They Want to Drop a Bomb in Iran in Honor of My Father, Peter Rodrick

I
’m doomscrolling on Facebook — past puppy photos, Paul Schrader recounting his ayahuasca journey, hopeful dispatches from second and third marriages — when a post stops me.

Someone says that he asked Pete Hegseth to drop a bomb on Iran in the name of my dead father.

The past is the present again.

IT’S NOVEMBER 1979. I’M AN eighth-grader in Oak Harbor, Washington state, folding and rubber-banding copies of the Seattle Times and counting the days. My father, Cmdr. Peter Rodrick, leads VAQ-135 — the Black Ravens — an electronic-warfare squadron flying EA-6B Prowlers out of NAS Whidbey Island. His hangar is five miles from our house. But he isn’t here. He’s never here. 

He’s deployed on the USS Kitty Hawk, and I haven’t seen him in six months. He missed my 13th birthday and a fairly disastrous year at Oak Harbor Junior High marked by paddlings, not asking a crush to dance with me to “Reunited,” and a school reputation entirely built on my ability to eat five ice-cream sandwiches for lunch every day. But that’s about to change. I’m flying to Honolulu on Dec. 10 to meet him and ride the carrier with him back to San Diego. I know it’s happening because the “Welcome Home” signs have been already painted. They are right here in the garage, next to his shrouded MGB convertible.

One night, my mother wakes me up in the middle of the night. Dad is on the phone from Subic Bay in the Philippines. The line is scratchy, but I get the message: The Kitty Hawk is turning around, heading for the Persian Gulf as a show of strength against Iran. The Hawaii trip is gone. It’s back to school, papers, time with my mother and my sisters, the youngest barely two. 

I’m at the Roller Barn for PE two weeks later, trying to skate backward, when a teacher calls my name. Her eyes are wet. She leads me to the benches, where my father’s best friend stands in full uniform, white hat in his hands. He sits beside me, pats my knee. He tells me my father’s plane is missing.

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“The helos are looking for them.”

That was 12 hours ago. I’m a big kid now. I know that means he is gone. Survivors would have been found by now. 

I’m right. All the helicopters find is black oil floating on a blue sea. The wreckage is found 63 miles east of Diego Garcia, not far from where Iranian missiles landed in March. 

I learn later what probably happened: A low-level flight, radar altimeters turned off, a banking turn just a few feet above the sea is misjudged, and  a wing touches water. The plane disintegrates. It is November 28, 1979. My father and his crew are among the first casualities in our undeclared war with Iran.

I TRY TO WATCH TRUMP’S UNDECLARED war on Iran with some distance, but everyone talks of America ending a war that started in 1979. That brings it all back. Then, social media intercedes. I belong to a Facebook group of my dad’s old squadron called “VAQ-135 World Famous Black Ravens Past and Present.” That’s where I saw the following message from a former squadron member. 

I have sent in the following email request:

Subject: Request for Memorialization of EA-6B Prowler Aircrew (VAQ-135) — 1979 Iran Hostage Crisis

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To the Office of the Secretary of Defense,

I am writing to you today as a former ALQ-99 Jammer Technician who served with VAQ-135 during the 1979 Iran Hostage Crisis. I am reaching out to request a specific act of remembrance for four of my brothers-in-arms who I believe were the very first American service members to give their lives in what has become the War on Terror.

In November 1979, while deployed to Diego Garcia in response to the Hostage Crisis, an EA-6B Prowler from our squadron crashed, claiming the lives of:

Cdr Peter Rodrick (Our Commanding Officer)

Lcdr William Coffey

Lt Bradley Brown

Lt John Chorey

These men were at the tip of the spear during the earliest days of our conflict with the Iranian regime. As a veteran of that squadron, it is my request that a piece of ordnance destined for operations related to Iranian-backed threats be marked with their names …

My urge is to write back saying, “Fuck off. Please do not drop a bomb in my father’s name in an unsanctioned war that has already killed hundreds of kids.” 

But then I read the comments. Everyone thinks it is a grand idea. One of the widows from my Dad’s crew adds her thoughts. She was left with an infant who would never know her father. At the memorial service, she let out an anguished, animal scream that I can still hear. 

“Thank you for remembering. I think this would be great.”

I think of her pain and the primal need for revenge. And I think of the tens of thousands of innocents murdered by the Iranian regime. I write nothing. 

Instead, I ask my son to go on a road trip with me.

I’VE WRITTEN ABOUT MY FATHER too much. I wrote a book where I put on a flight suit and deployed with his old squadron for two years. I flew in a Prowler with Cmdr. Hunter Ware, a skipper of the Black Ravens and stand-in for my father. I spent time with Ware at different outposts around the Middle East, including on the deck of the USS Lincoln in the Persian Gulf. I thought how easily an Iranian trawler could launch a missile and destroy the aircraft on deck. 

