Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman (24 page)

Jig Dog was a perfectionist and not one to suffer incompetence. He frequently had lesser pilots transferred off the ship, in keeping with a note he wrote to himself at the start of the cruise: “You are not aiding the individual or the Navy by retaining a weakling. Get rid of him early. He will only cause you trouble in the end.” But he realized Shepard was a keeper, and over time he decided to look the other way when Shepard broke the rules.

Once, during a change-of-command ceremony just west of San Francisco, Jig Dog chose Shepard to lead a ceremonial four-plane flyover. With all the
Oriskany
’s officers and crew assembled on the deck, Shepard had gotten approval from air traffic officials in San Francisco to make a low-altitude pass. But as the four planes approached the ship in an echelon formation, Jig Dog could hear a change in the pitch of the roaring jet engines, and he knew something was amiss. Then he saw the planes’ noses start to tilt upward. All heads on deck started tipping back as Shepard’s quartet soared up and over for a spontaneous—and unauthorized—loop-the-loop before coming in for the low pass. Air traffic control called the ship to ask about the cha
nging altitude of the jets on their radar screens. But Jig Dog talked his way out of it, and Shepard escaped unpunished. Again.

Another time the commander of the entire seventh fleet was aboard the
Oriskany
during exercises in the Sea of Japan. One by one, each four-plane division of Air Group 19 passed by the ship. Then Shepard’s division roared past—upside down. Again Shepard was spared the rod, but just barely. “It was pointed out that that type of aviation was not necessarily the way the fleet commander liked to see his planes flown over the flag ship,” Jig Dog recalled.

The way Jig Dog saw it, Shepard was flamboyant but not dangerous. He was a hotshot, always looking to stand out from the crowd, but he was never extreme. Sometimes Jig Dog would hear mumbles of complaint from other aviators—those whom Shepard might reprimand for deficiencies in their flying while he was out there breaking Navy rules. But Jig Dog had decided to let Shepard get away with his “idiosyncrasies.” They boosted the air group’s morale, broke up the tedium, and made the flyers momentarily forget the occasional fiery wrecks and funerals at sea. “He always had a lot of protection,”
Jig Dog said. Looking back, Jig Dog realized that by keeping Shepard on board and keeping him happy, he may well have saved his own life.

A winter night over the Sea of Japan, the Korean coast off to the west, the ship somewhere east, and a storm brewing overhead. Flying solo on a night mission, Shepard learned from the
Oriskany
that unidentified planes had been spotted on the ship’s radar, and he needed to find out who they belonged to. The mission looked to be a quick one. As he approached the “bogey,” he realized they were friendly—U.S. Air Force jets. Shepard made a wide turn back to the ship. He was above the clouds, but as he descended through them he was surrounded by a surging storm and couldn’t see a thing
. He began flying by his instruments, following the ship’s homing signal on his radar screen. Just then the blip on his screen that represented the
Oriskany
disappeared, and the control stick in his hand became mushy. A quick calculation told Shepard that a lightning strike had probably zapped his Banshee’s electrical system; a backup system kicked in, but flying under backup power was much more difficult, especially inside a raging storm. Then the jet’s navigational system quit, followed by the radio, essentially severing Shepard’s connection to the
Oriskany.
He was many miles out, and as he approache
d a spot where he thought he’d find the ship, it wasn’t there. A thought crossed his mind:
I
might be in real trouble.
He was burning fuel fast and considered that he might have to ditch in that dark, cold water. In an effort to steady his thoughts, he checked his systems again, and realized the radio was flickering on and off.

He tried calling the ship. “Malta Base, this is Foxtrot Two. Do you read? Over.” The reply was faint.

“Foxtrot Two, this is Malta Base. I just barely read you.”

Shepard explained that his navigational aids were “erratic” and he might need assistance. The ship couldn’t find him on its radar and asked, “Do you wish to declare an emergency?”

Shepard did not reply, and the ship asked again: “Do you wish to declare an emergency?”

“No,” he said, knowing what a declared emergency—and a lost plane—might do to his record and his reputation.
Declaring
an emergency means I can’t handle my airplane without help. To admit
that means I failed. It means I can’t fix my own problem.

“No emergency, Malta Base. I want to try a couple of things. I’ll get back to you.”

The famous French combat pilot and poet Antoine de Saint-Exupéry—who disappeared in a storm during a reconnaissance mission—likened the feeling of being lost in a storm to being “alone before the vast tribunal of the tempestuous sky.” Saint-Exupéry, who delivered mail from Spain to Africa before World War II, wrote often of such moments, when “fog and sand and sea are confounded in a brew in which they become indistinguishable, when gleaming flashes wheel treacherously in these skyey swamps.”

At such times, the pilot “purges himself of phantoms at a single stroke [and] brings sanity into his house.” And that’s what Shepard did. He ignored the “black dragons and the crowned crests of a coma of blue lightnings” and settled down.

Flying to the spot where he thought the ship should have been, he turned left, and left again, and again. He flew in ever-expanding boxes, each box a little bit wider than the last—a textbook search pattern. Dropping low over the water to improve his visibility, he was burning fuel at a horrendous rate.

As he turned into one of his squares, he saw a dim red light ahead. He flew nearer and through his rain-spattered windscreen saw the
Oriskany
’s faint outline emerge in the darkness. His final fear was that the plane’s electrical problems would prevent him from lowering the landing gear. But three green lights on the control panel assured him that the wheels were down.

