Velva Jean Learns to Fly (27 page)

I was flying so low over the white-brown peaks that I felt I could reach my hand out of the window and feel the cold of the snow on my fingertips. I hugged the mountains so tight, I could see the valleys and the dips and the lines in the rock face. Compared to the mountains, my AT-6—the
Sweet Six
, as we called it—was small as a toy. I would just trust my compass—Ty’s compass—and trust myself. I would follow the outline of the mountains until I was over them safely.

I stopped for gas at the army airfield in Deming, New Mexico, and climbed out of the plane—legs shaking, knees buckling—because I wanted to feel the earth underneath my feet. It wasn’t enough to stand there and so I sat down, right on the hard, warm pavement of the runway, and when that wasn’t enough I lay back so that every part of me was touching the ground. I lay there for thirty minutes, staring at the sky, thinking how high and far away it was and how crazy I was to ever want to go back up there. All I wanted was some food and to sleep in my own safe bed, but first I had to get on home to Texas.

An hour later I took off for Sweetwater. Just south of Dallas, a dust storm swept up and for the next sixty miles I had to fly blind. I flew into Avenger Field blind as a bat, and then I suddenly saw the flares lit along the runway.

I touched down thankful, weary, and hungry. I wanted food and my bed and never to fly over mountains again. The first person I saw was Paula. She was staring up at the sky with a mad look on her face. Then there was Mudge with her eyes all pinched in a way she hated because she said it gave her wrinkles. And Sally just beside her, crying. I climbed out of the cockpit and my feet hit the ground like lead. Sally liked to talk, but she wasn’t one to cry. I tried to think what might have happened.

As I started walking toward them, they looked at me—all at once—and I stood still, yards away from them, because I didn’t want to get any closer. I thought if I stayed there, rooted to that spot, I wouldn’t ever have to know what it was.

Ty’s engine caught fire on the outskirts of Blythe, just above the mountains. The plane crashed into the side of Eagle Mountain, near the Kaiser Steel mine. The miners followed the smoke and flames to a flat spot at the base of the mountain, a place covered in snow, and that was where they found Ty. He had tried to jump before landing, but his parachute slammed him against a cliff. The miners took him to the nearest hospital, where he died an hour later.

Paula said Ty lost consciousness and never came to again. He just drifted off, and suddenly his heart—the one he had written about in songs to me—stopped beating.

THIRTY

D
uring the week of September 27, three weeks before graduation, we took our final exams and had our final flight checks. As the four of us fell asleep at night, one of us would say something like, “Is the rule, ‘Never have high manifold pressure with low RPM,’ or is it the other way around?” Meanwhile, another one of us would be mumbling “GUMP” in her sleep, which stood for “gas, undercarriage, mixture, and prop,” which was the way we had to execute the routine cockpit check before landing. Eventually, one by one, the other girls would drift off to sleep, and I would lie awake till morning. I hadn’t slept more than an hour each night since getting back from Blythe.

On September 29 a letter came for me from Blythe, California. I stood in the PX and stared at the envelope. It was from Lieutenant Ned Tyler and it had been mailed before he left Blythe in his P-38 to go back to Ontario.

I walked outside into the fall air, which was turning cooler now, and sat right down on the steps and opened the letter. My hands were shaking so that the words on the page looked like they were moving.

He wrote:

I think the hardest thing I ever did was watch you take off this morning. I stood there till I couldn’t see you anymore and then I sat right down on the flight line and finished this song. I know it won’t beat you home, but I wanted it to get there not long after you do. I hope you like it, honey. You deserve a million of them, better than I can write.

See you at Avenger fast as I can.

You Make Me Happy

You make me happy.
Whenever you’re around I’m safe inside your sunshine smile.
You make me handsome
whenever I feel my nose just seems a bit too round.
You make me special, and God knows I’ve longed to be that kind of guy
to have around.
You make me lovely, and it’s so lovely to be lovely to the one I love.

Remember how we flew to Blythe
without a locust in our sight
and Valentino’s cozy corner felt like heaven for a moment,
while the waiters brought us wine and drink
and I led you dancing down the street?
And though it’s simple, it still means the best day that I’ve lately seen.

