The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (57 page)

Hawkins didn’t know right away that it was Williams. He radioed Hollenbeck and told him he had a pilot in trouble. Hollenbeck instructed Hawkins to head south and guide him toward the nearest safe landing area, which was the Air Force base in Suwon, designated as K13. Soon Hollenbeck picked up Williams and Hawkins.

“I moved up on Williams on his starboard wing,” Hollenbeck remembered. “He never did look right and see me. I wanted him to eject and save his life, because his landing gear was not down, but I still couldn’t get his attention. The tower called and said, ‘Your landing gear is not down, your landing gear is not down!’ But of course Ted couldn’t hear because his radio was off.”

Williams considered ejecting, which was normal procedure in this situation, but quickly dismissed the idea. He was nearly six-four and had to be shoehorned into his Panther jet. Crew chiefs on the ground literally had to stand on his shoulders and jam him into the cockpit with their boots. The ejection systems were still primitive. If he ejected, he could have broken his back or seriously injured his knees, ruling out the possibility of any more baseball, so he decided to try to land the plane.

It was this likelihood of serious injury, not the possibility of being taken prisoner, that concerned him about ejecting, Williams would tell one interviewer years later: “If I was floating down on a parachute, if any of those slanty-eyed little fuckers came up to me, I’d have said, ‘I’m Ted Williams. I’m a big deal baseball player.… How may I help you?’ ”
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South of Seoul, Hawkins got Williams into a landing pattern. “We kept talking by hand signals,” Hawkins said. “He kept signaling he was getting lower and lower on fuel. I knew if I started to slow down, fuel would pool and he’d break into fire. He came in doing about two hundred knots. I was flying about a hundred and fifty feet over him off to the side.”

It had been about fifteen minutes from the time Hawkins first spotted Williams in trouble to the time he was preparing for an emergency landing at K13. By then the word had spread among the other pilots that it was Williams.

“The word went around like wildfire,” recalled Woody Woodbury, who was on the mission that day. “Everybody knew it was Ted. It was a fright. He got hit. He got hit hard. Nothing worked. His radio was out, everything was wrecked, couldn’t get his wheels down, his flaps down, only the engine was working, but not much else. He had to be scared shitless. That’s all there was to it.”
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Around 11:00 a.m., Williams came streaking over the K13 base at three hundred feet, traveling from east to west, and started a wide sweep toward a final approach to the nine-thousand-foot dirt runway. He watched as Koreans from a nearby village looked up at the plane, with its thirty feet of trailing fire, then scattered and ran for their lives.

Then, as he crossed the airfield, a metal panel from the bottom of his jet broke loose and crashed on the mess hall roof. To Williams, the panel popping off sounded like an explosion. “Now there was fire and smoke underneath the plane,” he wrote in his book. “Why a wing didn’t go was just an act of God. The plane was still together and flying, but I knew something bad was happening. All I cared about was getting on that deck.”
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He shut off the master fuel switch to try to slow his speed a bit. He estimated he was going 225 miles per hour. He tried again to lower his wheels for landing, but now they were locked. He would have to belly it in. Then Williams, nominally an atheist who often took the Lord’s name in vain, nonetheless shouted what for him passed for a prayer. His exact words, as he related them later to his cousin Frank Venzor, were: “If that son of a bitch up there believes in me, he better save my ass now!”
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“I hit flush and skidded up the runway, really fast. No dive brakes, no flaps, nothing to slow the plane. For more than a mile I skidded, ripping and tearing up the runway, sparks flying. I could see the fire truck, and I pressed the brakes so hard I almost broke my ankle, and all the time I’m screaming, ‘When is this dirty S.O.B. going to stop?’ Geez, I was mad. I always get mad when I’m scared, and I was praying and yelling at the same time. Further up the runway the plane started sliding toward a second fire truck, and the truck tried to get out of the way, dust flying behind it. I stopped right at the end of the runway. The canopy wouldn’t open at first, then I hit the emergency ejector.… Boy I just dove out, and kind of somersaulted and I took my helmet and slammed it on the ground, I was so mad.”
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Williams skidded about eight thousand feet, nearly the full length of the runway. By the time the plane stopped, the fire had gone out, but fire crews quickly sprayed the plane down with foam just in case. The base
operations officer and his assistant, Robert Veazey, sped out in a car and tended to Williams, who had sprinted away from his plane, expecting it to explode.

