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hotel and took them to the Bremerton ferry dock. I remember Jean’s letter telling me how frightened she was. The ferryboat was filled with sailors, Navy officers and civilians like Jean who were working for the Navy. A Navy vessel, with fully manned guns, escorted the ferryboat across Puget Sound to Bremerton. That was the scary part—did the Navy expect an attack by Japanese planes? Then, of course, the fact that no one knew what was going on made it even scarier.
    Funny, Jean didn’t say a word about us and our future. We are at war. Does she wonder about us, about me? She says she was scared, but says nothing about what I might be facing, a Navy pilot fighting in the war. Maybe she hasn’t really thought about it. No sense in saying anything. I’ll just wait.
    I later learned that within a few days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Army arrived in Bremerton with “barrage balloons.” These were large (over 100 feet in length) helium-filled unmanned balloons. They were anchored by long steel cables to large Army trucks and sent into the sky to altitudes of about 1,000 to 1,500 feet. They had been designed to prevent enemy planes from diving on targets in the Navy Yard. One of them was stationed in a cemetery just behind Jean’s parents’ home. The military also issued orders to all civilians, setting up “black-out rules.” Windows had to be covered so no lights could be seen. No night driving was allowed without special headlights. In the case of some civilians who normally drove home from work after dark, the military arranged to house them on the base. Jean was one of those civilians. Others were issued special covers for their car headlights. In a later letter, Jean wrote that, “After about two weeks, I guess our government became convinced that the Japs weren’t going to attack Bremerton. We were allowed to return home and to drive again after dark. Once we realized we were safe, it wasn’t so bad. It fact, it was sort of exciting.”
    Before my flight on December 16, I had been involved for two full days in ground school. I had spent the time reading aircraft handbooks, taking written tests, and sitting in the cockpit of three different aircraft. We were required to pass a written exam on each aircraft we were going to fly and to pass a blindfold cockpit checkout. That meant that we had to be able to touch and identify all the controls in the cockpit while we were blindfolded. Those aircraft were much more complicated than the Yellow Peril. Not counting the new instrument panels, they had radios, wing flaps, propeller controls, different throttle controls and one of them had a retractable landing gear. It was an entirely different kind of flying. The aircraft were much closer to the type I would be flying when and if I received orders to a carrier squadron after graduation.
    Jesus, I hope the Navy knows what it’s doing. I only have 39.5 hours of solo time, and they’re expecting me to fly three different kinds of aircraft. They said some of the flying will be in formation. Damn, it’s hard enough to fly alone. Now they want us to fly with six other planes—even with eight other planes! I hope I can do it. Don’t get nervous up there. Shit, this program gets more dangerous all the time.
    Between December 16 and 24, my log book shows seven flights in an SNV with a total of 9.5 hours of flight time, 4.5 hours of which were solo time. The SNV was a low-wing, all metal monoplane with two cockpits. The cockpits were covered with a sliding canopy. The Vultee Aircraft Company had built it for the Navy as a scouting plane, but it had never been used in the fleet. We called it the “Vultee Vibrator.” The nickname came from the fact that at certain rpm settings of the prop, the entire airplane would start vibrating, which was rather unnerving.
    A right echelon formation.
    On December 28, I had a dual flight with an instructor in an OS-2U. The cadets’ nickname for this plane was the “OS