Making a Difference

Drip. Drip. Drip. Beads of sweat poured from my hairline, between my eyes and down my nose before falling with a plop onto my lap. I’ve never sweat so much in my life as I did that sunny day our destroyer knifed through the tepid waters of the Strait of Hormuz and into the Persian Gulf, July 27, 1998.
I was part of the maintenance crew that day along with my aircraft commander, Lieutenant Amy Lawless. Our helicopter, BattleCat 24, a gray SH-60B Seahawk, was fresh from a tune-up and now sat on the small flight deck of the destroyer trying to prove itself safe for flight. Amy and I did test runs measuring vibration levels in the main rotor head and tail rotor all day in the stifling heat.
Since this was my first deployment as a helicopter pilot, I was a “nugget,” or, as
Amy liked to call me, “The Young One.” At 25, I was the youngest of the five pilots on the ship. My job was to be a good co-pilot and do whatever Amy or the other two aircraft commanders told me.
As we sat in the cockpit with its dizzying array of switches, buttons, and circuit breakers, the window thermometer read 45 degrees Celsius. In Fahrenheit, that’s 113 degrees. The air conditioning ducting had been rerouted to ensure the cooling of the sensitive avionics equipment at the expense of our comfort.
Amy and I sat strapped into our seats by five-point harnesses. We wore flame-resistant Nomex flight suits, steel-toed black leather boots, helmets, and ten-pound SV-2s, which were survival vests that carried everything from a hunting knife to emergency flotation lobes to Chiclets.
The seat cushion beneath me was swampy with my butt sweat. But at least it was my butt sweat. I would find out in the next few months that my least favorite thing in the world was “hot seating” into the aircraft for a mission after another pilot had been sitting and sweating in the cockpit for the previous four hours.
But Amy had a reptilian–like tolerance for heat. We were sitting in what was essentially a greenhouse, and she wasn’t even sweating. She wore the sleeves of her dark green flight suit all the way down, the Velcro of her cuffs bound tightly around her wrists.
“Will you please roll your sleeves up?” I asked with irritation. “I feel hotter just looking at you.”
“I’m not that hot,” she said. I was surprised to get any reply. Usually when I sniped, Amy, the most taciturn of our crew, did not deign to reply.
Leaning my face toward the three-inch circular scupper vent in my window, I tried in vain to catch any breeze that might make it into the cockpit. “I don’t know why they even bothered to put these scuppers in. They do absolutely no good,” I said. No breeze, no response. I shifted in my seat. I had gotten second-degree sunburns on my ass snorkeling in Thailand ten days before. My butt was still peeling and itchy.
I looked over at Amy and saw that her scupper vent was closed.
“Can you please open your scupper?” I asked.
“You just said yourself it doesn’t do any good. The air around it is a dead zone. There is no circulation around that part of the aircraft. None.” Quite a speech for Amy.
“Why are we wearing our SV-2s anyway?” I continued. With the helicopter firmly chained to the flight deck for ground turns, there was virtually no chance we would need them.
No answer. Her aircraft, her decision.
Frustrated, I used my finger to squeegee a rivulet of sweat from my forehead and flick it across the center console at Amy while she was looking down at her checklist. The drops landed squarely on the left side of her face. She looked up at the switch board above her, confused. Though we were sitting only about three feet apart, the noise of the two jet turbine engines and four rotor blades turning over our heads drowned out my giggling.
“What the heck was that?” Amy rarely cursed, unlike the rest of us.
I flicked her again.
“Was that sweat?”
“Yep.”
“Knock it off!” We finally finished the marathon ground checks and in-flight tests the next day. BattleCat 24 was good to go.
Amy and I were roommates. We bonded over our mutual love for hot tea and disdain for our third roommate. We lived in a small stateroom in Officer’s Country with another “nugget,” Nicole McNeely, whom we called McSqueely, or just the Squeeler. The three of us I slept in racks three-high and shared a space the size of a walk-in closet.
