Standing on the newly resurfaced deck of the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower 60 miles off the coast of Norfolk, Va., last spring, I watched a group of F/A-18 Hornets approach from the southeast, three black crosses against a pale sky. The enormous ocean lay flat and gray in the morning haze, and as the three crosses assumed their more familiar and menacing shapes, I tried to imagine the reverse perspective of the pilot intending to do well what almost no one can do at all—land a jet on a ship. I had come to see Lt. Cmdr. Doug Hamilton '86, an old college friend, undergo two days of landing exercises, and although I'd been aboard the carrier for only a short time I'd begun to appreciate the odds in favor of a fatal accident.
More than three football fields long, the deck spreads across four and a half acres, as do the decks of the Navy's seven other Nimitz-class carriers, the largest warships in the world. The ship's "island" rises from the starboard side to the height of a seven-story building, housing the flight tower and observation platform and capped by seven radar antennae, one of them the size of a minivan. Bigger and heavier than the Titanic and longer than the Chrysler Building is tall, the Eisenhower is powered by two nuclear reactors that will run for at least 20 years before the uranium needs to be changed. Six thousand sailors live onboard, nearly half of them providing support for the pilots, like roadies do for the Rolling Stones; the hangar deck holds at least 60 aircraft.
As the carrier turned slowly into the wind, the angle of the sun shifted, and my attention focused on Doug, who would have to land on a deck moving 30 miles an hour away from him, into what the pilots call the "trap," zeroing in on a target 18 inches long. The "arrested landing" is a seemingly crazy idea: a 20-ton plane moving 170 miles an hour snags its four-foot titanium "tail hook" onto a giant cable connected to hydraulic cylinders belowdecks, and stops in a mere 300 feet.
Even a single bad landing exposes the pilot to the heckling of his squadronmates. More serious landing mishaps, when the pilot must eject from the airplane, often result in sudden death and an unrecoverable body; or, if the pilot survives, three separate Navy investigations and the possible termination of the pilot's career.
Doug broke off his flight pattern directly overhead the Eisenhower and turned in a steeply banked oval at an altitude of 600 feet. The ship increased its speed to "catch" as he lined his plane up with the enormous wake and glided toward the flight deck's center line. His wheels touched down, and the hook from his plane snagged the number 3 arresting wire. Landing—perfect.
I hadn't seen Doug in a long time. We met in 1982, in college. After we graduated and he'd begun his flight training in 1986, I consoled myself that he hadn't known what he was doing when he joined the Navy, that he was some nonpolitical flyboy and had backed into some profession for the pure joy of flying. We attempted to stay close through our early 30s by exchanging letters and e-mails, but as time passed, what I read in the newspapers about our American military contradicted what I thought I knew about Doug, and what little he said in his letters revealed only mystery and paradox. I knew, for example, that he was called Hambone by the other pilots, that he used such phrases as "implications our job has on the world's security" and "as we stabilize this hemisphere." But I was perplexed. If the birth of his new son made him so obsessed with safety, why was he constantly risking his life? If he only lived to serve our country, why had his ego grown to the size of a cathedral?
When Doug explained that he could get permission for me to come onboard the Eisenhower, I sensed not just an opportunity to see Doug's world and answer my questions but also a chance to find out whether I still, really, knew him at all.
I knew that being a carrier pilot required extraordinary ability. Doug had always been an athlete, a great downhill and water-skier, and since joining the Navy he'd become a nationally ranked triathlete. After going through aviation officer candidate school and learning to fly, he began to practice for carrier landings at the Naval Air Station in Kingsville, Texas, dropping his plane onto a runway painted like a ship's deck. Then Doug had his first try at the real thing, a carrier off the coast of Florida, and failed. He caught the number 1 wire twice, which means that he was landing too short. He was given three more weeks of practice, 150 landings. In need of a friend, he wrote me a letter telling me that if he were to catch the number 1 wire again, his career would be over. No more practice, no third chance, no Navy commission, no job as a pilot of lesser status, no wings, nothing. He would have to leave the Navy and start from scratch.
Never again would Doug come so close to failure. He returned to the ship and passed with honors at the top of his class. At the conclusion of advanced training, he again earned top honors in his carrier qualification. In his first assignment in the fleet, flying the two-seater A-6 bomber, he again came out at the top of his "nugget" class, and was called up by an A-6 squadron going right to sea that was in need of a pilot.