And don’t forget the funny bird, and pinwheel that seemed so absurd,
but must
have meant a lot to them.
And in two weeks we’ll fly again, perhaps a Chinese dinner then.
You make me happy; you make me smile.
You make me love you,
and that could be the greatest thing my heart was ever fit to do.

I laid my hand on the paper and felt the lines of the pen, the way the words pressed harder here, lighter there. I ran my fingers across every letter, thinking about Ty’s own fingers—the ones that played the bugle and held my hand and brushed the hair out of my eyes—writing each one. And then I thought about what he said to me in Blythe—telling me to look forward, to fly above the clouds so I was higher than the overcast. “Ceiling and visibility unlimited.” I knew enough in my life to know that people died and went away and you could look backward and stay looking backward or you could pick yourself up and go on.

I saw him sitting across from me, raising his blue glass. I heard him say, “Forward.”

“Forward,” I said, just like he was there to hear me.

For my last flight check with Puck, I sat in the AT-6, which was, of all of the ones I’d flown, my very favorite airplane. Duke Norris once told me to get to know the cockpit of any new plane so well that I could sit there wearing a blindfold and touch and name every single instrument. He said, “It may save your life one day.”

On the afternoon of my last flight check, I sat beside Puck and closed my eyes and thought: I’ll never be able to do this. After all these months of training and all these planes I’ve flown, I’m going to wash out right now, just three days before graduation.

Puck said, “You know this.” His voice was firm and gruff, but there was something in it that I’d never heard before—kindness.

I reached out my hand and went through all the instruments, naming each one. I told him the takeoff and landing speeds, the stalling speed, the throttle setting for cruising, and afterward I repeated the cockpit procedure.

Then I went up for my very last training flight. As I took off, the wind was gustier than normal and I got caught in a swell. The plane rocked from side to side and I tried to steady her. It leveled out as soon as we were over the clouds.

You make me happy . . .

I followed the railroad for a bit, which we sometimes did to keep our bearings, and then I started naming the towns as we flew over them, trying not to name them by their water towers. Each tower had a sextant on top that helped you know what direction you were flying, but I didn’t use them now. I headed east toward Abilene, then south toward San Antonio, then west again to Avenger Field.

As I brought the plane in for landing, I thought about the time Johnny Clay and I went flying and crash-landed in a cow pasture. It seemed long ago and far away, and I thought what a lucky girl I was to have so many people I loved in this world, even if they were, most of them, far away, and even if some of them were as far away as heaven. I was lucky to be a WASP and lucky to be a girl who could fly planes and lucky not to be a housewife back in the woods up on a mountain.

You make me smile . . .

When I climbed down from the AT-6, I rested my hand against its side, and it was so bright in the sun that it nearly burned my hand. I left it there another second, and then I followed Puck off the flight line.

And just like that, my WASP training was over. My class had fifty-five hours of primary training in the PT-19, sixty-five hours of basic training in the BT-13, and sixty hours of advanced training in the AT-6 and twin-engine AT-17. We had thirty-eight hours of instrument flying, and that included time in the Link trainer, which was a box shaped like a ladybug that simulated flying. We’d finished PE and ground school, and our tests in navigation, aircraft engines, mathematics, meteorology, and Morse code were done too.

On October 14, the Thursday before graduation, Puck gave me my evaluation, and I passed. On it, next to all the numbers and percentage points I’d earned, he wrote: “Tendency to take things too hard and doubt herself, but listens well. One of the most natural pilots I’ve ever seen.”

The next day Jackie Cochran passed out copies of
Life
magazine to each trainee.
Life
didn’t just write a short article on the WASP—it gave over twelve pages of photographs and story. The headline called us the “Lipstick Squadron,” and the reporter, a man named Herbert Langley, described us as “sun-bronzed and trim as the streamlined planes.” He also quoted field supervisor Major Donald Mackey, who said that “gentler treatment” was the only change required for the instruction of women trainees. Then Miss Cochran was quoted saying, “I worry that combat might harden and brutalize our girls, who still need to be wives and mothers after the war. But when it comes down to it, these women are perfectly capable of flying combat missions. After all, when aroused, women make the nastiest fighters.” We knew she meant it but that she was also campaigning, trying to get the military to recognize us officially once and for all.

