Nuts

"So here's a nickel on the grass to you, my friend, and your spirit, enthusiasm, sacrifice and courage—but most of all to your friendship. Yours is a dying breed and when you are gone, the world will be a lesser place."

-Anonymous

Man, how life calls you up short.

I started this morning thinking I'd write about a whole host of trivialities, not sure which direction this blog would take.

My first thought had been a reflection on how these GLP-1 drugs I started taking four days ago to deal with a little weight gain since my knee prevented running for over a year now have left me with lots of time for bathroom musings because of one unfortunate side effect.

Then there was the young coed in Athens who was jumping up and down on a mattress in her eighth floor apartment while celebrating the Dawgs' win over the Sooners last Saturday, flew sideways out an open window and down to the pool deck below, and lived.

Or the truly careless and stupid Senate staffer who put together an ambush of Jack Smith by his equally careless and stupid Republican boss, only to have the trap slam shut on their own leg because they didn't realize the Hawks (Atlanta's NBA franchise) and the Hawkeyes (the University of Iowa's team mascot) were two different things.

Then I opened an email letting me and the rest of the guys know that Rob "Nuts" Destasio had passed away a couple days ago.

I don't know why this hit me as hard as it did. Maybe the drugs again. I mean, Nuts and I hadn't seen each other in over 30 years.

He was truly one of the good guys. Nuts served in the 94th "Hat in the Ring" squadron across the parking lot from my squadron, the 27th, when I was stationed at Langley AFB from 1988-91. The Spads, as they were also known, were sort of a fancy pants, show squadron, with a replica World War I biplane out front, and a really nice player piano in their replica French bar, circa 1918 (complete with fake exposed brick and shell-damaged stucco), so they could sing bawdy fighter pilot songs as god intended, as they were sung since the notion of the fighter pilot was invented. Our squadron was actually older, but our digs were comprised mostly of windowless converted hangar space, with a squadron bar that looked a lot like the Perry Elks Lodge before the post-hurricane renovation.

There was, as you might expect, a lot of rivalry between the squadrons. They thought we were jealous of their fine trappings. We thought they were a bunch of sissies who served as the show squadron for Tactical Air Command, which was headquartered at Langley. Whenever some visiting poobah was brought from HQ to see what a real fighter squadron looked like, they were whisked to the Spads' building, and not our dank old setup that smelled vaguely of stale beer and our squadron commander's cigarettes.

So, Nuts was a Spad. We didn't see much of each other except on Fridays at the O Club. What always struck me about him was that he had the "look" we all wished we had--tall, athletic, with sort of a Tony Bennett face and vibe. And he was funny as well, and self-effacing, something you didn't see much in the fighter community back then.

When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August of 1990, the 27th and the 71st, the other squadron comprising the First Tactical Fighter Wing, were called up and deployed to Saudi Arabia. The Hat in the Ring Gang were left behind, in reserve. That was the state of affairs until a few days into the war in January of 1991, when it became obvious that the only way we could fly all the sorties CENTAF had assigned us was to quit sleeping altogether or find us some help. At that point the wing directed the 94th to pull together an all-star team of pilots to travel to Dhahran, get a quick local area "fam hop", and then start flying combat sorties with us. Nuts was one of those all-stars.

I won't tell you he and I sat around the alert barn sharing hopes and dreams and similar nonsense--fighter pilots don't generally do that, particularly in a war. We're more apt to pull out some bit of dark humor that's been around since at least the Vietnam era--for instance, if we walked past the big wall map while a four ship was briefing an upcoming mission, and saw they were going downtown into a blob of antiaircraft defenses, we might blandly ask one of the players if we could have their stereo if, you know, the bad thing happens (note: no one had a stereo in Desert Storm--this was the birth of the Walkman era).

So we did that bit, the war ended, and we came home. A few months later I PCS's to Tyndall to join the Boneheads, and Nuts followed not long thereafter, landing down the tarmac at the 1st TFTS. We lost touch with each other after I left for law school, although my foggy recollection is that he made a couple wing reunions before i stopped going because of, well, MAGA. From a quick google search, I see that he was an object of local interest in Phoenix, where we'd settled, by being videoed offering water from his canteen to a squirrel on a hike through the Arizona hills five months ago. And he was in Vegas two weeks ago on a vacation trip with his fiance.

And now he's gone.

As Peg says about my relationship with my sister, you have to hang onto the shrinking group of people who remember your youth, remember things that only you and those folks experienced together. I can read back over this meander and see, feel, that those years at Langley and the war were some of the most formative of my life, and the guys who were there are the only ones who, while they may have arrived at a different understanding of what all that meant, at least carry around the memories, the sights and sounds and feel of a time that might as well have been a century ago.

So, a nickel on the grass, Nuts. You were one of the good ones.