There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
(Shakespeare. Julius Caesar. act iv.)
With new wife and already a baby on the way, we drove her big Monte Carlo with my sprightly blue 1800E Volvo sports car in tow across the country from Philadelphia to San Diego. Except for some "black ice" in Nebraska, skidding out of control near Rifle, Colorado, and being snowed-in for days at Vail (that allowed me some skiing, but not my pregnant wife), the trip was otherwise, uneventful.
Shortly after arriving once again in San Diego, and NAS Miramar, it did not take long to determine this time things would be very different than before. On my earlier 1970 arrival, there was a war going on, I was a bachelor, and I spent over a year training in the RAG at a relaxed pace.
Now in 1976, it was a "peacetime" Navy very unlike what I had experienced before. Now I was married and starting a family. Now my training would be abbreviated, but not only because of my prior experience. It was mostly because of temporary "G" limitations imposed while some serious aircraft "growing pains" were resolved. Thus I received no F-14 ACM RAG training. And other training in this new aircraft was sorely inadequate for a variety of reasons. Now I would be joining my squadron with a mere 30% or less of my previous F-4 RAG training, to a squadron already on cruise and a half a world away, rather than merely in the hangar next door.
But especially painful were the tragic losses near the end of our RAG training of four guys within our small FCLP (Field Carrier Landing Practice) "bounce" class.
On 21 June, 1976 former POW LCDR Anderson and his RIO, "PD" Donaldson were inexplicably killed in the relatively safe and benign, night "bounce pattern." ...
... Then only two nights later my wife received a call from the duty officer for me to not come in to the squadron for my late night bounce. There had incredibly been another crash of an earlier scheduled bounce crew again, and my period was cancelled.
I soon sadly learned that a good friend and someone whom I had flown with many times - Ray Chivers - had died along with his pilot Ltjg Wilt under equally strange and unexplained circumstances, again on a clear night in the supposedly safe bounce pattern. For the rest of us in the class, we were grounded for weeks until some preliminary cause of the two mysterious F-14A crashes within two days under the same circumstances could be explained.
Nevertheless despite the tragedies, it was still an exciting time for me. The F-14 was new to the fleet, possessed awesome capabilities, and I happily rejoined many of my old friends in the fighter community. It was the best place for me to be.
