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Today, Memorial Day 2008, I’m sitting here alone writing. The kids are with their mom. My friends have long left for barbeques. The television is off and has been all day.

Today for the first time in eighteen years, it’s about memorializing my friends who will never have kids, who will not see another barbeque or a beer. It’s also about realizing that I lost more friends in seven years of peacetime service than most Americans have in the past seven years of warfare.

Most of my friends died after living only a few short years out of high school. They are my heroes.

As I’ve said before in the postscript of Bug’s Prayer and Core Values these are the types of people I want my boys to hear about when they ask what a hero is.

One hero who might not be remembered was a friend of mine from aircrew school, Rick Tafoya.

Rick was an Aviation Ordnanceman - AO Aircrewman, not directly in my rate. This was before they made all Aircrew jobs AW jobs.

Rick was cool and a great guy to hang out with, full of energy and positive about his future.

Richard (Rick) Tafoya - VP-50 Blue Dragons d. 1991

I remember running into Rick at the NAS Moffett McDonalds just a few months before his death. It was that night that I had a premonition that one of us wasn’t going to make it. Of course I thought it would be me dying, not him, and that part I recall as clear as yesterday.

Had I not picked VS as my platform. it could have easily been me onboard a VP-50 plane. I would have been in the VP pipeline, and knowing those folks at Alameda and Moffett, I probably would have picked orders to a squadron based there.

There I was… Bored on a Friday…

I was bored one Friday night in either in late 1990 or early 1991 and being underage in San Diego I decided to deadhead up on a C-12 transport to Moffett and see if any of my friends up there were having a fun time. I had just started my final school before the fleet and decided, Have Flightsuit, Will Travel. I knew some of the C-12 aircrew from my time at Pensacola where we all shared common survival training.

In fact one of them stationed at NAS Alameda, Scarlett "Sarah" Connor (best said in a Terminator style voice), was an aircrew classmate of mine from 1989 and she and I definitely did the Aircrew ‘cracks’ together, the O Course, and many other things.

She was also one of the roommates of the very first Navy female to complete SAR school in 1989. Scarlett was stationed up at NAS Alameda and was a blonde knockout who always had a great group to party or hang out with. I figured I would see what was going on and return to North Island either that night on the return leg or on Sunday night.

Of course this was before cell phones, remember what it was like to try to connect with anyone before cellular? If all else failed, I reasoned, I would bomb around the base until I found someone I knew.

I landed at Moffett and couldn’t locate anyone I knew by phone so I decided to take the Duty Driver up on his offer to grab some McD’s before the return flight to San Diego’s NAS North Island. We headed over there and as I walked out I saw Rick.

Rick had a scruffy beard growth and had just broken his arm. He had a grin on a mile wide when he saw me as I was going in and he was coming out.

"You’d better get a shave there shipwreck!" I shouted to Rick, "…don’t you remember that from P-cola?!?"

Rick was laughing as he had seen me at the same time and threw his arms halfway around my back as we shook hands.

We stood there for a short time, catching up.

Rick told me that he didn’t have to shave because he was on light duty, having just broken his arm snowboarding. I told him that I was headed back to NAS North Island but that I would come up again when I had a chance so we could hang out.

He also offered to teach me how to snowboard the next time I was up. According to Rick, the snow was killer in the Sierras. I think he mentioned Mammoth but it could have been Big Bear.

I was on a clock for the return flight so Rick gave me his squadron duty desk phone number and we parted company, me walking out and him walking to the counter to make his order.

I remember it like it was yesterday what happened next. When I walked out those doors a small voice in my head said,

You better turn around, because this is the last time you’re ever going to see Rick.

I stopped and spun around, looking back at Rick through the glass door as it swung closed behind me. Eighteen years later I still remember seeing him half saluting, half waving at me, his hand in the half cast as he stepped to the counter to place his order.

I always figured that I would be the one dying, not Rick. P-3s were notoriously safe, slow and the mindset of a P-3 pilot was more of safety than glory.

S-3 Vikings, my aircraft of career choice, were the ones with a sketchy safety record. Aside from the typical carrier flight deck hazards of getting killed fifty different ways on the way to the aircraft, once you launched there was a sudden death sort of roulette.

There was some sort of uncommanded binding of the flight control upon launch that caused immediate death to three of the four flight crewmembers. Depending on which way it rolled, either the left rear or right rear ejection seat was the only seat within survivable parameters.

That’s why the little voice didn’t bug me. I figured I was the one who would die, and that I’d never see it coming.

Am I getting that old?!?

