Burning the Days (21 page)

He also, for a time, carried binoculars. Someone had suggested they might be a help for distant sightings and he rounded up a pair. We were encumbered in the airplanes—heavy clothing, life vest, pistol, flares—and on top of all this and his knotted, white scarf, the binoculars hung. They were not very practical—their field was small and the sky they jerked across immense. He pretended they were useful. He was like Nelson holding a telescope up to his blind eye. In any situation, he was ready to engage. In
this he was like Quixote, with whom he shared certain characteristics though he was not, like the knight, a deeply serious man.

In the air he was imperturbable and, rarer, magnanimous. We were in many fights together, often uneven fights, but his mere presence, he felt, made any odds equal. He was not methodical. He fought the way a man does who has a few drinks and sits down to play poker, the cards may be running right. Calm, congenial, he enjoys the game and if he finds himself over his head can still smile and say good night or, as a famous black champion once addressed reporters, having lost the bout of his life, “Gentlemen, I have had a most entertaining evening and I hope that you have, too.”

One day I watched him turn, in a huge tilting circle, with the leader of a flight of two MIGs. He had hit him earlier, but at long range, and was trying to finish him off. The wingman had disappeared. Into and out of an enormous sun that seemed to burn black in the sky, we flew. In crossing from side to side to stay in position I had moved slightly ahead and called to Colman that it was me passing in front of and beneath him—there had been cases of mistaken identity. “I’m between you and the MIG.”

“Go ahead,” he replied. “You take him.”

It was a lavish gesture, though no more than I expected of him. It would have been a victory we shared. I had already damaged a MIG a week or so earlier and seen they were not untouchable. I knew, with the confidence that assures it, I would have many, entirely my own. “No, you’ve got him,” I said.

I was looking behind. It seemed very leisurely. After a while I heard, “Do you still have him, Two?”

I looked to the front. Nothing.

“I seem to have lost him,” Colman remarked idly.

The sickening losses of more than forty years ago. The leaders have died of old age, the fights along the river in the dusk are forgotten. Still I see it clearly, the silvery fleck that is his plane, the
string of smoke that trails from it as he fires, the serenity of it all, the burning fever. The invitation to join at the feast.

We traveled far together, sometimes to forbidden places, deeper and deeper into Manchuria, almost to Mukden, looking for them in the sanctuary, so high that the earth seemed neuter. It was a great, barren country, brown, without features. The Yalu was behind us, no longer even in sight. Farther and farther north. Every minute was ten miles. No one would know what had happened to us, no one would ever hear. My eye returned to the fuel gauge again and again. The needle never moved but then it would be lower. How much do you have? he asks. Nine hundred pounds, I reply. Two brief clicks of the mike; he understood. Finally, giving up, we turned.

It was not duty, it was desire. Duty would not search with such avidity in the waning light, coming down the river one last time, the earth already in darkness that was rising slowly, like a tide, the heavens being the last to go. A strange high sound begins in the earphones: gun-laying radar. Along the river a final time. Near its mouth the darkened earth begins to light up, first in one place and then another, like a city come to life. Soon the entire ground is flashing. They are firing at us far below. Black shellbursts, silent, appear around us, some showing an unexpected red core.

It was victory we longed for and imagined. You could not steal or be given it. No man on earth was rich enough to buy it and it was worth nothing. In the end it was worth nothing at all.

——

Now as I shake the box there falls onto the desk not dust but a kind of particulate from old things, along with matchbooks, paper clips, stamps without glue, and a talisman that I carried and for a long time could not bring myself to throw away. I switch on the lamp. Memories of the past. In the early evening, the hour when civilization is at its most comforting, the talisman gleams in an almost
forgotten way. It is made not of anything material but of something less lasting: words spoken once, late at night, in the coldness of that winter, after a day of flying. I was with Woody in the quiet of some room. We were like figures out of Beckett, bundled up, dirty as ranch hands. We had about fifteen missions apiece. The months, with whatever was to come, stretched out ahead.

His face ran in an arc, the chin jutting out to one side. His hair was like brushed silver. “You’re going to get a lot of them here,” he predicted.

I felt my heart race. He was unbrash by nature. We had been drinking but he was not drunk. “You think so?”

