Let Me Finish (20 page)

Before this, I'd been accepted for armament officer training school and also for the administrative O.C.S. school in Miami, but was told there were lengthy back-ups in the quotas. Unexpectedly, in February 1944, something better
came along—a chance to join a group of Public Relations noncoms headed for the Central Pacific to staff a Seventh Air Force G.I. magazine. (I'd just had a story published in
The New Yorker,
which might have helped my chances.) Within days, it seemed, we'd closed up our life in Denver and gone home on a final furlough; Evelyn took up chores at the Whites' farm in Maine, and, away from her now, I became the managing editor of
Brief,
a fifteen-cent, slickpaper weekly, published in Hawaii but covering a westward beat of four million square miles. For a time our stories centered on skimpy B-25 raids to distant small islands in the Gilberts and Marshalls, but after the bloodlettings at Tarawa and Kwajalein, the invasion and capture of the Marianas brought full-scale, hardened runways and a shot at Japan itself. One afternoon at Hickam Field, in Honolulu, an Intelligence major we
Brief
guys knew ran off a private screening of some still-classified film footage of the Eighth Air Force's disastrous B-17 raid on the German ballbearing works at Schweinfurt, back in the previous August—part of a massive double raid that also included the Messerschmitt works at Regensberg. Bad weather had separated the main groups, and once the escorting P-47 fighters had to turn for home at the end of their fuel limits, the waiting Focke-Wulf 190 and Messerschmitt 92 fighter groups launched attacks over a distance of almost two hundred miles, in relentless waves. When they exhausted their ammunition, other groups appeared, and when they, too, at last departed the flak attacks began. Some of this grainy or sun-flared black-and-white footage still sticks in mind—a progressive, jolting panorama of explosions and flames,
with
the bombers, under ferocious attack, losing their formation and drifting out of their places in the sky. One of the great dark B-17s is on its back and spewing debris, while another, trailing a thin plume of vapor, pursues a tilted, stately path off and down to the left, with a jammed rudder or dead pilot. In among the chunks of falling, failing planes you can spot the hunched little forms of bailed-out American crewmen from a stricken plane overhead, with their arms clasped around their waists or knees as they rip past in free-fall, waiting for a safer level before they open their chutes. There are plenty of Browning .50s to watch in action, with the masked and muffled waist gunners at their stations dodging and flinching as they swing the pivoted guns back and forth and fire, the thick belts of ammunition feeding snakelike from over their shoulders. They gesture and try to yell whenever another FW flickers into view, spewing gunsmoke, and is instantly past, over their heads. This was not quite the stuff we were teaching at Lowry—nor would the decision have been quckly made to show this film there, I think, if the chance had come. Two hundred and thirty B-17s attacked Schweinfurt that day, while another hundred and forty-six went off to Regensberg (these planes labored on from their targets all the way to bases in North Africa), and sixty of the total, with six hundred crewmen, went down. The attack was called a success, but on October 14, the Eighth's B-17s had to go back to Schweinfurt again, two hundred and ninety strong this time, and again lost sixty planes and crews, with another twenty or thirty planes crashing on landing or being written off from battle damage. Five dead airmen and forty-three wounded
were taken off the planes that got home. After this, the Eighth Air Force called off daylight raids over Europe until the arrival of the long-range P-51 fighters, in the spring.

A few months after this, I wrote a piece about a B-24 bomber that had been simultaneously hit by Japanese flak and fighters while on a mission from the Marianas to Iwo Jima, and, although heavily damaged, had made it home again to its base on Tinian in a falling flight that stretched across eight hundred miles. Four of its crew were wounded in the battle—one of them, the co-pilot, severely—and the rest were banged up in the landing, when the plane, with one wheel down and no brakes, slid the full length of the runway and broke in half. All survived and all got Purple Hearts. When I talked to the crew, some in their hospital beds and others recuperating at a rest camp, I realized that some of them still didn't know how close they'd come to disaster. An aerial burst from a Japanese fighter had knocked away the top turret canopy, and the co-pilot lay semi-conscious in his blood in the freezing stream of air. One of the four engines was gone, another was leaking fuel at a perilous rate, and a third kept running away in mid-flight and had to be controlled by manipulating its feathering button, but most of the crew members only knew their own part of the picture. When I asked the tail gunner what he'd thought about the runaway engine, he turned pale. "What runaway engine?" he said. I wrote all this for
Brief,
and then, in a longer version, for
The New Yorker
(it was my first reporting piece for the magazine), but what the Army and Navy censors wouldn't let me say in the piece was the news that the pilot, although unhurt in the action
over Iwo Jima, had gone to pieces on the way home, unable to fly or to speak because of his terror. With the co-pilot wounded, the flying for most of the journey was extemporized by one of the gunners, who had washed out of pilot training school back home. The pilot, a captain, composed himself near the end and pulled off the tough landing, when the brakeless, screeching hulk banging down the runway was slowed a little by parachutes that had been strapped to the waist and tail gun positions. Several of the survivors swore to me they'd never fly with that particular captain again.

