Burning the Days (24 page)

——

You remember the airfields, the first sight of some, the deep familiarity of others.

Apart from those that finally appeared when you were coming in, nose high, in fog or heavy rain, the most beautiful field I ever saw was in Morocco, down towards the south. It was called Boulhaut, a long, flawless black runway built for strategic bombers and never used, the numbers at each end huge and clear—no tire had
ever marked them. You could not but marvel at its extraordinary newness.

I liked fields near the sea, Westhampton Beach on Long Island, Myrtle Beach, Langley, Eglin, Alameda, where we landed in the fall, ferrying planes to be shipped to the fighting in Korea, and went on to Vanessi’s with the navy pilots’ wives. I liked Sidi Slimane for its openness and the German fields, Hahn and Wiesbaden, Fürstenfeldbruck.

There are fields I would like to forget, Polk, where one night, as a rank amateur, I nearly went into the trees, trying clumsily to go around with my flaps down. Later, in the wooden barracks, came another lesson. Two men in flying suits, drab in appearance, paused at the open door of the room where I sat on a bed. “Are you the one flying the P-51? Where are you from?” one asked.

“Andrews,” I said. I felt a kind of glamour, being connected with the silvery plane and its slim, aggressive shape, parked by itself on the ramp. It was not hard to deduce that they were lesser figures, transport pilots probably. I told them I was in the Fourth Group rather than going into the less interesting facts—I was actually a graduate student at Georgetown. They did not seem very impressed. “Ever hear of Don Garland?” I said, naming a noted pilot in the Fourth.

“Who’s that?”

“One of the best pilots in the Air Force.”

“Oh, yeah?”

I offered a few exaggerations I had overheard at one time or another in the Andrews Club. Garland flew the slot position on the acrobatic team, hanging there with his bare teeth, so to speak, the proof of it being the blackened rudder of his ship, stained by the leader’s exhaust and as a mark of pride always left that way—no mechanic would dare to rub it clean. He was a wild man, Garland—I could tell them any number of stories.

“What does he look like?”

I gave a vague answer. Was he a decent guy? they wanted to know.

I had almost been in a fight one evening at Andrews, not with Garland but with another member of the team. “Not particularly,” I said.

Suddenly one of them began laughing. The other glanced at him. “Shut up,” he said.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” the first one said. Then to me, “This is Garland,” he said, gesturing.

I was speechless.

“What the hell’s your name?” they wanted to know.

I left early in the morning, before they were up.

Later, when I actually joined the Fourth, they were luckily gone by then. There were other Garlands. At Bitburg one of the wing lieutenant colonels used to sit in my office, aimless as a country lawyer, looking at the board on which there were photographs of our pilots—I was squadron operations officer then—and ask, if war broke out, which of them would become aces? We sat examining the faces together. “Emigholz,” I said.

“Who else?”

A pause. “Cass, probably. It’s hard to say. Minish.”

There was no real way of judging. It was their skill but also their personalities, their remorselessness. “Maybe Whitlow,” I added. I was trying to match them to the memory of aces or near-aces in Korea. Emigholz was like Billy Dobbs, Cass was like Matson. “And Cortada,” I finally said. He was from Puerto Rico, small, excitable, and supremely confident. Not everyone shared his opinion of his ability—his flight commander was certain he would kill himself.

With the instinct that dogs have, you knew where in the order anyone ranked. Experience counted, and day-to-day performance. Pilots with few flying hours, in the early years of their career, were the most dangerous. They were young, in the well-being of ignorance, like flies on a sunny table, unaware of the fate of countless
others. As regards flying, they had only a limited idea of the many ways to fail, most of them deadly.

With a lanky, indecisive lieutenant named Kelly, I left Bitburg late one day bound for Marseille. Destination weather was forecast to be scattered clouds and eight miles’ visibility. I had put him in the lead. It was important to give pilots the chance to make decisions, gain confidence. The ships in a flight, for whatever reason, might become separated, setting every man on his own, or a leader’s radio could go out and force a wingman to take over. In an instant the responsibility for everything could shift.

