The Magical Stranger (9 page)

Chapter Fourteen

T
upper and his men settled into the routine of a naval aviator at sea, vast hours of tedium punctuated by seconds of terror. A few days out of Japan, Tupper had one of the terrible moments.

The frightening contradiction of carrier flying is that a pilot has to reduce his plane to the slowest speed possible short of stalling for the last quarter mile of an approach to the carrier. Watching from the tower, it looks like the plane is suspended, barely floating, for the last few seconds before wheels and tailhook hit the deck.

On a windy day north of Singapore, Tupper's Prowler was at that tenuous instant when a gust whipped around the
Nimitz
's tower. For a moment, the wind looked like it was going to push Tupper's Prowler down into the
Nimitz
's backside. But Tupper anticipated the gust—known in the Navy as the burble effect—by a half second and went to full power. His Prowler surged up fifty feet and caught the two wire.

His legs quivered as the plane captain on the deck directed his Prowler to its parking space. He knew he would have been a goner if the same problem had arisen when he was a young pilot. But that night, he checked his email and found out Brenna had been cast as the lead in
The Nutcracker
. Tupper went back to the ready room and didn't talk about cheating death; he talked about his daughter's dancing skills.

The Ravens' ready room was an 800-square-foot windowless space just below the flight deck that served as the squadron's workspace and clubhouse. There was a small cubbyhole of an office for maintenance and operations and a front desk where a duty officer fielded phone calls. The rest of the room was a series of leather chairs pointing toward a podium at the front of the room where Tupper spoke about squadron business. But the star attraction was the giant plasma-screen television. Each night, the men settled in and watched the television show
Top Gear
and the movie
Beerfest
on an endless loop.

Tupper and most of the men were hanging around the ready room one afternoon when they were told that Captain Paul Monger, the
Nimitz
's commanding officer, would be making an announcement over the ship's closed-circuit television system. His round, bald head popped up a few minutes later and told them the news the men had been dreading: owing to problems with the USS
Enterprise
's nuclear reactor, the
Nimitz
would be extending its cruise from six to eight months. As usual, the guys on board were the last to know. Tupper had received info from folks back in Whidbey that
USA Today
had already reported the
Nimitz
's extension.

Tupper and the men pulled into Singapore for a port visit a couple of days later, but there was a gloom about them. As usual, the officers rented an admin suite in a posh hotel, a sprawling 1,200-square-foot place that seemed more luxurious before twenty naval aviators moved in and filled one of the tubs with cheap beer and booze. Sure, there was the requisite binge drinking and Tupper ended up sleeping on the floor with just a bathrobe as a bed—the actual beds were first come, first served—but there was blackness to everyone's mood. The Navy was screwing them again.

Back on board, Tupper thought he had turned a corner on the maintenance issue. The sailors seemed to have warmed to him once they realized he wasn't going to be Doogie redux. They invited him down to the fo'c'sle—an area in the front of the ship that houses the anchors—for a chief indoctrination where three seamen were being promoted to chief petty officer. The sailors were blindfolded, spun around, and given hypothetical situations, and then they had to shout their answers. The petty officers let Tupper slip in front of the sailors, and they were screaming instructions back and forth. Then they whipped off the blindfolds and the new petty officers saw they were trading spittle with the skipper. Everyone laughed and Tupper thought: “This is why I joined the Navy.”

He went back to his room and checked his email. Caitlin had sent him an essay she'd written about learning to kayak. He was amazed by how grown-up she sounded. But then he read the line, “I wish my Dad was here to see me, I miss him.” His eyes clouded over. Tupper wanted to call her so badly. But it was the middle of the night back in Anacortes.

A
week later, the
Nimitz
arrived on station in the Arabian Sea, two hundred miles south of the Pakistan coast. Tupper and his men had their first flights in-country.

The Prowler mission was both critical and absurd. To reach Afghanistan, the Black Ravens flew almost 1,000 miles north—up the boulevard, in Navyspeak—over Pakistan before entering Afghan air space. The Command and Air Operations Command at Bagram Air Base would dispatch them to different quadrants where American troops were moving. The Prowlers would fly the route and see if the pulses coming from their pods could explode radio-controlled mines and IEDs before they blew up Americans. Then they would try to jam the cell phone and radio communications of the Taliban fighters before they could tell their comrades that American troops were on the way.

