Crash Course

I had heard the basic story dozens of times; I'd even lived it: NIMBYs (as developers call them) versus the public good. The Navy wants to build what it calls an "outlying landing field" (OLF) in eastern North Carolina so its carrier pilots, based at its Oceana Field near Norfolk, Virginia, can practice landing their F-18s. F-18s (a.k.a. Super Hornets) are the noisiest planes in the Navy's inventory, and local residents and environmentalists don't want them. What a surprise.

Then I started reading court documents and press clips and couldn't stop and couldn't believe. It wasn't a story about a landing field at all. It was a story about the lawlessness, profligacy, politicization, incompetence, and abject stupidity of the U.S. military as commanded by the Bush White House under the guise of the "global war on terror."

Before September 2003, when the Navy announced that the global war on terror required it to build the OLF on 30,000 acres on the Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula in northeastern North Carolina, it had visited the site only in summer. It had heard that there was this wildlife refuge three miles to the northeast, but it hadn't seen many birds in the area. There was a good reason for this: The 113,000-acre Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge, identified by BirdLife International as a Globally Important Bird Area, is waterfowl wintering habitat, where about 24,000 tundra swans (25 percent of those in eastern North America) and 70,000 snow geese hang out between trips to and from their Arctic breeding grounds.

Challenges in district and appellate court to the Navy's environmental impact statement by Audubon (joined by Defenders of Wildlife, the North Carolina Wildlife Federation, and Washington and Beaufort counties) have stopped the project, but only until the Navy completes a supplemental EIS. And while that document may meet the technical requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act, the plaintiffs are not optimistic that it will accurately report the danger to wildlife or, for that matter, to pilots. Super Hornets will do 15,825 practice landings and 15,825 practice takeoffs annually, mostly at night when the birds are roosting, and often one of each every three minutes.

The Navy's interest in birds is no less keen than Audubon's, though for a different reason. When large birds enter engines or strike canopies, aircraft tend to crash. On December 7, 2005, the Navy conducted Super Hornet test flights over its proposed OLF site in Washington and Beaufort counties and on December 8 at an alternate site in nearby Hyde County, but now tundra swans and snow geese were fresh in from the Arctic, roosting at night on the refuge's Pungo Lake and, by day, billowing out into private cropland to feed. At both sites onlookers gasped as Super Hornets banked sharply to avoid "ingesting" waterfowl. The avian air traffic caused flights at Hyde County to be aborted.

Watching the first flyover at Washington and Beaufort counties was former Navy flight officer Brian Roth, now mayor of the nearby town of Plymouth. "The plane was very fortunate not to collide with the flock [of tundra swans]," he told the press. "That is clearly what we'd call a near miss."

The two-day air show was just one of countless performances that seemed to have been lifted from the old TV sitcom McHale's Navy. In 2000, a year before the start of the global war on terror, the Navy explained that it needed the OLF because residents of Norfolk, Hampton, and Virginia Beach had been complaining about jet noise at its Oceana Field. At enormous public expense ($58 million) it had bought up easements around that field so it could create a buffer. But it never enforced the easements, and the land got developed. Now it was politically inexpedient to evict the squatters.

In 2004 Rear Admiral Stephen Turcotte advised the public that the OLF site in Washington and Beaufort counties had been selected “because it is in the middle of essentially nowhere.” That didn’t sit well with the North Carolinians whose land the Navy has bought or condemned, also at enormous public expense ($6.4 million), and whose homes it plans to flatten with bulldozers instead of enforcing its easements in Virginia.

Nor did the comment sit well with Mayor Roth, who had been under the impression that despite its meager population of 4,000, his historic town of Plymouth mattered. On the steamy afternoon of July 25, 2006, he proudly showed me Civil War artillery along the Roanoke River and a moored replica of that conflict’s most successful ironclad, the CSS Albemarle. And he pointed out bullet holes left in grand old houses during the Battle of Plymouth in April of 1864, when 13,000 Rebels routed Union garrisons from three waterfront forts in the last victory for the Confederacy.

Addressing the first OLF study-group meeting convened by North Carolina Governor Michael Easley, Rear Admiral Turcotte, participating by speakerphone, explained that “South Carolina law” made it easy to move farms out of the project’s path. When the committee chairman reminded him that the OLF was planned for North Carolina, Turcotte offered this (in jest, he went on to explain): “Driving up 95, they both look the same.”