The War Lover

by John Hersey

  There had been a few seconds, back there, when my hatred of Marrow had almost flown out of control in the slow, heavy, side-slipping way of a Fort with a broken cable. I had lost all track of what Murika was saying, and I had clamped my left hand across my forehead and over my eyes, but then I saw the sweat of my terror and anger gleaming like a morning cobweb in the wrinkles of my palm, and I thought: I’m in lousy shape. Maybe I’d better go to Doc Randall after the briefing and tell him I was going to have to chicken out on this mission. I’d be a danger to my crewmates.

  But then Stormy Peters was on his feet, who’d been up all night, and he was talking about the sky, and I guess I must have thought of Doc Randall, building his jaws on a pipe stem and worrying, deep in those unconquerable eyes of his, about all his troubles, which were aviators, and I guess I was so sorry for Doc that I got some courage back; what we call courage.

  “…six- to eight-tenths stratocumulus at twenty-five hundred to three thousand, tops five thousand, decreasing to nil just off the English coast; three- to five-tenths altocumulus at twelve to thirteen…”

  I almost enjoyed this part, for I could see in my mind pictures of the fantastic skies Stormy dryly told us about—until something about Stormy reminded me of Kid Lynch, my other best friend, who was dead; dead as the body on the beach at Pamonassett that I never could forget. This was all I needed: to have to think of the Kid. Now there was a marvelous half-trained mind. The Kid had squandered his assets—all that corny clowning on the Tannoy system—and maybe he’d have been that way all his life, throwing half of himself away. But what use was that maybe? The world, this f—ed-up ball of s—we lived on, had blown the top off his skull and thrown all of him away.

  After that we had our sunburned friend Merchant, whose nickname was Feather (What else? Were ever Rhodes not Dusty?) on the flak prospects, and he was ridiculous, as usual—“…expect meager-to-moderate at Bingen, Hasselt, Maastricht, moderate at Antwerp, meager at Diest…”—for he had to get off the stale line that had once been regarded as a joke, about the flak being mainly a deterrent, men.

  The sergeant gunners left for the armament shop, and the navigators and bombardiers and radiomen got into clumps and received their special briefings, and Flying Control, in the obnoxious person of Major Fane, with his air of just having taken a morning dip in a dry-cleaner’s vat, gave us the order of taxiing and we found out where The Body was to be in the formation: she was to lead the second element of the lead squadron of the lead group of the second box of the Schweinfurt strike. No fighter support. Translated into English, that meant: sucking the hind tit. Lousy.

  And we ended up, forty-one minutes after Old Man Bins had opened the briefing with that rumbling, “All right!,” with a time tick, synchronizing our watches.

  For a couple of seconds, as we stood up and stretched, exactly, for me, as if it were the end of a movie at the ancient Fox Poli in Donkentown, I caught Marrow’s gaze. It seemed to me that as he looked at me his eyes were surprised, puzzled. I wondered if he knew that for the first time in all our months together I saw right through him.

  9/

  Nine of us rode in a weapons carrier out around the five-mile perimeter track to a dispersal point where, surrounded at a distance by vague, lumpish trees and shrubs, our ship huddled in the mist like a great dark sea lion among some wave-worn rocks.

  When the carrier stopped, our sergeants lifted out their guns and parked them for the moment on the engine tarps which the line crew had stacked on the grass beside the hardstand.

  I stood in a daze on the paved area; I was puzzling out a queer sensation I had had a few minutes before. In the equipment room, as I had pulled on my bright-blue electrified flying suit, and once again, as I had stood in the co-pilots’ line for kits, I had felt waves of funk. Like gusts of cold wind they had hit me and had passed. Marrow had stayed behind in the briefing room with the squadron leaders to talk formation, so I didn’t, at the time, associate the flashes of fear and despair with him. I had been fortunate; I had not had too much of that sort of trouble, especially since I had made my separate peace with the enemy and had devoted myself to survival. I had had plenty of fear all along but very little panic. And now, as I walked with my crewmates across the hardstand toward The Body, I had all my usual symptoms of pre-strike anxiety, but I was free of anything like those thrusts of agony I’d felt in the equipment room and kit line. I think that when those had hit me I must have been struck by deep urges to avenge myself on my once-friend Marrow—though at the time I’d have sworn on a stack of Air Force regulations that nothing could have been further from my thoughts.