Over Marseille at thirty-five thousand feet we had just under eighteen hundred pounds of fuel remaining. The field, Marignane, was not visible. It was hidden by a deck of clouds that had moved in unexpectedly from the sea. In addition, neither Marignane nor Marseille Control would answer our calls.

The sun had already set and the earth was dimming. Kelly signaled for speed brakes and we dove towards a corner of the great lagoon that lay east of the field. We leveled out at three hundred feet. Ahead, like a dark reef, were the clouds. Squeezed as we were into a narrow layer of vanishing light and haze—the bottom of the overcast was perhaps a hundred feet above us—we missed the field. Suddenly the ground began to rise; it disappeared in the clouds just ahead, and we pulled up, breaking out on top at two thousand feet. It had grown darker. I looked at the fuel gauge: a thousand pounds. Kelly seemed hesitant and we were at the threshold of real difficulty.

“I’ve got it,” I said. “Get on my wing.” I could hear something he could not, the finality of the silence in which we found ourselves, in which the sole sound was that of the Marignane radio beacon—I rechecked the call letters against my let-down book, FNM.

I turned immediately towards the beacon and examined the letdown diagram. The light was dim. The details were complex—I noted only the heading to the field from the beacon, and the distance
and time to fly. At 175 knots this was a minute and twenty-seven seconds.

When things do not go as planned and the fuel gauge is slowly going down, there is a feeling of unreality, of hostile earth and sky. There comes a point when the single fuel needle is all you think about, the focus of all concern. The thought of bailing out of two airplanes over Marseille because we could not find the field in low clouds and darkness was making me even more precise. It was the scenario for many accidents. Did I have the right frequency and beacon? I checked again. It was right. A moment later, for the first time, the tower came on the air. I suspected they had been waiting for someone to arrive who could speak English. Talking to them, although they were hard to understand, gave some relief: the field was open; there were lights.

We passed over the beacon at two thousand feet, turned to the reciprocal of the field heading and flew for thirty seconds. It seemed minutes. The world was thundering and pouring out. I was determined to do everything exactly, to make a perfect approach. We began a procedure turn—forty-five degrees to the left, hold for one minute, turn back in. The direction-finding needle was rigid. It began to quiver and then swung completely around as we hit the beacon.

We started to descend. The minimum altitude for the field was eight hundred feet, minimum visibility a mile and a half. At five hundred feet we were still in the clouds. Four hundred. Suddenly the ground was just beneath us. The visibility was poor, less than a mile. I glanced at the fuel gauge: six hundred pounds.

A minute had passed. The second hand of the clock was barely moving. A minute and five seconds. A minute ten. Then ahead, like distant stars, faint lines of them, the lights of the field. Speed brakes out, I signaled. Gear and flaps down. We landed smoothly together in the dark.

A taxi drove us into town. We talked about what had happened,
what might have. It was not an incident; it was nothing; routine. One flight among innumerable. We could find no place to eat. We slept in a small hotel on a tree-lined street and left early in the morning.

——

Once in a great while there was a letter from Horner. He had resigned his commission and was in his father-in-law’s business, landscaping.
Dear Fly-boy,
he would write, with a touch of wistfulness it seemed,
I hope you’re having a good time in Europe. I used to.

At one reunion, years later, the rumor spread that he had just been seen driving through the main gate with two chorus girls. It turned out to be untrue. The days of chorus girls were past though we had once gone with two from the Versailles when we were in pursuit of everything except wisdom.
Susie and I were there the other night,
he wrote of another place,
and the violinist came up to our table and asked us where the gentleman was who had been so fond of “Granada.” I assumed he was speaking of you, so I told him that you had returned to the front …

——

There are things that seem insignificant at the time and that turn out to be so. There are others that are like a gun in a bedside drawer, not only serious but unexpectedly fatal.

For Colonel Brischetto, it was not a single detail but a series of them, none of great importance and spread over months. He was the new wing commander at Bitburg who had arrived in August, filled with ambition but having very little jet time. Tom Whitehouse, the old commander, diminutive and gallant, turned over to him a veteran fighter wing. It was like turning over a spirited horse to a new, inexperienced owner who would, of course, attempt to ride.

