Maybe I don’t want it, he thought as he pulled tight on the laces.
CHAPTER 3
In her stateroom that evening, Olive wound down from a long day at the duty desk. She forced herself to e-mail her mother a birthday greeting full of the emoticon hearts and flowers her mother loved. The head cheerleader at Vanderbilt in the late 1970’s, her mother was a Knoxville socialite, still stunning at age fifty. The hair, the teeth, the heels — Camille Bennett had it all. She also attended every important community event. Junior League. Democratic Party fundraisers. Garden Club tea parties. With one son in Vanderbilt medical school, and the other as Sigma Nu president at Ole Miss, no one could match her.
Olive’s mother left her father, Ted Teel, when Olive was a small child — probably because she couldn’t stand to hear “Camille Teel!” from her squealing sorority sisters one more day. She didn’t mind Ted’s six-figure salary at the prestigious downtown law firm of Smith, Teel and Martin, but that was adequate only until 50ish investment banker Mike Bennett came into her life with seven figures. Her mother was pregnant within a year, and Olive suddenly had a distant middle-aged stepfather to go along with her absent father.
From the time Olive was born, Camille wanted to use her as a dress-up doll, a role Olive fought for as long as she could remember. Olive could play the piano and had learned about white gloves and party manners at the cotillion. She could even navigate the make-up counter at Lord and Taylor, and her statuesque height and athletic prowess caught everyone’s attention. But Olive knew how to draw boundaries; for example, she eschewed the cheerleader culture.
She liked the guys — but wanted to be around them on her terms, not as an arm piece — or piece of anything. Her mother cried when Olive was accepted into the Naval Academy and rarely visited. When she did visit on the yard, radiant in her navy-colored suit and stilettos, she would scoff under her breath and say, “Kristin, must you wear those mannish Oxfords?” Then she would spy a boy and whisper, “There’s a cute one! Unbutton a few buttons and go up to him. Go on.” Olive shook her head at the thought of it.
Camille cried again when Olive was accepted to flight school. “You marry a pilot, not become one!” Olive was a huge disappointment to her mother, and always had been. The calluses of emotional defense she had developed from childhood were the foundation of the reserved personality she still maintained. Even now, whenever one of her Junior League friends asked about Olive, her mother politely said, “Kristin flies for the Air Force,” and quickly changed the subject. Camille could not have identified an FA-18 Hornet to save her life.
Just as Olive hit “send” on the e-mail, her roommate, “Psycho,” burst through the door.
“Hey, how was duty?” Psycho asked. Without bothering to listen to Olive’s answer, she undid her hair and began peeling off her flight suit.
“Fine. How was midrats?”
“Awesome! Sat with a bunch of Moonshadows. You know Lester and Crunch? They crack me up every time! Smoke was there… Dutch… Sponge…. good time.” Lifting her t-shirt over her head, she added, “You should go up there. They are probably still there.”
“No thanks. Writing my mother on her birthday.”
“Awww… Happy Birthday, Mrs. Teel!”
Olive waved off the reference to Mrs. Teel — Psycho didn’t know and never listened — and then admired her roommate’s shape for just a moment as she changed. Psycho had curves—curves Olive wished she had. She had had boyfriends in the past, but with her insecurities made it a point to catch them eyeing a full sweater or tight pair of jeans on other girls and then blew up at them. Because she had been hurt before, she now dismissed all men (boys) as incorrigible pigs — a belief she had thrown up to act as another layer of defense.
However, she was alone — and didn’t like it.
With her pajama bottoms on, Psycho maneuvered into her top and began buttoning the buttons.
“Hey, what do you have tomorrow?”
“A night intercept hop with the skipper,” Olive replied. “How about you?”
“A day dick-around with Smoke.”
Olive glanced over and saw a flash of Psycho’s perfect breast before the last button was buttoned. I may need to get me some of those, she thought.
Psycho flung on a robe, stepped into her flip flops, and opened the door to visit the female head down the passageway. “B-R-B!” she called out airily as she left.
Olive smiled to herself. Psycho, she thought, if Mom could overlook the fact you “fly for the Air Force,” she would love to have you as her daughter.
CHAPTER 4
The ethos of fighter squadron life is competition. Against other squadrons and outside groups, between squadronmates, and even against oneself. The competition is daily and relentless, and, once at sea, there is no escape from it. Landing grades, boarding rate, interval timing, bombing accuracy, air-to-air training engagements won, aircraft system test scores, flight hours per month, career night vision goggle hours, career traps, night traps per month (high and low), squadron flight qualifications, ground jobs held (high and low), combat sorties, combat drops, strike/flight Air Medals, and squadron competitive ranking… In fact, practically every area of their lives — including beers consumed on liberty, facial hair quality, stock portfolio knowledge, video game victories, coolness of car, and hotness of girlfriend — become legitimate areas of competition for the aviators in a fleet carrier squadron.
For a pilot, and for some more than others, each flight is one big pass/fail test. However, each flight also includes dozens of little tests, some institutionalized but many self-administered. These tests allow the pilot to measure his performance against others but most importantly against himself in order to do one thing — get better. The pilots live with a constant undercurrent of anxiety; in no way do they want to embarrass the squadron or themselves. It is not surprising that the overwhelming majority are first-born perfectionists.
Even killing time in the ready room turns into evaluation and critique sessions as they watch their air wing buddies on the closed-circuit flight deck TV, called the Pilot Landing Aid Television or PLAT. The eyes of every pilot of every experience level are drawn to the PLAT whenever it is on. The pilots check the weather outside or how the aircraft are parked on the deck or “spotted,” but more often than not, they just want to watch the minute-by-minute drama of carrier aviation. At night, the PLAT is genuine entertainment in its own right, depending on the weather conditions, with the ready room “cowboys” able to monitor the side numbers and recognize the voices — and voice inflections — of their fellow air wing pilots and naval flight officers as they struggle to make their approaches. Like everything else, the landings always create an environment for stiff competition between squadrons and individuals. A missed trap bolter for “the girls next door” is almost always good; a bolter for a trusted squadronmate is the source of feelings of sympathy, or even of personal disappointment — however, for a rival squadronmate, not so much.