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And having her not jumping for joy and being excited when I told her I’d be willing to stay with her had definitely upset me.
Twelve hours into my forty-eight hour shift, I was still upset. I mean, come on. How could she have any doubt in her mind that we’d work out?
After the way I’d consistently shown up for her on every single off-day, ready and willing to help her family keep their dream alive, she had to know I was serious about a future with her.
And the fact that she didn’t, or she was too scared to admit it to herself, broke my heart. I didn’t have the best track record with women, so I wasn’t new to breakups.
But heartbreak? Yeah, that was new.
Alarms sounded and lights flashed around me, and I jolted out of bed, adrenaline shooting from my head to my toes. Good. I wouldn’t have been able to sleep anyway.
But what had happened?
There were no night flights tonight, so unless someone was taking a bird for a joyride and it went down, it couldn’t have been a crash.
And yet, they were calling for all hands to respond, so whatever it was, it was incredibly serious.
My crew and I jumped into action, ditching our station boots and expertly slipping into our heat-reflecting, metallic-silver proximity gear. We hopped into the rig and it zoomed out of the bay.
Two minutes later, three trucks zoomed onto the flightline, speeding toward an F18 surrounded by red and orange flames.
Immediately, I relaxed in my seat.
There were about a dozen Marines standing around it with clipboards, looking cool as cucumbers as they watched the flames swallowing up what I knew was an empty shell of an aircraft designed for this very purpose.
It was only a drill.
Since I’d been through so many of them now, I could tell this one was supposed to simulate an engine fire during a touch and go—the maneuver where the pilot would take off, do a loop, touch back down on the runway, and take off again.
There would likely be a dummy in the cockpit that we’d need to rescue, but first, we’d need to put out the flames before they’d remote-open the canopy.
Our turret man sprang into action, spraying aqueous film-forming foam at high volumes from the front bumper of the truck as we approached the fire. Nothing in our actions suggested we were treating this like a drill.
In fact, it was just the opposite. We needed to treat it like we’d treat a real emergency. For our safety, and also for the success of our crew when a real one did come along.
If one of our Marine pilots had actually been in this situation—and I’d seen it happen on deployment once—our entire crew needed to be well-versed in how to handle it.
Thankfully, even though an F18 carried several different kinds of ordnance, the bombs had a thermal coating that would keep them from exploding even if they were completely on fire.
For a while, anyway.
The bombs all had cook-off times, and it was our job to make sure we got the fire out before the time ran out. And if not, the consequences of a sympathetic detonation of an unspent round could be devastating to anyone in the line of fire.
As the most senior member of our crew, I was the incident commander on duty. I squinted into the night, assessing the situation and developing my plan of action.
My years of training had kicked in from the moment the first bell sounded, replacing all of the worries over my situation with Hattie. I was singularly focused on the task at hand as we jumped out of the truck and went to work.
Smith, our handline man, immediately began stepping toward the flaming faux aircraft wielding a high-pressure hose. Our rescue man was right behind him, one hand on his back and the other on the hose.
They moved together, their steps in sync, spraying the front of the aircraft first before moving along the sides and toward the back.
The other two crews did the same on the other side of the jet, all of us working together in three-man hot huddles.
I moved with them, keeping an eye out for spot fires and pointing out areas that needed more foam. When it was safe to do so, I tapped the rescue man on the shoulder and pointed to the cockpit, signaling for him to attempt a rescue.
Next, I alerted the handline man to move the spray so we could proceed with the rescue, then went around the front of the jet and coordinated with the other sergeants.
Someone opened the canopy remotely, as the pilot himself would have done, had he been a real man instead of a dummy. On my signal, the rescue man moved to the side of the jet and began to ascend.