The Squeeler had three undesirable qualities: she was a poor stick, had a habit of crying in response to stress, and chewed with her mouth open. Since I never flew with her (nuggets don’t fly with nuggets) but did have to hear her eat in tight quarters, I considered the last her biggest fault.
The USS Drummond was a 563-foot long gray Spruance-class destroyer with five inch guns, torpedo tubes, a Tomahawk missile launching system, and other armaments. It smelled of a mixture of diesel fuel, steel, floor wax, and Simple Green, and was home to about 300 sailors and one helicopter. Part of the Abraham Lincoln Carrier Battle Group, the Drummond was based out of San Diego, which we had departed a month and a half earlier for a six month deployment.
The Maintenance Officer for our helicopter crew was Lieutenant Steve Morgenfeld. Steve’s meticulous attention to detail fit his job as “MO” nicely since he was in charge of the care and feeding of a $30 million aircraft. However, he was also a tree-hugging, left-leaning vegetarian who got in trouble on his first deployment for burning incense in his stateroom. And, he liked to drink.
Steve, Amy and I cemented a friendship getting drunk together in Japan, Hong Kong, and Thailand before arriving in the Persian Gulf. I had the unusual distinction of being the only officer put in hack (essentially grounded) by the commanding officer, Captain Strausser, after getting so drunk with Steve and British ex-pats in Hong Kong that I passed out on the boat bringing us back out to the Drummond and had to be carried by Steve up the gangplank onto the ship.
Of course, drinking underway on a U.S. warship is forbidden, so after we pulled out of port we had to content ourselves with reading, watching movies, and giving each other shit in our free time.
Within a day of passing through the strait, the Drummond was on station in the far northern Persian Gulf. We began enforcing United Nations sanctions against Iraq in the area abutting Iranian and Iraqi territorial waters.
For us helicopter pilots, this meant three and a half hour flights, usually at night, querying foreign merchant vessels about who they were, what they were carrying, and where they were going. If their answers were vague or suspicious, the Drummond’s boarding team searched the ship to verify the legality of their cargo.
The querying process was tedious, since there were countless ships passing through the area and we had to question all of them in English. We tried our best to be professional and courteous, but inevitably the language barrier caused tempers to flare.
One night Steve and Amy came across a small cargo ship heading south. Steve began the query. “Merchant Vessel X, say your port of origin.” What followed was an unintelligible word starting with “M.” Amy and Steve looked at each other.
“Did you get that?”
“Nope.”
“Please say again your port of origin,” Steve said. The ship’s officer tried several more times to make himself understood. No luck. “Your last transmission was unreadable. Say again your port of origin, over.”
After the fourth or fifth time the ship’s officer’s frustration boiled over. “We are from Malta, Malta! Small island in Medi-terrain! Malta! Sheesh!” he yelled into the radio. Steve and Amy each blew sighs of relief. Malta! Excellent—no boarding required.
The anonymity of the radio gave other bored souls an outlet for their creativity. Occasionally, a male Middle Eastern voice would come over the radio. He would begin slowly, seductively, with “Philippino moooonkey,” before finishing with a staccato, “Lick my balls, Lick my balls, Lick my balls!”
And God forbid a female pilot ever try to query a vessel or say anything over Bridge to Bridge, the common radio frequency the merchants monitored. A woman’s voice was immediately met with dozens of lewd sexual remarks and offers. Amy, McSqueely, and I left the queries to Steve or our male aircrewmen.
A week into our time in the northern Gulf and dozens of badgered merchants later, it became difficult to believe that what we were doing was important. Our many flights had netted exactly zero busts of smugglers. Were we really hurting Saddam Hussein and helping to bring down his regime? I doubted it. My morale began to slip in the 120 degree days. How was I going to stand three more months of this when every day at sea is a Monday?