Doug spent a total of 42 days at home in 1994; the rest of the year he was on deployment or training. He and his wife, Sarah, tried to honeymoon in Europe while Doug's carrier was deployed in the Mediterranean, but the ship never showed up at scheduled ports of call. After crisscrossing Europe, Sarah went home alone.
Now I watched Doug walk slowly across the deck, and although I sensed his relief, I knew also that his perfect daytime landing only delivered him to the much more difficult task of a night landing. For months Doug had hoped that the two night landings required of him would take place at dusk, when visual clues outside his canopy would help in the final moments before touchdown. When Doug first found out that his night landings would be under a new moon—which is the absence of moon—he told me, "I hate night landings. Flying around the carrier in the dark is an act of insanity." For good measure, he added, "We're all scared of it. Not just me."
READY ROOM 3, DECK 03
I found Doug filling up his coffee cup in the squadron's ready room, the Blue Blasters' one place to conduct meetings, receive instructions, make flight plans, debrief, read the paper. He greeted me with the swagger he's learned since he became a fighter pilot, smiling, his blue eyes glowing. Doug has a prominent jaw and brown hair cut to make his head look square. I could see gray flecks of stubble and heavy lines across his forehead and around his eyes, blood-black circles underneath. A strange crease ran across his face from the rubber gasket of the oxygen mask that had been tightly clamped over his nose and mouth for the last couple of hours. We normally exchange a quick and manly bear hug like men do these days, but the Uniform Code of Military Justice forbids any physical show of affection while in uniform. We shook hands.
Another pilot, C.C. "Heater" Heaton IV, introduced himself. Like the others, he moved and spoke with a stiff confidence, immediate and robotic; even though his squadronmates ran the gamut of personality and looks, and even though they could be charming or pensive or joking, it was impossible to penetrate what an individual man might have felt about something deeply—such as being called "sir" all day or the off-chance of disappearing in a fireball.
The fighter pilot derives his swagger in part from his privileged position in the Navy. Fighter pilots, who comprise less than 1percent of the Navy's population, make more money than their nonflying peers, and unlike anyone but a ship's captain, have command over their vessel. They're privy to all sorts of highly classified information and combat rooms. They enjoy their reputation, and star in the very public show up on the flight deck. Everyone inside the ship seems to keep track of each feat or botched landing.
WARDROOM 3, DECK 03
Among Doug's Blue Blasters, 10 of the 18 had become new fathers within the last year. Despite the dull conversation, the slouching, the silences filled by chewing noises and stupid Lewinsky/Clinton jokes, a brotherly closeness marks their group, as with a professional sports team who are forced to travel the poky backwaters of the world in close quarters but who still like to play ball together, except that these guys are trained to fight in the air and drop bombs that blow things up and kill people. Every pilot Doug introduced me to was "a great guy" and "an old friend," but I could see the stress of competition. Pilots are ranked within the squadron on every imaginable statistic, from bombing accuracy to staying on the correct frequency to the grace of landings.
Doug asked Phil if he thought there'd be any residual light cast from Virginia this far out into the ocean, to define the horizon. Phil said, "I don't think so."
From the beginning of his Navy career, Doug filled his letters to me with detailed descriptions of how it feels to perform the carrier landing at night. The pilot stares blindly into a "black void," then comes aboard at a high speed, crash-like, at a steep angle for accuracy of hook position, almost out of gas—the plane can carry only a small amount of gas because if it is overburdened with fuel, it might break apart on landing. "Whoever invented the night cat/trap is a lunatic," he wrote. "As soon as I launch, I'm worrying about the landing when I get back."
I wondered why he spent so much energy telling me his fears of landing at night. Doug is a typical daredevil: this fear seemed like an anomaly, a hysterical concoction, but I couldn't figure out to what end. He talked about the anxiety, the adrenaline that rushed through him during the final moments before touchdown, the sleeplessness, the misery and humiliation of counting days until the moon comes back out. Night-carrier landings are by nature intimate: the pilot reaches back to an intuitive, athletic marriage of instinct and faith in order to land. By last spring, Doug had performed 360 carrier landings, 115 of them at night. Since the birth of his son Craig, though, he'd begun to obsess even more than usual about safety and proficiency. Things seemed to have gotten worse. "None of us likes to fly at night," he told me. "I hate it and I wish I didn't have to go through it."
