Burning the Days (23 page)

As I fly this time I remember missions over endless sky beaches formed by clouds, the solitude and clear, ionized taste of pure oxygen, looking hard at nothing with no chance, it seemed, of other than nothing, searching along the empty horizon, then a little higher, or back where the enemy sometimes materialized in the rearmost corner of one’s eye—lackluster missions when out of nowhere, suddenly, here they come.

I finished with one destroyed and one damaged, which I would sometimes, among the unknowing, elevate to a probable, never more; to do that would be soiling the very thing fought for.

When I returned to domestic life I kept something to myself, a deep attachment—deeper than anything I had known—to all that had happened. I had come very close to achieving the self that is based on the risking of everything, going where others would not go, giving what they would not give. Later I felt I had not done enough, had been too reliant, too unskilled. I had not done what I set out to do and might have done. I felt contempt for myself, not at first but as time passed, and I ceased talking about those days, as if I had never known them. But it had been a great voyage, the voyage, probably, of my life.

I would have given anything, I remember that. The moments of terror—alone, separated from the leader, and seeing, like a knell, drop tanks with their foreign shape and thin, vaporous trails falling silent to both right and left—the sometimes ominous briefings and preparation, the dark early mornings which for me were
the worst—none of it mattered. A few years afterwards I won a gunnery championship in North Africa and led an acrobatic team—I had, in short, learned equitation. We dropped from the sky into distant countries and once in a while in a locker room or bar I would hear a remark that someone, a name from those days, had been killed in a flying accident, but like Conrad’s shipmates on the
Narcissus,
I never saw any of them again.

BURNING THE DAYS

I
FLEW IN THE
75th, the 335th in Korea, the 22nd in Germany, and at the end with the 119th Squadron in New Jersey, years of it, like cavalry years, the waiting by empty runways, the barren operations rooms, the apocalyptic sound of engines tremendous and uneven, the idleness and cynicism, the myth.

In those days there was nothing in the world but us. The rarity was fine. There were other squadrons, of course. Some you knew quite well. Ships from all three squadrons in the group and also from other fields came in past the little shack on wheels by the side of the runway. Many times it is you yourself who are returning, coming back beneath the clouds, seeing the long straight runway, or the hangars alongside it blurring in the rain—an incomparable happiness, the joy of coming home.

——

We had pilots named Homer and Ulysses, country boys unfrivolous by nature who took good care of their cars. Farm boys, for some reason, always seemed the truest men. They were even-tempered and unhurried in the way of someone who will watch a man doing something foolish and not make any comment—the joke will come at the end. They became flyers instead of going to the
city though of course it was not the same thing, and they saw the world from a distance—the Grand Canal like a gray thread winding among the barely distinguishable piazzas far below, the unmistakable narrowing spire of Paris rising above the haze. Beneath them passed all the miracles of Europe, few of great interest—their wonders were more elemental, in a room, standing naked with a member like a grazing horse’s, in front of a full-length mirror with a German whore. Some married waitresses.

You knew them, that is to say their ability and to an extent their character, but much was hidden. After two or three years you knew little more than at the start, but still you were attached to their silence, the honesty of their thoughts. One night one of them, on a motorcycle, sped into the concrete pillar of a bridge and was in the hospital for weeks, legs broken, jaw bound together with silver wire. Nevertheless when I came into the room he managed to smile. He had a willing nature and the name of an ace, strange and abrupt: Uden. Broad and capable hands, fearless eyes, yet somehow it all came to nothing. Face-to-face for the last time at the noisy farewell party, the blue, farm-country eyes suddenly filled with tears. “I know I’ve disappointed you.”

“That’s true.”

“I just wanted you to know one thing—I won’t do it the next time.”

That was true also. There was no next time. A year later someone was describing an accident at Myrtle Beach, a night takeoff with full fuel load, 450-gallon drop tanks, the planes wallowing, the overcast seamlessly black. The join-up was in sky undivided between the darkness of air and water, a sky without top or bottom; in fact there was no sky, only total blackness in which, banking steeply to try and catch up with the lights of the fleeing leader, the number-three man, low in the roaring nightmare, determined to do well, went into the sea. Uden.

