The Bell Tolls for Thee, Maverick

This is no bullshit:  I witnessed the death knell of the naval aviator.

In you case you didn't notice amidst all the hooplah over the Zimmerman trial, the Northrop Grumman X-47B, an unmanned air vehicle, was successfully landed on the deck of an aircraft carrier in front of the CNO, SECNAV, divers admirals and press, and moi on July 10.

Well, I kinda sorta witnessed it.  I happened to be in a different compartment of the ship which had a flight deck video feed, so I was able to watch it from there.  So I didn't see it with my naked eye.  Of course, because I require glasses or contacts I never see anything with my naked eyes, or if I do it is extremely blurry.  Plus, consider that, my eyes are only providing me with information on the light bouncing off of different objects, so even then its subjective.  I mean, what if your red is different from my red?  Does that mean that "red" doesn't really exist?

Is your conception of reality starting to fall apart?  Take a deep breath, a shot of whisky, and pull it together.

Better?  Okay.  Let's crack on.

So if I didn't actually see it in person, at least I was on the USS George H.W. Bush when it happened. I was on the ship for a few days, as part of the Newport News Shipbuilding Engineer to Sea program, where 10 engineers get lead around the ship by knowledgeable peoples to learn more about how all the pieces and different departments fit together on an aircraft carrier.

Me on the Flight Deck of CVN77

Most of those engineers actually did fight their way up to the Island, past the press, some admirals, their ceremonial cookie bearers (don't laugh - it is one of the perks of office), and the CNO himself to get a view.  I passed on the opportunity so that I could get a tour of the reactor compartment in hopes that I would soak in enough radiation to gain super powers.  Unfortunately the plants on the CVN77 are shipshape and Bristol-fashion, so I still lack the ability to leap tall buildings with a single bound or open soda cans with my mind.

There was much rejoicing over the success.  That night in the smoking sponson all the men and women who were present in support of the X47-B, a seven year project which finally culminated in proof that an unmanned vehicle could indeed be launched from and recovered on an aircraft carrier, were all smoking giant stogies in celebration.  No doubt some of them would have preferred to get rip-roaring drunk, but such things are not allowed in today's navy, at least aboard ship.  Perhaps, feeling a little loose, they decided to mix Orange Soda and Grape Soda together in the wardroom, or have an extra bowl of ice cream after dinner.

I don't imagine everyone was happy.  My good friends Ted and Tank down in Pensacola told me they went out to a bar frequented by naval aviators that night and a few tears were shed as they tapped their brown shoes to "You've got that loving feeling" for one last time.

I myself have mixed feelings about it. I've watched pilots land F/A-18s on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, and its probably just about the coolest thing I've ever seen -- definitely cooler than Didier Drogba slamming home the final PK to lift Chelsea FC to Champions League Glory, but probably not as cool as when in senior year I finally got to see Maxime McGulligan's birthmark, which bears a startling resemblance to Pitt the Elder and has the additional benefit of being in a fairly private place.

E-2 Hawkeye Landing on the deck of the CVN77 during Carrier Qaulifications.  

The romantic in me thinks it would be a sad thing if no one landed planes on aircraft carriers anymore. Watching the X47-B trap probably stirred feelings in many hearts -- my own included -- that were probably not dissimilar to a Captain Jack Aubrey watching a steam engine or naval gun demo.  You can't argue that what you are seeing is progress and it's probably not a bad thing;  and yet at the same time you know that things are going to change and some of the dash and daring of life is going to go away.

Setting one's emotion aside, it is clearly better to take the pilot out of the seat.  If John McCain had been flying a drone instead of an A4-E Skyhawk when he was shot down over Hanoi in 1967, he would have shrugged his shoulders, gotten his ass chewed out by his commanding officer, grabbed a cup of coffee from the coffee mess and comforted himself with the fact that tomorrow he'd get another chance.  As it was he ended up spending 5 and half years at the Hanoi Hilton being tortured to within an inch of his life.  The more we can  avoid that sort of thing from happening again the better, and its hard to pit any romantic feelings against that.