PILOT'S STATEROOM
I knocked on Doug's door. He lay on his bunk in the dark, not sleeping. He asked me to flip on the light. Pale fluorescent bulbs came on. His "stateroom" was as ugly and barren as a high school locker room, the furniture and walls constructed of that same thin, dented metal they use to make lockers, with paint chipping on the ceiling; beside the door was a list of phone numbers and a heavy black inter-ship telephone. The room was like the inside of a steel crate, two strides across, and, like the rest of the ship, it shook with vibration.
He started taping a photo of his baby on the metal bureau. "I want to be home more. That's the effect that little bastard has," he said. Aware that soon he would have to perform the night landing, he waved to the face in the photo, stepped across the room, and grabbed his flight suit off a hook on the wall.
Doug explained that the risks were known—one in four died during a 20-year career—and he kept a will on file with the squadron, in case of a mishap. He had talks with Sarah; she was always very strong about such things, though in the last conversation, "She got a little edgy," because they now had a son.
I mentioned that I'd read that naval aviation was safer now.
"Safer than what?" Doug asked. "I personally know 10 guys—these are guys I flew in the same airplane with, students and instructors—who died in crashes in my 12 years in the Navy." [Doug's roommate] Barry sat calmly and listened, nodding along. "The most disturbing one was a Harrier pilot, a Marine guy I trained with, who was lost at sea. He just never showed up back at the ship."
I asked Doug what his father thought of all this.
"Every time I go home my dad cries."
Barry interrupted. "Your dad, too?"
THE CAT SEAT
After dinner Doug and I entered the Carrier Air Traffic Control Center, which Doug called the "cat seat," a cool, dark room where a bank of radar screens and floor-to-ceiling clear Plexiglas backlit status boards formed a wall in front of us...
The longer I stayed on the carrier and the more I learned about the ship's capabilities, the more threatening the world became—like a big, bug-infested peach—and the safer I felt aboard. More than once I imagined a full-scale invasion of the United States by some unspecified aggressor and how safe I'd be here, and thought of my girlfriend back home, poor soul, innocent and trusting enough to sleep at night without a helmet. Unprotected, unarmed people of America seemed farcical to me, unbelievably naive and misguided dummies. Every few minutes I learned about some other amazing weapon: the radar-guided Phalanx Gatling gun on each corner of the ship that can fire 50 rounds a second at the front end of a missile the diameter of a pie plate approaching the ship at 500 miles an hour and obliterate it in midair. Others were too fantastic to believe: a secret radar so powerful it bounces off the moon and fries the electronics of anything airborne, causing it to drop out of the sky. Hearing about these weapons gave me the same dull cushiony feeling I had when I took Dilaudid, synthetic morphine, after having my wisdom teeth ripped out. Nothing could happen to me out here, nothing could touch me, nobody in the world. I come from a family of very paranoid people—if you wake one of us up in the middle of the night we jump to our feet in karate position—and this was the first time in my life that I was surrounded by people far more paranoid than I am.
ON THE FLIGHT DECK AT NIGHT
Doug looked at his watch. It was almost time to fly. He suddenly seemed fragile. The fear in his face reminded me of who he used to be. Then it was 9 p.m., and he said he was going to head to his rack for a few minutes, to get into his "box"—not some coffin he kept handy, but the common term for the inviolable time before flying. From the time he left the cat seat until he reached his jet at 10 p.m., if anybody wanted to speak to him he'd say, "I'm in my box," and they would have to wait until later.
A few minutes before 10, he dressed in his flight gear. It seems appropriate that when he's at work he wears an elaborate costume, a strange form-fitting G suit...
He went up to the deck. After his plane captain signed off as the final inspector of number 205, Doug did his own pre-flight check, looking for any oddity, maybe a blown hydraulic line leaking on the graphite and epoxy skin of the jet.
Up at the catapult, Doug pushed the throttle up, watching the plane captain for signals, waiting for the engines to spool up, watching the RPMs, temperature, fuel flow, hydraulic pressure. A second later the whole ship shook and off he went.
The pilot's view in the final seconds of approach is the ship's miniscule landing-strip light. At 4,000 feet, three miles, and a mere 45 seconds away, the huge ship is a dot of light the size of a pinhead held at arm's length. (The ship, painted matte, is designed to be invisible at night.) The sensation in pitch darkness, one pilot told me, is that one is sitting still while the tiny glowing pinhead of light becomes, in a disorienting and unnatural rush, the deck of the carrier. Beside me the woman with the wool pom-pom hat stared up into the black sky with binoculars, unable to see anything other than three colored lights, and spoke to Doug by radio, coughing up commands every half second: "Power." "Right." "Don't go low." He came over the landing area, and it disappeared beneath him. His landing gear took the intense shock, and I stepped forward as he went by and watched him pull the number 3 wire right to the edge of the deck.
