Johnson - Jet Girl: My Life in War, Peace, and the Cockpit of the Navys Most Lethal Aircraft, the F/A-18 Super Hornet

Shoes were off and my feet, in polka-dot socks, were on my desk next to a stack of letters from my ninety-six-year-old Grammy. Country music played on low in my earbuds. I blew strands of hair from my eyes and looked up from working on my masters to gaze at Ryan Gosling, who stared back at me from multiple angles of the many posters we had hung on our walls, unwaveringly sensitive and understanding. My full-time job, as usual, had kept me up the night before, but Id pulled myself out of bed early to study. I felt groggy and missed my family, the comforts of home, and a perennial on-again-off-again boyfriend who Id maybe never see again. Like most mid-twenty-year-old students balancing a job, academics, and a love life (or lack of one), I was lonely, overworked, and just trying to get by. In the hallway outside my room I could hear what amounted to a fire drill. I was beginning to get annoyed. I heard five life-altering words boom over the intercom, Launch the alert 30 fighter.

I yanked out my earbuds, skin tightening and heart beating so hard the concussions reverberated in my teeth. The voice repeated the order, This is the TAO. Launch the alert 30 fighter. I say again, launch the alert 30 fighter.

This command from the Tactical Action Officer, or TAO, would, in effect, send me flyingno, screamingat nearly the speed of sound, armed to the teeth, into an international incident with one of our countrys most volatile adversaries.

My dorm room for the past four months, the Sharktank, housed the six fixed-wing female aviators aboard the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush. The Bush, a nuclear-powered, floating steel fortress known as Mother, steamed at the head of a strike group. Imagine a dozen boats skimming across the glittering waters of the North Arabian Gulf in a V-shaped formation, like a necklace with the jewels drawing white wakes in the brilliant blue water. Dont let the pretty picture fool you. These warships bristle with enough weaponry to turn an area the size of Texas into a smoking pile of uninhabitable ash. And what you cannot see is doubly dangerous. Down in the depths of the ocean, armed submarines plow steadily ahead, sonars on, silent and battle-ready.

The purpose of the surface formation, the submarines below, and the seventy-five hundred highly trained Sailors manning the vessels was singular: guard the crown jewel traveling at the apex of the V-formation of the necklace. In other words, protect Mother, the most lethal and versatile weapon the US can drive out onto the worlds stage. Of the nearly eight thousand people working in Strike Group Two, only three women flew the most feared plane of all, the most technologically advanced, the baddest of the badthe $80 million F/A-18 Super Hornet. One of those three lucky girls was me, Caroline Johnson, full-time grad student, Naval Flight Officer, and Weapons Systems Officer. Jet Girl.

I jolted out of my chair and slammed my polka dotclad feet into the boots directly next to my desk. Officers on alert are supposed to stay in a complete uniform at all times, but our steel-toed boots were waterproof, and Id worn them more than fifteen hours a day, every day, for the previous four months in a climate so hot and humid you could drink the air. Rather than let my feet rot, Id broken a rule. No time to worry about that.

Throwing the Sharktank door open, I sprinted down the hallway up the narrow ladder wells, taking two steps at a time.

Alert 30 fighter, vector 330, the TAO said, his voice growing anxious over the intercom. Vector 330 was the heading where we would find whatever was stirring the hornets nest. I knew I would need to recall it later, as I could already feel the boat turning to a different heading. The four engine shafts propelling the ninety-thousand-ton carrier churned at full bore, pointing Mothers bow into the wind in order to generate twenty-five knots of airflow across the bow. The wind over the deck provided a crucial boost for our fully loaded fighter until our two afterburners could power the plane into the sky.

Because of the fire drill, most of the ships doorsmonstrously heavy hunks of metal sealed watertightwere all closed as if we were under torpedo attack. I heaved open the massive door at the end of the first hallway, running into a crew of firemen performing a drill in the passageway. Under normal circumstances, I might have snickered at the six Sailors in full firefighting gear, pantomiming the act of extinguishing a nonexistent fire, but right then, they were blocking my passageway.

Make a hole! Out of the way! I sprinted toward them, but they continued their charades.

I braced myself, lowered my shoulder, and bodychecked the first dude, sending him smashing into the wall. His fire-team leader turned to me and snapped, Someones in a hurry.

Get out of my way! I pointed to the intercom overhead. Theres real-world shit going on!

He looked up, blinking, confused, and then nodded to his men. Move!

I ran full-out down the hallway, knowing I needed to get from my stateroom in the bow of the Bush to the Ready Room all the way in the stern, about two hundred yardsor two football fieldsaway. My lungs burning and flight suit soaked, I hurdled the fifteen-inch braces that dotted the hallway every twenty feet. By yard one hundred and fifty, I was losing steam when the Carrier Air Group commander, or CAG, the second most powerful person in the strike group, ducked out of his office, clipboard pumping in hand.

Keep going, Dutch! he barked hoarsely. Iran is forty miles out!

A group of aviators waited for me in the Ready Room. Go, go, go! one of them said, shoving my helmet bag, complete with the encrypted codes and data for the jets weapons systems, into my hand. Crocket is waiting for you.

Crocket, aka Corn Rocket, was my pilot that day, and when I pushed into the paraloft, he was already halfway into his G-suit, deep into his pregame mindset.

CAG told me an Iranian F-4 is inbound within our vital area, I said and he nodded. We both understood a line in the sand had been crossed. The Iranians flatly knew better than to fly so close to us, and our job was to go intercept that plane.

See you up there. He winked and hurried up to the flight deck. Pilots and their Weapons Systems Officers, or WSOs, have a unique working relationship, a bond built on respect and trust. The respect is based on each others skills, reputation in the air, and by proving time and time again that you can not only do the job, but do it flawlessly. I had tremendous confidence in Crockets skills, as I knew he did in mine.

Trust is something different from respect. It is respect in a nosedive. Crocket would be flying what amounted to a fully loaded bomb at five hundred miles per hour and then landing it on a steel cork. I would be his eyes, ears, and guns as he did so. Even the most hardass, war-tested Navy SEALs think what we do is crazy. And when