The leader of that flight was one of the great war aces; highly
visible and bulletproof; there were a number still around. Combat had never really ended for them. The sign on the desk of one read,
The mission of the Air Force is to fly and fight, and don’t you ever forget it.
Blakeslee, another, an untamable fighter whose reputation was one of temper and violence, I met only once, in my final year of flying. It was at a dinner dance in Germany and he walked into the bar of the club not in uniform with two or three significant ribbons but dressed like the owner of a 1930s nightclub in an out-of-fashion tuxedo with a stiff shirt. He stood down at the end, a little apart; I would not have known who he was had the bartender not greeted him by name.

A couple of young officers, transients like myself, approached him as he stood waiting for his order. They were F-104 pilots from England. In war it is not like other things, where youth is arrogance. War is terra incognita. The young are usually eager to have the curtain lifted, even slightly, by one of the greats.

“Evening, Colonel,” they said.

He looked at them without expression. His power was such that he could destroy the ego of all but the most aggressive.

“Sir,” one of them said, “I just wanted to ask you a question. It’s something I’ve never been able to get an answer to. It’s about German aces.”

Blakeslee, who had been a colonel and then reduced in rank, possibly for cause, so he was now a lieutenant colonel, stood there. He listened without showing the least sign of interest.

“Is it true,” the young captain went on, “that the Germans counted their kills by the number of engines and would get four victories for, say, shooting down a B-17?”

Perhaps Blakeslee knew the answer. Perhaps he was weighing the real intent of the question. His face was heavier than it once had been, his body thicker. The electric skies over the Reich with their decks of clouds, shouts on the radio, confusion and vertical descents, those legend skies were gone. Finally he spoke.

“I don’t know,” he said slowly. He was picking up three or four glasses. “I only know one thing: it’s all phoney,” he said.

They like to say you cannot understand unless you’ve been there, unless you’ve lived it. You could not argue with his scorn.

——

How well one remembers that world, the whiff of jet exhaust, oily and dark, in the morning air as you walk to where the planes are parked out in the mist.

Soon you are up near the sun where the air is burning cold, amid all that is familiar, the scratches on the canopy, the chipped black of the instrument panel, the worn red cloth of the safety streamers stuffed in a pocket down near your shoe. From the tailpipe of the leader’s plane comes an occasional dash of smoke, the only sign of motion as it streaks rearwards.

Below, the earth has shed its darkness. There is the silver of countless lakes and streams. The greatest things to be seen, the ancients wrote, are sun, stars, water, and clouds. Here among them, of what is one thinking? I cannot remember but probably of nothing, of flying itself, the imperishability of it, the brilliance. You do not think about the fish in the great, winding river, thin as string, miles below, or the frogs in the glinting ponds, nor they of you; they know little of you, though once, just after takeoff, I saw the shadow of my plane skimming the dry grass like the wings of god and passing over, frozen by the noise, a hare two hundred feet below. That lone hare, I, the morning sun, and all that lay beyond it were for an instant joined, like an eclipse.

One night in early spring there were two of us—I was wingman. No one else was flying at the time. We were landing in formation after an instrument approach. It was very dark, it had been raining, and the leader misread the threshold lights. We crossed the end of the runway high and touched down long. In exact imitation I held the nose high, as he did, to slow down, wheels skipping
along the concrete like flat stones on a lake. Halfway down we lowered the noses and started to brake. Incredibly we began to go faster. The runway, invisible and black, was covered with the thinnest sheet of ice. Light rain had frozen sometime after sundown and the tower did not know it. We might, at the last moment, have gone around—put on full power and tried to get off again—but it was too close. We were braking in desperation. I stop-cocked my engine—shut it off to provide greater air resistance—and a moment later he called that he was doing the same. We were standing on the brakes and then releasing, hard on and off. The end of the runway was near. The planes were slithering, skidding sideways. I knew we were going off and that we might collide. I had full right rudder in, trying to stay to the side.

