From almost the beginning, Old Cretin's Mexican Restaurant held a place in the proud traditions and hearts of those with leathery necks in the United States Marines. Some mythical Old Corps jarboon, humping around the desert for fun, had to have stumbled onto the place, and unaccountably tired of eating snakes, popped in and discovered the Nacho. Thus was the stuff of legends born.
"Listen up, you people! I can eat two dozen more of them things with cheese and japaleño peppers on them than any of you boots!" he addressed his squad, the Corps and the universe in general. The natural response to such a challenge was lots of cold beer, manly contests of strength, skill and scarfing of many plates of the delicacies. Ornate wooden plaques appeared on the thick adobe walls and solemn ceremonies proclaimed the victors. It was unthinkable that Naval Aviation would not get involved and take advantage of the Marine Corps air station that grew up nearby.
It didn't hurt that there were miles and miles of burning sand populated by Gila monsters and snakes that were largely indifferent to huge quantities of Mk 76 practice bombs and 20 mike-mike slugs being plopped in their midst. The occasional human beings in the nearby towns of Yuma and San Luis had noticed that they were seldom menaced by MiGs, and that the young, manly men who left the base often distributed dinero among the needy at the local cantinas. So the whoostling of their war birds disturbed them not.
So clouds of Naval and Marine aircraft descended on the desert. From the oyster-crusted Chesapeake, the palmetto-planted South and from all parts of the libertine West Coast, Scooters and Crusaders came to do battle with raked targets, flying carpets and occasional pieces of hardware distributed around the Chocolate Mountains that simulated artifacts of the godless commies that begged being bombed, rocketed or strafed the short distance back into the Stone Age.
To the very Youthly Puresome, learning the attack trade with the Fist of the Fleet at NAS Oceana, happiness was a warm gun and anything doused with chili. The prospect of a two-week weapons deployment to MCAS Yuma caused him much loud joy and wonderment that the U.S. Government actually paid him to blow things up and consume fine Mexican cuisine.
Of course, there was some trepidation about being strangers in the strange Marine land of extreme Brasso, spit-shined shoes and high-and-tight haircuts. The fleet replacement pilots had only recently escaped from the Training Command and the many Marine instructors who insisted their charges stomp and salute and shine stuff, starch their skivvies and keep their spiffies straight. After some 18 months of such intense horseshit, the NavCads especially were enjoying their ensign mini-officer status in the more relaxed world of the RAG, and the NavCads' return to the lair of their former tormentors caused many of them to shriek in their sleep.
Newly minted brown-bar ENS Weed used that uneasiness about the upcoming deployment to pull his pal Puresome's chain, easily yanked because Youthly tended toward the relaxed in military appearance, though he usually cleaned up nice.
"You swabby maggot!" Weed barked in his best drill instructor imitation. "You better square away! You look like Joe Shit the rag man! You look like a busted-out bale of cotton! You look like you been rode hard and put away wet! You look like you been et by a wolf and crapped off a cliff! You will secure those Irish pennants and keep your eagles up, do you understand me, squid?"
"Excuse me, but you have mistaken me for someone who gives a horse apple!" Puresome responded offhandedly, being used to such attempted affronts against his person.
That seemed to end the matter, though Puresome knew that if there were no Marines, God would have to create them. The country needed folks who would eat glass and run up and stick bad guys with sharp objects for fun. Like F-8 pilots whose job description included the words "loud" and "dumb," Puresome admired the particular kind of Delta Sierras among those who happily made frontal assaults or accepted night ramp strikes as part of the job.
It turned out that everyone was way too busy flying to sweat the small stuff. An instrument hop and low-level flight were checked off the syllabus going and coming from Yuma. The daily flight schedule started furiously with the dawn with instructors and students rushing to get two practice ordnance flights completed before the desert sun melted the hard-working humans loading, servicing and maintaining the aircraft.
Since this was the day of the Doomsday Weapon, 60 percent of the program was dedicated to the launching of a simulated "bombus atomicus" in many imaginative ways designed to obliterate the target and keep the launchee from frying.
Puresome did over-the-shoulder idiot loop and loft-bomb deliveries until hewas red in the face, often being optically tracked by snuffies out on the range who transcribed his flight path for debriefing purposes inside the optimum four-g loop template. A high point was when Puresome was zipping along the run-in line at 100 feet and 500 knots, when a small bird made the tactical error of being in his way. Its hiney left a brown streak on the flat, bullet-and-bird-proof front panel of his canopy rather than piercing a more vital part.
Youthly also practiced low- and medium-angle loft bombing, using timing from known distances from the target and flinging the bomb forward while the pilot racked the airplane around and got the hell out. Of course, on occasion when a low-angle setting was programmed into the bombing computer for an over-the-shoulder hop, the 25-lb. blue practice bomb left for Mexico and, the perpetrator fervently hoped, an uninteresting impact.