But that was more than a decade ago. Since then, my wife and I have had a son. He was born on Nov. 28, the day of my father’s crash. We named him Peter. My Navy buddies from the book are now retired, and we mostly talk of our kids, backaches, and that time the cops chased us 20 years ago coming out of Raffles Hotel in Singapore.

Our son is 12. I’ve done the math, and on Aug. 28 he will be the exact age I was when I lost my father. We now live about two hours from NAS Whidbey, but I never gave serious thought to taking him to the base to see the Prowler Memorial where his grandfather’s name is etched on a plaque along with all of the other aviators killed flying the Prowler. One thing I learned while writing about my father is the idea of closure is a joke best kept to yourself. Nothing changes. 

But now I want to go, I want him to see it. And there is someone I want him to meet.

That weekend, a F-15E fighter jet is shot down in the Iranian mountains. Two parachutes are seen. The pilot is rescued quickly, but his weapons officer is missing. The value to the Iranian regime of having a captured airman to put on television is incalculable. Trump knows this. Planes are scrambled, special forces pack into helicopters and head into Iran.  

My friend Brian Danielson knows too much about rescue missions. I first met Danielson, a now retired Navy commander, at NAS Whidbey in 2010 while working on my book. He was giving a presentation at the officers club on the hundreds of sorties flown in December 1969 attempting to rescue the pilot and bombardier of Boxer-22, an Air Force F-4 Phantom shot down while on a bombing mission over Laos. 

Danielson quickly took the audience through a PowerPoint of what happened next. Both men ejected safely, but landed on opposite sides of the Nam Ngo River. Like in Iran, the Air Force threw everything to find them. A-1 Skyraiders flew low and laid down ground fire. Helicopters spotted the pilot and moved in. They got close enough that Airman 1st Class David Davison laid down machine gun fire. But he was killed by ground fire.

Night fell and the aviators were told to hide until morning. The next day, hundreds of sorties were flown over the area. They still couldn’t get close enough. The pilot’s transmissions got desperate, he reports troops were moving in. Then they stopped. Another night passed. Miraculously, a rescue helo maneuvered through enemy fire the next day and picked up the delirious, near-dead bombardier. 

The pilot was listed as MIA. His name was Air Force Lt. Benjamin Franklin Danielson, Brian’s father. Brian was a baby back in Kenyon, Minnesota, and his early memories are of his dad on the MIA list. He imagined his father might walk off one of the Freedom Birds, planes that brought home Vietnam POWs at the end of the war, but he didn’t. Ben Danielson was moved to KIA status in 1976. 

Brian becomes a naval aviator and tries to make his father proud. In 2003, Benjamin Danielson’s dog tags were found in Laos along with a human shoulder bone not far from his crash site. Three years later, Brian made a trip to Laos with a POW-MIA task force and dug through the mud in search of his father. Listening to the presentation, my eyes fill with tears. I want to leave. His story is too close to my own. 

At first, Danielson says, they were digging at the wrong spot, and it took a whiskey bribe to get him to the precise point where his father disappeared. At this point in the presentation, Steamer stopped for a moment. I could hear his breathing through the public-address system. “I was carrying a bag of flowers. I laid them where we assumed that he was killed.” 

He paused again and gave a sad smile. “I’m not very happy about admitting this, but I tried to go where I thought he was.” He pointed at a speck on a map. “I started walking into the trees, and I got lost. It wasn’t what I’d expected.”

Eventually, DNA proved that the shoulder bone found belonged to his father. Brian accepted the remains, and on May 8, 2007, a funeral procession made a slow trek toward Kenyon’s First Evangelical Lutheran Church, the place where Benjamin and Mary Gates, Brian’s mom, had been married 44 years before. 

I tell Brian’s story to my son on the way to his house. He listens quietly.

“Is that all true?”

I say yes. Before we reach Brian’s house, I take my son through my childhood. We drive by the Roller Barn, where I got the news. We creep through the neighborhood and I show him the street where my friends and I played football daily. It seems smaller now. I linger outside the old house, stopping where a long black car holding the base chaplain parked the day of my father’s crash. I wonder if I’m torturing my son, trying to shift some of my grief onto him, or if I just want him to understand someone he will never meet, or why someone wants to drop a bomb in his grandfather’s name. 

We then head to Brian’s house, just a mile away. 

It’s been 15 years since we met. Brian and I have drank many small beers, talking about missing fathers and boyhood fantasies about how they might still be alive since their bodies were never recovered. Most of the time we talk about the horseshit that is modern life. 

We hug and I debate whether I should even bring up the latest news. That morning, President Trump announced on social media “WE GOT HIM.” The Air Force airman is saved. Later, details emerge of a massive effort in the Iranian mountains that involved hundreds of aircraft, a hastily created airfield, and special forces on the ground. The cost is immense, multiple aircraft had to be destroyed lest they fall into enemy hands, but the most complex rescue mission since Boxer-22 has brought someone home.