“He wasn’t shaking like a leaf or anything, but you could tell that he was somewhat agitated,” Veazey said. “We asked him, ‘Are you okay?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I got bumped up a little bit.’ He was not talking a lot at that point. We didn’t even ask his name—we didn’t have his name until we got to the base hospital, and he still had his helmet on, with his oxygen mask hanging to one side, and that’s where we found out it was Ted Williams. We’d had no idea who he was.”
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Doctors examined Williams, but except for a sprained ankle from pressing on the brake so hard he had barely a scratch. Veazey then took him back to base operations, and before long a crowd of about forty pilots had shown up to gawk at the Great Man, who posed for pictures and signed autographs. Eventually, a C-47 turned up to ferry Ted back to his home base at K3.

The Associated Press got word to Doris Williams back in Florida that her husband had been in a crash but was fine. “Oh, my gosh,” she said to the reporter. “I think it’s awful. It’s an awful close call—too close. And he just got there.… Golly, I’m glad he’s safe.”
^*

Ted thanked the AP for calling Doris, but he seemed to be thinking more of Evelyn Turner. He dashed off a letter to her the day after the crash, saying, “No doubt by now you’ve heard about my ‘hairy’ experience of the 16th. I had holes all over the plane and I was riding on all the prayers people say for me ’cause I was awfully lucky. My plane was burning like hell when I crash landed. Everyone around here now is calling me lucky. Anyway I’m missing you. Every inch of you ’cause I know how sweet you are. Love, Ted.”

That same day, the seventeenth, Williams—his crash not twenty-four hours distant—went on another mission, unloading six bombs in a four-plane attack south of Pyongyang. Marine policy was that a pilot who had been involved in a crash should be grounded for a few days at least, but Art Moran, Ted’s squadron commander, decided it would be
best to send Ted right back up lest he lose his confidence. Moran was called on the carpet for this decision by Major General Vernon McGee, commander of the First Marine Aircraft Wing in Korea, and Williams was subsequently grounded for three days.

News of Williams’s flaming crash landing—and survival—reverberated around the United States, especially in the Boston tabloids. (
TED WILLIAMS IN WAR CRASH
, screamed the front page of the
Record.
) In turn, the Marines facilitated the surge of interest in their celebrity pilot by making Ted available for interviews with the wire services and other news outlets. There, Ted offered modest accounts of how he’d managed to bring his jet in. He said he was lucky and gave credit to Larry Hawkins.
^*

But fanned by purple prose and numerous breathless accounts of the event, Williams’s feat of derring-do would settle in the public consciousness as a bookend to his baseball prowess. Although Ted was no Audie Murphy, his valorous, dauntless deed in combat was magnified by his status as one of the most famous athletes of his time.

Still, that would be for history to sort out. For now, Williams tried to settle into a routine of sorts in Korea, knowing that crash landings wouldn’t happen every day. He set about getting to know his squadron mates. Like Ted, most were reservists who had served in World War II. One pilot Williams quickly formed a friendship with was John Glenn, the future astronaut and US senator from Ohio. Glenn had arrived at K3 shortly after Ted and took over as operations officer for VMF-311, assigning pilots to the daily missions. After Ted introduced himself in the pilots’ ready room, Glenn, an avid baseball fan, was thrilled. He found Ted genial and likable, and noted that he devoured the chocolate fudge sent over by Glenn’s sister-in-law.
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Glenn, who lived in the same Quonset hut as Williams, began to choose Ted to serve as his wingman. “He was excellent,” Glenn said. “He didn’t shirk his duty at all. He got in there and dug ’em out like everybody else. He never mentioned baseball unless someone else brought it up. He was there to do a job. We all were. He was just one of the guys.”
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Once, the two flew an early-morning reconnaissance and bombing run together that Glenn initially feared would result in his being court-martialed. The North Koreans moved troops and supplies to the front at
night, and Glenn and Williams took off in darkness, hoping to spot the enemy still on the road at dawn. Glenn’s plane would fly about one hundred feet off the ground while Ted’s would stay up fifteen hundred feet so that he could see farther up the road and give instructions to Glenn, who would be looking for trucks and troops. Then every ten minutes they would switch positions.