I can’t recall where I first met Rick - somewhere in the Aircrewman pipeline since we didn’t share a common rate. Still, he was cool and we hung out together from time to time either in San Diego while he was in the barracks for SERE school or in Pensacola. Looking back eighteen years later, I’m not sure whether we were in the same Aircrew class or not but it’s probable that we were.

Regardless, Rick Tafoya, AO, was my friend. He and I did the Aircrew ‘cracks’ at Pensacola either separately or together. We ran the seawall, the obstacle course and the cross country course. We learned drown-proofing and swam a mile in the flight suit. We sweat together. We bled together. We could relate to these things because we’d both had to do them. SERE school was no different.

We learned our inner limits and then we pushed them farther than we thought possible. In doing so, we grew and in doing so, we were all brothers.

Rick’s Goals: Getting Commissioned From The Ranks

We all wanted to actually FLY the plane and we saw Aircrew as a blue-collar way to get there. As Aircrewmen we knew we were the top 1% of the enlisted Navy, and to be accepted into the ECP or NAVCAD programs like Norman Johnson, another contemporary was just a matter of choosing which way to the commission.

If I recall right Rick told me when I saw him that he’d applied to the ECP - Enlisted Commissioning Program - and he urged me to do the same. We all were looking for ways to get

And that other Single Anchor. The pilot’s wings. Rick, like all of us, loved the lifestyle of Naval Aviation. We just weren’t the same as other people. Pilots treated us like little brothers for the most part while we were flying, and we were trained professionals in a dangerous and demanding role.

Most everyone knew at least one or two guys who had their private pilot’s license in Aircrew. I can’t think of a time at any command I was in which didn’t have at least one Aircrew pilot available who we could bum rides from in a Cessna or other base flying club aircraft.

Rick and I both had common friends. One of my great friends at the time, Duncan, was roommates with Brian Cerino, an AW who I knew from A School who was another of Rick’s squadron mates who perished. His story will come later.

The Worst Air Accident In Naval Aviation

During training a few months into 1991 we had just mustered for the morning at VS-41’s schoolhouse when the news got out that there had been a tragic accident off the coast of San Diego between two P-3s.

From the Los Angeles Times, March 23, 1991 article:

…Word of the deaths shattered families around the country.

Among them was the family of Richard Anthony Tafoya, 21, of Glendale, a 1987 graduate of Glendale’s Hoover High School. Tafoya enlisted in the Navy during his senior year to pursue his dream of becoming a "Top Gun"–one of the Navy’s best fighter pilots.

Standing in the driveway of the apartment building where Richard grew up, Tom Tafoya, 25, said his little brother, the youngest of the three Tafoya children, was well on his way to fulfilling his goal.

He was accepted into the Navy’s Officer Training School, Tafoya said. He was so close to becoming a pilot, so close…:

His death seemed impossible, said his sister Valerie Tafoya, 23. After all, just last weekend Richard had driven down from Moffett Naval Air Station near San Francisco to visit his family.

"He was very family oriented," she said. "All his nieces and nephews loved him because he would play with them and he always seemed happy."

In San Diego, meanwhile, Navy officials reported that they had found two lines of debris, including exposure suits and helmets, about 100 yards apart in the ocean.
And at Moffett, in Mountain View, a grim-faced group of Navy officials–buoyed until Thursday morning by the military victory in the Persian Gulf–announced the beginning of two separate investigations to determine what caused the crash that apparently took the lives of Tafoya and 26 others.

The two all-weather P-3 Orion turboprop planes collided in a fiery flash in stormy weather at 2:26 a.m. Thursday 60 miles southwest of San Diego. One plane apparently was arriving to relieve the other, which had been airborne for 7 1/2 hours.

Survivor’s Guilt

I’ll never forget Scarlett’s voice on the phone that morning as she read me the names and ages of the enlisted onboard the two planes. I knew two right away - Tafoya and Cerino.

"My God Chuck", she said as she read one of the ages, "this boy’s not even old enough to drink. He’s only nineteen!"

I reminded her that I was only nineteen. She started crying as she made it through the list, and we soon hung up.

I had two friends whose name I recognized. Hearing Rick’s name was like a knife through my side. I felt rage, sick, you name it, seven steps to acceptance.

That single moment affected Scarlett as well. While I went on to the fleet, and to do several combat WestPacs, Scarlett was stuck in C-12 flight attendant mode. She told me a few years later that it didn’t seem fair that she was restricted from flying combat while our friends died in training accidents, and that it wasn’t fair that she was soaking up a full time shore position someone else could be using in rotation.

As far as I can tell looking back eighteen years ago, Scarlett developed Survivor’s Guilt and her life changed gradually. If I remember correctly, she gave up her flying position and just went back to ground crew until she got out sometime in the mid-1990s.