I said casually.

It was not only you against them but you against obscurity. There were men who had made a name for themselves and stood above the rest, older men, some of them in their thirties, with the broad hands and deliberateness of carpenters, men who kept their own counsel and knew in the thick of it what to do. Most, though, were younger. I was twenty-six and could have used a few things, gunnery practice for one. No matter.

“You’re going to hit the glory road here,” he said.

He was far more experienced. His words to me meant more than I could say. I carried them around as if they were written on a slip of paper. No one else had heard them, no one knew about them. I alone.

——

We had many aces: Thyng himself, Asla, later shot down, Baker, Lilley, Blesse. In our squadron alone there were Love, Latshaw, Low, and Jolley, as well as latent others with four victories, ready on any day to climb down from their plane in triumph, grinning, genuine at last. For me, though, for reasons I cannot fully explain, Kasler was the nonpareil.

He was in our flight, together with Low. I cannot remember exactly how he looked, and yet in a way I can. The image is like a dream just at the moment it begins to be lost in the light of day. He had a round head, thin lips, cold uninquisitive gaze. He was laconic, the words barely slipped from his mouth. He had dignity, from what I don’t know. It had been given to him, I believe, just in case. Skill, of course, great natural as well as acquired skill together with nerve, and a furied patience like that of a lion lying flattened in the tall grass. Crowning it all was the unsentimentality of a champion. He had served a long apprenticeship, first as a B-29 tail gunner and older than the others when he got his wings. He was an obscure lieutenant when he came. He left renowned.

There are certain indestructible people, stalwarts—leaders of squadrons and their best followers; mechanics numb-fingered in the cold; bleak colonels with eyes reddened by late hours—all having one thing in common: They are the dikes that stand against aimlessness and indifference, that hold back the sullen waters that would otherwise mingle and flood. Kasler was one of these. I flew on Colman’s wing and Kasler, in turn, flew on mine.

Darkness, silence, the dawn mission getting up and appearing, dull with sleep, in the lighted mess hall, gloomily looking into the empty steel pitchers. “Where’s the bunja juice?” I hear Kasler ask coldly. The Koreans call the canned orange juice “punch.” “Havano,” they say helplessly. We eat in silence, looking at the tray, and ride in silence down to the flight line.

Two hours later we are over the river. There is the reservoir, the ice of its wide surface crazed with dark lines. It looks like death invading the tissue—all is disorder, all has failed. You can gaze at it for only a few seconds—the sky seems dead, too, abandoned, but can come alive at any moment with fateful glints.

Then it is late in the day again and there has been action. We are looking for them desperately—radar is continuing to report enemy flights—the sun is sinking, the earth beginning to be
awash. We fly and see nothing. “They’re up by the mouth of the river!” someone calls. Heading there, the sky remains maddeningly empty and then, in an instant, there are planes everywhere. The impatience, the frenzy—every one we come close to is friendly. A minute or two later we have somehow passed from among them and into emptiness again.

Suddenly a plane flashes by beneath: huge tail, red stars, incredibly close. I turn after it, glance quickly behind, my heart pounding. It’s clear, but Kasler cries, “Check your right! Look right!”

Not two hundred feet away, plain, foreign-looking, is the wingman. I turn hard towards him and then partway back. He seems fixed, frozen there, like a hare in the headlights. I’m nearly behind him. It will be point-blank. Before I can fire there are four of them almost on top of us, coming in from the other side. “Break left!” Kasler is calling. They turn with us, like cars on a speedway, and we are going down, I can’t see if they are firing. Then we are alone; they’ve broken off when we didn’t see it. It’s over. Above us the contrails are already fading.

——

The members of a flight, five or six pilots, lived together in one room. It was a makeshift life amid spare furnishing. There was a large table at which we sat or played cards and a houseboy who pulled the blankets taut on the cots, swept, and did errands. During the day you might often be alone in the room when not flying or at other tasks. At night, never, but there was the officers’ club and the bar. There you could talk to strangers but rarely did.