I'd become a wily old noncom, in suntans now white with laundering. I'd gotten tougher, and felt an old lag's distaste for the length of our sentence and our foul-mouthed, relentlessly male jokes and beefs. We
Brief guys
had our own jeeps and a weapons-carrier truck, and kept our own hours. We cultivated the right officers; knew our way through the red tape at Pearl Harbor (some days you could see Admiral Nimitz throwing horseshoes just below the balcony outside the censors' office); and hit up the best post bakery for warm, fresh-from-the-oven Danish at five in the morning. Hiding our stripes, we got into drunken officer parties, and picked up word about the Iwo Jima and Okinawa invasions before they happened.

With the war in Europe ending, our style and sector of the fighting had already begun to prosper. Shiny, enormous new B-29 bombers flooded the fields at Guam and Tinian, and after some unexpected difficulties with the weather and Japanese fighters at the prescribed twenty-five-thousand-foot level of operations, went down to five thousand and
with mass incendiary raids systematically burned Japan into submission. Our stories in
Brief
covered all this with restrained exuberance, mentioning the targets struck—Kobe, Yokohama, Nagoya, Osaka, and the others—but not the cost: three hundred and fifty-seven thousand civilian dead in sixty-seven cities. Eighty-five thousand died on March 9, 1945, the night of the great fire raid on Tokyo. A returning B-29 bombardier told me later that the updrafting torrents of flame at five thousand feet had blown some of the planes around him upside down. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when they came, felt like more of the same. One of our writers, Bob Frederick, got into Hiroshima on the second day anyone was allowed there, and we ran his story, in our next-to-last issue, under the headline "Too Great for Tears."

It wasn't until after I got home that I could begin a personal accounting. John Brackett, Walter Ebbitt, and William (Boopa) Sturtevant, school or summer friends all, had died in flight-training accidents. Freddy Alexandre went down in action over the English Channel while piloting an RCAF Mosquito fighter. Harry Blaine fell in the first wave at Saipan, and our college classmate Demi Lloyd, a Navy aviator, was killed there two days earlier. Orson Thomas was lost at Wake Island; Bob Nassau and Paul Carp in the Mediterranean. A childhood friend of Evelyn's, Gordy Curtis, died in the invasion of Sicily when the Army transport he was piloting was shot down by friendly fire. And so on. Three classmates lost their lives in B-17s or B-24s over Europe: Bill Emmett on his fifth mission, Frank Joyce on his eighteenth, and Robert Rand on his forty-third. At Hickam Field, I'd drawn straws one day with Larry Swift, to see
which of us would go out to the Marianas for a stretch to write little hometown stories for stateside newspapers. He won the toss, and a week later got into a B-25 bomber and flew a low-level mission over Tinian, to see what that was like. He and I had come overseas together, as part of the
Brief
project. He was ten years older than I, and curious; in New York, in peacetime, he'd been a reporter with
PM,
the serious-minded crusading tabloid. He must have been excited about the B-25 run, with the fixed bow cannon and the frag bombs and the machine-gun bullets smashing men and buildings just below, because when it was over—these harassing raids only took twenty minutes or so, round trip—he got back on another plane, then another, all in the same day; it was never clear how many. In time, one of the B-25s he was in hit a tree or ran into Japanese ground fire, and went in. A little before this—in May, 1944—Evelyn's sister Tudie had married Neil MacKenna at Fort Benning, Georgia, two months before he shipped out to Europe as an infantryman. She got him back at Camp Pickett, Virginia, the following February, seven months after he was severely wounded at Belfort Gap, France. He'd lain semi-conscious for twenty-eight hours on contested ground, and played dead when a Wehrmacht patrol came by, shooting anyone who moved.

