Mercifully, she wasn’t seasick; she detected no motion at all even though she could see by the closed circuit TV image of the flight deck that they surely were moving across the water.
How beautiful St. Thomas was! And by the looks of it, the day outside was gorgeous. She couldn’t wait to go outside to smell the salt air from the flight deck, to see the blue Caribbean. And later in the day, the pilots were going to fly! So exciting! I can’t wait to watch that!
Everyone in the ready room — except for Shane — wore green flight suit. Like a real sailor, she wore a wash khaki shirt and slacks, another first. She admonished herself for not concentrating on the CO, and once again gave him her attention.
Wilson wrapped up his comments about the upcoming exercise and how he wanted his squadron pilots to behave.
“Remember, our job is to support both the ship’s drills and tasking from SOUTHCOM. We’ve got a nice exercise for us to get some training and have fun, and we’ll hear more about that in a minute. If you are called off an exercise intercept, do it without backtalk and investigate what they want you to look at. If the ship can’t schedule our hops when we want them, too bad, we’ll fly when available. Also during this time we’ll have testers from OPTEVFOR flying with us, like Commander Hopper and Lieutenant Commander Meadows here. They’ll be helping test some Fire Scout UAVs from the small boy Max Leslie, and that ship could be anywhere. So, it’s going to be a fun and diverse three or four weeks in this new and beautiful part of the world for many of you: both exercise and real-world operations, lots of gas from big wing tankers, and flying, which is always a good deal.
“So, we’ve got day and night ops today after a nice week off in port. Now we need to refocus on routine carrier operations. Flight leaders, we need solid preflight briefings, and because the jets have sat for a week, they’ll have some bugs to work out. So don’t press it. Fly smart and fly the brief. Okay, enough motherhood. Stretch, what’s next?”
“Sir, we have the spy next,” answered “Stretch” Armstrong
Wilson gestured to the back of the room. “Okay, new guy, Ensign Duncan, come on up here.”
With heart pounding, Shane gathered her folder and slid out to the aisle and strode forward. Wilson motioned her to stand next to him.
“All right, we’ve got our new guy spy, Shane Duncan, who comes to us from the University of Idaho via a little stop at intel school. Shane, it’s good to have you in the squadron as we’ve been without an intel officer for some time. We need your analysis and knowledge of the local situation, and we look forward to your brief.