Landing—perfect. Of course.
I found Doug afterward, that line from the mask indenting his cheek again, a grin of relief on his face. He'd made his second landing without incident. He poured some coffee (it was almost midnight), and as we headed down to the wardroom for one last meal of meat loaf, he mentioned that when he'd climbed into his jet at 10, he noticed that two of the cockpit instruments that help the pilot with his approach, the "needles" and the "bull's-eye," were broken. A third navigational instrument, the least desirable of the three, still worked. Doug, trained for less than perfect conditions, took off anyway.
Doug grabbed some cake and strutted stiffly out, still somehow my longtime friend, yet also the man in the visored helmet and tight oxygen mask, now and forever unknown to me.
"A Pilot's Tale" appeared in the February 1999 issue of Harper's Magazine. Excerpts reprinted by permission of Matthew Klam, © 1999. Klam's work has also appeared in The New Yorker and other magazines. His short story, "The Royal Palms," received an O'Henry Award in 1997. A collection of his short stories will be published by Random House next year.
Testament to Friendship
That Doug permitted me to write this story is a testament to the strength of our friendship. He let me write about his whole life—his potentially lethal and world-saving attributes—something only the truly brave would do. The insights I gained while writing this story for Harper's Magazine, the flak Doug had to take from his squadronmates as a result of my writing, the dangers of his job that became evident to me—all that has brought our friendship into a new era with its own personality and a deeper trust. This trust, the basis of our friendship, was born 15 years ago at UNH.
We met during our sophomore year, pledged neighboring fraternities, dated Chi Omega sorority sisters and grew bored of the Greek system at about the same time. In our senior year, we moved off campus into a house on Route 108 with four great friends, and built a bigger, broader friendship on the back of the more ordinary one.
Away from the revelry that had been our social beginnings, we discovered another side of life at UNH. We skiied on those backwoods, cross-country trails, snowshoed, made road trips to Stones concerts, hiked the Presidential Range of the White Mountains, skated, swam and waterskiied around Doug's family's house on Lake Winnepesaukee. I have fond memories of that house, built by Doug's great-grandfather. I remember raising the dock with Doug and his father at the end of the summer; I recall philosophizing with Doug's grandmother at the kitchen table about the exact point of ripeness to eat a banana. I remember standing in front of the roaring fire in that house, showing our Chi Omega girlfriends the candy-striped long underwear I wore under my ski pants, bought half-price at the Kittery Trading Post. In the summer after college, on the cusp of fall, we covered a section of the Appalachian Trail over four days; we played harmonica duets at the supper campfire, slept in a tent the wind tore apart as it blew through like a freight train.
Then Doug became a naval aviator. We stayed in touch through letter writing, later via e-mail. While I lived in Arizona, I made long drives with another college roommate, Jim Woodman '86, to see Doug fly into Phoenix and Albuquerque. But it was Doug's clear, luminous, brilliantly-written letters as much as it was my first sight of him flying that sparked my interest in his new life. I remember a letter in which he explained the logistics and fear associated with landing on a carrier in total darkness, during near- hurricane conditions. I read this letter to a writing workshop while in grad school at Hollins College—the feeling of sitting in a jet preparing to launch, the ship heaving in 30-foot seas— and saw the stunned look on my classmates' faces as we wondered whether Doug would survive. And it was around that time that I first pitched the idea of writing about his life, and how it was beginning to reshape him—how could it not?
Over time you develop certain fascinations about people you really care about. You see what they're able to achieve, and you begin to theorize about how their internal wiring allows them to work these minor miracles. Yes, Doug can land an F/A-18 jet on a moving ship's deck, on a spot 18 inches long, he can put himself in harm's way for a cause greater than himself, with sometimes a less than discernable outcome in mind. But he piqued my interest long before he landed a jet on a ship. On our hike along the Appalachian Trail, he led the way most days, and I watched from a bank while he jumped from small rock to rock across a rushing stream with a 60-pound pack on his back. Then I tried to copy his steps and fell in. Doug is a mysterious fellow.
—M.K.