I observed Christmas of 1945 on the homeward-bound carrier Saratoga, converted to a transport. I took another troop train, shivering in the winter weather, then checked out at last from Fort Dix and into the Algonquin Hotel, where I found my mother and Evelyn having lunch in the
Rose Room. We'd not seen each other for twenty-two months, and in that space—with Hiroshima and the Holocaust a part of our consciousness now; with Germany and Russia and much of Europe laid waste, Hitler and FDR dead, and an end at last to the killing—our world had changed beyond imagining. I'd not been in the war, exactly, but like others back then I'd got the idea of it.

M
R.
Hopper, paint me a seascape. Give us an islanded bay—a sunlit reach, with water moving around ledgy, beachless shores and bold rises of spruce and hackmatack. Darker water, please: we're Down East, and a fingertip trailed idly overside here comes up pickled. Next, as centerpiece, a classic little keeled sloop, gaff-rigged, as in your day, just now close-reached and throwing an occasional splatter of white off her starboard bow as she steps along in the first morning breeze. The man at the helm sits at ease, his right hand on the windward coaming and his left on the tiller; his sneakered right leg is comfortably up on the seat, and his gaze, behind shades and a faded Red Sox cap, is contented, for he has been here many times before. The islands here are unchanged except for their thicker recent growths of pine and fir. Without thinking he registers the nearer run of island shapes and shores: Conary and White, with Bear lower between them; the sweet cove next to Devil's Head,
on Hog. There's the rim of Smutty Nose, up to port. Soon he'll pick up the "tongg" of George's Bell. With this breeze, why not stand right out into Jericho Bay? Forty years ago, in this selfsame Herreshoff 12½ (that's a waterline length), he might well have passed within a yard or two of this tack on the identical moment in August. The lone sailor is lucky and knows it, so why should he remind himself so perversely—I'll take it from here, Mr. Hopper—how many people, within view and beyond, begrudge him his happiness?

He is an old summer sailor is why; he is me, and I know that the aversion, while mostly unspoken, runs wide and deep. It is not a burden, but it's there all right, a little onus that can never quite be shaken, and it turns an apparently harmless pastime into something only awkwardly shared, except with other sailors. Involuntarily, I am in holy orders. Let me list a few of the disbelievers and disapprovers of my morning sail aboard
Shadow.
The preoccupied lobsterman who waves a gauntleted hand as he skews his vessel toward his next buoy. (He is working; I am playing.) The distant, growly yacht running down toward Swans Island, and the nearer, bouncing, earsplitting runabout. (They are going fast and straight; I am going slow and in zigzags.) The kids coming down the gangplank onto the club float, with their spinnaker bags and their tactics. (I have happily given up racing.) My local friends and neighbors, at the general store and the post office and the boatyard. (They live here; I am forever from away.) But I am thinking even more of city friends—at home or in my office, in New York—who do not sail and know that I do, and
can hardly bear the idea. "Going—uh, sailing, will you be?" they offer a day or two before my vacation starts. "Going off in your—uh, boat, I suppose?" I nod, I hope not too cheerfully, and we change the subject.

Some of it must be the language, although the argot of sailing, to my ear, is not much more arcane than that of golf or cooking or opera or flytying. But say "sloop," "close-reached," "starboard," or "tiller" (as I have done here), or murmur "halyard," "jibe," "headsails," "genoa," and the rest with any air of familiarity (it's "heads'ls," I mean), and you are instantly seen as a dilettante, a poseur or a snob, a millionaire, and, almost surely, a Republican.

Is this fair? More to the point, is it true—can mere lingo do such damage? I doubt it. Out on the water, even during one of those eventless, inexorably slow, time-flattening stretches of sailing—nothing doing, nothing to do—I realize once again that my eye and hand are reacting almost on their own to the thousand sights and sounds and movements of sailing. The look of the mainsail along the luff, an infinitesimal tug on the tiller, the lift of the stern on a quartering sea—all lead by reflex to a countering small movement of my own. I am sailing and, like countless thousands of other summer skippers, old and young, I am calling upon knowledge and responses that lie dormant during long months ashore but are there to be drawn upon for a lifetime.