But all those Top Guns drowning their sorrows should not fret just yet.  The drone has its place, but currently it is unable to replace a top-notch fighter and is only capable of delivering limited weapons.  It is more likely than not that in the near future naval drones will spend hours above the battlespace gathering intelligence. Sure, they might take a pot shot at somebody or something if the opportunity presents itself (though I am not sure I agree with our current tactical regime for the drone, as sadly we seem to have a knack for striking weddings in countries we are not at war with just as much as we actually use them to kill terrorists), but more than likely they will just be directing those good old brown shoes towards a target so they can finally have the chance to fuck up someone's day and then request a fly-by back at the carrier, which will be denied, but they will do it anyway because they are hot shit.  And then the CAG will get really, really mad at them but send them off to Top Gun School anyway, because he has to give them their shot!  And so the pilot will end up trying to outdo another Top Gun student who looks like Val Kilmer and he'll get to show his aeronautics instructor some really cool chess openings over breakfast (and no, that is not a euphemism for sex, bur rather a recognition that it just so happens the instructor also really enjoys chess and so they meet at a coffee shop on Sundays with a board to discuss the merits of the Lewinsky Gambit and the Hermoine-Snape Defense), but just when things are looking up Goose dies and the kid goes into a tailspin of regret because it was his fault -- or was it??  But he (or she!  Remember that now females can be fighter pilots too!) drives around Pensacola on a motorcycle and she (or he!) finds it deep within him (or--a, fuck it) self to carry on and he passes the class and goes on to be a really great pilot.

Then one day he finds himself administering medicine and medical advice to cranky 80 year old Serbian Americans, because only someone who has landed a fighter pilot on the pitching and rolling deck of a carrier at night has the nerves of steel and ice of blood to actually be the primary care physician for those crotchety, old, angry people.

And I ask you: if we don't have naval aviators anymore, who will actually be able to do that?  Who will help them?  I don't know -- it is becoming clearer that the real losers in all of this are the 'viches of our Happy Republic.

Life is a vich and then you die.

PS:  Those naval aviators should take additional heart by the fact that the X47-B only completed two out of four landings.

Gettysburg

There's been a lot in the news recently - and actually for once a lot of it is worthwhile.  The death of Arizona firefighters, the reverberations from a historical Supreme Court Session, yet another round of protests in Egypt. It's little surprise that, at least from where I am sitting down here in God's Country, the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg has been something of an afterthought.

Of course the fact that I live in Virginia may explain some of that...

I had the very good fortune to spend two days on the battlefield with my dad about 12 years ago.  Civil War scholarship is a hobby of my father's, though I am not 100% sure why.  He spends the second half of each year reading about the Civil War or people associated with it -- though there are those years where the book he chooses is so detailed and he is otherwise so busy that he can only make it through one text in 6 months, if that -- and when we went to the field Gettysburg had been the focus of his studies for several years.  He knew the order of battle down to the regiment virtually everywhere, and in a few places even down to the company.  No need for a tour guide that time.

It was a memorable trip, but the highlight for me, the thing I will never forget as long as I live, was walking Pickett's Charge.  For those of you deciding not to click on the link, Pickett's Charge was the assault by Confederate troops on the Union center on the third and final day of the battle.  Lee, after assaulting the flanks of the Union line on the previous day, decided that he must attack the center based on the principle that do the same thing over and over again and expect different results is a sign of insanity, so obviously something else had to be tried.  The Union center was the only option left.    

No, that isn't strictly true.  Though his intentions, target, and the wisdom of the charge are all hotly debated, it seems his goal was to break the Union center and pour troops into the breach and roll up the Union lines while using a cavalry assault from the rear to exploit the gap.  A massive artillery bombardment would pave the way by destroying Union artillery and demoralizing enemy infantry at the focal point.  As it was the bombardment was ineffectual, and while some Confederate troops did break the Union line there was not enough of them and they were easily repulsed with a counterattack by Union reserves.  

Why my dad and I were so keen to walk it I am not so sure.  In this hyper-political day and age, where an act as simple as buying a chicken sandwich can taint a person with the stain of intolerance, it seems like only those with some affinity for the South and her cause would dare walk the charge at all.  But that was certainly not the case with us.  I'll admit we had some admiration for some of the South's generals and soldiers as fighting men, but we had no illusions of the odious institution of slavery that lay at the heart of the Confederate cause (see postscript for more on this) and we had (and have) no wish to see the south rise again as some people, inexplicably, still do.  We walked the charge because it seemed like something worth doing, and it certainly was.

