Unsung Heros
By: Mulderzkid (Ali Cherry)
Spoilers for Scar (2.15)
For submission:
Lt. Brendan "Hot Dog" Constanza
Battlestar Galactica
Colonial Fleet
Colony: Caprica
Unsung Hero
I don't often sit down to write an essay. I thought those things had been left behind when I finished with school. But when the Captain announced the competition at the flight briefing, I decided that maybe I should enter.
We're suppose to talk about a hero in the fleet and many people are probably writing all kinds of things about their Captains and their moms and dads and some are even writing about us, the viper pilots of Galactica, or even writing about Commander Adama or President Roslin; we really are heroes. Not to, ya know, blow my own horn, but we do protect the fleet. It's just…my mom always told me that the real heroes are the ones that are overlooked. The ones that provide the glue for the cracks so the rest of us can do the crazy jobs, and Captain Lee "Apollo" Adama does this, he provides the glue for us Viper pilots, which is why he is a hero to me.
Many people think I'm talking about the heroic things he does in combat. Don't get me wrong he is a spectacular flyer. Not just anyone can fly straight down a conveyer belt tunnel, not just anyone can match Starbuck in one of her reckless moods. Only the Captain can set down on a cubit, front landing strut perfectly positioned. But it is not his flying abilities that make him special, that make him a hero, it is the little things: his strength, his compassion, his stability, and his ability to take the things the squadron doles out, the things we say and imply, and keep smiling.
The life of a Viper pilot is hard. The hours suck, the pay is crap, don't even let me tell you about the food. And a little secret…we're all just a little unstable and insane. You have to be to fly the missions that we do. We go out every single day and expect to die. The expectation of death wears on a person; it grates them down bit by bit. Even before the war, the life expectancy of a Viper pilot wasn't more than 10 years. Even if you love flying, which we all do, the stress on the body, on the mind, it takes its toll. Apollo is a touchstone for us, a rock. Sure we tease him, call him "Captain Tightass," but we respect him.
When the rest of the CAP, Combat Air Patrol, collapses in the bunk after 15 hour shifts, Captain Apollo can usually be found working on paperwork in his closet, uhh… office, or updating the rooster board, or working on Vipers with the deck gang, or pulling a shift in CIC, and yet every Thursday when we get together to play Triad, there he is pulling up a seat, plunking down his money. As hard as we work, he puts in ten times more than any of us. He wouldn't be a hero, not in my head, if he didn't care about us that much as well. Because he doesn't come to the Triad games for the crappy booze or the lame jokes. He comes to talk to us, to make sure we're alright. To let us win if we've had a crappy week; to take us down a notch when we've gotten a bit arrogant. He is a good CAG.
All of us in the fleet have had our share of grief and loss. Some more than others. I was on vacation with my family when the worlds were destroyed, and so I have loved ones to write home to, but there is a need to talk about my best friends, my dog, and my girlfriend. Some days are worse than others, but I know if I sit at the CAG's table at lunch, he'll listen to me. He may not say much, but that's alright, knowing that he'll remember with me, for me, when I forget. Sometimes I'll see a look of pain in his eyes, but for all his compassion, he has never dumped his grief on any of his pilots, or anyone else for that matter. I gathered he was based on the Atlantia, and was well liked, and they were gone… are gone, had the switches to their Vipers pulled and then left to watch as their death aimed for them, and the Captain was flying in a decommissioning exercise and has no pictures of them to place on the wall, no way to remember them. But he doesn't break with his grief as the "stronger" members of our squadron have done. Even this is not what makes him a hero to me. No, I find, for me, what makes Apollo a hero is his nightly ritual.
Apollo is young, capable, controlled. He teaches self-defense classes, he teaches precision maneuvers with Vipers, he is responsible for the refueling of the fleet, and he was the President's military advisor. But his solid stability, his reliability makes him a hero. Every night, after enforced darkness snakes through the ship, Apollo makes his rounds. He strides through the pilot quarters and pulls curtains here, resettles blankets there, turns off lights, and if you're having a bad night, missing people you've lost, or even just missing yourself, your-old-self, he'll lay his hand on yours as he checks on your bunkmate and you know you're not alone. If you need a word, he'll have it.