Puresome's favorite nuclear delivery was to pull up 30 degrees pitch from 100 feet altitude and 500 knots, roll inverted, pickle off the retarded bomb when a point went by the canopy bow, then pull down and roll upright to escape, lickedy-split, in the original direction. Yahoo!
But the quiet concussions that faintly made their way from a small Southeast Asian country halfway across the Earth were felt by Naval Aviation, and new emphasis was given to the traditional skills of conventional bombing, rocketing and strafing in anticipation of the coming storm. The canned, 30-degree, low dive-angle delivery practiced in plopping bombs and squirting 2.75-in. rockets toward defenseless rings marked in the sand was to prove an excellent way to get blown away by the amazing variety of metal that Gomers loved to fling at Yankee Air Pirates in the near future.
So Puresome got to fly his beautocks off during two high-intensity hops a day to the close-in targets that were manned by enlisted troops who spotted and reported each student's hits. Launching in the relative cool of the desert dawn, a flight of three or four students and an instructor chase pilot would take off, rendezvous, and in short order check the flight in with the target controller over UHF. When contact was established, they'd break from formation into suitable intervals between aircraft in a racetrack pattern for bombing, rocketing or strafing.
Youthly was very busy keeping the aircraft in front of him in sight, setting up his rotary weapons selector to either BOMBS or ROCKETS and moving the proper weapons station switch to ON so as not to look bad by dropping or firing the wrong thing. Following the plane in front of him, he then had to position himself over the ground to roll in for the canned, school-solution 30-degree dive delivery. From 7,000 feet and 250 knots, he set the throttle to 82 percent and called the controller that he was rolling in "hot." As the controller cleared him for his bombing run, he turned his master armament switch ON and rolled almost inverted to dive at 30 degrees.
As the airspeed increased in the dive, Youthly tracked his gunsight pipper toward the spot on the ringed target that he had calculated from pre-launch wind data would give him a bull's-eye hit with his bomb (and a free beer if he won that day's bombing derby). To do so, his dive angle, airspeed, release altitude and wind correction all had to be bang on—or all his mistakes cancel each other out. Since few runs were perfect, good bombers had to learn how to compensate for being steep or shallow in their dive, pickling the bomb above or below release altitude, being fast or slow on their airspeed or dealing with goofy winds that messed with their bombs. At 2,500 feet, Puresome was plunging toward the ground at 450 knots. Since the controller would yell at him if he cheated and pressed the target, he squeezed the bomb pickle on the stick and pulled out of his dive, grunting from the effects of the four g's required to get his nose pointed back up into the sky.
"Vulture Two, your hit is at six o'clock at five-zero feet," the controller called as Youthly zoomed his Scooter into the sky, picking up and taking interval on the plane in front of him to regain his place in the bombing pattern. As he climbed, he jotted down his hit on his kneeboard card, turned his master armament switch OFF and tried to figger out how to change things to get a better hit next run.
"Vulture Two, roger!"
And round and round the pattern he went, chunking off bombs, whooshing off the tiny, erratic 2.5-in. folding-fin rockets, or going pocketa-pocketa with the mighty twin 20 mike-mike cannon. Typically, in a one-hour flight he would expend six bombs and six rockets, or either bombs or rockets with 20 mike-mike for strafing. Youthly would land sopping wet from the physical effort of constantly bending the aircraft around the sky. After a Coke and fat pill, the flight would brief and do it again. Of course, it was attack pilot's heaven, made even better by the mandatory replenishment of vital bodily fluids with cold beverages at the daily debrief at the Officers' Club or low-level missions to Nachoville or the cantinas of San Luis.
Even being chided for the appearance and odor of his salt-encrusted flight suit did not dampen his enthusiasm.
So the skies were not cloudy all day, and the ramps were full of Crusaders and Skyhawks, with bustling maintenance folk loading and servicing, starting, checking and releasing them to taxi to arming areas where safety pins were pulled from bomb racks and rocket pods. Aircraft thundered down the runway and curved away in running rendezvous to join up en route to their targets. The traffic pattern overhead was filled with returning aircraft breaking from echelon formation with graceful precision to proper interval on preceding aircraft downwind. They landed in rapid succession on alternating sides of the parallel runway and taxied clear for de-arming—where sun-burned ordnancemen checked for hung bombs or rockets—finally to taxi back to the ramp, shut down, and do the whole thing again.
It was a display of astounding energy and understood purpose, and it often sent chills of pride down Puresome's back. He knew that he was immortal, part of something big and important, and that certainly he was invincible. In the years to come, he would return to Yuma as a Scooter RAG instructor, and later he was to have many adventures there as a Crusader driver in the Reservistas.
But from those innocent early days, the passage of time was to prove that only the Nacho, safe behind thick, adobe walls at Old Cretin's, would stay the same.