It always seemed to happen too quickly. My world, a bubble I was strapped tightly into, hit the water with a jarring “thump” just before I’d gotten as much air into my lungs as I’d have liked. Over the course of my career, I’d done this at least 30 times already, so it was familiar, yet still disorienting, especially when I felt the g-forces press against me as they fought the bulk of the water, and my world spun around and hung me upside down, 10 feet or so underwater.
The first time I did this, I found myself looking up at a bright light that was quickly occluded by a concerned looking face, which was then swallowed up by a searing light that I later realized was a small pen-style flashlight shined directly into each of my eyes. In the far distance I could hear a siren and a lot of road noise from a bumpy ride. An ambulance. Voices, and so much noise. Then just as quickly, I was back in the water, choking, having taken in a big breath of nothing but water, and was being dragged to the surface of the pool by two frogmen in scuba gear. That first time in the “Dilbert Dunker,” I had been a Naval Flight Officer Candidate living in a hell otherwise known as Pensacola, Florida and staffed by Marine Corps Drill Instructors who seemed to want to either drown, or in some other painful way, kill me with their bare hands. During the nicer moments, they simply screamed at us. I was in basic Flight Officer training in the Navy, working toward the day I’d be flying in Navy jets. Not flying them, since thanks to my 20-40 eyesight I couldn’t qualify as a pilot, but as a Naval Flight Officer – hopefully a “BN,” a Bomber/Navigator, in A-6 Intruders, carrier-based bombers.
This time, riding the “Dunker” was purely for fun. I had rotated in for a 6 week training cycle, under a program that had experienced officers taking brief refresher courses before going back to their squadrons to prepare for a deployment. It was late 1990, and Tammy was waiting for me in Bellingham, Washington, near where my squadron, VA-136, known as “The Archers” was based at NAS Whidbey Island. We had a deployment coming up in a couple months aboard U.S.S. Ranger, and I knew what was coming. The rhetoric involving Saddam Hussein was heating up, and though I had no memory of which ships participated in Desert Storm, I had a feeling that Ranger and VA-136 would be in the middle of it.
That was fine. It was what I trained for.
I’d passed on the opportunity to take this path the last time I lived these years, and regretted it. Once again, I took the path I’d decided against last time. So far, making that choice had been the right thing to do. Though I had no idea of it at the time, as I calmly waited for the “Dilbert Dunker” to jerk to a stop, and the bubbles to disperse from around me, before I could begin releasing myself, this fork in the road wouldn’t lead anywhere good. It would, in fact, lead straight to heartache and loss. But again, slowly unsnapping the restraints that held me in this cage, meant to resemble the cockpit of whatever aircraft the trainee ended up crewing, I had no idea about what was to come in this particular future.
Fourteen years had passed since I had chosen a different path in my relationship with Tammy. We had started dating the night after I spilled my guts and she kissed me at Noble Roman’s, and for both of us, that was that. We made it through college a couple, she studying dance at Ball State in Muncie, Indiana and me playing basketball for Purdue. Muncie wasn’t that far from West Lafayette, where Purdue was located, so we saw each other most weekends. I would go to her outside of basketball season, she visited me during the season.
At Purdue, unlike my previous experience, I actually studied seriously this time, not weighted down by my pain and painkiller problems, and eventually got a degree in Mechanical Engineering. I wasn’t an All-American for the Boilermakers, but contributed, starting the last half of my Junior, and all of my Senior years. So, when it was all done, I went down in Purdue’s basketball history as one of the solid, productive non-stars, destined to be forgotten a couple years after graduation by all but a handful of die-hard Boilermaker fans, the one starter whose name they could never seem to easily remember in later years. Superstars remained in the consciousness for decades, but my type of player came and went pretty quickly. But, I was proud of what I accomplished, and found that my athletic experience and engineering degree made me a desirable addition to the Navy. Since I’d always loved flying, I jumped at the chance to pursue a career that I’d thought about the first time through, but had ultimately drifted away from committing to.
My parents had, just like in my first time through this time period, moved to San Diego while I was in college, but because of my basketball scholarship, won through an excellent senior year at Ben Davis that saw us win the Indiana High School State Title, I didn’t move with them. Their lives pretty much went on as it had done the first time, and Tammy’s and my lives seemed to be in a temporal “bubble,” where the ripples caused by my following a completely different course seemed to fade quickly, the further from us they got. We were leading completely different lives, but not much of the rest of the world seemed to be at all different from what I remember. It was very odd.