The pictures were taken by Oliver Sheehy, who I guessed was the man with gray hair. There were photos of girls on the flight line, girls at the wishing well, girls sunbathing between the barracks, girls in the classroom, girls in PE, girls at mess. There was one of Mudge sound asleep on a cot after a day of flying, lying on her stomach, her face turned to the camera, eyes closed, hands brushing the floor. There was one of Sally and Paula lying on the floor in navigation class, charts spread in front of them, plotting their courses. And on the cover was a girl with a ponytail and no makeup, wearing a zoot suit, sitting on the wing of a plane. The caption said: “Velva Jean Hart, pilot.”

On Saturday, October 16, we pulled on white shirts and tan pants—we called these our “general’s pants” because the only time we wore them was when generals and other high-ranking military officers were visiting the base—and marched across the field two by two behind an honor guard carrying the American flag. The Big Spring Bombardier School Band played while we marched. And we sang one last marching song.

It was a warm, clear day with the brightest, bluest Texas sky I’d ever seen. I knew my family wouldn’t be able to come to graduation, but I still wished for them, just like I wished for Ty. I wondered if I would always wish for Ty, even after I’d met someone else someday and gotten married again. I thought of the locusts and the first time I’d met him and I felt the same swift stab of pain sweep through me.

Most of the other girls had at least one person there to see them. I wasn’t going to feel sorry for myself, though, because there were so many girls who weren’t there—Loma Edwards and other girls we’d known who’d washed out or gone home. I remembered my very first day at Avenger Field, back on February 14, when Jackie Cochran had told us to look at the girls on either side of us because they wouldn’t be here at the end. Only 59 out of the original 112 were graduating.

Sitting up on the reviewing stand were Jackie Cochran; Brigadier General Isaiah Davies, who was commanding general of the air force’s 34th Training Wing and one of the guest speakers; and General Hap Arnold, commanding general of the U.S. Army Air Forces, and the man who had given Jackie Cochran the approval to create the WASP program. General Arnold had been taught to fly by the Wright brothers, was the first United States pilot to carry the mail, and then went on to be one of the first military pilots in the world.

We stood in the blazing sun during the speeches, our white shirts sticking to our skin. General Arnold said: “We will not again look upon a women’s flying organization as experimental. We will know that they can handle our fastest fighters . . . ; we will know that they are capable of flying anything put in front of them. This is valuable knowledge for the air age into which we are now entering . . . We of the Army Air Forces are proud of you.”

I couldn’t help it—standing in the blazing sun, shoulder to shoulder with other WASP like me, I started to cry. It wasn’t the gulping, sobbing kind of crying, but the tears rolling one by one down my face kind. I thought of where I’d been and where I was, and where I was going, which I didn’t actually know yet because we hadn’t got our assignments. We’d each be going to a military base somewhere, to do the work we’d been trained to do. The only place I knew I would never go—not even if they tried to send me there—was Tulsa.

After General Arnold finished talking, we passed over the stage one by one, and Miss Cochran pinned our silver wings to our uniforms. And just like that, we weren’t trainees anymore. We were Women Airforce Service Pilots.

Before the ceremony was over, we stood in front of Jackie Cochran and General Hap Arnold and Brigadier General Isaiah Davies and sang one last song. This wasn’t a marching song. It was a hymn to Avenger Field.

In the land of crimson sunsets,
skies are wide and blue,
stands a school of many virtues,
loved by old and new . . .

Long before our duty’s ended,
a mem’ry you shall be,
in our hearts we pledge devotion,
Avenger Field to thee!

I’d been working on a song myself—not on paper, but in my head. It was a song about a girl who trades in her old yellow truck for an airplane and goes to a tiny little place in the middle of Texas, where the earth is brown and the sky is blue, and where there are other girls just like her, wanting to live out there, and she learns to fly. She buys a Mexican guitar and meets a boy who loves to fly like she does and then he dies doing what he loves, but she keeps on flying anyway.