Word: nimitz
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...squadron who flew into Iraq the first harrowing night of Desert Storm in 1991. "Everybody on the ship is prepared," McLaughlin says. "We all understand our role here as instruments of policy--gunboat diplomacy. Now it's like the old adage, 'Put me in the game, coach.'" The Nimitz's fighter pilots had devoted two weeks to poring over secret lists of targets in Iraq, according to Pentagon officials. The strikes, by Navy and Air Force jets as well as by cruise missiles, would be at the suspected weapons facilities Saddam has tried to hide from U.N. inspectors. Fighter pilots...
...aviator slang for flights over southern Iraq. The missions were routine, and until recently flyers joked that they would "have a better chance of seeing Jesus than an Iraqi jet." Even the past week, the skies had been quiet. No Iraqi radar had been turned on to "paint" the Nimitz's jets as targets, so far as the pilots could tell. Still, "every time you get in the jet and go over Iraq, you never know if this is going to be the day they're going to take a potshot at you," explained McLaughlin, 29, from Newport Beach, Calif...
...that something will happen, so guys are going into the box with that mind-set." It was the threat to the U-2 spy plane that was setting off the pilots' internal alarm bells. They knew that if Saddam Hussein even tried to fire at a U-2, the Nimitz air warriors would be launched in reprisal. When a U-2 flew early last week, the pilots "spooled up," sensing that the call might come quickly. Now, with more U-2 flights planned, the flyers were spooling up again. The feeling toward Saddam in the ready rooms was about...
DOUGLAS WALLER, our State Department correspondent, left Foggy Bottom last week to get a closer look at diplomacy--or the lack of it--in action. He flew to the U.S.S. Nimitz, somewhere in the Persian Gulf. Waller knows his way around carriers, having recently completed a book on Navy pilots that will be published by Simon & Schuster next June. Still, getting to the ship required some doing, between getting permission to board and rousting out a groggy Bahraini official in the middle of the night to obtain a visa. Waller's efforts result in a rare glimpse of the intricate...
...booze allowed. Well, almost. According to naval tradition, if a ship is at sea more than 45 days, each crew member is entitled to a ration of two cans of beer. Just two. One man, the captain, decides whether the crew gets them. As of Tuesday, the Nimitz will be at Day 45. It has 5,500 sailors, so flying in 11,000 cans of beer poses a logistical challenge. The clock is ticking, but the betting here is that the beer won't come until the crisis in Iraq has passed...