Burning the Days (19 page)

“Roger. Sixty-six out. Will you inform K-2 that we’re in the soup, low on fuel? We’ll be declaring an emergency.” Then, to the element leader, “What do you have, Three?”

“Twenty-four gallons.”

That was six or seven minutes of flying at altitude, throttled back to minimum cruise, but they also had to let down, make an approach, line up with the runway if they could find it. The heads in the cockpits were motionless, as if nothing of interest were going on, but they were facing the unalterable. The wingmen might have even less fuel than the element leader. After a while the flight leader called again, “Milkman, Maple. How far are we out?”

“We have you thirty-four miles out, Maple flight.”

“Roger.” He looked over at the element leader, who was perhaps fifty feet away. “What do you have now, Brax?”

“I’ve got nine hundred ninety-eight gallons, buddy,” the reply came calmly.

Not long afterwards, one by one, they ran out of fuel. The entire flight dead-sticked onto the runway at K-2.

It was among the knowledgeable others that one hoped to be talked about and admired. It was not impossible—the world of squadrons is small. The years would bow to you; you would be remembered, your name like a thoroughbred’s, a horse that ran and won.

——

In November, in northern Maine, you might see two of them from far off, at the end of the runway set amid the fields. They are
barely identifiable, early F-86s with thin, swept wings. Nearer there is the sound, wavering but full, like a distant cataract. Then, close, it becomes a roar with the smoke billowing up behind. They are being run up, engines full open, brakes on, needles trembling at their utmost.

The pilot of the first airplane has his head bent forward over the instruments as if examining them closely. Red-haired, gaunt, he had so far said almost nothing to me. His name was Stewart. I knew little about him. He was a Korean veteran and a maintenance officer. Lined up beside him, I waited. Why do you remember some things above all others and men who have hardly spoken a word to you? I was new in the group and nervous. I was determined to fly good formation, to be a shadow, almost touching him. We were taking off just before sunset. No one else would be flying.

His head rose then and turned towards me. His hand came up and hesitated. I nodded. The hand dropped.

Wreathed in thunder we started down the runway. Gathering speed I saw his arm suddenly swinging wildly in a circle. I had no idea what it meant, was I to go on, was he aborting? In a moment I saw it was neither, only exhilaration; he was waving us onward as if whipping a bandana around in the air. The noses came up; we were at liftoff speed. I saw the ground fall away and from that moment for him I ceased to be.

There was a low overcast through which we shot, and above it brilliant reddening sky. I was barely twenty feet from him but he never so much as glanced at me. He sat in the cockpit like a prophet, alone and in thought, head turning unhurriedly from side to side. We had reached thirty thousand feet when the tower called. Weather was moving in, our mission had been canceled. “Operations advises you return to base,” they said.

“Roger,” I heard him say matter-of-factly. “We’ll be in after a few minutes. We’re going to burn out some petrol.”

With that he rolled over and, power on, headed straight down. I
didn’t know what he intended or was even doing. I fell into close trail, hanging there grimly as if he were watching. The airspeed went to the red line; thousands of feet were spinning off the altimeter. The controls grew stiff, the stick could be moved only with great effort as we went through rolls and steep turns at speeds so great I could feel my heart being forced down from my chest.

We burst through the overcast and into the narrow strip of sky beneath. I’d moved to his wing again. We were well over five hundred knots at about fifteen hundred feet. It was almost impossible to stay in position in the turns. I had both hands on the stick. All the time we were dropping lower. We were not moving, it seemed. We were fixed, quivering, fatally close.

Five hundred feet, three hundred, still lower, in what seemed deathly silence except for an incandescent, steady roar, in solitude, slamming every moment against invisible waves of air. He was leading us into the unknown. My flying suit was soaked, the sweat ran down my face. A pure pale halo formed in back of his canopy and remained there, streaming like smoke. I began to realize what it was about. Never looking at me, absorbed by the instruments in front of him and by something in his thoughts, sometimes watching the world of dark forest that swept beneath us, hills and frozen lakes, he was gauging my desire to belong. It was a baptism. This silent angel was to bring me to the place where, wet and subdued, I would be made one with the rest. If, like a scrap of paper held out the window of a speeding train, my airplane were to instantly come apart, torn bits tumbling and fluttering behind, he would only have begun a large, unhasty turn to see what had happened, his expression unchanged.

