Just One Catch (12 page)

 

4.
A Cold War

LENA HEARD
from her son that he had been sent from Long Island to Miami Beach, Florida, for basic training; from there, he had taken a train to Lowry Field in Denver, Colorado—an eleven- or twelve-day trip—for further testing and technical training. Now he was stationed at the Santa Ana Army Air Base in California for aviation cadet training and preflight classification. Eventually, he would fly in airplanes over disturbed territory. She knew he would die in a crash. In his phone calls and letters, he could not talk her out of this possibility.

Her days in the apartment now, with her family scattered, were quiet and slow. She wanted a change—a turning away from drab reminders of the past, fresh colors to perk her up. She decided to hang new curtains in the kitchen, and so one morning, she pulled a small stool up to the window, gripping the drapes. She stretched, shook, wobbled, and with a sudden crack of wood, the stool gave way. She tumbled to the floor. Pain shot through her hip and thigh. She couldn't tell if she had broken anything. She couldn't stand. She crawled toward the window and lifted herself to the sill. Across the street, in an open window of another apartment building, Jeannie Goldman, a girl Joey's age, stood taking the air. Weakly, Lena said her name.

*   *   *

THE CHAPLAIN'S OFFICE
at the Santa Ana Army Air Base called Joseph Heller in. A telegram had arrived at the base, from Heller's sister, informing him that his mother had been taken to a Brooklyn hospital. On the spot, the chaplain arranged an emergency leave for the young man, helping him secure a Red Cross loan to pay for the train ticket.

In the days spent traveling cross-country, Heller recalled the reoccurring dream he used to have of the shadowy man entering his room. Fears for his mother—and anxiety about not being able to help her—reversed the dream, and he worried he wouldn't recognize Lena when he saw her. Like an infant who fears his mother will never return the instant she leaves the room, he felt premonitions of catastrophe in the slightest change. It was not the first time the mother he thought he knew had disappeared.

Gingerly, one afternoon, he entered the women's ward of Coney Island Hospital. The place smelled of Mercurochrome and sterilized metal, odors that brought back to him the uneasy night here when he'd had his tonsils removed, when his father had left him on his own. He felt disoriented. From across the room, he spotted his mother. Her hair had gone shockingly white. As he had feared, her features were not familiar. She didn't seem to know him, either. He kissed her forehead and hugged her. Nothing he said could blow away the fog in her eyes. He slumped in despair. Then, across a row of flat white beds he saw a woman gesticulating wildly. She had a plaster cast on her leg. Lena. Exactly as he remembered her. He glanced back at the woman beside him, a total stranger. From a distance, his mother continued to wave at him in fitful exasperation. He approached her sheepishly, holding his cap in his hand. Lena looked up at him and said, “You have a twisted brain.”

*   *   *

HIS MOTHER HAD BROKEN
her hip and would probably walk with a cane the rest of her life. Generally, though, she would be fine. Heller returned to California, secure in the knowledge that Lena could summon her downstairs neighbor, Mrs. Kaiser (another widower now) anytime she needed to by whacking her cane on the floor.

Back in Santa Ana, he stared at the open suitcase on his bed, dreading the task of separating dirty clothes from clean, of refolding and putting away his things. He remembered the summer Lena had packed his suitcase and sent him off to camp; how easy it had been just to leave everything in the bag; how nice it would be if Lena (or, more precisely, some mother figure who would then go away whenever he wanted her to) were here to help him unpack. The barracks beds were all the same—low, flat, and springy. Towels were to be folded a certain way—once, vertically—and hung at the foot of one's bed. The men were not allowed to display personal photographs. As at Surprise Lake years ago, it hardly seemed worthwhile to empty his case.

