

“Do you know what today is?”

“No.”

“It's Mother's Day. And you did nothing. No card, nothing! What is wrong with you? This has to stop.”

I stared at the ground while she drove back to her perfect home on the perfect golf course with the perfect kids who remembered Mother's Day. I tried to apologize to Mom, but she was already sequestered in her room.

There were times when the only frayed strand holding our family together was Christine. She was now five, with big brown eyes perpetually dazed in a state of wonder. Her innocence could make you cry; there was joy in her every move, in her recitation of her favorite Smurfs. The rest of us could agree on nothing except our love for her. We found happiness playing Candyland or taking her for vanilla chocolate swirl cones and watching her dribble ice cream down her shirt. It was blessed light amidst all the darkness.

My grades continued their long slog to the bottom. I wouldn't show up until third period some days, clutching a poorly forged note composed by the Dodson girls claiming extensive dental work. No one seemed to notice I never wore braces. I wasn't getting stoned in the parking lot; I was at the Flint Public Library, reading back issues of
Rolling Stone
and
Melody Maker
, devouring stories about New Romantic bands. I wanted to be part of a different world, any other world.

The school was complaining to Mom about my behavior on an almost weekly basis. The problem was the old story: I'd sit in the back of class and daydream or bullshit rather than add anything constructive. The calls usually came late in the afternoon. I'd hear Mom pick up the phone and I'd eavesdrop. She'd hang up the phone and come looking for me, her voice breaking as she started swatting at me with backhands that were more comical than brutal. I'd laugh and she would lose it.

“I don't know what game you're playing, mister, but this is going to end. You're going to leave this house and I'm not going to feel bad about it.”

She slammed my door. I came home the next week to military school brochures scattered on my bed.

W
e agreed on that one thing: the idea of getting me somewhere far away. Mom saw me in a uniform getting screamed at by some tyrant. Me? I wanted to be somewhere like the places I read about in the piles of magazines and books that filled my bedroom.

That fantasy world I dreamed about was vaguely British for some reason. I'd become an Anglophile, which in early 1980s Flint made me a jackass. I blamed it on Gordie and another buddy named Jim. Despite the fact that they both grew up on the not always happy-making streets of Flint, the two of them had developed an obsession with the United Kingdom. Gordie even looked like Sebastian Flyte as played by Anthony Andrews in the BBC's
Brideshead Revisited.
Except he wasn't gay and it's doubtful Sebastian ever placed his face against a yellow legal pad and said, “Man, look how greasy my face is!” Jim's take was more rock 'n' roll, perhaps most tragically summed up by his insistence on wearing a Clash T-shirt from their
Cut the Crap
tour, which was actually just crap.

Somehow, the American version of Anglo mutated into preppiness. We all wished we went to a prep school. They just seemed cooler. Jim and I almost picked up two blondes at a Catholic teen dance by saying we were lacrosse players from nearby Cranbrook.

No human being better personified the American prepster-as-Brit than William F. Buckley Jr.,
Firing Line
host, spy novelist, and former New York City mayoral candidate. Buckley spoke in a clipped, hesitating manner accentuated by arching eyebrows. This was quite exotic to us. We worshipped him from our Conservative Liberation Organization days.

That spring, the Flint chamber of commerce disregarded the double-digit unemployment rate, pooled their savings, and announced that they were paying Buckley to speak at the Whiting Auditorium in downtown Flint. Afterward, he would attend a cocktail party at the home of a University of Michigan–Flint professor.

We scored tickets to the speech and reception, but that wasn't enough. We gamed the extremely limited flights arriving at Flint's Bishop Airport from New York City and cut our afternoon classes to meet Buckley at the airport. Some guys blew off class to get blow jobs. We cut out of choir class so we could accost an old man in a Brooks Brothers suit at the airport.

It seemed right at the time. This was celeb-free Flint and three camera crews showed up at the airport. WFB, as his friends called him, made some brief remarks, none of which touched on his 1960s support for segregation. He was rushed away after a few minutes, declining our offer of a ride. We barely touched the hem of his trench coat.