Sadly, I wasn’t able to do anything to change Coach MacLaren’s life, or more accurately, his death. I had a number of talks with him during my senior year, and in the three years that followed, but since Coach had never had a single symptom or sign that anything was wrong with his heart, he shrugged off my nagging. We had a lot to learn about nutrition in the 70s, about cholesterol, fat, smoking and everything else. I even got excused from practice to be at the game the night I knew Coach MacLaren was going to have his massive heart attack in the locker room. There was usually an ambulance and EMT stationed at most games, but to be sure, I had ordered up and paid for a private ambulance service to be there as well, parked right outside the doors by the home locker room.
It didn’t matter, though. It was Coach’s time. The heart attack was massive, and right on schedule. I was with him after he sent the team out on the court to warm up. I’d come to watch the guys play, I had told him, and would love to show my support in the locker room before the game. He bought it, and never asked why I wasn’t at school at practice. Coach MacLaren had asked me to go to his office to get him another play-plan clipboard, and must have collapsed right after I left the room. I picked up the board off his desk, and glancing through the window that looked into the locker room, saw him lying on his side on the floor. I didn’t even bother going to him, but instead, flew out the door to the outside and shouted for the paramedics in the amblance I’d hired. By the time they got to him though, barely a minute after I saw him on the floor, he was gone. They later told me that he was probably dead when he hit the floor.
So, it seemed like, except for Tammy and me, the world went on as it had before. I hadn’t had another episode that took me back to 2005 until my first experience in the “Dunker,” so when it finally happened again, it was quite a shock. I never told Tammy any more about what I was going through either, which probably seems quite strange. But you have to realize that while I was in the 70s and 80s, living day to day, there was always the thought in my mind that I had imagined it all, and that feeling grew stronger every month that passed. I found myself doing my “remember 2005″ exercises less and less, and though so much of what was in the news was so familiar and expected, there were so many things going on in my life that were different this time, it got easier to convince myself that this life was the real one, and the life in 2005 with Molly and Samantha was some strange fantasy or trick of the mind. I’d be less than honest, however, if I said the ache in my gut over the family I left in 2005 ever eased, let alone disappeared.
By the time Tammy and I graduated from college in 1981, she in the spring on time and me the following winter (basketball had cost me some time, despite my doing a couple summer sessions), I had come to accept that if this was all real, and I was truly living in my past, I would be here awhile. Thelma had told me she spent 30 years in her past. If that happened to me, so be it, I figured. I would live this life as if it were the only one I had. And so I did.
Tammy and I were engaged a month after I graduated, just before Valentine’s Day, 1982. She was teaching Ballet at a dance school in Indy and I was working for an Engineering firm that did work for various divisions of General Motors. We’d gone to Tammy’s parents’ house for dinner the night before Valentine’s Day and when we had a few minutes alone, I asked Mr. Sorenson if I could ask Tammy to marry me. He smiled, shook his head, and said “I was beginning to wonder if you were ever going to ask, Rich.” He held out his hand, which I took it and felt him shake it vigorously. “Absolutely.”
I told him that my plan was to take her to dinner the next night and propose. Gene Sorenson thought that sounded like a great idea, and insisted on paying for dinner.
Tammy and her sister were still living with their parents, so after dinner and some conversation, she walked me to my car, the same Plymouth Fury I’d had the first time I lived these days. I leaned against the passenger door of the car, parked on the street outside the Sorenson’s house on the west side of Indianapolis, and Tammy slipped into my arms, tucking her head under my chin as I pulled her in close. We stood that way for a minute or so. It was unseasonably warm, but still chilly. My coat was open, and her arms were underneath it, wrapped around me. I closed my eyes, drew in the scent of her, a little musky, since she had come home straight from teaching three dance classes in a row, but with the remnants of Taboo mixed in. To say it was stirring is an understatement, and I began to feel the effects of her being close by, when we hadn’t much time together in the past week.
“I’ve got to go,” I said.