The ship pitched and yawed in the rough sea. At 888 feet long, the
Oriskany
was nearly 100 feet shorter than Shepard’s previous carrier, the FDR. Subtract from that the front half of the deck, where the rest of the
Oriskany
’s planes were parked, and the actual landing area of the ship was about as lo
ng as a football field and half as wide. In the seven years since Shepard’s first carrier landing, he had nailed that tiny runway scores of times without incident. But never before had it looked so faint, nor had it bucked and heaved so violently.

To complicate matters even more absurdly, Shepard had less than five minutes of fuel left as he neared his ship. He had only one shot at making the landing.

Through the heavy rain and “scud clouds” he could barely make out the dim, lighted profile of the brave LSO who was standing on the
Oriskany
’s tail. His one final concern was that the electrical problem had jammed the jet’s tailhook, which should have been lowered from the jet’s tail, ready to grab one of the arresting wires. To make sure the tailhook caught, he slammed down hard onto the deck, the force of it jarring his teeth and bones. Then came the satisfying shove forward as the tailhook snagged a cable. He roared to himself as the plane came to a stop.

Climbing out of his plane, Shepard strutted across the soaking wet deck, straight toward the ready room, and joked that it was just a “normal carrier landing.” Later, Shepard admitted to his squadronmate John Mitchell that it was the first and only time he’d thought he was done for. “It scared the pee out of him,” Mitchell recalled.

Years later, when asked about the highlights of his piloting career, Shepard said without hesitation that flying on and off carriers at night “was the hardest kind of flying I’ve ever done or ever expect to do . . . It’s what separates the men from the boys.”

Colors also separated man from boy aboard a Navy aircraft carrier.

Brown or black—one or the other was the shoe color of every man on the ship—immediately identified the wearer as somebody or nobody. More than 90 percent of the three thousand men aboard the
Oriskany
wore black shoes. Avi
ators wore brown, and the term “brown shoe” was nearly equivalent to “sierra hotel”—shit hot. “Black shoes,” meanwhile, were looked down on. The aviators sometimes called them just “shoes.”

But there was an even hotter color than brown. Blue belonged to the uniforms and the jets of the men who performed maneuvers few other Navy pilots were allowed to fly. They snapped and rolled and looped and spun. They were called the Blue Angels, and every brown-shoe Navy man harbored a secret desire to be one of them. Shepard did little to hide his desire to be blue.

The Navy had created the stunt-flying Blue Angels in 1949, and for years Shepard nurtured a simmering envy of the studs chosen to be the Navy’s stunt men. Once, while ashore in Spokane, he and Frank Repp watched a Blue Angels performance, and afterward Shepard asked Repp to introduce him to the leader of the Angels, Ray Hawkins, with whom Repp had previously served. “He always wanted to be one of them,” Repp recalled. “He just liked being around them.”

In late 1953, one of Shepard’s colleagues—the commander of a sister squadron in Air Group 19—had been picked to become the new leader of the Blue Angels, and Shepard wrote to Doc Abbot and Turner Caldwell, asking them to help get him a gig as an Angel, too. But the Navy crushed Shepard’s dream when it decided in 1954 to start using the acrobatic team as a recruitment device and to allow only naval aviation cadets to become Blue Angels. The reasoning was that young men, with dreams of someday becoming an Angel, would want to join the cadets.

Shepard’s response was not to sulk or complain, but to turn around and surreptitiously organize his own acrobatic team, comprised of the
Oriskany
’s best flyers. He chose his friend and mentor Bob Elder, young Billy Lawrence, John “Mitch” Mitchell, and Preston “Spook” Luke. With Jig Dog’s reluctant permission, they became a poor man’s Blue Angels and during lulls in the schedule practiced formations, wingovers, and loops. Onc
e they were proficient enough, Jig Dog even let them put on a few shows for visiting guests. In time, they earned the nickname Mangy Angels. They performed many of the same maneuvers as the Blue Angels, “except we took a few liberties the Blue Angels couldn’t,” Elder recalled.

They’d fly straight at each other and, at the last fraction of a second, twist 45 degrees left into a knife edge and pass canopy to canopy, with just a few feet between them. They’d fly horizontally past the ship, slam into a chandelle (a maneuver with a sharp left or right twist and then a climb), shoot straight up like rockets, let their jets coast to a stop, and then tumble back toward earth like a wounded bird before kicking in the thrusters again and soaring back to the sky. “It got a little dicey,” Elder said. “I wouldn’t do it with any old pilot.”

One Sunday afternoon the Mangy Angels performed for the entire Pacific task group. Cruisers, destroyers, and carriers lined up at sea to watch the acrobatics. “The star of the show was Alan Shepard,” Charles Griffin, the
Oriskany
’s captain, said later. “He was a magnificent pilot and he really put on a show.”

Once, the Mangy Angels made plans to get a photograph of themselves flying vertically in a four-plane diamond formation with Japan’s Mount Fujiyama in the background. They envisioned making the cover of
Life
magazine, or at least the
Naval
Aviation News.
They took off from the Japanese air station at Atsugi, flew a couple of practice loops, then headed south toward Mount Fuji. John Romano, one of the ship’s photographers, followed behind in the backseat of another Banshee. As the four-plane formation prepared to go vertical, with Shepard in the lead, they called to make sure Rom
ano was ready. His response was garbled gibberish. They called him again but got no answer. Finally Romano radioed back that something had come up and he was headed back to Atsugi. When the other four landed, he confessed that he’d gotten sick in his oxygen mask. “We were very disappointed,” Bill Lawrence said many years later. “Because
the country was probably denied the greatest aerial photograph in history.”