There was no way of knowing whether you'd jammed a Taliban warning call or blown up an IED before a Marine stepped on it, so the Black Ravens flew 2,000 miles daily not certain whether they had helped or not. All they knew was that the guys on the ground didn't want to move without the Prowlers' protective blanket. For Tupper that was an easier burden than the one borne by the Hornet guys—a Prowler squadron would never go to sleep wondering whether they bombed a schoolhouse by mistake.

The missions lasted six hours, but only two or three of them would be doing actual jamming. The rest of the time was spent on the commute and hitting Air Force tankers for more fuel. There was a solution to all the coming and going: place the Prowlers at Bagram in northern Afghanistan. (The Air Force had discontinued the EF-111 Raven, its radar-jamming plane, in the 1990s, leaving the entire mission to the Navy.) From there, it was just a forty-minute flight to the fight.

But that contradicted the Navy mission. The modern Navy was all about carrier warfare: the ability to put five acres of sovereign American soil on an enemy's doorstep. If you started taking parts of a carrier's air wing and stashing them on Air Force bases, the next thing you knew Congress might start reassessing whether the billions spent annually to maintain the Navy's eleven carriers was really necessary.

So the Prowlers stayed on the
Nimitz
. The borderline lunacy of the situation struck Tupper on that first flight back from Paktia Province in northern Afghanistan. He was hitting the KC-135 tanker for the third time in six hours and turbulence pitched his Prowler up and down, hundreds of feet at a time. Five miles up, Tupper had to maneuver the refueling hook of the Prowler into a magnetic basket connected to the KC-135 refueling hose. It was a terrifying illusion as a pilot: it was hard not to think the basket was going to fly through your windshield.

An hour later, Tupper landed back on the
Nimitz
. His back was killing him. He'd hurt it when he was a twenty-year-old Middie running from a rent-a-cop in the catacombs underneath the Naval Academy, slashing his spine against a heating duct. Now each long flight reminded him of his crazy days. He sat down in the squadron's maintenance shack and signed in the jet. Twenty minutes later, he asked a petty officer to clear the room. Once the room emptied, Tupper whispered, “I can't stand up.” His sailor nodded and gingerly lifted his skipper to his feet.

But it was okay. His back might ache, but at least he was now doing something real, something that justified his family's sacrifice. That night, he got his first good sleep in weeks.

T
he good feeling didn't last long. Doc called him early the next morning. One of his sailors had been gravely injured.

The Prowler used nitrogen cartridges to blow down wheels and flaps if a mechanical failure prevented the plane from doing it the normal way. Seaman Ryan Headden was up on a ladder manning a hose refilling nitrogen through a Prowler's nose wheel. When he was done, another sailor was supposed to cut off the nitrogen and then Headden would unscrew the hose. But something went wrong. No one turned off the nitrogen. Headden twisted off the pressurized hose and it whipped around and smashed him in the left eye, an eye unprotected because Headden had pushed his safety goggles to the top of his head.

At first, the injury didn't seem too bad. Navy doctors bandaged Headden up and sent him back to his room with ice and a Percocet. But Headden woke up the next morning and couldn't see out of his left eye. The eye socket had swelled and exploded, detaching his retina.

Tupper was furious. Where was the veteran chief who was supposed to be supervising the kid? Why was the most junior sailor performing tricky maintenance on a ladder while his superiors waited below? Why didn't someone insist he wear his goggles correctly?

But he pushed those thoughts out of his head temporarily. They needed to get Headden to an eye specialist as soon as possible. The nearest air base was in Oman, a two-hour flight away. Headden was bandaged up and prepared for a COD flight. Tupper dispatched a trusty chief to travel with the kid so he would be less afraid.

Then the phone rang again. The COD was broken. Tupper cursed. The damned CODs were always broken. They were worthless. The
Nimitz
's command then made a compassionate decision. The 1,092-foot-long nuclear aircraft carrier with 5,600 sailors in the middle of combat ops turned west and hauled ass for six hours until the
Nimitz
was within helicopter range of Oman.

Tupper was grateful, but he also knew he was screwed. A sailor in his command had been injured while performing unsafe maintenance, forcing a warship to divert from wartime operations. Sure, the air wing kept flying missions to Afghanistan, but every pilot had to fly longer, every plane had to burn more fuel, every sailor had to work that much harder. It had happened on Tupper's watch. It wouldn't be forgotten.

