NED GEIGER. REST IN PEACE

I was sitting down in my easy chair after dinner last night, ready to write something hopefully amusing or at least mildly snarky when my wife looked up from her computer. “My god,” she said. “Tom Baur sent an email. Ned Geiger died.” The news brought me up short. Ned Gieger. . . A name I hadn’t heard - a face I hadn’t seen - in almost 40 years. And yet I could instantly picture him in front of me – slim, dark haired, an incredibly handsome young man, whether in a flight suit or his Service Dress Blues.
We were squadron mates a hundred or so years ago when we were both in our twenties. Ned checked into VAW-122 a few months after the squadron returned to Norfolk from the Med cruise of 1974. He was, like me, a junior NFO – a Naval Flight Officer – the ‘other’ type of aviator, the ones who sat behind the pilot and operated the weapons or the radars back in the days before electronics took over most of those tasks. Ned and I, and Jim Robkin were the junior members of the back end crews who sat way, way behind the pilots in our E-2 Hawkeyes, back in the tail end squeezed in next to the three radar screens, the half dozen radios and a few thousand knobs and toggle switches. The two pilots sat up in the cockpit admiring the scenery while the NFOs plus an enlisted technician who was there to keep the gear from blowing up sat in darkness staring at the blips on our radar screens and listening to the BBC on the HF radio that fed into our helmets.
Ned was good. Whether he was a natural or had to work at it, I couldn’t tell. But he made it look effortless. Our warefare speciality was to vector F-4 Phantoms and later F-14 Tomcats towards whichever radar blips were heading in the general direction of our task force and see if they were airliners or Russian bombers. They were always airliners, but you never knew.
We trained off the Virginia coast, but instead of Russian Bears, we’d run intercepts on Navy Reserve jets. The senior NFO would take control of the bogie and me or Jim or Ned, we’d take the fighter., We’d run the two jets in opposite directions for 40 or 50 miles, then turn them back towards each other at a closing speed of 500 knots, about 570 miles an hour, pretty much 9 and a half miles a minute. The goal was to talk the fighter pilot into the perfect intercept position: a half mile behind and five hundred feet above the enemy. The trick was knowing when to turn your guy so he ended up right on the bogie’s tail – not five miles behind, and certainly not a mile in front. Ned always nailed it. Always. Me, I was inconsistent.  Some days I could do no wrong, most days my pilot wasn’t even close enough to see the other jet.
Ned had a level of competence I could never match. I stayed in for a second tour, but knew the Navy wasn't going to be my life. I assumed that like most of us junior officers, Ned had returned to civilian life, studied law perhaps, climbed the ladder to the executive suite. It would have all been open to him. Instead, the email said that he’d stayed in the Navy and gone on to command one of our sister squadrons. I read an obituary tonight on the US Naval Institute blog that said Ned had been a pillar of the E-2 Hawkeye community, a master tactician, and retired as a Captain. I’m sad at his passing – sad for his family, and sad for those who knew him, even if like me, it was only for a moment of time 40 years ago. Rest in Peace, sailor.