I decide not to say anything at first. Out of the Navy, Brian had gone full Viking, growing an auburn beard that stretched down to his chest. But he is freshly shorn. “I gave the eulogy at Arlington for a repatriated POW.” He smiles. “I didn’t think the beard would have been a good look.”

We head over to the base with Brian driving his BMW. I try to defuse my own discomfort, by telling self-lacerating stories from my boyhood. There’s the place where I was the worst Boy Scout waiter at the pancake breakfast. There’s the place where I had my singular moment of athletic glory, making a one-handed catch in little league football. And there’s the Catholic church led by the priest who invited me to call him anytime after Dad died and who, decades later, was accused of being a pedophile. 

I continue blabbering as we pull through NAS Whidbey’s main gate. I have Brian stop at the Navy Chapel. We park in the exact spot where my mother pulled our 1977 Buick station wagon into for the memorial service. A Navy friend leaned into our car and try to prop up my mother.

“Barb, you can build a whole new life,” 

She answered in a single word.

“No.”

We head over to the Prowler Memorial. It’s near the flight line, where EA-18G Growlers, the Prowler’s successor, are parked. Down the runway, a large transport plane idles, waiting to load up a squadron and fly them to a deployment, maybe the Middle East, maybe elsewhere.

The memorial features a mothballed Prowler mounted on a platform. At the base are the names of the lost aviators. A statue shows two aviators in conversation, debriefing a mission. I’ve been here before, and I tell Peter that I don’t know why they made the two pilots so short. He walks toward them.

“Dad, come over here,” he says. “They’re normal height.”

And he’s right. Brian and I try to explain the Prowler’s mission — radar jamming, electronic warfare — but it comes out in fragments. We linger over his grandfather’s plaque: CDR. Peter Rodrick VAQ-135 28 NOV 1979. I snap some photos. 

Then we go.

We drive back to Brian’s house and grab a basketball. We head to a nearby park so Peter can shoot, and we can talk. Brian gives me updates on his three kids; one of his sons is now a military aviator, like his father and grandfather. I gingerly bring up today’s rescue mission and wonder if it is hard for him, leaving the implication that it must be because his own father never made it home. Brian is a kind man, but he looks at me as if I am an insane person.

“Are you kidding? This country is so torn up, but we still value one American life,” Brian says. “I like that we hold ourselves to that standard.” He lets out a rare grin. “Shit no, it’s awesome that we can still come together and do something like this.”

He pauses for a second.

“Fuck the mullahs.”

And that’s when I remember I’d forgotten part of Brian’s story. During the Iraqi War, Brian and other Prowler officers served in Iraq on a task force using their electronic-warfare expertise to combat the lethal cellphone-triggered IEDs that killed hundreds of American soldiers. The explosives were sourced to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

“They had these EFPs [explosively formed projectiles] which were just gruesome and horrible,” Brian says.  “Those were all brought in by Iran. I can’t tell you if this war is going to be successful, but killing the mullahs is a net positive.”

We talk about the Facebook post from one of my father’s squadron mates urging Hegseth to drop bombs on Iran in his name. I tell him that I’m furious. He suggests maybe I take a step back.

“People have a need to do something, misguided as they are. And often it involves their own ego,” Brian says. He tracks down one of Peter’s errant shots. “It’s annoying as fuck when it involves your own life. I like the people who genuinely care and do shit from the heart, but they are usually the quiet ones.” 

He pauses for a moment and we look into the Whidbey sky, the same sky I stared at as a Prowler flew overhead when I was a boy, wondering if it was my father’s plane. Brian shags another ball and shouts back toward me.

“No one is going to understand what we have been through.”

I FEEL THE CLOCK TICKING WITH my son. It’s irrational, but I am trying to pack as many memories into the time before he hits the age when my father died. I received a tiny inheritance from my mother, and this year it has been spent taking Peter to a Maui basketball tournament, the Canadian Rockies to learn how to ski, and, last month, to San Jose, California, for the Sweet 16. 

Tonight, we stop at a hotel halfway home so we don’t miss the Michigan-Connecticut NCAA final. We’re rooting for the Wolverines and have given each of their players nicknames that are only funny to the two of us.

“Dad, Punky Brewster can’t hit a shot, but he has six assists.”

I read the news on my laptop. Trump is promising to burn Iran to the ground. In a few hours, he will post, “A whole civilization will die tonight.”

And I know none of it — none of it — is going to bring him back.

I make a Chipotle run at halftime, and we eat dinner looking at the stats on his iPad. I tell him I appreciate him making the trip with me. He smiles.

“Dad, I got to miss a day of school. It wasn’t hard. I’m proud of you.”

I ask him why.

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“I just am.”

He gives me a hug. We go back to the game.