Headden was eventually taken from Oman to Bagram where an ophthalmologist specializing in battlefield injuries unsuccessfully tried to save the vision in his eye. Headden was medevaced to Germany and then back stateside to Walter Reed Hospital. Back on the
Nimitz
, another Raven sailor put his hand into a still-spinning jet engine, resulting in thirty-three stitches. Tupper and Vinnie met in his stateroom and tried to come up with a new strategy. They lowered their goals. Instead of being the best Prowler squadron in the fleet, they talked about getting through one day without kicking themselves in the balls.

And he kept flying. On the long flights up and down the boulevard, some of the pilots and ECMOs bullshitted the whole way. On one flight, four Black Ravens spent five hours debating how they could introduce anal sex into a relationship after a no-anal-sex first year. But Tupper's flights were filled with silence. He watched rivers, sparse forests of pine, and small valley towns pass below him, saying nothing but what was required.

Back in his room, he stared at pictures of Beth and the kids and some Churchill quotes he'd taped above his medicine cabinet for inspiration. He started dealing with an emotion he hadn't felt since he was eighteen. It was a dark thought he had not let enter his head before, not when he was at the academy, not when he was a test pilot, not even when he was Doogie's XO. The feeling was doubt.

But then he received an email from Brenna. She was stuck on an algebra problem and Mom couldn't help. Tupper typed up some math tips he'd learned as a boy. A little later, Brenna emailed him back. “Thank you, you're my hero.”

That helped.

O
ctober burned by. It was supposed to be the midway part of the cruise, but with the extension they were barely a third of the way through. Still, Beth and the wives went forward with their midcruise dinner back on Whidbey. Tupper had all the officers write letters to their wives and girlfriends that would be placed on their dinner plates. Tupper struggled with what to say in his note. He settled with describing him and Beth as two proud trees whose roots had grown intertwined. He knew she would think it was corny, but it was true. It was also true that it was hard to find new ways to say I love you after twenty years.

Beth passed on some new school pictures of the girls and Tupper saw how much they had changed in just three months. A week later, he awoke to an email from Beth announcing in a sentence that Brenna and Caitlin had been baptized at the church the family had started attending two years ago. In an earlier time, Tupper would have been pissed at the unilateral decision making. But things that once seemed worth controlling simply didn't seem that important now. He hoped they would gain strength from the water.

Besides, there wasn't a lot of time. One moment he was reading about his kids being baptized in Anacortes, the next he was 25,000 feet above 85 Charlie kilo, thirty miles north of Kandahar, listening to an out-of-breath tactical air controller huffing his way to the top of a hill so he could direct Tupper's Prowler on an aerial path to support troops under attack.

Naval aviators talk endlessly of mastering situational awareness, knowing where you are and knowing what comes next at all times while in the cockpit. But on the long flights back from Afghanistan, Tupper's mind would toggle furiously between home and war, mission and family. He'd approach the carrier and his laser focus would return, but then he'd see his kids' faces swim before his eyes as he parked his Prowler on the edge of the deck. Tupper knew his situational awareness was seriously fucked.

Chapter
Fifteen

W
e lingered
in Oak Harbor for just five months. There was an unspoken rule for widows: move
on. All we did was remind our neighbors of the worst-case scenario. Besides, Mom
said she didn't want to drive down roads decorated with homemade welcome-home
signs. That was a homecoming she'd never know again. I completely agreed. I
loved Oak Harbor as much as a thirteen-year-old uncoordinated, fatherless ADD
boy could love anything, but now I wanted to get the hell out.

Mom considered moving us to her hometown of
Virginia Beach, but that was a Navy town too, still too much blue and gold. Her
sister Nancy insisted that we move near her in Flushing, Michigan, just outside
of Flint. They were not particularly close, but she stepped up after Dad
died—neither of Mom's parents made it out for the memorial service—so Mom
listened.

Nancy was a tanned type A personality always
changing in and out of tennis whites. She'd worked as a stewardess before
marrying my uncle Larry, a suave dentist with a Clark Gable mustache who waltzed
into rooms like he was starring in a movie only he knew about. They lived in a
mansion and told Mom there was plenty of room until we found a place of our own.
I delivered my last papers on April 25, 1980, the day of the failed mission to
rescue the hostages in Tehran. We boarded a dumpy turboprop at a grass airfield
just outside of Oak Harbor. Our plane took off and banked south toward
Seattle-Tacoma Airport. Crosswoods grew smaller and smaller in the airplane
window until it was gone for good.

We arrived in Flint just as the auto industry was
collapsing, but you wouldn't have known it from my uncle and aunt. There was a
Cadillac and a Jaguar in the five-car garage and a lake house up north. Mom
hoped my uncle would serve as a surrogate father to me. It didn't happen. I was
thrown off by his constant presence. He came home for lunch every day, eating a
sandwich and then dozing for a few minutes on the couch in his powder blue shirt
as a game show droned on in the background. That seemed unnatural to me.