Tammy looked up at me, that same predatory look in her eyes that I’d first seen in the music hallway in high school several years before, when she was singing “Makin’ Whoopee” to me. Oh, for God’s sake, I thought. I’ve got to derail this, because there is no way…
Still looking up at me, Tammy pressed in closer, dropping her hands to my butt and pulled me to her, causing some parts of me to make more direct contact with her. “Hmmm,” she said, looking down, “what in the world…”
“Tammy, can I ask you a question?”
She stopped, relaxed a little and again looked up at me. “Sure. What?”
“Well, I love you. And I want to marry you. Will you marry me?”
The look on her face was priceless, in all its cliched, open mouthed glory. Never before had I, or anyone I knew of for that matter, seen Tammy Sorenson at a loss for words, but here it was. I guess that for everything, there is a first time. Suddenly, my quickly expanding parts forgotton, her arms moved to around my neck, and she pulled herself up, reaching for my mouth with hers, and I got my answer.
I entered AOCS (Aviation Officer Candidate School) in June of that year, 1982, and we were married in July of the next year. By 1990, we had two children, both boys, a rarity among Naval Aviators, who usually produced female children – something to do with the electromagnetic fields we were exposed to, high g-forces, or some other environmental influence. In 1990, Aaron was five years old and Michael was three. Navy life was good, as was living in Washington State. Tammy owned a small dance studio in Bellingham where she taught Ballet, Tap and Modern Dance, and I flew in Intruders, keeping the world safe for Democracy. Entire weeks would go by without my thinking of 2005, but then I’d be at home in the den of our small bungalow and see my Macintosh computer and it would all flood back in. Or, I’d see something on television about the World Trade Center towers and the past/future would take over my thoughts. For the most part though, I lived without constant reminders that from my perspective, I was living in the past. In 1990, news didn’t come at you like water gushing from a high-pressure firehose as it did in 2005. News was on at 6pm and 10pm. CNN was on cable, but it wasn’t anything resembling what the network had become by 2005. There was no MSNBC, no Fox News and no CNBC. I think if all of those outlets had existed, I’d be constantly reminded that I’d seen all of this before. But because what I experienced was extremely local in nature, it was all new to me. I could almost forget the truth of my life in this time period.
I often wondered though, if there was a way I could warn someone about Mohammed Atta and the 9/11 hijackers. I mean, I knew the name of the leader of the group of terrorists who would fly airplanes into the World Trade Center. They would, in the next few years, be training here in the United States! But, I really couldn’t think of a way to communicate what was going to happen with enough stridency to be noticed, but without raising a whole bunch of questions that I wouldn’t be able to answer. It was frustrating. I wasn’t able to save Coach Bob MacLaren’s life by stationing an ambulance outside the gymnasium door, but I figured at the the very least, I could book a seat on the flight Atta and his associates were on, then in the waiting area, get security and insist I saw him handling a box cutter, and overheard him talking about killing a flight attendant when they take the plane over. I vowed that if I were still here on September 11, 2001, I’d be on that Boston to L.A. flight. Whatever this experience was, maybe I could spare this timeline at least part of 9/11.
A better idea, of course, would be to target them long before 9/11 when they were more vulnerable. I remembered there was an FBI agent based in Minneapolis, I think, who had warned her superiors about these guys training to fly large aircraft, but had been ignored. I considered reaching out to her as we got close to the date and tell her the truth. Whether she would buy it or not, I couldn’t begin to guess, but it wouldn’t be easy. I figured that even if I was still here in 2001, I had 11 years to figure out what to do.
The interesting thing was, I knew that I was preparing to go to the Middle East in the next few months, even if many of my squadron mates didn’t believe we’d actually be deployed and flying combat missions. I didn’t speak with any knowledge or certainty about it, just taking the position that I’d go where Uncle Sam sent me, and follow my orders. My flying partner, A-6E pilot Lieutenant (like me) Patrick Maney was far more gung ho, ready to deliver ordinance to Saddam Hussein, and make him sign for it. Pat, 5 feet 8 inches of irritatingly cocky Navy combat-air jock, was no fan of the rich Arabs of Kuwait, but he seriously disliked Saddam. Ironically, I think it was the dictator’s habit of wearing uniforms and medals he hadn’t earned that truly irked Pat, who had worked extremely hard to earn his uniform and “chest candy” and didn’t like pretend-warriors. I would listen to his harangues at least once a week, which ran the gamut from quietly angry, to passionately and hilariously funny, depending on the news out of the Gulf that day. Though to most people, military included, the Iraqi dictator looked fairly “squared away” in his uniforms, whether he was addressing the government leaders of Iraq or shooting a rifle into the air from a balcony, Pat insisted Hussein looked like “a bag of ass.”