  We walked toward the ship through nacreous pools of oily water on the asphalt parking area. Visibility was less than a hundred yards. We couldn’t begin to see Erector Set and Finah Than Dinah, the Forts that were parked on hardstands on either side of ours on the perimeter. Marrow hadn’t been driven out yet.

  I heard Jughead Farr, our right waist gunner, sniff the fog and say: “Great day for an abort, hey Brag?”

  And Bragnani, left waist and Jughead’s stooge: “Aw, kiss my ass.”

  This was Bragnani’s way of expressing enthusiastic agreement. Long since, we had come to understand that Bragnani, who was no good (whereas Farr was dangerous), put a reverse twist on everything he said. Thus, “Go f— yourself!” meant “Sure, pal,” and “What a horse’s ass!” meant “He’s a prince.” Black was white; lies were truths in Bragnani’s mouth. Farr, who had Bragnani under his thumb, could parse and scan this imbecilic double talk for the rest of us.

  I heard some of the others, in whose minds our Gelsenkirchen abort, Farr’s single-handed fault, was all too fresh, jump him now. He talked back. Even little Junior Sailen snarled at Farr. Our crewmates began snapping at each other like vicious hungry dogs. It was Handown’s peremptory, “Cut the chicken s—, Jug,” that brought the flurry to an end, and we stood silent, breathing hard as if burned out by a sudden violent run, in the thick morning beside the silver ship as Handown fumbled at the underside hatch handle to let us in.

  When The Body was open the sergeants went for their guns, and I scrambled up through to the pilot’s compartment for the preflight check.

  I sat in Marrow’s seat. I was in charge. For a moment I took Marrow’s wheel in my hands, holding it lightly, in his manner, between thumbs and forefingers—but of course the controls were locked, and I snapped out of it. I reached to the central control panel, forward of the throttles, and threw on the big ignition switch; then, to my left, on Buzz’s side wall panel, I checked each battery switch with either inverter on, and turned on the master battery switch. I threw the hydraulic pump switch to automatic. The list and order were clear and immutable in my memory like lettering engraved on a headstone: landing-gear control switch in neutral, flap control switch in neutral, set parking brake….

  I was conscious that Marrow was standing in the aisle looking down over my shoulder. As I glanced up at him he began heckling me. What was I doing in his seat? Had I remembered to do this? That? The other thing?

  For weeks, during the middle stretches of our tour, Buzz had entrusted the preflight to me. Indeed, in all that time when he had played the bloody hero, especially after he got his D.F.C., he couldn’t be bothered with the boring routine of life in The Body; that was all left to underlings. His time was sky time. Ho-hum. But lately he’d become irritable about routine checks, erratic, inconsistent, and I didn’t know any more whether the responsibility was mine or not.

  This particular morning I knew that I’d had it, where Marrow was concerned, and I startled him, no less than myself, by saying, “If you don’t like the way I do the preflight, you can do it yourself,” and I started to get up out of his precious throne.

  “That’s O.K.,” he said, like someone turning off a hot-water faucet, and he was suddenly on his hands and knees crawling down the passageway to see Brindt and Haverstraw.

  So I
hollered to Handown to take the blocks out of the controls and still sitting in Marrow’s seat I moved the wheel and the column and the rudder pedals to the extremities of their operating ranges. And across the way my own co-pilot’s wheel, unmanned, my column, and my pedals moved in perfect automatic harmony with the movement of the pilot’s controls.

  10/

  I crawled down to the greenhouse, where Marrow was going over the mission in a cursory way with Brindt and Haverstraw. The three of them hunched like conspirators there—Brindt sitting backwards-to in his bombing seat, Haverstraw at the navigator’s desk, Marrow in a crouch by the desk, all washed by queer gray-green light that came through the plexiglass of the astrodome and the nose. They had already covered the target and most of the flight plan out and back, and I must say I resented Marrow’s going into all that with Max and Clint without my being present—as if they didn’t really need me. I had to horn in, as it was.