We received an unexpected break in the routine when on August 7th al Qaeda bombed the United States embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, killing hundreds. The Drummond and several other ships from our battle group received orders to speed back through the Strait of Hormuz and into the northern Arabian Sea by the Iranian and Pakistani border. Nobody, not even the captain, knew what we were going to do.
Though we had only been in the torrid Gulf for two weeks, the Arabian Sea and its relatively cool temperatures in the 90s felt like a dream. Since we had to keep a low profile, we were not allowed to fly much, which allowed plenty of time for speculation.
We filled the time with working out in the ship’s tiny gym, training on tactics and aircraft systems, watching more movies, and wondering what our “national tasking” would mean. Our nightly intelligence briefings introduced us to al Qaeda and its leader.
“Bin Laden? Who’s that?” I whispered to Amy during a brief. She shrugged. We had never heard of him.
The Groundhog Days of the Gulf were quickly replaced by the intense anticipation we all felt awaiting further orders.
“I heard we’re going to bomb Pakistan,” went one rumor.
“No, we’re invading Afghanistan,” was another.
We had no access to the internet, television of any kind, or telephones. Our only source of information was a daily news round-up compiled and sent by the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service. Mostly, I just checked the Cubs’ scores and tracked Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa’s chase of the home run record.
We finally got our orders that we would be part of a massive Tomahawk cruise missile strike into a terrorist camp in Afghanistan the evening of August 20th. The other ships with us would be launching missiles to the same area, and another battle group in the Red Sea was to launch Tomahawks into Sudan.
Feverish work replaced idle anticipation as the Tomahawk experts on the ship worked to make sure the missiles were functional and loaded with the correct guidance information. Assuming we would be relegated to the sidelines, we were excited when Captain Strausser told us he wanted aerial footage of the launch.
Late afternoon on the 20th we put on our flight gear, inspected the aircraft, and strapped in for engine start.
Lieutenant Commander Haeg, the Officer in Charge of our helicopter crew, was the aircraft commander for the flight. Steve, second in seniority, was his co-pilot. Amy was on the flight because she was third in command, and also because she had bought a sophisticated video camera in Hong Kong. Petty Officer Stanton took the crewman’s spot in the cabin, and I got the last seat because nobody liked McSqueely.
I heard Steve and Haeg going through the engine start checklist.
“Doors, inertial reels,” Haeg read.
“Locked,” Steve responded. “You guys locked back there?”
Stanton looked over at me and I gave him a thumbs-up. “Locked.”
“Engines, start.” I heard the familiar whine up above my head as the number one engine started, followed shortly by number two.
“Engine Idle Ng’s, checked.” The engines were operating normally. Next Steve released the rotor brake, which had been keeping the rotors in place, and Haeg advanced the Power Control Levers to “Fly.” The four long rotorblades started spinning, slowly at first, then faster and faster, the body of the helicopter doing a shimmy-sham beneath me as the engines went to full-power.
After a few more systems and communications checks, the flight deck crewmen ran into the rotor arc at the three and nine o’clock positions and removed the chains that had been holding us securely to the deck.
“You guys all set back there?” Steve asked.
“Affirm,” Stanton replied. I felt the helicopter get light on its landing gear as Steve increased power and smoothly pulled into a hover above the flight deck. After a final check of the instruments, he turned into the wind, pushed the nose over, and we flew away from the ship and over the water.
Shortly after take-off Amy and I unfastened our seat harnesses and sat at the open cabin door, our boots dangling high above the milky water.
Haeg and Steve flew us around the ship for a while, waiting for night and the appointed launch hour. Amy and I goofed around with Stanton in the back, taking pictures of each other, laughing, and enjoying the view from the open cabin door and the novelty of simply being a passenger on the flight. I made a flip remark over the intercom that stepped on a simultaneous transmission from the ship. Oops.
“Hey, is it too much to ask that you guys quit dicking around for two minutes and shut the hell up?” Steve said over the intercom. “People are going to die tonight.” He was right. If all went well, a lot of them.