I had surrendered myself to all of it and to whatever might come when unexpectedly he turned towards the field. We had already crossed it two or three times. This time we entered on initial approach and dropped dive brakes, slowing as we turned. I had a
feeling of absolute control of the airplane. It was tamed, obedient. I could have gently tapped his wing with mine, I felt, and not left a dent. I could have followed him anywhere, through anything.

I remember that moment and the smoothness of landing in the fading light. Now that the sound of our passing violently overhead had disappeared, on the field all was still. There was unbroken calm. Our idling engines had a high-pitched, lonely whine.

Afterwards he said not a word to me. The emissary does not stoop to banter. He performs his duty, gathers his things, and is gone. But the snowy fields pouring past beneath us, the terror, the feeling of being for a moment a true pilot—these things remained.

——

My closest friend in the squadron, a classmate, had hair flecked with gray and a wry way of talking that I liked. William Wood was his name. He was older—he’d been perhaps twenty when we became cadets, and afterwards had gone right into fighters; he’d been in them since the beginning. He was relaxed and could be very droll.

Early that winter, he and I went to Korea. We had eagerly read—it passed from hand to hand—the first definitive report, a sort of letter about the enemy airplanes that had suddenly appeared in the war, Russian planes, MIG-15s, and when the chance came, like men running to a claims office, we had raced to volunteer. There were two openings that month and we got them. It was not only the report, the war itself was whispering an invitation: Meet me. Whatever we were, we felt inauthentic. You were not anything unless you had fought.

Come now, and let us go and risk our lives unnecessarily. For if they have got any value at all it is this that they have got none.
We arrived in Korea, as it happened, on a gloomy day. It was February, the dead of winter, planes parked among sandbag revetments and bitter cold lying over the field adding to the pall. The ranking
American ace—mythic word, ineffaceable—a squadron commander named Davis, had just been shot down. With the terrible mark of newness on us, we stood in the officers’ club and listened to what was or was not fact. We were too fresh to make distinctions. We had come, it turned out, to join a sort of crude colonial life lived in stucco buildings in plain, square rooms, unadorned, with common showers and a latrine that even the wing commander shared.

We were there together for six months, cold winter mornings with the weak sunlight on the hills, the silvery airplanes gliding forth like mechanical serpents not quite perfected in their movement and then forming on the runway amid rising sound. In the spring the ice melted in the rivers and the willows became green. The blood from a bloody nose poured down over your mouth and chin inside the rubber oxygen mask. In summer the locust trees were green and all the fields. It comes hauntingly back: silent, unknown lands; distant brown river, the Yalu, the line between two worlds.

That first night they were talking about the MIGs, how good they were, how superior at altitude. Whatever anyone said we accepted as truth. I stayed close to Wood, as if to suggest we were equals. The group commander, an older, admired figure—Preston was his name—was there. He had been leading the fatal mission on which Davis, with only a wingman, had attacked a large formation of MIGs. He’d gotten the leader and then slowed down to try for one more. He was successful but it killed him. He was hit just behind the cockpit by cannon fire from still another airplane. The last victory was his twelfth.

Fighters don’t fight, as St.-Exupéry said, they murder. He did not fly one himself—he spoke as their possible victim, which in the end he became. He was flying a reconnaissance plane when it happened, unarmed and relying only on speed, though they are never quite that fast. He was too old for the war and too civilized.

The fighter aces had names like Adolph and Sailor, Ginger and Don. They had five or more kills and appeared suddenly and unseen, in the first terrifying seconds letting loose a stream of fire. A kind of blood poured from the plane being hit—black smoke really, but it foretold everything. Pieces of metal were flying off, the whole carefully constructed machinery was coming apart miles above the earth, shedding wings, hurtling out of control.

At Pointe de la Baumette on the southern coast of France there is a lighthouse with a tablet recording the end of St.-Exupéry. He disappeared in July 1944, his aircraft one of the many simply lost without trace in the great sweep of the war. Blue sea of glittering beauty, the sea on which Cervantes fought and where history was born—somewhere within it lie the bones of this secular saint.