He loved the warm late winter here, but he wasn't sure California was safe. On the base, talk spread rapidly that Japanese-Americans, living in the state, were engaged in domestic spying, and many of them had been removed to detention centers. A Japanese submarine had shelled an oil facility near Santa Barbara. Each night, searchlights scanned the skies over Los Angeles and antiaircraft gunners perched in the hills above the city. Miami Beach and Denver had been much more pleasant. In Florida, sunshine bounced off the surface of the ocean as if the water were tin, and everywhere you walked, you were likely to trip over bunches of oranges—at a dollar a sack, they were plentiful in and out of the messes. Now,
that
was basic training! The Air Corps did it right. They rented nearly every hotel along the beach to house their enlisted men and officers. After a day of drills, the men would lie around half-naked in their rooms, drinking and listening to radios. Even the mess boys—mostly black enlisted men—charged with cleaning the kitchens (sweeping away orange peels, mopping up apple butter and jam) spent much of their time sipping whiskey and playing jazz records on portable phonographs. The military had the run of the city. On weekends, the men slipped away under piers on the beach with a bottle and a girl (locals, known as “camp followers”) to lie on dark, damp sand still warm from the day's sun. It almost never rained at night; dawn often saw fellows staggering back to their hotels, emptied of all desires. The air smelled of flowers and fuel. Years later, Heller recalled doing the lindy hop late into the night at a Florida dance hall, and then, in a deserted parking lot, on the fender of a sports car, achieving sexual release (though not intercourse) in the presence of a woman for the first time, a woman he had met that night and whom he had awkwardly taught to dance.

Every so often in the afternoons, cool green thunderstorms scrubbed the beaches and the air.

At Lowry Field in Denver, he'd sat in classrooms, absorbing bomb specs and details about machine guns and other armaments. The mess hall, located in a former sanatorium, was open around the clock to accommodate the cadets' staggered schedules, and Heller would often slip out of bed and head for the mess to get an extra late-night meal or to sneak in a second breakfast. “I loved Denver,” he wrote years later. “It was winter, but it was a beautiful winter, the kind of winter you never see in New York.” On the base, lists were posted of local families who wished to invite servicemen to their houses for dinner, in appreciation of the boys' sacrifices for their country, and to help the war effort. “They didn't care if you were from Coney Island,” Heller wrote in amazement. “They might have cared if you were black.” He was stunned by “how courteous and generally … warmhearted” westerners were. “There … [was an] affection and optimism that New Yorkers are not accustomed to,” he said. But he didn't press his luck and reveal he was Jewish. The only trouble he ran into at Lowry came courtesy of fellow Brooklynites, a pair of enlisted men from Norwegian and Irish neighborhoods who had grown up taunting Jews. The westerners and southerners Heller met didn't know the first thing about Judaism, and his relationships with them were friendly and uncomplicated.

Then came another train trip, this time to Santa Ana—an airfield without airplanes. So far, he had spent most of his military service in poorly lighted railway or bus stations, lost among duffel bags and the smell of wet cotton, in lines with other soldiers, with young girls, many of them carrying sick, wailing babies, almost too heavy for them, and with MPs in their sharp white leggings, twirling nightsticks as if they were America's last defense against villains.

In California, he sat in more classrooms, learning the geometry of killing. A plane travels at so many feet per second; a cartridge travels so many yards, so fast. To hit a plane coming at you, aim behind it, because of the forward airspeed of your ammo and the opposing plane's swerving path.…

The lessons were sometimes difficult, and often boring, especially those on the Theory of Flight (and he didn't much care for Chemical Warfare, Camouflage, or Code), but he had to admit his standard of living had almost doubled since joining the military. The food was good—though the army skimped on butter—and, once he made second lieutenant, he stood to earn $150 a month, plus $75 dollars flight pay for a minimum of four hours aloft monthly. Adolf Hitler seemed to have done him a favor.

In addition to technical savvy, his classes tried to instill in him a solid swagger. “They put us in dark rooms … and had voice-overs of planes fighting—you know, an American plane gets shot down; he's parachuted out; and the Jap Zeroes start machine-gunning him on voice-over,” William Price Fox said at the USC literary symposium in 1995. “And you come out of there just bristling. You could bite a fireplug. Go into combat that minute, anything.”