I wondered if at that moment some poor goat herder on the wrong mountaintop in Afghanistan was about to get a 1,000 pound cruise missile up his ass. I said a silent prayer that the Drummond’s missiles would find only freedom-hating terrorists.
As our ship neared its launch point, off the starboard bow a small nameless fishing dhow came into view in the twilight. A solitary dark man in his underwear was on its deck, pulling lines onto the boat, the design of which dated back centuries.
A voice came over Hawklink, our secure, discrete communications line between us and the Drummond. “The bridge wants you guys to tell the dhow to scram,” said Turtle, our aircraft controller back in the Combat Information Center on the ship.
“Roger that.”
“Fishing vessel 500 yards off the starboard bow of U.S. Warship, please alter course immediately for safety,” Steve said. Silence. He tried again several times; all requests went unanswered.
“Captain says to get that guy the hell out of there,” Turtle said. Steve maneuvered the helicopter into a 100-foot hover just off the dhow’s side. The fisherman covered his head and cowered from the rotorwash. Amy, Stanton, and I gestured wildly in vain, trying to get him to understand that he needed to move.
“No joy,” Steve reported over the radio.
“Well,” Turtle began. “This guy is in for one hell of a show. Captain says as long as he isn’t in the direct path of the boosters we’re a go.”
The front deck of the Drummond was lined with rows of small, unassuming trap doors that lay flat when closed. Underneath those doors were dozens of 20-foot long Tomahawk cruise missiles.
“Showtime,” Turtle said over Hawklink.
I looked from the dhow to the Drummond as the first door of the launcher snapped open. A Tomahawk blasted straight up into the night sky, a great fireball trailing behind its booster. Other doors followed, and more missiles shot up behind the first.
“Holy shit,” someone said over the intercom.
As each missile disappeared to the north, a parabolic arc of smoke marked its path. The missiles firing in rapid succession, the smoke arcs lined up next to each other in an acrid gray rainbow over the bow of the ship. I looked over at Amy, who was sitting next to me at the cabin door, focused on filming the launch with her video camera. Everyone in the aircraft went silent.
The entire launch took less than a minute.
“That’s it?” I asked. Amy nodded. We got up from the cabin door and strapped ourselves back into our seats. The ship set Flight Quarters and the flight deck crew took their positions to bring BattleCat 24 back in.
We landed uneventfully. Getting out of the aircraft, we compared notes with Nicole on what the launch looked like from the Drummond. She enthusiastically described it with lots of sound effects and gesticulations. The mood on the ship was euphoric.
Amy, Steve, and I joined the rest of the sailors celebrating the successful launch with cigars outside on the gun deck. Captain Strausser was all smiles as he puffed on his stogie, and slapped everybody on the back.
“Nice work! Great job!” Soon after the deployment, Captain Strausser would receive a promotion for the Drummond’s success.
Amy leaned back against the five inch gun mount and puffed on her cigar.
“Nothing like doing the right thing for the wrong reasons,” she said. Though cut off from breaking news, we were aware that “Monica-Gate” was dominating headlines back home. What we did not know was that just three days before the launch, President Clinton had finally admitted his affair with Lewinsky. “Diversion complete.”
“Whatever,” I said, coughing. I never did like cigars. “At least we finally did something important.”
“I wonder when the missiles are going to hit,” Steve said, trying to blow a smoke ring. Amy and I shrugged. No idea.
As the missiles streaked across the Northern Arabian Sea toward a terrorist camp in Afghanistan that bin Laden had just evacuated, the three of us left the celebration and climbed up the ladder that led toward Officer’s Country.
In five years the ship under our feet would be lying on the ocean floor, its hull cracked, purposely broken in two by a torpedo in an exercise off the coast of Australia. An artificial reef at 25 degrees south, 155 degrees east, I imagine clown fish taking up residence in the gun turrets and coral growing over the Tomahawk launch doors.
“You guys know what movies are playing?” We walked into the wardroom to find out.