We were replacements, new wingmen—fighters fly always in pairs—and it would not be long before we too were sleek for murder, crammed with gear into the cockpit, like overcoated gangsters in limousines, high above North Korea in the late afternoon, the sun low, the ground lost in reflection and haze. Farther and farther north we go. “Dentist” is the call sign of the ground radar. Nothing is being reported by them yet. Cautious voices in the dusk in a sky that is ominously empty.

——

Just as, they say, in North Africa during the war the thing to have immediately to hide your innocence was desert boots, so the first requirement of a pilot in Korea was a folding plastic-covered map of the long peninsula that projected down from China into the Yellow Sea, the muddy Yalu its northern border, the spattering of numerous islands, and midway, the enemy capital, Pyongyang. Over the area of North Korea we drew a fan of lines, all converging on our base. This gave headings, especially to home. Arcs of distance crossed these vectors to show at a glance how far you had gone or had to go.

From the front lines, which crossed the country at the waist, it was about two hundred miles, twenty-five minutes or so, to the river and only a few more to the enemy fields in China, where we were forbidden to go. There was no struggle for possession of the air. Like a backroom deal, that had already been decided. The MIGs entered the sky over North Korea at will, fought if they chose to, and went back to their fields. We were trying to exterminate the enemy, but even the boy who mows the lawn knows that you do not kill wasps one by one, you destroy the nest. The nests, however, were not to be touched. Everything in between was contested.

We sought to keep them from attacking our fighter-bombers that were heading north, laden and often low-flying, to cut railroads and bomb bridges. We did not escort but patrolled instead. The noses of the MIGs were sometimes yellow, afterwards red, then purple, then black.

It turned out that this was because their ideas were the opposite of ours. We had only two wings of air-to-air fighters in Korea and they remained there, replenished constantly with pilots to keep them up to strength. Thus there were always veterans with eighty or ninety missions and brave boys ready to scatter who had none, plus the in-betweens. The Russians—they were mainly Russians—whom we fought moved entire air regiments through, probably to initiate as many of them as possible. They would arrive with very little experience and leave three or four months later, battle-hardened. But it meant they were all bathed in innocence at the same time and learned together, and this proved costly.

What occurred in the rest of the war meant little to us. There remains with me not the name of a single battle of the time or even general other than Van Fleet, who had an honest face and the history of having risen, like Grant, belatedly, a colonel in Normandy when his classmates were commanding corps—Van Fleet and of course Ridgway.

In the sky were weather and widely separated operations conducted by the Navy, Marines, and Air Force. We had little to do with one another. It was only in the headquarters, approached on rutted roads and the dusty, tree-shaded avenues of Seoul, in the theatrical evening briefings with the commander sitting silver-haired, stars on his collar, smoking a cigar and in a woman’s voice saying thank you after each presentation, that orchestration took place. Here were all the strikes, targets, losses—everything a general might need to know.

War is so many things. It is an opportunity to see the upper world, great houses that have become hospitals or barracks, precious objects sold for nothing, families with ancient names at the mercy of quartermaster sergeants. In the familiar footage the guns jump backwards as they fire, the tanks roll past and forgotten men wave. It is all this and also the furnace of the individual in a way that a life of labor is not. Its demands are unending, its pleasures cruel. Goya knew them, and Thucydides, and Isaac Babel. One morning there is the wonderful smell of breakfast, and on the next the sudden arrest and hasty sentencing. The fate that seemed impossible, the justice Lorca knew. He could not cry out, I am a poet! They know he is an intellectual, or worse. They put him in a truck and he rides, with others and without a shred of hope, to an outlying district, where he is handed a shovel and told to dig. It is his grave he is digging, and in silence, the silence he will soon be part of, he begins, who was raised in this country, who became its very voice.
Death laid eggs in the wound,
he once wrote,
at five in the afternoon. From far off the gangrene is coming, at five in the afternoon. His wounds were burning like suns, at five in the afternoon, and the crowd was breaking the windows …
In his grip is the smooth wooden handle, and the first shovelful of earth is one of the most precious moments of his life, if only it could last. But in war nothing lasts and the poets are killed together with the farm boys, the flies feast on their faces.