Enter Sandman in General

In spring of ’91 I was in the Replacement Air Group (RAG) for the EA-6B fleet. It was technically the Fleet Replacement Squadron (FRS), but Navy guys are hard to change. We still referred to the FRS as the “RAG.” A term that carried over from the beginning of Carrier aviation.

I was in the middle of academics, which meant classes for half the day, flights for the other half the day. Tests and simulators, Then the “holding breath” part of the day waiting for the flight schedule to drop and find out you were flying until 2am and had a 5am brief for one of the late “NT” simulators where you were fighting WWIII.

If I was lucky I had prepared for the sim early. If not, I walked into the simulator building thinking “This. Is. Going. To. Be. Ugly.”

You weren’t guaranteed to get into the fleet. They would flush you like a turd in a heartbeat.

Then all the work and pain and turmoil to get the RAG would evaporate, you’d get a plane ticket to wherever you accessed from. And in a year or two you would get a DD-214.
I am a bit surprised there weren’t more suicides. You know that scene in “An Officer and a
Gentleman” where Richard Gere screams “I got no where else to go!”

That was all of us. Failure was not an option.

Toward the end of the fiscal year, money dried up and we weren’t flying much. There is only many simulator hours in a day. We started breathing again.

One of my classmates (classmates was a weird subjective term, we all started together, but based on scheduling ended up graduating up to a year apart), a frat boy decided we were going to have an epic party. He was renting a house on Dugualla Bay.

Metallica’s Black album was blasting from monstrous Bose speakers. He had a gong set to ring every fifteen minutes, at which point everyone had to down a beer.

The house was right on the bay and all the lights attracted sand sharks. You could see there beady little eyes staring at us.

Being incipient steely eyed dealers of death some guys thought it would be a good idea to have a drunken tussle with the sand sharks. It was fucking hilarious! Guys were hauling these sharks up onto the beach, and the least drunk among us were saying “not a good plan, stan, not a good plan!” And those freaking sharks kept coming toward the beach.

Somebody finally had the sense to turn off the flood lights.

I woke up late the next morning in the backseat of my car. I had brought a sleeping bag and pillow, and while not the ritz it was better than some of the sleeping arrangement I saw as I went into the house to see if dickhead had any coffee, which he did.

I was heading for the door when I heard someone plaintively ask “Anyone check the flight schedule?”

That thrum, thrum, thrum of Enter Sandman pounding in my head.

Jesus Christ. I was 29.