The True Adventures
Of
Youthly Puresome
THE NIGHT THING
written by
Jack Woodul
illustrated by
Jack Snow
comments by
Steve Milliken
Certainly, the Demon that used to live out there at Mach One was dead. By the time Puresome hit the tactics phase of the Naval Aviation Advanced Training Command, it was ordained that the student’s first hop in the F11 Tigerjet would include stroking the afterburner, stuffing the nose over, and no-big-dealing through the “Sound Barrier.” But the Thing that lived at night around aircraft carriers, the Thing with yellow eyes and long teeth that could curdle the righteous stuff of the most steely-eyed Naval Aviator, was alive and out there, waiting.
Even Air Force Pukes knew about “night noises,“ mysterious moans and glicking sounds made by one’s aircraft that were ominously amplified at night. Patrol Pukes knew that night air sucked lift off the wings, and that night over the ocean sea was darker than forty feet up the gastrointestinal tract of the largest dinosaur. But carrier aviators knew the Night Thing was all of that, and, on any given night, could manipulate the vertigos, the sea, and both ends of the Boat to make you look bad, or dead, or both.
Back at University, Puresome’s dreams of Wings of Gold were occasionally troubled by sea stories from the fleet that percolated down to his NROTC unit. Night carrier qualifications involved haphazardly hurling an aircraft with a slow-to-spool-up engine at a heaving spot of iron in the ocean, and many who tried were found wanting and sent off in humiliation to be Chaplain’s assistants in remote corners of the Empire. And there were the dark images of the “Know when, then go!” poster of horrific Crusader prangs that seemed to regularly happen at night. But Puresome knew that there were many rungs of the ladder to hack before he had to face that particular malevolence, and he stuffed his nascent awareness of the Thing into a box and put it on a far shelf in the back of his mind. But it growled and quivered and waited its time, never very far away.
TOP OF THE PILE
By and by, Ensign Puresome found himself with Golden Wings, having climbed to the top of the Training Command pile, only to start over at the bottom of another pile as a “Firp,” a Fleet Replacement Pilot, with Tinker Toy RAG (Replacement Air Group) at NAS Oceana. The “Fist of the Fleet” Squadron would teach him all things Scooter and deliver him to his fleet squadron as a fully qualified Frabbing New Guy Nugget who didn’t know squat and would be told, “Forget all that stuff you learned in the RAG, because this is how we do it in the fleet!”
All the while Youthly was flying FAM (familiarization) hops, formation; doing low levels; learning the fine art of idiot loop, over-the-shoulder bomb delivery of the Doomsday Weapon and other such delights on weapons deployment to MCAS Yuma, previous classes of Firps progressed to the stage of doing hundreds of Field Mirror Landing Practice landings, preparatory to the Final Exam of day and night carrier landing qualification. Each simulated carrier landing pass was closely graded by RAG LSO’s (Landing Signal Officers), and Firps had to pass their cold-eyed scrutiny to earn their trip to the Boat and carrier qualifications. Puresome watched and listened to their progress with studied indifference and real attention, knowing his day was coming.
And so it happened that the Firp class in front of Puresome went to the Boat and three Firps had done their day qualifications and then refused to fly their night qualifications! They subsequently had their wings ripped off, their swords broken, and were hustled off to Vladavostock, all very publicly!
“Jerbis Flinderbars!” thought Puresome, “it’s alive!” as something dark and evil YOUHAHAHA’ed its way to his mind’s center stage.
This Frabb-up at the Boat constituted the ultimate Naval Aviation sin: it made people look bad. Therefore, guano ran down hill until a great heap of it landed on the heads of the RAG LSO’s responsible for certifying students as ready for the Boat. Naturally, the LSO’s passed on their pleasure at this condition to the lucky students of Puresome’s class. They would not Frabb up, or they would not pass go.
So Youthly flew his fanny off, doing six or seven bounces at Fentress, the auxiliary field set aside for this business; then popping back to hot pit refuel at Oceana, and returning to Fentress for another go. LSO’s snarled and their assistants wrote caustic descriptions of each pass. After a week of two-a-days, there was less yelling and government issue ball-point pens didn’t burst into flame as often, and the students graduated to two-a-nights. Puresome would emerge from these hops with his flight suit soaked and fuming, calooses on his butt, and a real need for half a glass of good scotch whiskey.
