by CDR Jack D. Woodul, USNR(Ret), artwork by Carl Snow
Back, back over the left field fence of history, Naval Aviation offered a plethora of planes for an aspiring young manly man to consider. There were huge flying boat P5Ms that could land on salty water, there were P2V patrol planes that had their own hot plates for lunches, and the S2F “Stoof” came back to its own wee carrier after scouring the wine-dark sea for the wily submarine. There were helos of various shapes and sizes that could stop and back up.
Then there were jets.
“Forget them jets!” barked the instructor in the preflight power plants class. “Most of the Navy flies recips, and so will most of you. So get your heads down from twenty thousand feet and pay attention to this sumplight thing.”
Like everybody else who heard this speech, Bullet Boomer understood that its grim statistics applied to everybody else. But he had heard of the “Breaks of Naval Air” whereby even “aces of the base” were whimsically assigned to some girly airplane that wasn’t even on their choice list. But the practicalities of growing up on a ranchito deep in the heart of Texas and surviving the Corps of Cadets at Texas A&M had given Boomer lots of practice in “figgerin’ things out.”
Boomer had figgered out that over in Corpus Christi, hidden among all the many-motors, the Navy was still training a few folk, mostly South Vietnamese, in the wonderfully manly Douglas AD Skyraider. The Spad was a legendary machine that could carry many things that went boom under its wings, and it carried four mighty 20 mike-mike cannon.
If he was probably going to fly a recip, it might as well be something with lots of guns. He was not called “Bullet” without reason, and it was for the hope of something good to come that he went all squinty-eyed and concentrated as the instructor droned on about the joys of overboosting.
And so it was that Bullet found himself at VT-30 in Corpus Christi with a few other lucky lads and lots of South Vietnamese. After the mandatory studying-up on the new airplane, he and two others were assigned to a flight that would mostly fly together through their training. They seemed to be good ol’ boys, and they listened intently to their instuctor’s tales of the terrors of torque rolls as he readied them for their first solo.
All by now had well-developed right legs from stuffing takeoff rudder in T-28s and were tall enough to see out of the cockpits without sitting on a stack of phone books, unlike some of the smaller Southeast Asians. Boomer and his pals all made their solo flights in the Beast without a prang.
Naturally, this joyous achievement demanded a bonding ritual. Kitchen passes were to be written for all those who had soloed that week for a Friday afternoon competition, and wives and lady friends understood that there might be some beer drinking involved. Naturally, there was no flying scheduled for the next day.
The nature of the competition, Boomer found out, was that the three members of each flight had to drink a case of beer that had been decanted into a chromium-plated bomb case. The flight that emptied the bomb in the shortest time won the competition and was entitled to bragging rights and a plaque engraved for ready room posterity to admire. Bullet knew his flight had to win, so he started figgerin’ out how.
“Fellas,” he told his pals, “I know something about drinking beer fast — you have to take the fizz out. I’ll take an eggbeater and whup it up. Now, I can give it a purty good hit the first time around, but if it comes back to me, it had better be about gone.”
Bullet’s flight swilled the bomb empty in a minute and 39 seconds. It was a new world record — none of the other competitors even came close. It was such a triumph that Boomer spent the rest of the evening sucking the top out of beer cans in celebration. Somehow, he completely forgot that his Sweet Wife had invited folks over for a lovely spaghetti supper.
When Boomer finally made it home, the guests and spaghetti were long gone. Sweet Wife was not overly proud of the world record or the commemorative plaque, either.
Came the dawn and the little man with the ice pick had visited the head of the leader of the world-record-holding Swill Team. Neither were Bullet’s innards ready for his usual sausage, biscuits and hen’s egg breakfast. “Fix me something simple,” he murmured to Sweet Wife.
“How about some cinnamon toast?” she replied with a strangely inscrutable smile.
Bullet grunted his acceptance as Sweet Wife bustled about the kitchen, whipping out a dutiful breakfast for her beloved, errant husband.
The cinnamon toast was lovely, right up to the point where Bullet found out it had been made with last evening’s garlic butter. It was only after an extended session addressing the ivory throne that he was able to contemplate that, just perhaps, he hadn’t quite figgered everything out.
It was a lesson, of course, that you had to keep jinking. And it was real good training, since no future Gomer was bound to be as wily as a Sweet Wife get-back.