The men who taught the courses demanded more respect than their abilities warranted. As Samuel Hynes, a World War II aviator once wrote, “The most surprising thing about preflight school is that we [all] managed to survive it.… I don't think we learned much there, but we did learn … to hate our enemies—not the Germans and the Japanese … but the nonflying, Attitude-talking martinets who commanded us, and the military system they represented.”

Still, the combat-simulation trainers were almost as much fun as gun games in the penny arcades in Coney Island.

On classification day, thirty-five weeks after the beginning of his classes, Heller was told that his aptitudes, mental and physical, suited him best to be a navigator/ bombardier. He was given more physical tests, blood samples were taken from his inner elbow, and he was sent to bombardier school in Victorville, out in the desert, in far southeastern California.

On bombing runs, he learned, the bombardier was always the hero or the goat. The success or failure of each mission depended on his timing and accuracy. He also learned that the average life expectancy of a bombardier in heavy combat was three minutes.

His instructors showed him a Norden bombsight, a supposedly top secret device, though Heller swore he had seen photographs of it in popular magazines before he went into the Air Corps. Many generals believed its accuracy would win the war. Turning the sight mechanism to keep its needle centered over the intended target and guiding the plane through the bombsight's connection to a pilot directional indicator, the bombardier was said to be nearly infallible in locating his target from as high as thirty thousand feet. The sight was controlled by gyroscopes and “weird, twisted pieces of metal, each one representing possible computations on line graphs and bar graphs, and they were supposed to be coordinated,” Heller explained. “The Norden bombsight, I think, was theoretically perfect, assuming the right information was put into it,” but even in training he saw this was “impossible because … air speed, ground speed, wind speed changed constantly,” so you “couldn't possibly” use the thing. Nevertheless, all bombardiers were forced to take the following oath: “Mindful of the secret trust about to be placed in me by my Commander in Chief, the President of the United States … and mindful of the fact that I am about to become guardian of one of my country's most priceless military assets, the American bombsight … I do here, in the presence of Almighty God, swear by the Bombardier's Code of Honor to keep inviolate the secrecy of any and all confidential information revealed to me, and to further uphold the honor and integrity of the Army Air Forces, if need be, with my life itself.”

*   *   *

ON JANUARY 20
, 1943, H. H. Arnold, commanding general of the U.S. Army Air Forces, had announced that President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Britain agreed with U.S. Army Air Force's recommendations that round-the-clock bombing be conducted against German troops in North Africa. Two months later, American workers in war-related industries were ordered to spend a minimum of forty-eight hours per week ensuring that production met military demands.

During this time, while Heller was in training, the U.S. Army Air Forces grudgingly admitted there was a morale problem. As early as 1942, a Colonel Grow, surgeon of the Eighth Air Force, had officially noted that the spirit of combat troops in the European theater was “not all that it should be to obtain the maximum efficiency in operational missions,” and the primary cause of this was the troops' awareness of survival estimates. These estimates reported an average personnel loss of 5 percent per mission, which theoretically meant they would all be dead after twenty flights. Colonel Grow suggested a mission limit of fifteen, but his recommendations were not acted on. Throughout the early months of 1943, adequate replacement troops were not being received in the European theater, and uncertainties spread among the men about the number of sorties they were going to be forced to fly. Morale plummeted further. A study prepared by group and division surgeons, entitled “Morale in Air Crew Members, Eighth Bomber Command,” released on March 9, 1943, strongly urged establishing a fixed combat tour. Finally, Ira Eaker, commanding general of the Eighth Air Force, announced that twenty-five missions would constitute a tour of duty for frontline bomber crews.

Shortly after completing bombardier school on November 13, 1943, Joseph Heller received a letter telling him that the secretary of war wished to inform him that “the President ha[d] appointed and commissioned [him] a Second Lieutenant” and that “this commission [would] continue in force during [
sic
] the pleasure of the President of the United States for the time being, and for the duration of the war and six months thereafter unless sooner terminated.”

In February 1944, Heller was sent to the Columbia Army Air Base, in Columbia, South Carolina, for advanced flight training. By the end of the following month, he had logged thirty-six hours and forty-five minutes of flight time there.