  Haverstraw began to give the Gee information: the Eastern Wyoming and Southern California chains on Grade A would operate during the entire mission. I loved those codes; I wanted to cling to the fantasy that it was all a huge game of Cops and Robbers. The bombers’ call sign for the day was Windbag. The fighters’ call sign was Croquet. (Bins or somebody had spelled it Crokay on the blackboard.) The target was a German city that we called Alabama…and at the word “Alabama” I had a glimpse for a moment of the stately curve of the high-rankers’ homes at Maxwell Field on the way out to the officers’ club, the grass new-mown by the sidewalk and vividly fragrant after a sudden shower, and a splash of bougainvillea, too brilliant to be true, and some officers’ wives getting out of highly polished cars, going to a quiet luncheon in the club, probably an afternoon of bridge; and I yearned, with a nostalgia that was like a lover’s pain in the chest, for those days that I had thought so dull at the time, those days in that other world before the killing began.

  For it had turned out not to be Cops and Robbers.

  Marrow was leaning forward now, his eyes bugging out at Max Brindt, who was so mild on the ground and so ferocious on the bombing run, and they were almost drooling as they talked about our loading, and its distribution, and the fusings: we were carrying ten five-hundred-pound general-purpose bombs. Both of those men would have preferred to carry thousand-pounders. The bigger, the louder. Voom! Voom! Marrow was full of sound-effects, like those of a ten-year-old boy. Skidding tires. Crunching fenders. Colliding aircraft. Above all, explosions, the trembling of foundations, falling masonry, the collapse of cities, the rumble of the end of civilization. He could do it all so hauntingly in his throat, with a grin.

  As we piled out through the lower hatch we saw that most of the sergeant gunners had finished their work and were standing in a clump in the grass having a smoke. Red Black, the unpredictable crew chief, sweet as taffy this morning, moved in after us to polish the glass of the nose. Our radio gunner, Lamb, was still aboard, moving around checking the interphones. We four officers walked out across the hardstand toward the others. Marrow was raving again about the doughnut girl—saying that taking a uniform off a girl was better than taking an ordinary dress off her, it was more like a gift wrapping, and this Red Cross girl, he’d studied her uniform….

  But I thought I detected a new strain in Marrow’s voice, an undercurrent of some kind of uneasiness. Perhaps he suspected that Daphne had told me a few things about him. Or perhaps it was only in my mind, that he was a man who ought to be uneasy.

  The pickup truck came around with K-rations and candy, and we had a rhubarb about the sweets. The driver tried to pawn off peanut brittle on us. Marrow stood on tiptoes and began flailing his arms.

  “Hey! We want O. Henrys,” he shouted.

  “Tough titty,” the driver said.

  “I got to have my chocolate,” Buzz said.

  “Better tell General Arnold about that,” the driver said. “Hap Arnold wants his boys to have chocolate.”

  “You God-damn sergeants,” Marrow said. “Always wising off.”

  I thought Buzz was going to reach in and poke the guy.

  “What’s more,” the driver said, as saucy as ever, “stations time’s postponed forty-five minutes. Till eight fifteen.”

  “—on account the inclement weather,” Handown said, mimicking the driver’s prissy voice.

  “Big news, for Christ’s sake!” Marrow said.

  “And that ain’t all,” the driver said, and then he ground the gears and fussed with the gear shift. He knew how to twist the stiletto in a man’s guts, especially in those of a man like Marrow, who just couldn’t stand waiting for anything, least of all news. Finally he gave. “I got word they’ve scrubbed the diversions.” And with a pert little glance at Handown he added, “On account of the inclement weather.” And he gunned the pickup and zoomed in a sharp curve out of our hardstand, practically on two wheels.

  Marrow took off with a torrent of obscenity against Wing Headquarters, which was the only institution he hated more than the sergeancy. The idea that Wing could send us on a deep penetration without any fighters, and without diversionary raids to decoy the squareheads—well, Buzz’s tirade was a dusey.