We started out at a monument to James Longstreet (who ironically was not in favor of the charge) and headed towards the copse of trees, the oft quoted but still debatable visual target for the charge. We walked toward the Union lines at a small distance apart from each other, not speaking, each lost in our own thoughts.  We were nearly to the angle in the stonewall under the copse when it happened.  

I looked over to my left, and I swear to this day I saw a host of Confederate soldiers clothed in their tattered butternut uniforms with their battle flags flying, the men shouting to keep their spirits up.  When I looked forward towards the slight ridge and low wall that defined the Union line I saw a pair of men with slouched caps and the muzzle of a cannon.  There was a flash from the cannon and I felt -- and heard -- the thud of a ball of canister shot hitting me in the chest.  

I was dead.  

And then it all disappeared.  I was back in an empty field, my father now somewhat ahead of me, on a rainy summer day in Gettysburg.  

I can hear you all reaching for the bullshit flags right now.  There are those who would say that in some past life I probably died at Gettysburg fighting for the South, but in spite of that experience I don't believe in re-incarnation.  The more astute of you would probably also tell me that the Union artillery were behind the line of infantry in position at the stone wall, so I couldn't have possibly seen a cannon -- my vision or whatever you want to call it was historically inaccurate.  Others would remind me of the biscuits and gravy I'd had that morning for breakfast, northern biscuits and gravy that were not sitting well in my southern stomach, and quip that there was more gravy than grave about the visions I saw.

Just so.  Still, rational though I am (often to a fault), I reserve the right to believe in things supernatural, things that simply cannot be explained.  

I believe that is quite possible that in places like Gettysburg, full of so much death and violence and ideal and elan, some kind of imprint gets left behind that can manifest itself later.  It's like that feeling you get at night when you don't feel quite alone, that some specter from the past is hanging around in the living room, meaning no harm, maybe not even cognizant of itself, but just passing through like a chilly mist on a way point to somewhere else, an etching from a previous life.

It makes sense to me, then, that the visions I saw were an etching, a remnant, of the men who died in the throes of our nation's great and tragic crisis.  It is my hope in relating this story to you (aside from it being a pretty neat story) that you might pause to remember those who died in that struggle, and mull over the words that one of the greatest of men would forever immortalize in their honor:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.


But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

~Abraham Lincoln                                                                

PS: Let the Gettysburg Address sink in for a bit.  I am about to ruin the moment.  Go get a glass of water or something.

You back?  Excellent.  Let's crack on.

So, when I was in the Boy Scouts and we could stop thinking or talking about girls long enough to focus on something else we used to actually discuss if slavery was THE cause of the Civil War or not, if it was rather a battle over states rights.  As I grew up in Southwest Virginia there were plenty of us (myself not among them) who argued that slavery was not the cause of the war, and one of the crutches holding up this precarious argument was the rumor that the great James I. Robertson Jr., Civil War historian and a professor at Virginia Tech, had said so.

The man, and the class he taught, are justly legendary.  I was told that the course had a waiting list years long, and he would flat out tell you that slavery did not cause "The War Between the States" or "The War of Northern Aggression" or (my favorite) "The War to Prevent Southern Independence".

You can imagine my horrible, self-satisfied, smugfuckingly smug smile when one of the first sentences to be drawled by Professor Robertson in his peculiar Danville accent when I did take his class (no waiting list, by the by) was "Make no doubt about it:  Slavery was the cause of this war."  Clearly, he realized his reputation proceeded him.  

Though I will say one thing about prof. Robertson to his detriment:  he was the historical consultant for the movie "Gods and Generals", and he was extremely proud of this, told us many times that it was a fine film.  

Well, I saw that movie in the theaters, and in my opinion it was horrible.  It was some 4 hours long, and during the intermission everyone in the crowd, all eight of us, asked one another if we should struggle through the rest or if we should just call it a night and try to impress the coffee girls at the local hippie bakery by showing them how we had mastered a whole slew of asymmetric chess openings.  We all decided to hang with the movie based on principle, and I believe all of us regret it still.