Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [47]
Eventually, a truck arrived and a bunch of military police got out the back of it. One officer stopped about twenty feet from us. He didn’t say anything. He just pointed his gun at us, ready to shoot. In the mayhem as we ran away, it sounded to us as if he had fired that gun several times and that the bullets had whizzed over our heads. Maybe he was a bad shot, or else he was trying to deliver warning shots to break up the crowd. Either way, we quickly realized the risks of being tourists at a riot, and we took off back to our ship.
The day after graduating from the academy in 1986 with a degree in marine engineering and nautical science, I got in my car and drove from New York down to the U.S. Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida. While many of my classmates took the summer off to relax and clear their heads, I started training in Pensacola the following Monday. I had become too driven a guy to sit around and lose time. I had decided I wanted to fly, and I didn’t want to wait.
During my training, however, I quickly found out that I wasn’t a particularly good pilot. Boy, did I struggle. I failed a couple of check rides with instructors, and barely reached the point where I was considered safe enough to make an attempt on an aircraft carrier. When the Navy sends you out to the ship for the first time, there isn’t anyone crazy enough to go with you. No instructor. It’s just you, by yourself, with whatever skills you have accumulated from countless hours of practice.
So in July 1987, I flew out to the USS Lexington by myself. It was cruising in the Atlantic, and I was instructed to do two touch-and-go landings and four arrested landings. In arrested landings, you put down an extended hook attached to your plane’s tail, and you’re stopped by a long cable strung across the back of the ship. Then you taxi to the bow and are catapulted off to go around for another landing. After returning to shore you get debriefed by the instructor, who has been watching you from the deck. In my case, I’d been pretty awful. I barely passed.
I discovered during training that we all don’t learn at the same rate. The student pilots who were great on their first aircraft carrier landings didn’t necessarily go on to be astronauts. How well you perform when you start trying something difficult is not a good indicator of how good you can become. Looking back, I’m a prime example of someone who was able to overcome a lack of aptitude with persistence, practice, and a drive to never give up. By working hard, I went from a bad student pilot to an OK test pilot to a pretty decent astronaut.
In December 1987, after eighteen months training on the T-34C Mentor, the T-2B Buckeye, and the TA-4J Skyhawk, I was designated a naval aviator. I spent all of 1988 training to fly the A-6E Intruder attack aircraft, after which I was assigned to the “Eagles” of Attack Squadron 115 in Atsugi, Japan. It was from there that I’d be deployed twice to the Persian Gulf aboard the aircraft carrier USS Midway.
Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990, and for a few months, the international community tried diplomacy and sanctions to convince Saddam Hussein to withdraw his troops. In November, our ship was sent to the Gulf, where we waited to see if the United States and a coalition of thirty-four other nations would opt for military action. On January 17, 1991, at about 3 a.m., the Persian Gulf War began with a massive aerial bombing campaign. My first flight into battle would begin much later that day, at 9 p.m. I was twenty-six years old, the same age Gabby was when she returned to her dad’s tire store.
The A-6E was a two-man aircraft, and my bombardier/navigator