When I was a kid, my mom and dad took us on a trip through Europe camping in a VW Bus. One of the places we went to was Pompeii, and seeing those plaster casts of people all huddled together and had an effect on me.
As a 13 year old, I felt in my heart the utter hopelessness that those human beings felt as death approached, asphyxiation by hot gasses, then entombed in ash until someone found the empty voids centuries later which they cleverly used as casts. I thought about that often after that, and not just as a kid.
I had an experience once in the Navy that brought that memory back to me.
I used to be a Flight Deck Troubleshooter on the carrier JFK, which meant that as my squadron's planes taxied up to the catapult, I would, with another Troubleshooter from my squadron, stay with the plane right up until it was catapulted into the sky.
I was relatively new to the job and still learning the ropes on the day this took place.
There was a F-14 Tomcat being readied for launch, and the JBD (Jet Blast Deflector) rose up out of the flight deck. My fellow troubleshooter and I were positioned on the opposite side of the A-7 Corsair that was next in line to launch. The wings folded down and locked into place, and he and I, positioned under the wingtips on each side of the plane watched as the red lock indicators retracted into the plane, then we rocked the plane side to side by alternately pushing upwards on each wing to ensure it was locked.
When that was done, I walked back to the fuselage on my side, and heard the whine of the engines of the Tomcat on the catapult begin to increase in intensity.
At full power, it got turbulent and hot, behind the JBD, but it was entirely manageable.
However, I had never been there behind the JBD when the Tomcat in front of me went to afterburner. Inexperienced as I was, I missed the signal from the CAT Officer that the F-14 would be going to full afterburner during launch, so I was dawdling around where I shouldn't have been, standing just behind the main landing gear.
When the flames began to come out of the back of those twin Pratt and Whitney TF-30 engines, it got hot quick.
It was too late to run out from behind the JBD, I would have been blown down the flight deck. So I ducked into the starboard wheel well of our Corsair which was about a foot away, and wedged myself inside.
All around me was the roar of the jet engine at idle just a foot or two away from me, and the two roaring beasts vomiting flame out the tailpipes. I could be mistaken, but I recall hearing the Tomcat had five stages of afterburner (If I am wrong, someone will correct me) and as it went into full afterburner, it got damned hot and I couldn't breathe. I pulled the neck of my white turtlenecked flight deck jersey up over my mouth, then immediately over the mouth and nose. Finally, I pushed my face up into the remotest corner of that wheel well.
I wasn't going to get asphyxiated, but it got hot enough that it made me take breaths in little tiny portions, because too much felt dangerous. It seemed like a long time, but when I think through the launch sequence in my mind, from the time he turned on the afterburners until the moment it shot off the catapult couldn't have been more than five seconds.
I have heard that Einstein said, when explaining relativity: "Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute."
With my face shoved up in that corner of the wheel well and sizzling hot exhaust flowing around me like a river, I felt like I had my hand on a hot stove.
After our plane launched, I told my fellow Troubleshooter what had happened (I think his nickname was "Mookie") and he looked at me in surprise and said something like "You were really back behind the JBD when the Tomcat when off? You didn't see the Cat Officer?". I never made that mistake again.
Anyway, when I think of those people who died in the ashes of Pompeii being unable to breathe, I think I understand in a visceral way how that might have felt.
I liked Italy, except for Naples.
That place was a real, dirty pit when I was there in the Seventies. The epitome of a gritty blue class working port in Europe.
Prostitution and Peroni were seemingly the only destinations, and the only time I remember having a really good time was when my squadron had a party at "The Volcano" which was some US military recreation area. That was a fun day:
Otherwise, not much good happened when we made port calls to Naples.
I got kicked out of a hotel while trying to hide under a bed, saw a riot on Fleet Landing, while on Shore Patrol, got chased by a knife wielding transvestite who looked like Alice Cooper, and watched a raucous Naples erupt in craziness on New Years Eve, because nobody was allowed ashore. So we sat on the flight deck and watched. It looked and sounded like a battle zone.
I have heard Naples has since been gentrified.