I don't remember much from his Whiting speech. He used a lot of words I'd never heard before. The reception was held in a professor's drafty, rapidly depreciating Tudor. It was a momentous night for me: my first cocktail party. Now I know every cocktail party is exactly the same—intolerable made bearable by creeping drunkenness—but at the time it seemed like something out of, well, an Evelyn Waugh novel.

Buckley was pounding vodka and grapefruit and had a frozen look on his ruddy face that I now realize was half public persona, half get me the hell out of here. Waves of assistant professors shook his hand and asked him what he really thought about Gore Vidal, whom I'd never heard of. I don't know if it was the spring weather, the open bar, or just middle-aged smart folks starved for a little intellectual glitter, but all the grown-ups got stinking drunk. After an hour or so, Buckley had had enough. His blue eyes began searching for his designated driver. He found him, but the hapless professor was wasted beyond even the lax Michigan DUI standards of the mid-1980s.

He then turned to us and stage-whispered.

“Say, are you boys still good for that ride?”

It was pronounced
rhiiide
. We nodded yes. Then Buckley grabbed his coat and muttered, “Let's get out of here, then.”

He said good-bye to no one, which seemed quite British and awesome. We went out to my car. Buckley blanched for just a moment when he noticed it was a two-tone Chevy Chevette. He piled into the passenger seat and placed his black loafers down on a sea of Taco Bell wrappers and a boom box holding a Smiths cassette. I lurched the car into drive.

Gordie asked a complicated question about Reagan and Thatcherism. Buckley answered with a bon mot drenched in alcohol and a plummy American accent not known to common men.

Overstimulated, I floored the Chevette through a blood-red light. Buckley didn't lose his cool, offering just a cautionary stuttering of “Ah, ah, ah,” as he pointed his patrician forefinger toward the next potentially lethal intersection.

Maybe it was luck, maybe it was Buckley's Yale-educated and old school Catholic God waving off the traffic, but we didn't get broadsided by a Chevy Blazer. Buckley was staying at the recently opened and soon to be shuttered Hyatt Regency. As we pulled into the circular drive, I screeched the Chevette to a stop and shut down my V-4. Buckley smiled at me.

“Now, now, that was an adventure.”

I asked him if he could sign something as a memento for me.

“I, I think I can do better than that.”

He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a small, blue velvet case. His manicured fingers popped the case open. Inside was a gold key. The inscription read, “From the Citizens of Flint, Michigan.” Buckley pulled out a fountain pen and a scrap of paper and signed, “To Stephen, Best Wishes, William F. Buckley.” He shook my hand, gathered his trench coat and stepped out of the car. He quickly disappeared into the revolving doors.

The next day, I told my government class about my night. My teacher overheard and told me he didn't believe me. I went to my locker and returned with my blue velvet trophy. He squinted at the handwriting and sadly shook his head.

“Rodrick, how do I know this isn't fake?”

I didn't say anything. Inside, I knew the Buckley encounter meant something. There
was
a whole world out there. Maybe I really could find it.

F
ortunately, a mugging and a quiz show intervened on my behalf. One afternoon in history class, I was providing unwanted commentary to a filmstrip discussing the root causes of World War I when Mr. Winchester had enough.

“Rodrick, you're not helping here. Go across the street and get me some cigarettes.”

I jumped up. There was a 7-Eleven across the street from school and I headed there with Winchester's $20 bill in my hand. The 7-Eleven was a hangout for lowlifes and minor thugs who nominally attended the public high school next door and spent their days playing Asteroids. I tried not to make eye contact. I bought the cigarettes and some Hostess cupcakes as my tariff. I'd barely crossed the street back toward Powers when three Asteroids kids jumped me and threw me down on the grass. I popped up, disoriented. The ringleader jabbed me in my palm with a rusty jackknife just enough to draw a drop or two of blood.

“I'd like your money.”

I gave them my change and they pushed me back down again. Then they sprinted away. I staggered to my feet and walked back toward my class. The filmstrip was just ending. I paused for a second and smeared some extra blood across my ripped yellow button-down shirt. I was ready for my close-up. I stumbled into the room and slammed the smokes on Winchester's desk.