Some of you may remember that one of the pilots got herself hyped up on stims while Ms. Biers was recording on Galactica. That pilot, "Cat", is my bunkmate. We went through basic flight together, dealt with Starbuck at her deadliest, made our kills, talked, bullshitted, we are friends, close friends, because in the end the people who have lived your life with you are the closest to you here on Galactica. After Cat crashed her Viper, I was lost because I've always thought that she was so much stronger than me, but she had broken, cracked under the stress and grief. What the hell was I going to do? The Captain came through on his rounds and pulled shut Tweeker's curtains. Set Frosty's alarm for him, turned off Racetrack's light and pulled up her covers, and then he leaned down to pull my curtains shut, and I reached out and stopped him. He read the questions in my eyes and squeezed my hand.
"She'll be fine. She'll be stronger because of this. She'll be a better pilot." His voice was quiet, soft, soothing. The CAG has one of the softest voices I know. He doesn't have to shout his commands, he merely states them. He doesn't have to raise his voice to get people to listen, they just do. And his voice is comforting.
"She is so much stronger." I had whispered plaintively. Okay, I was whining, expecting him to make me feel better. If I hadn't been truly rattled by Cat's accident he would have slapped me down, but I was and he can read that in our faces, and so he sighed and looked across the room for a minute, searching for words.
"Everyone gets their strength from someplace different. You aren't Cat, you won't fall apart, you'll hold." And he means it.
"I don't know how you and Starbuck keep it together."
My comment was greeted with a snarky spat of laughter and a wry grin. "Starbuck and I are more frakked up than the rest of you guys put together. We're just better at hiding it." He smiled again, dry and sarcastic, and then it gentled to something real and he patted my hand. "She'll hold. You'll hold. You are both great pilots. You'll survive." He said the last softly, pain twinging his mouth. So many of us haven't returned. So many of us have died, and Apollo carries them all around with him. He carries the Atlantia, all of his buddies from flight school, he carries the memories of his brother and mother, he carries the grief for us, carries the names of the dead, the faces, so that we don't have to.
Recently, restlessness has taken hold in his eyes, in his movements, and he seems less at peace with that grief, or maybe he's more accepting of it, since he nearly died. I don't know, but I saw his face after the explosion of the Dara Maru. He was angry, that we humans could choose death for our fellow human beings. Because whatever else the Captain is, he is a fighter.
These days as I watch as Starbuck disintegrates in grief and bitterness, I know that the Captain will save her. He won't have to push her ship back onto Galactica, as she did his, but he will raise up his glass, and stop the pain from leaking from her heart. He will hold her shattered remains as she puts them back together. And when all is said and done, he will sit down at the Thursday Triad table and listen to us complain about the rotation schedule, and will take the braggart comments that Starbuck throws his way, and he will never mention his own pain, his own problems, or the way he has saved her ass time and again. Because he is the CAG and he is my hero.
Lt. Brendan Constanza, Viper Pilot
Hot Dog looked at his writing in front of him and sighed. It wasn't very good and didn't capture half of the things he noticed about the CAG. Like how, hurting and anxious to look for a missing Starbuck, the CAG had kept his strong hand on Hot Dog's shoulder and then had pinned his own wings on the barf splattered tanks. How Apollo had held Hot Dog's gaze as he had told him, "Constanza, when Galactica says 'shoot,' you shoot. I knew what I was doing; I knew they might order you to take me and the President down. You did your job, Hot Dog, and you did it well." The CAG had been proud of him. "Sometimes you just have to do what you have to do." The gaze had been steady, solid, so very "Apollo" and Constanza had felt better.
"What have ya got there, Hot Dog?" Cat leaned down over his shoulder and skimmed the first few lines. "The CAG, huh?" She nodded perfunctorily at him. "Yeah, I can see that. I mean after we saw him fly into the Conveyor Tunnel. Well, very little has been that frakking cool since. Maybe I'll write my own entry. See if I can't win a little R&R on Cloud 9." She grinned at him, and Hot Dog smiled back.
"Oooo. I'm sweating in my flight suit. You can barely string two words together, nugget." Constanza hastily shoved his essay into his locker as Cat punched him in the arm.
"Better than you and don't even think about calling me, nugget. I'm so far past you; you eat my wingman's vapor trail." Cat pulled out a sheet of paper and a pen, "Now leave me alone so I can win me some sweet time in the sun." She grinned back at him and tuned him out.