Thinking back, she was a casualty of the accident as were we all in some manner or another. All the fun we had enjoyed up until then vanished. While the rest of us went off to war, Scarlett dealt with the pain by getting more hardcore about her job but still left the service disillusioned a few years later and we lost touch.

Had I not picked VS as my platform. it could have easily been me onboard a VP-50 plane. I would have been in the VP pipeline, and knowing those folks at Alameda and Moffett, I probably would have picked orders to a squadron based there.

It affected me as well, but I had a combat job to focus on. One of my instructors told us in Aircrew that friends of ours would die. Up until now it had never been so many all at once.

The Impact

The VP-50 mishap was my first glimpse of how grown men handle grief. It was a life changing moment. We were a tight community, we knew each other by name, reputation, face, or in some cases, by sea story.

After the phone call I told Duncan and some others who had been killed. Duncan was Cerino’s roommate and he took it pretty well. I don’t recall if we all met at his room later that afternoon or if he was living off base, but we talked about it as well as we could with our first brush with death.

We all were thinking the same thing. I saw more than one near fistfight in the halls that day as we all went through our duties on edge. Nobody could concentrate. The instructors and some of the students had no doubt heard of it hours prior through their own social network, one that I developed as well when I hit the fleet.

Some of the instructors were on edge also. I remember hearing raised voices in the staff room. Most took the day off as soon as they could clear out.

Topping it off it was a Thursday, the day of the week all the students performed Field Day and scrubbed and waxed the hallways. Afterward we cleared out to grieve in our own separate fashions or in small groups.

In America we lose maybe fifty thousand lives each year in auto accidents, and in the military we lose a fraction of that. In fact, there are those who say that more military died under Clinton in training accidents than under Bush with the war on terror. In our social network, we lost a disproportionate amount because our jobs were inherently risky.

What Really Happened at 2:32am | Cliffy’s Report

Years later I would hear the story of VP-50’s midair from another source. Brian "Cliffy" Kerr, one of the senior AW2s at VS-38, who was on duty in the CIC (Command Information Center) of the USS Abraham Lincoln - the ASWMOD (Anti-Submarine Warfare Module).

Kerr was a tough guy by nature with a bushy mustache and a penchant for flatulence on command. He was also operationally brilliant. Stick him in a plane or position of leadership and he was completely professional and by the book. He and I didn’t always see eye to eye, but he was good. He was also the one who hosted my wing-drinking party even after the 1991 Tailhook fallout made it illegal. That made him ballsy as well.

Brian told me later that at 2:32am he was the night Assistant Division Officer who started the mishap / rescue procedure when he heard one of his radio operators monitoring Alpha X-Ray, the ASW radio say that he couldn’t raise either P-3’s flight crew. Brian checked with radar and they didn’t have either plane squawking IFF transponder.

They were all gone.

Brian told me that it was the hardest thing to pull out the big heavy 3-ring binder which had the step by step procedures in it.  It was hard because he knew in his heart at that moment that he knew some or all of the aircrewmen onboard.

Brian’s take was that they were coming down as the other P-3 was climbing and they just impacted without ever seeing each other. I asked him if it could have been prevented and he shook his head stating there was no precedence, maybe if the aircraft commanders had thought of it. Otherwise it was just another case of pilot error.

Since then, the lesson written in blood in ASW operations was to always have sight of the other party or to standoff at least five miles or so with constant headings.

From the LA Times:

… In Glendale on Friday, the talk among friends and neighbors who had gathered to console Richard Tafoya’s family was not of mechanical failure or the lack of it, or even whether stormy weather was the culprit. It was of a young man’s passion for playing his guitar and for running–both of which his family said he excelled in.

They recalled that he had received a varsity letter in football his senior year at Hoover, earned good grades and was well-known both at school and in his neighborhood.

"He was an unselfish person, one who would do anything to help others," his brother said.

"He had many, many friends in Glendale and in the Navy."

Rick was my friend and I miss him

Rick Tafoya is one of my heroes because he was my friend. He and Cerino were not people I saw daily but we were all family. He and I did the Aircrew ‘cracks’ at Pensacola. We ran the seawall. We ran the obstacle course and the cross country course.

We sweat together. We bled together. We learned our inner limits and then we pushed them farther than we thought possible. In doing so, we grew up together and as such, we were brothers. As Scarlett is one of our sisters. We all hurt when one of us hurt.

He was a brother, and I miss him. I miss him not teaching me to snowboard, and to this day I still haven’t learned.

I’m unsure if I’m still waiting for Rick, nearly twenty years later, smiling and scruffy, hand outstreched in a mock wave or salute, to call me up so we can go hit the slopes and he can teach me how to grind.

Until that day, Rick.