he thought, scolding himself as he felt the JOs’ eyes on him.
* * *
An hour later, Wilson’s roommate, Lieutenant Commander Mike “Weed” Hopper, entered their stateroom. He found Wilson at the computer in PT gear. Weed took the measure of his roommate.
“Hey, man.”
“Hmm,” Wilson grunted without turning his head.
Weed clicked the light on above his desk. “Olive told me what happened.”
“Hmm.”
Hopper was the squadron Maintenance Officer, one place below Wilson in the Raven pecking order. Tall, with red hair, he possessed a big smile that matched his sense of humor. The Ravens were fortunate that these two department heads were friends, as they both had to work together to make the squadron flight schedule work.
“Five more months, my friend,” Weed said with frown.
“Roger that,” Wilson replied, and then added, “I can stand on my head for five months.”
“He grabbed me earlier, too. Said there were too many boot marks on four-oh-two and the troops needed to be more careful. Imagine that— too many boot marks on a deployed fleet Hornet.”
“Where is the skipper?” Wilson asked.
“He went to the wardroom with some JOs. C’mon man, let’s do the same.”
Wilson donned his flight suit and began to lace his boots. Five more months. He took stock of his situation. One thousand miles north kids were getting their legs blown off with IEDs on a daily basis. And that didn’t even take into account the misery of living day-to-day in the 110-degree talcum-sand hell of Anbar Province… for a full year.
Compared to that, putting up with humiliation from known prick “Saint Patrick” is a small sacrifice. The bigger one is being away from Mary and the kids. Combat flying over Iraq would be a relief, and short of that, the routine flight schedule offered an almost daily respite from the XO. Wilson knew if he wanted to be a squadron CO, he would have to take it. All he had to do was take it for the remainder of this cruise. The question was whether or not his pride and vanity would let him.
Maybe I don’t want it, he thought as he pulled tight on the laces.
In her stateroom that evening, Olive wound down from a long day at the duty desk. She forced herself to e-mail her mother a birthday greeting full of the emoticon hearts and flowers her mother loved. The head cheerleader at Vanderbilt in the late 1970’s, her mother was a Knoxville socialite, still stunning at age fifty. The hair, the teeth, the heels — Camille Bennett had it all. She also attended every important community event. Junior League. Democratic Party fundraisers. Garden Club tea parties. With one son in Vanderbilt medical school, and the other as Sigma Nu president at Ole Miss, no one could match her.