After nearly two hundred simulated carrier landings, the hard-eyed LSO’s were as satisfied as they were likely to get, and Puresome got his ticket punched for a trip to NAS Cecil Field and the USS Franklin D. Roosevelt, CVA-42. He listened with great attention to instructions in etiquette around the ship , so as not to play the complete Delta Sierra during his ten day and six night traps. No mention was made of the supernatural attraction of thunderstorms to aircraft carriers or possible poltergeist intervention.
The day traps on the FDR were fun. On the second day, four day traps were required before going out for night qualifications, and Puresome felt he handled the substantial sink-hole behind the Boat with some competence. But, hanging around the rest of the day, waiting for his turn in the barrel that night, caused an intense attack of what athletes call “adrenaline build-up” and Naval Aviators call “the chickenshits.” Even watching the antics of the pre-autothrottle RA5C’s from Vulture’s Row failed to divert him much. Somehow, the wild flapping of their huge horizontal stabilizers and their ponderous waveoff performance, like a leviathan stuck in a tar-pit, seemed to prefigure a certain amount of doom. It did not help to have entirely too much imagination.
Which made it too easy to imagine that the red ready room lighting and the red goggles used for night adaptation had turned everything into some naval level of Dante’s inferno. The trip from the ready room up the escalator was red-lit, as was the flight deck, and the waiting A-4’s hulked ominously in the gloom. As Puresome shoe-horned himself and his thoughts into the tiny A-4 cockpit, the Night Thing sensed an opportunity and grinned an evil grin.
Puresome’s first frabb-up was conceptual. Even though he had to fly his carrier approaches with his seat in the full up position, so as to be able to see over the nose of the Scooter, he figured that, since he would be flying actual instruments in the black-assed night, he would take the catapult shot and fly the pattern with the seat full down, the better to see his instruments. It was a bad idea. He was not used to the seat position, was profoundly uncomfortable, and never managed to line up the TACAN needle and the boat on his first trip around the pattern. Cleverly raising his seat to the normal position solved his instrument scan problem, and the next pattern found Puresome staring at the dim, red drop-lights on the blunt end of the boat and following the meatball down the glideslope, more or less as advertised.
But as he got “in close,” he remembered the sink hole that was there during the day and squoze on a little extra power, and was amazed as the ball traveled upward and he sailed over the wires, his tailhook sending out a shower of sparks.
“Bolter! Bolter! Power and go!” hollered the LSO, and Puresome disappeared into the blackness. Something Evil cackled, but nobody really heard it.
His next pass was identical: Youthly couldn’t help himself, squoze on a little power against the sink hole that had to be there, sailed over the wires and made sparks in the night.
“Puresome, you are adding too much power in close and are sailing over the top! Easy on the power and just fly the ball, or you’ll bolter all night!”
“I will be frabbed if I will!” Puresome snarled into his mask. “I will do this!” He realized that there was no place for wailing, doomed dinosaurs or Dante’s gloom, only himself and what he had to do. He fought the Evil Force to a draw, fixed himself on the job, and flew the Scooter around the pattern and trapped.
After refueling, he launched and banged out five more traps, even though the vertigos gave him the sensation of doing aileron rolls down final on the last pass.
“Does that give me a qual?” Puresome squeeked as he taxied out of the arresting gear in the red deck lighting that wasn’t nearly as ominous as it used to be.
The Air Boss allowed that it was. And the Night Thing would have had a hissy fit, but it was not its nature, and there would always be other nights.
Puresome knew that the Night Thing had not gone away, but was always there, waiting. Before his first night trap in his fleet squadron, he went to bed all afternoon and flew his approach a thousand times in his head, and he was ready when he almost lost it when he descended from a pinkie holding pattern in his Tinker Tanker down into the dark. Puresome started thinking about the night trap immediately after the catapult shot on every subsequent night hop, and it was never far from his mind, even while dropping flares and bombs on the godless, rat-eating commies. Sometimes a good LSO with a calm voice could bring you aboard despite the all the efforts of thunderstorms and supernatural intervention.
The Night Thing might never be far away from Naval Aviators, but Puresome knew that the important thing was that you could kick its ass.
Says Puresome.
THE NIGHT THING is copyright 1998 by Jack Woodul
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