When he got spooled up, it was all I could do to keep from describing to Pat the scene of his nemesis being pulled out of a hole in the ground in Iraq in 2003. I was looking forward to seeing the look on Pat’s face when he saw the news accounts of Saddam being pulled out of his rat-hole, looking like Howard Hughes.
I pushed myself out of the pool, having once again successfully extracted myself from the Dunker, and watched as the contraption slowly climbed back up its own rails to the locked top position, ready for another rider. A couple more dunks and we’d be done with this nostalgic little program that had us revisit some of the experiences of our early training, designed to, as much as anything it seemed, give us a sense of all we’ve accomplished. As odd as it sounds for the Navy to do something like this, that’s what it feels like, since most everything that we’ve done is so much easier than it was last time. I had to admit, it did give me an interesting sense of the depth of my experience in the service. But, once the nostalgia wore off after the first couple weeks, it just became tedious, being away from family and our normal routines. The irony of this wasn’t lost on me, that this experience was very similar to what I was going through with my time travel. Sure, the nostalgia of it all was great at first, but it quickly became apparent that I needed to do things differently this time, or die of boredom watching the same reruns of Barney Miller and M*A*S*H, not to mention getting messed up again on painkillers.
But, the Navy didn’t give us much opportunity to be creative with these training exercises, so in the end, they were mostly just…boring. Of course, my enjoyment wasn’t the objective. They had training and bio-mechanical experts watching it all, seeing how experienced officers handled the tasks they spent a lot of money and effort training recruits to do. Like all things in Government service, somewhere in all this there was a point. You just had to dig a bit for it. Or a lot for it.
A couple hours later, dressed in service khakis, Pat and I were in the Officer’s Mess having dinner, not really interested in spending our last night in Pensacola in town with a bunch of rowdy junior officers. We were heading back to Whidbey the next day, and were anxious to see our families. I’d been away from Tammy and the boys for 3 weeks, since they had flown back to Washington after a nice week-long visit to the sunshine. Pat’s wife and twins hadn’t been able to come, caught up in work and school.
We were talking, as usual, about the upcoming deployment that we both knew would involve shots fired, even though my knowledge was a bit more credible, having lived through this time period once before. I was right in the middle of insisting, above Pat’s argument, that Saddam would most definitely set his oil fields on fire when an officer, a full Commander, walking through the room about 10 yards away from us, caught my eye. As he passed from behind a table, my eyes dropped reflexively to his feet and saw he was wearing black navy oxfords, not the brown oxfords of an aviator. I couldn’t see his warfare badge, but he looked really familiar. Where had I served with this guy? It just wasn’t registering. Then it hit me.
“Micah Steinberg!” I shouted, drawing the attention of a small group of officers at the next table, and causing the black-shoed officer to stop and look. I had gotten up, and was advancing on the puzzled looking Commander, who I now saw wore a Medical Corps warfare badge on the left side of his chest. He was not quite as tall as me, but thinner, with older style black framed glasses and the beginnings of grey through his slightly longish (for a naval officer) hair. He stared for a few seconds, then recognizing me, his faced broke into a huge smile and his hand extended.
“Rich Girrard!” was all he could say as I pumped his hand.
Then, dropping his hand, I nodded at his epaulets, “holy shit, Doc, you’re running away from me. You go get a Surface badge and you’ll be driving my boat!”
A wry smile from Steinberg. “I don’t think so. They keep promoting us to keep us out of private practice. But Jesus, who needs to have to buy malpractice insurance?” he asked. It had been almost 5 years since I saw Micah at our 10th High School class reunion. He’d gone to college, graduated in 3 years and then the Navy put him through Medical School, counting on him to be a Neurologist for Uncle Sam when he finished. Which he did…And was. A really good one too, apparently.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, meaning Pensacola, not the Officer’s Mess.