All wing and group flying officers were attached to one of the squadrons. The wing commander flew with ours, not very frequently,
as it happened, and not very well, though there was nothing alarmingly wrong. You could feel his weakness on the radio where he was like an actor fumbling for his lines, and in following instructions in the air there was often a slight, telltale delay.

We went, each year, to North Africa to gunnery camp. The weather was always good there. At Wheelus, a large airfield in Tripoli, we lived in tents for four or five weeks and flew every day. It was essential for all pilots to qualify during that time though there were occasional opportunities for a few planes to go and fire elsewhere. There were fighter wings from all over Europe scheduled into Tripoli throughout the year, nose to tail. Not so much as an extra day there could be begged.

That year we were booked for Wheelus in the very beginning of January. All preparations had been made but we did not go—the weather at Bitburg prevented it. Throughout the holidays there had been freezing rain and low ceilings; the runway was covered with heavy ice. In North Africa the sun was shining and irreplaceable days were passing. At last the rain stopped and the forecast seemed encouraging. All through the final night there were airplanes taxiing slowly up and down the runway, trying to melt the ice with the heat of their exhaust.

At noon the next day the ceiling lifted sufficiently. We were ready. It was six days after our intended departure.

An outwardly calm but impatient Colonel Brischetto was to go in the first flight. He was on the wing of an experienced pilot, a lieutenant, his favorite instructor, in fact, Cass. They were already on the runway when he called that his tailpipe temperature, a critical instrument, was fluctuating wildly, and asked Cass for advice—he had already had some minor difficulties with the ship. Airplanes had their own personalities. They were not mere mechanical objects but possessed temperaments and traits. Some were good in gunnery, others hopeless. Some were always ready to
fly, others rarely. Some planes, if not creaking like ships, nevertheless made strange noises. Without minds or hearts, they were somehow not wholly inanimate. An airplane did not belong to one pilot, like a horse, but to all communally. There were no secrets—pilots talked freely about the behavior of planes and in time flew most of them.

When Brischetto asked Cass whether or not he should take off with an erratic indication, he was told that such a decision was up to the pilot. Despite his great anxiety, Brischetto made a prudent choice and aborted. He taxied back to the ramp, was assigned another airplane, and became part of another flight.

Now it was early afternoon. The first planes, Cass and his flight, were well on their way to Rome, where they would refuel before continuing. The clouds at Bitburg were holding at six hundred feet. The bases were ragged, the top of the overcast layered and uncertain; the visibility, threatened by rain, stood at five miles. Brischetto had just forty minutes of actual weather experience in the airplane. He felt, probably correctly, that he would have more difficulty flying on the wing of another plane in these conditions than having another plane flying on his, and he indicated he would like to lead the flight.

The four ships, in elements of two, the colonel leading, taxied out to the runway. The takeoff interval between elements was to be five seconds, and they were to join up, if possible, beneath the clouds so that all four could penetrate together with a single leader and a single voice.

Brischetto read his clearance back to the tower incorrectly. He was obliged to repeat it three times before permission was given to take the runway. He had a very steady pilot, Tracy, who had never flown with him previously, however, on his wing. So, after many delays, some unavoidable, they were ready to depart.

The planes lined up on the runway together. The noise of their engines swelled. With an almost dainty slowness, the first two
ships began to roll. Five seconds later, the next two. I was watching with no particular interest, sitting in the cockpit in the squadron area, a flight leader, waiting to start. Very quickly the four planes disappeared into the clouds. They had not—I attached no meaning to it—come together as a flight.

In the air the colonel, as it happened, had responded with a distracted “Roger” to the request to reduce power slightly to allow the second element to catch up after takeoff. He then gave the command to change channels, from tower to departure control. Changing radio channels meant reaching down and back. The indicator was hard to see. It was best done by counting the clicks between numbers—perhaps Brischetto did this, though he was never heard on departure control.