We slid off the end of the runway together and went about two hundred feet on the broken earth before we finally stopped. Just ahead of us was the perimeter road and beyond it, lower, some railroad tracks.

When I climbed out of the cockpit I wasn’t shaking. I felt almost elated. It could have been so much worse. The duty officer came driving up. He looked at the massive, dark shapes of the planes, awkwardly placed near each other, the long empty highway behind them, the embankment ahead. “Close one, eh?” he said.

This was at Fürstenfeldbruck, the most lavish of the prewar German airfields, near Munich. We came there from our own field, Bitburg, in the north, the Rhineland, to stand alert or fire gunnery close by. Zulu alert, two ships on five-minute, two on fifteen. The long, well-built barracks, the red tile roofs and marble corridors. The stands of pine on the way to the pilots’ dining room, where you could eat breakfast in your flying suit and the waitresses knew what you preferred.

We were not far from Dachau, the ash-pit. One of them. I had seen its flat ruins. That Otto Frank, Anne Frank’s father, had served as an officer in the German army in the First World War, I
may not have known, but I was aware that patriotism and devotion had not saved him or others. They might not save me, though I swore to myself they would. I knew I was different, if nothing else marked by my name. I acted always from two necessities; the first was to be like everyone, and the second—was it foolish?—was to be better than other men. If I was to be despised I wanted it to be by inferiors.

Munich was our city, its great night presence, the bars and clubs, the Isar green and pouring like a faucet through its banks, the Regina Hotel, dancing on Sunday afternoons, faces damp with the heat, the Film Casino Bar, Bei Heinz. All the women, Panas’s girlfriend in the low-cut dress, Van Bockel’s, who was a secretary and had such an exceptional figure, Cortada’s, who smelled like a florist’s on a warm day. Munich in the snow, coming back to the field alone on the streetcar.

I flew back to Bitburg with White, one of the two men in the squadron to become famous—Aldrin was the other—on a winter day. It was late in the afternoon, everything blue as metal, the sky, the towns and forests, even the snow. The other ship, silent, constant on your wing. With the happiness of being with someone you like, through it we went together, at thirty-five thousand, the thin froth of contrails fading behind.

White had been the first person I met when I came to the squadron and I knew him well. In the housing area he and his wife lived on our stairway. He had a fair, almost milky, complexion and reddish hair. An athlete, a hurdler; you see his face on many campuses, idealistic, aglow. He was an excellent pilot, acknowledged as such by those implacable judges, the ground crews. They did not revere him as they did the ruffians who might drink with them, discuss the merits of the squadron commander or sexual exploits, but they respected him and his proper, almost studious, ways. God and country—these were the things he had been bred for.

In Paris, a lifetime later, in a hotel room I watched as on screens
everywhere he walked dreamily in space, the first American to do so. I was nervous and depressed. My chest ached. My hair had patches of gray. White was turning slowly, upside down, tethered to the spacecraft by a lazy cord. I was sick with envy—he was destroying hope. Whatever I might do, it would not be as overwhelming as this. I felt a kind of loneliness and terror. I wanted to be home, to see my children again before the end, and I was certain it was near the end; I felt suicidal, ready to burst into tears. He did this to me unknowingly, as a beautiful woman crossing the street crushes hearts beneath her heel.

White burned to ashes in the terrible accident on the launching pad at Cape Canaveral in 1967. He died with Virgil Grissom, with whom I had also flown. His funeral was solemn. I attended, feeling out of place. To be killed flying had always been a possibility, but the two of them had somehow moved beyond that. They were already visible in that great photograph of our time, the one called celebrity. Still youthful and, so far as I knew, unspoiled, they were like jockeys moving to the post for an event that would mark the century, the race to the moon. The absolutely unforeseen destroyed them. Aldrin went instead.

White is buried in the same cemetery as my father, not far away. I visit both graves when I am there. White’s, though amid others, seems visible from some distance off, just as he himself was if you looked intently at the ranks.