“They brought in some doctors to listen to me talk about brain trauma, early treatment, blah, blah, blah. They seem to think I know something about that stuff. What are you doing here? Are you stationed here now?”
“Hell, no. I’m just here for the shirtless volleyball,” I answered, straight-faced, bringing a puzzled look from Micah that only lasted a second, then he got the Top Gun reference and threw his head back and laughed. Micah Steinberg was brilliant, but it always took him a minute to get the joke. In truth, I always believed that in his mind, he evaluated a joke he just heard for humor, evaluated how strong a response it required, and then executed that response. Ever since high school, he was the brainiest guy I’d ever known. It couldn’t have been easy, being one of the only Jewish kids in a midwestern high school, and he probably learned to evaluate humor in that way because so many jokes had been at his expense.
“Hey, join us. You got a few minutes?” I asked, hopeful.
“Sure!” Micah answered, as I pointed the way to our table, where Pat waited.
“Commander Micah Steinberg, Lieutenant Pat Maney, my parter. He turns the airplane on and I tell him where to go.”
“HA!” Pat answered, standing and shaking Micah’s hand, our bit well-worn. “He’s ‘Goose,’ I’m Tom Cruise, only taller.”
“Not by much,” was my response. All this earned an easy laugh from Micah.
Nodding at Steinberg’s medical badge, Pat said “So, I take it you’re the Doctor who forged this guy’s psych evaluation so he could get in the Navy?”
This brought a perplexed look from Micah, countered by Pat’s quick “Kidding.”
“Oh!” and another big laugh. We all sat down.
“So, what YOU think about Saddam, Commander?” Pat asked Micah, using the pronounciation President Bush used, emphasizing the first syllable, “SADdam”. Some language experts said Bush did that on purpose, since that pronunciation translated as “shoeshine boy” in the language Iraquis spoke.
Steinberg shrugged. “It’s easy to say he’s insane, but when you consider the environment in which he grew up, what that part of the world’s like, it’s easy to see how men like him are created. Culturally, that part of the world tends to line up behind dictators fairly easily, and there are always plenty of thugs interested in leading the parade. It becomes kind of like the mafia with uniforms.”
Pat and I both nodded. Expecting our brand of democracy to simply take hold in a place like that is pretty naive. Among us three, obviously I was the only one with first-hand experience watching that debacle, purple fingertips notwithstanding.
Micah continued. “I served with a doctor a few years ago who had been part of a liaison mission to Iraq when Saddam was a friend of ours, during the Iran-Iraq war. He said it was like being in an alternate universe, where it was like a time traveler had gathered up a bunch of technology and gone back in time to take it to the people there. He said it was a rather disjointed experience.”
That thought hit me like a burst of electricity. A time traveler.
I looked closely at Micah. was that statement a message? Did he know something? But no, he carried on from there. “It will be interesting to see what the future brings.”
Again.
The topic turned to internal Navy stuff, postings, friends and acquaintances we all had in common. Put two Navy people together and it doesn’t take long before they start down that road, and it’s always startling, no matter how many years you’ve served, when you realize how small a society it is. But, there were no more references to time travel, and I began to relax a little, still thinking about it though.
It turned out Micah was heading to Whidbey Island, booked on the same flight Pat and I were to return on the next day. His little head trauma dog and pony show was set there for the next week, since most of the aircrews stationed at Whidbey were scheduled for the coming deployment. They expected more than the usual supply of training accidents in the next few months, I guess. It was Thursday, we were flying back on Friday and Micah didn’t have anything on his schedule until Monday afternoon, so I talked him into at the very least, a barbeque on Saturday at the house. He knew about being a newly reunited family post-deployment, and politely refused the offer to stay at our place, insisting the BOQ (Bachelor Officers Quarters) on base were great, and he’d been wanting to hike Deception Pass State Park.
After a few more minutes we parted, planning to see each other again on the plane to Whidbey the next day. It felt good to be reconnecting to an old friend, but I was a little wary about the timing. Attributing it to paranoia, I mentally shrugged it off and realized that it was a very good thing to have some time with Micah this weekend. There was a very good chance that my experience was neurological, and I knew (or at least believed) that I could trust him with at least part of my situation without getting my flight privileges yanked in the process.
