Free The Cannibal Queen by Stephen Coonts Page A

trick: he owned a lumberyard in Pensacola but had been recalled to active duty by the Navy and assigned as a primary flight instructor at VT-1 at Saufley Field. So he flew students all day and managed his business at night—I don’t know when he slept. It seemed to me that if the Navy was going to recall him to active duty, they should at least have the decency to ship him somewhere for an adventure. He seemed to regard his recall to active duty as another shit sandwich. Still, he was an excellent flight instructor.
    I was one of three students Mr. Hanks was shepherding through primary, and I was perhaps his dullest and least promising. On the first flight in the T-34 I became deathly ill and filled the barf bag he had thoughtfully provided beforehand. Doped with Dramamine, I worked like a slave on subsequent flights yet acquired the skills so slowly that Job would have thrown his hat in the dirt.
    Jimmy Hanks explained it for the sixth or seventh time, his voice low, trying to use nontechnical words so this bumpkin from West Virginia would finally comprehend and convert that comprehension to cockpit performance. But he wasn’t a saint. The fifth time I taxied the airplane in after a flight and forgot which space we had taxied out of at the start, he didn’t scream, he didn’t shout—he just informed me curtly that if I didn’t write the row and space number on my kneeboard from now on, he was going to shove my pencil up my ass.
    One day he asked, “You want to fly jets?”
    I admitted that I entertained that ambition. So he began to pad my grades, salt in some above-average marks that I hadn’t earned. In those days a student needed above-average cockpit grades to qualify for the jet training pipeline.
    Years later when I was a flight instructor on A-6 aircraft I came to understand the risk that Jimmy Hanks decided to run. Sending a marginal student to a challenging program just because he wants to try it is merely giving him a golden opportunity to fail. Failure for a student pilot usually means being washed out of the program, but occasionally the consequences are more catastrophic. Thirteen student pilots crashed fatally at the bases where I flew in the fifteen months it took me to earn my wings. Jimmy Hanks decided to give me the opportunity I wanted well knowing that I was going to have to learn to acquire the critical skills quicker or I was going to be washed out or dead.
    I occasionally wonder what my life would have been like if I had not gone to jets, not gone to A-6s, not gone to Vietnam. I wouldn’t have met the girl I married, I wouldn’t have had the children I did, perhaps I would not have become a writer. Who knows? Maybe I would have married an heiress or be living in sin with a starlet with silicone tits.
    George Dustin had an equally significant influence on my life. He was a lieutenant in his late twenties, a Spad pilot. The Air Force called their Spads A-l Skyraiders but George Dustin never did. A Spad was a Spad was a Spad.
    Mr. Dustin had a massive head that sported a square, handsome face, this atop a pair of broad shoulders and oak-tree arms. His voice was a hoarse, gravelly bass that carried even when he tried to speak softly. I got to know Mr. Dustin because he taught the pre-solo course that gave us students the basic information about the Alabama gulf coast peninsula where we flew and he administered a multiple-choice examination on this body of knowledge. The fledgling had to pass the exam before he could solo. I failed it the first time around and got to spend extra time with Mr. Dustin reviewing the material—“stupid study” we called it.
    Then my parents arrived in Pensacola for a vacation and I got busy squiring them around and not cracking the books. I failed my first retake of the exam. And the second. Now I needed a perfect score to pass this hurdle. To Mr. Dustin’s and my dismay I failed the third retake by missing one question.
    I was on the verge of flunking out of