Someone, the houseboy perhaps, had found a couple of photographs and put them on the table in the middle of the room. They were the size of postcards. Picking them up idly, you saw the faces of two former members of the flight who, missions completed, had long since gone home. These photos, in a border of
black, found their way onto the wall within a large, painted frame in which there was room, as in a cemetery, for others. A simple date was beneath them—the date, in fact, they had left, so far as could be recalled. It appeared to be something more final.

Glancing at his wristwatch, someone would quietly announce the time, “Nine o’clock.”

Colman stood up. “The wall,” he said.

Everyone rose to his feet. A bundled-up figure—Smith, who liked to go to bed early with a white scarf wound around his eyes like a bandage—jumped up and, standing on the bed, unwrapped his head. His right hand, like everyone’s, covered his heart.

It was a solemn performance. All eyes, including the bewildered visitor’s, were turned to the photographs outlined in black; there were eventually three or four of them. The cast remained motionless for a full minute, a long time to hold so fixed a pose, and then abruptly and without a word, relaxed. Smith, puffy-eyed, rewound his soiled turban. The card game started up again.

Occasionally there were even toasts: The boys on the wall! The rarest moment was the first evening of someone new in the flight. Whoever it was dared not openly disbelieve, even if every instinct said to, and the least hint of reverence delighted the liars who were posing. It led to absolute refusal, on the part of the duped, to stir whenever someone rose and announced, “The wall!”

——

Every six weeks or so we were given a few days in Japan.

In Tokyo it was different. We came in from what amounted to the front, unsophisticated, raw, and found the city in the possession of those who were stationed there and had everything: cars, comfortable billets, telephone numbers. It was the life of conquerors, brothels and floorshows, sensual nights. The taxis were ancient and took you wherever you liked, down ill-lit boulevards and nameless streets.

The Imperial Hotel, the eastern palace Lloyd Wright designed that had survived the great earthquake and the war, was standing then. Horizontal, deep-eaved, with green-tiled tubs and the feeling of a ship, its very bricks had been specially made. In its rooms and lounges were civilians, dignitaries, Red Cross girls. They were indifferent to the war in Korea, at least to its unconfirmed heroes. Their interests lay in the capital and the life they were arranging. Looking at them, talking to them, seeking information from them, you saw that they had everything. But there was one thing they did not have, as believers say: They did not have the truth—that was in the
Stars and Stripes
one morning in early April. I read it sitting in the lobby of a hotel, hotel without a name and day without a date, though they had them then. Kasler had gotten his first. It was strange how, in a single moment I lacked all interest in anything; envy can do that. Coming back from Tokyo it was as if I had never been away, but there was a void, three days during which the war had gone on and which were irreversible.

Something begins and you have your run, like a player at the table or a batter. Kasler’s second I actually saw, by chance, hit the ground in a bright splash during a big fight. I was with Colman at the time; we were chasing two but never got close. In the debriefing afterwards I recognized a new contender, one hand bending abruptly behind the other to show how he had done it, the sooty marks of an oxygen mask still on his face. We had been among the uncounted, he and I, and I watched as if from afar.

At the beginning of May, Colman and Kasler each got their third. I saw them landing afterwards, the planes sleek and bare.

The fourth and the fifth I will tell about later.

——

There were so many things that could happen, a large part was chance. Perhaps it has rained for days—the planes sit out in the weather and dampness affects them, the radios become unreliable.
Break!
they are crying in a fight and you hear nothing. The silence is uncanny.
Break right!
they are shouting,
break right!
For some reason you look back and there, behind you, is an intake the size of a locomotive. In fright you pull too hard and the plane shudders, snaps, begins to spin. The earth is revolving, dirt from the cockpit floor is floating up, and they are following you down; when you pull out at low speed they’ll be waiting.

There were days one felt a dread, when something was wrong, something impalpable. Like a beast lying in a field sensing danger, you could not run from it, you did not even know what it was. It was an eclipse, not total, of courage. People were getting hit, Woody, Bambrick, Straub. Carey was lost, Honecker. Sharp, with his savoir-faire and black moustache, was shot down—the MIG dropping out of the clouds behind him—and rescued. While turning final one day I had the controls freeze—something had gone wrong with the hydraulics, I could not move the stick—and barely missed being killed. Still you went to the briefing, carried your gear to the plane.