The HVARs on the Panther jets had had some problems with their proximity fuses, causing explosions when the plane landed, so if they weren’t needed on the mission, the pilots were on orders to fire them off before landing. Recalled Glenn, “I unloaded all my HVARs—squirted them off. Ted’s coming along behind me. I turned around to see where he was. He went around again and fired all six of his HVARs. At the time, there had been some HVAR drops that had accidentally hit American troops. I looked on my charts and I thought Ted’s shots were on our lines. I was so mad at him. I thought I was going to be court-martialed. We looked at a more accurate map back at the base. I plotted where I thought Ted’s rockets had hit. It turned out the lines had changed and had been redrawn back to the south, and Ted’s rockets hit in what was still enemy territory.” Williams claimed he knew it all along.

Ted liked to play acey-deucey, poker, and pinochle to pass the time, and he was an occasional visitor to the officers’ club, the center of K3 social life. Woody Woodbury would preside at the O club, as it was known, playing a piano that he and Glenn had brought in from Japan. Woodbury, who would go on to a successful career as a singer-entertainer and comedian, played each night at happy hour, leading improvised songs like “On Top of Old Pyong-Yang” (sung to the tune of “On Top of Old Smoky”) and “I Wanted Wings ’Til I Got the Goddamn Things.” (“Ted would join in once in a while, but he was certainly no boy soprano,” Woodbury said.)

In Korea, Williams also got serious about photography, which his father had taught him and which he had dabbled in. While he took reconnaissance photos as part of his job, he eagerly took pictures of villagers around Pohang and people he encountered on trips to Japan, where he’d buy the best cameras. He would develop his own prints in the K3 photo lab and eagerly display the pictures to his roommates and other pals.

But Ted’s favorite thing to do in Korea was to go duck hunting. The local ducks were huge. “My God, they were as big as a C-47,” recalled Woodbury.

Duck hunting was the domain of one Edro Buchser, a self-described “hillbilly from Kentucky” whom Ted befriended. After Buchser had
flown eighty-seven missions, they made him provost marshal of K3, a position he took to with great zeal and humor.

Buchser had been there about a year when Ted arrived. He supervised scores of men, was in charge of several roving patrols, and was responsible for a fleet of Jeeps, which he mostly used for speeding around the rice paddies to keep tabs on the ducks.
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Ted had difficulty going anywhere on base without people trying to talk to him. Buchser had an office in a tent, where Ted would come to get some privacy.

Buchser also helped Williams evade another enemy—the Boston press corps: “Those sons of bitches. One sportswriter from Boston came one night at three a.m. and found his hut, woke him up for an interview, and he had to fly at six a.m.”

When it came to hunting, Buchser would usually go all out for Williams. First he’d dispatch a few patrols to find the ducks, and then they’d get going. “We’d get a hundred ducks in, say, an hour and a half or two hours. He’d get sixty-five and I’d get about thirty-five. He could outshoot me, and I was very proud of the way I could shoot.”

Sometimes the brass would ask Buchser to take them hunting, and if Williams was along, so much the better. One day, Major General Vernon McGee was the featured guest, and he brought along his aide-de-camp, a zealous Ivy Leaguer. Ted insisted on absolute quiet, and the aide was making too much noise. “I put the general downwind of the rice paddy, the best place,” said Buchser. “Ted was upwind. When a flock of ducks came, the aide stood up and said, ‘There they are, General!’ I heard Ted grumbling. Next time the kid did the same thing. Ted jacked one in the chamber, stood up, and said, ‘You son of a bitch, you do that one more time I’m going to shoot you.’ ” Instead of giving Ted a dressing-down, McGee sent his aide back to the Jeep.

Williams generally found his superior officers obsequious, and he preferred the company of enlisted men. The officers were either groveling or demanding inside baseball tidbits; sometimes they asked Buchser to arrange dinner with Williams. Ted would reluctantly agree, but would not be afraid to use the occasion to speak his mind about whatever was bothering him—such as the rules of engagement, which he considered too restrictive, or even the brouhaha surrounding his recall.

Williams had one other misadventure. It happened on a late-April bombing run when the fuselage of his plane was hit by a rock that had been dislodged by the bomb explosions. But Ted was able to return to base and make a routine landing.