An Ensign Begins

Like many teenagers, I had a dream. I wanted to fly jet fighters. To me, that dream was as tangible as the shiny jets I saw at airshows. In my youthful imagination, flying jet fighters would be the ultimate in adventure; zooming through the sky without limits, in control of a powerful machine, meeting any challenge that might arise. I could never imagine the many steps along the path to reaching that dream, I only knew that others had done it, and I would do whatever it took to do it too. I was going to fly fighters.

After a decade of dreaming — no, seeing myself flying those jets — I took the first real step toward reaching my goal. Three weeks after graduation from college, I was in Pensacola, Florida, to start flight training.

You can hardly talk about flying in the Navy without mentioning Pensacola. In 1914 the Navy set up its first flying school in this busy little city. To this day, one thing every Navy flier has in common is the aviation indoctrination course at Naval Air Station (NAS) Pensacola.

Some officers come to Pensacola from the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, some from the Reserve Officer Training Corps program — well-known as ROTC, with units at dozens of colleges across the country — and some begin their Navy training in Aviation Officer Candidate School, where they receive intense military indoctrination after earning their college degrees. Each program has its pluses and minuses.

ROTC worked for me, and I attended Georgia Tech in Atlanta. The Navy ROTC program included taking classes called Naval Science and going on four-week "summer cruises" that exposed us to what life would be like after we graduated. We got a glimpse of the various career choices: submarines, surface ships, aviation, or joining the Marine Corps (which had its own career fields). This helped some students to figure out what they wanted. For me, it confirmed that I was on the right path. I'd known since grade school that I wanted to fly fighters. I had devoured everything I could find about military aircraft, and I even drew airplane pictures while sitting in class, all through high school and college.

Like most who dream of flying, I yearned to be a pilot. But then, during my freshman year of college, my eyesight began to deteriorate. I knew that to be a fighter pilot you had to have 20/20 vision. Eyesight doesn't go bad overnight, so for several months I talked to many people about it, including a few fortunate souls whose vision had actually improved over time. But by the time I got glasses, my vision was 20/40. There was no kidding myself. I was not going to be a fighter pilot.

I had considered Air Force ROTC but fortunately chose Navy instead, because the Navy was introducing a spectacular new fighter, the F-14 Tomcat. This was good news! The F-14 had a two-person crew, and the second crewman didn't need 20/20 vision. I could wear glasses and fly fighters! I wouldn't be a pilot, but I would be in a fighter. My dream was alive.

During our senior year of college, my ROTC classmates and I filled out "dream sheets" requesting the kind of duty we wanted to go into after graduation. What an appropriate name for these requests, in my case. Our instructor told us we had to write something in every block. So I did: aviation as my first choice, surface ships as second choice, and something else as third. This was the first of many "doors," instances where my future was uncertain. I knew where I wanted to go, but would have to be selected or meet qualification requirements.

We were repeatedly reminded that the most important factor in our assignments was "needs of the Navy," a phrase we would hear repeatedly throughout our careers. During the months of waiting for the decision, I occasionally imagined myself on a sleek destroyer, slicing through gray seas in the open ocean. I decided that if that's where the Navy sent me I would make the best of it. But it didn't come to that. I was ecstatic to learn, about three months before graduation, that I had been selected for aviation training. There would be many more doors ahead. As each of these decision points approached I did what I could to give myself the best chance, but sometimes I just had to trust my fate and the wisdom of those making the decision.

At graduation for the Class of 1979, I was commissioned an ensign. By July I was sitting in a crowded Navy classroom in Pensacola with thirty-eight other freshly minted officers, mostly young men, but at least one young woman as I recall. With painted cinder block walls and fluorescent lights, the room was crammed full of displays and charts that served their purposes but looked like antiques that belonged in a museum. My new friends and I were not there to judge, for this was the start of our new lives. We had competed for these seats and won them over many others. We would be here for six weeks of classroom, physical fitness, survival, and other training. I couldn't wait to get started.

Our teachers were Navy lieutenants and Marine Corps captains, many of them a mere five years older than we were. They wore the same uniform we did, and only a handful of years before had sat in the same classroom. Now they carried not only technical knowledge and instructor skills, but a credibility and confidence gained from a few years in "the Fleet." They had presence. They had attitude. They were what we wanted to be.

Most of us were Navy ensigns, joined by a few Marine Corps second lieutenants and Coast Guard ensigns. A typical day in class felt a lot like college: we started at 7:00 or 8:00 a.m. and finished in the afternoon. But unlike some college classes, everything we were studying would directly apply to our profession for the next few years, such as basic aerodynamics and aircraft engine fundamentals. Classroom sessions were peppered with lessons from accident investigations, and all of the instructors added their own tales of mishaps or great saves. These were called "war stories," whether they happened in combat or not. At this point in my training, stories about flying still seemed distant, still my dream.

It was too early to be very competitive; most of us just wanted to get a sense of the new environment and our friends. We got to know each other around the slide-show training programs in the library (state of the art in 1979), practicing on the low-intensity obstacle course near the officers' quarters, hanging out at various night spots in Pensacola, and washing the cars we had recently bought when we started getting paychecks.

These first cars were commonly known as "ensign-mobiles." Most were fairly modest,...