We moved to Flint before our house was finished
because Mom hoped I'd make some friends before summertime. Unfortunately,
Flushing Junior High was populated with kids in REO Speedwagon T-shirts, known
by a previously unheard term: burnouts. They smoked weed and cigarettes before
gym. Back in Oak Harbor, it was hard to buy candy cigarettes. Here, no one cared
what Dad did or how he died. At lunch, I substituted chocolate shakes for my
ice-cream sandwiches. I drank them alone and then wandered the hallways, trying
not to be noticed.

In June, we moved into a subdivision called Hidden
Creek Drive. The subdivision's name was a lie; the creek was pretty easy to find
since there were no trees. GM middle managers filled the tract homes. There were
two cars in every driveway, most religiously washed on Saturday afternoons. I'd
ride my bike around the neighborhood alone—most of the kids were much younger
than me—and wonder about people who waxed and shined up metal just for the rain
to fall and wash away their hard work. Maybe they had nothing else to do.

Mom kept it together for a while. Her father came
out and the two of us finished our basement, which consisted of me hammering the
occasional nail and then Grandpa following behind me, pulling out the nail, and
redoing my work. The walls of our new home were decorated with old pictures and
plaques from my dad's career, while models of his planes sat peacefully on the
mantelpiece. But we never talked about him. Whole calendar years could pass
without a specific mention of him. Dad's parents came to visit when I was
fourteen, and his name was not spoken.

I no longer spent hours in my room conjuring up
season-long triumphs on the football field. Instead, I devised narratives where
Dad wasn't dead. No bodies were recovered after the accident, so the rest was
easy. They had ejected in the Indian Ocean and were immediately picked up by an
enemy spy ship, probably Soviet. They were taken to a secret prison and locked
away.

But, somehow, Dad led a prison break. He took his
crew across a no-man's-land of mountain ranges and deserts until they staggered,
barely alive, to a friendly border. We received a phone call in the middle of
the night and through the crackle we could hear Dad's voice.

“I'm alive.”

The story usually ended with me sitting at a table
with Dad's arm around me as he did an interview with the
Today Show
. The fantasy lived in my mind for years.

That first summer, we drove to Cape Cod and shared
a house for three weeks with my father's sister, Lyn, and her four kids. One
afternoon, I took the ferry from Woods Hole to Martha's Vineyard to see my Oak
Harbor buddy Billy who was visiting his grandmother. Billy had two brothers, but
this trip was just him and his dad, something I never experienced. I watched
with glee as they short-sheeted each other's beds and talked about their Pinto
having 4-60 air conditioning; four windows down at sixty miles per hour. I
didn't want to leave.

We drove back to Flushing a few days later, and the
following Sunday just Mom and I headed to Mass. We parked and I told her there
was something I wanted to discuss.

“Billy's dad said I could live with them back in
Oak Harbor. Or maybe we could move back.”

Mom slapped me hard.

“You wanted to move here as much as everyone else
did. Why don't you try helping for once in your life?”

She was right. That summer, Mom sold Dad's MG to
her probate lawyer. Minutes before he arrived, she stared at Dad's car, still
shrouded in canvas. I didn't know what to say, so I rode off on my bike. That
night, Mom was stone silent. At dinner, she stared at me through bloodshot
eyes.

“What?”

“Why did you make me do that by myself?”

I had no answer. Soon, September was here. I
determined there was no way I would get out of Flushing High School alive. I
begged Mom to shield me from the criminal element and send me to Powers
Catholic, Flint's parochial school. This was a bit counterintuitive, as Powers
was located in a sketchy neighborhood of Flint, the murder capital of the
country. But then again, Mom had just moved us to a city with 20 percent
unemployment; faulty logic was the family ideology. I told her Dad would have
wanted me there. She couldn't argue with that.

Powers was not the sanctuary I imagined. Most of
the kids had attended one of the county's K-through-8 Catholic schools. Many had
friends dating back to first communion. I didn't know anyone. This wasn't new
for me, but no one else was Navy, so they were more guarded. Strangers were
intruders.

I went out for freshman football. In Oak Harbor,
I'd been decent in football because the league was done by weight, so I was
thirteen playing against ten-year-olds. Here I was a 104-pound fifth-string
defensive back on a team of seventy. I stretched one of my dad's Naval Academy
T-shirts over my shoulder pads for practice thinking it made me look tough, but
I wasn't fooling anyone.