  11/

  The men, in a knot, groused and joshed back and forth, using their bizarre nicknames for each other—Dopey, Negrocus, Butcher, Slop-jar, Jughead, Rum-Boogie—and soon they had broken it up and were passing the sluggish time as well as they could. Butcher Lamb, Prien, and Sailen went in and messed with their guns, and I could see Max Brindt fumbling around looking for something in the greenhouse, with a flashlight, like a prowler on a country estate, and Buzz kicked the huge tires; I suppose that was a check. I heard Bragnani, Farr, and Marrow strike up a razz about dames, and then: San Francisco, Brag was saying, was the meatheaven of the world. “Why, s—,” he said, “those babes out there like it. You can’t fight ’em off. We’d no sooner get in there to the hotel, you know, on an overnight, when, Jesus Christ, the dames would be lined up with beds on their backs.” Later Buzz walked along the perimeter track part way to the next dispersal point, and I heard him holler down to Stebbins, who was to be his left wingman on this one: “Hey, Steb!” and when an answering hail came, Buzz shouted, “Listen, you son of a bitch, you owe me four hundred and seventeen cokes.” That would be from acey-deucy. Stebbins’ answer swirled off in the mist, too hollow for me to hear. I did hear Negrocus Handown’s thick Southern wail, as he stood with his head and shoulders between the open bomb-bay doors, probing the shadows with a light beam to see whether the eggs were securely racked:

  “My mammy calls me sugar-lump

  My pappy calls me apple-dump,

  Oh Mammy, Mammy, ain’t it a shame,

  That Snowball ain’t my name?”

  I had turned an engine tarpaulin inside-out to find a dry part, and I had stretched out on it on the grass, and I was burned up at Marrow—this surely was balmy of me—because he wasn’t the guy he’d seemed long ago. I guess what really made me furious was that I’d been taken in by him—by his look of being a happy animal in those early days. The very first time I met him I was struck by his vitality, by a fine tension he had between pouring out and holding in, which made him look pneumatic, blown up with energy. I saw him that day for the first time in the assembly hall at Spanner Field when our group was being formed. I was in a cluster of men around Major Bairn when Buzz came up, walking expressively, like a man doing a tango, lightly but with a dance-floor self-consciousness, a being-watched look, with a rhythmic heave up onto his toes at each step. He was pretty old, twenty-four or -five, and I, being short and slight and envious of big men, could estimate his height fairly exactly at six feet and one half inch, and his weight at one ninety-five; I could have made a lot of money at country fairs guessing the sizes of big men. Buzz had a centaur’s chest and a head like a great statesman’s and hands big enough for a steeplejack or a sea-going rope handler; but his feet were tiny, in dainty brown sadd
led brogans. His face was a muscle playground, ugly, square, and active—rippling with little spasms that might have been taken for thoughts. Major Bairn introduced him around our circle, to perhaps seven of us, and I remember his looking down at me, in my turn, as if I were some kind of freshman initiate, and when the Major had gone all the way around Buzz said with great animation, “Glad to meetcha, gentlemen. Or are you gentlemen?” His face exploded, and out came a booming laugh, and his shoulders heaved so energetically that soon we too were convinced that he had said something funny, and we laughed. Then Major Bairn told us that Lieutenant (then) Marrow had used to be a test pilot for Mildress Aircraft and that he’d been famous for his reckless power dives, and Buzz said, “S—, sir, they were afraid those cowlings would crack because of the temperature change, but I never could crack one of the God-damn things. I tried. By Christ, I tried!”

  On a small table at the end of the Number Two Officers’ Mess here at Pike Rilling there was a ledger, with a title printed by hand on a piece of adhesive tape across the front: Beef Record, and underneath the title: “Register here all suggestions, recommendations, reports of good or bad work or service, and all personal insults to Mess Officer.” On the pages within the fliers had written according to their kind. “Let’s have some fruit turnovers.” “A meringue on the butterscotch custard pie would be 100% improvement.” “Suggest that brief passage of reminders as to conduct becoming an officer be posted in mess hall or passed around.” In very small letters: “Let’s go home.” Only one entry in the whole book had initials after it, and that had appeared late in March, when Marrow was brand new and hadn’t flown a single mission, and of course the initials were W. S. M., for William Siddlecoff Marrow, and before these initials Buzz had written, in sprawling capital letters, “I WANT MORE STEAKS.”