A wide-eyed redheaded sadist named Mr. Duncan was
one of our coaches. He taught science, but Bunsen burners and splayed frogs were
just the price he paid so he could stalk the sidelines like a Viking on a
killing spree. Duncan lived for a football drill named Bull in the Ring. We'd
all gather in a circle, start running in place, and make animal noises until
Duncan screamed out two names, supposedly at random. Usually, he'd pair two kids
of like size and talent. Other times, he went for sadistic comedy.

“Artis!” “Rodrick!”

Bill Artis was already six feet tall and weighed
200 pounds. I tried to go low on him, but Artis went lower. I was flipped up in
the air—a rodeo clown getting the horns. I landed in the dust with a thud. No
one made a sound for a moment. The trainer checked my pulse. He assured everyone
that I was not dead, and laughter became permissible. I would have laughed too,
but I couldn't breathe. Bill apologized after practice but also suggested I
might want to consider cross-country. I should have listened. I got in for eight
plays all season.

I was placed in a number of honors classes because
of my acute skill at filling in circles with a pencil. I found my people, so to
speak, in Mr. Winchester's history class. One of them was Gordie, the
fair-haired boy of our class. I'd seen him on the football sidelines—he smartly
nursed a wrist sprain for the entire season—but he seemed out of my social
class, aka the untouchable new kid. He was blond and an expert soccer player,
the Flint equivalent of an Ibiza playboy.

In a strange bit of synchronicity, we shared a
heritage: his dad was also a Navy pilot, if a distant one, living in Washington,
D.C. We never really spoke about it, but any accredited child psychologist or
sitcom writer could have predicted what would happen next. Together, we embarked
on an unintentional competition to see who could have the most spectacularly
underachieving high school career.

It was the fall of 1980 and we had an unhealthy
affection for Ronald Reagan. I'd grown up in California and Reagan was the
governor when I was a little boy. On TV, he seemed cool and handsome. When he
ran for president in 1976, I read everything I could, rooting for Reagan with
the desperation I usually reserved for the Raiders. I cried when he lost to
Gerald Ford. Now he was running against Jimmy Carter. Carter was an Annapolis
guy but not an aviator, and Dad and his squadron mates hated him, blaming parts
shortages on his White House. Oh, yeah, he also turned the
Kitty Hawk
around, indirectly leading to Dad's death. I was not a
fan. Gordie and I drew up business cards that read the Conservative Liberation
Organization, ripping off Yasser Arafat. We celebrated Reagan's landslide by
toasting milk cartons in the lunchroom.

Things at home started slipping away. Mom managed
to keep us fed and chauffeured us to our various school activities, but her
brave face was gone. Most days, she struggled to keep it together. I'd do
puzzles with Chrissie while she fixed dinner with a furious clatter, banging
pots and slamming glasses. We'd eat in silence, then we'd all go our separate
ways: me up to my room to work on Dad's escape, Terry to talk on the phone with
her new friends, and Mom to put Christine to bed.

My first-semester grades were a clot of B minuses
with a single A in history. I gave them to Mom after dinner one night. She
stared at the page for a full minute, as if she could make the letters change by
sheer will. Then she threw the card at me, stormed upstairs, and slammed her
bedroom door.

I could hear her sobbing. Terry came out of her
room, rolled her eyes, and took Christine down to the basement to play. I sat
outside Mom's door. I could hear her talking to someone.

“Why did you do this to me? Why? I can't do this.
Why did you leave me? Why? Please, please come back.”

I knocked softly on the door.

“Mom, I'll do better. I promise.”

“GO AWAY.”

T
he
thing is, I didn't do better. At school, I learned that the quickest way to stop
the other kids from making fun of you was to make fun of yourself. In religion
class, I memorized passages from the book of Job and started doing impromptu
readings to spice things up.

“My soul is weary of my life; I will leave my
complaint upon myself; I will speak in the bitterness of my soul.”

The other kids would laugh with or at me. I didn't
care. I soon dropped out of honors classes. Mom took me to an adolescent
therapist that spring. I sat through one session and couldn't get over his awful
wine-colored suit. I was no fashion expert, but I knew no one dressed that badly
could help me. At school, a sweet, harmless counselor came up to me in the
hallway. He took me into his office and we talked for a few minutes.

“I want you to write a letter to your father. Tell
him everything you want to say.”

I told him I would, but I never did.