The War Lover

by John Hersey

  7/

  Marrow treated our tiny ball-turret gunner, Junior Sailen, as if he were a child. On the afternoon of the seventeenth of March there was a terrible accident at the field, one of those horrors of lethal carelessness that a war seems to bring, displaying to the world not heroic killing but gratuitous homicide. A mission bound for Rouen had been recalled by Wing after the planes had got out over the Channel, and the fliers were furious, because they’d reached altitude in fair weather, but the fighters had missed the rendezvous. In a disgusted frame of mind, back at the base, a ball-turret gunner, removing his guns, accidentally whacked the trigger bar of one of them, which he thought he had locked on safety, and it began to fire and perversely jammed and ran away, spraying the village of Bartleck with fifty-caliber bullets and killing five ground-crew men in a matter of seconds. Marrow and I were in our room and saw none of it, thank God, though we heard the distant firing.

  Marrow’s reaction to news of the tragedy was to go to Sailen and say, “Listen, Junior, if you ever do anything like that I’m going to stop your allowance.”

  8/

  We had climbed in an easy spiral, and as the houses below became toys and fields became a quilt, we sailed for a while among islands of cotton. At ten thousand Marrow called us on interphone and told us to put on oxygen masks, because we were ascending for our first high-level practice flight over England, and he ordered Prien, our tail gunner, to run oxygen checks of the crew every ten minutes. We had flown at high altitudes over Lowry Field, but somehow this was different, for our being in foreign air-seas and very close to war made us seem interdependent as we hadn’t been before. All ten of us were linked to the ship and to each other by those life-keeping hose lines, and we were like an unborn litter of young in the belly of our common mother. Never before had I—or since have I—had such a feeling of being part of a brood in a plane.

  “Check in,” Prien said. “One.”

  “O.K.,” Max Brindt responded.

  “Two.”

  “Yup,” said Haverstraw.

  Prien numbered us off. We climbed higher and higher, and now the earth through the clefts was a mottled, hazy blue. The clouds close around us were gray and soft-edged, but as we climbed away from them their outlines appeared hard and sharp; other clouds above were a dazzling white against the Sahara-dry sky overhead. I watched the tiny ball of my oxygen gauge, jumping up and down, as if it were alive with my life, and I was aware of my oxygen bladder, and of Marrow’s, swelling and waning, alive with our lives. Prien checked us again. I switched my earphones to liaison, and Kowalski, our radioman, was tuned in to B.B.C., and for a while I listened to a contralto voice singing opera; maybe it was Verdi. We were at twenty thousand. The music became passionate, and I began making a childhood world of the sky, when suddenly Marrow cut in on CALL, which interrupted everything else, and said, “Prien! Off your ass. Give us a check.”

  I heard some gurgling and a moan.

  Marrow jerked his thumb to indicate that I should get back there, so I got all unhooked and went onto a walk-around oxygen bottle and squeezed back through the bomb bay and radio room and ball-turret compartment and scurried along the waist and found Prien slumped forward on the tail gunner’s seat, doubled up tight and wrestling with himself, and although the temperature inside the plane was probably twenty below zero, he was pouring off summer sweat, and his skin was yellow, and when he turned his head toward me I saw his eyes rolling behind his goggles like the little metal balls that you’re supposed to roll into the holes in those glass-covered puzzles.

  I hooked myself in to Prien’s interphone jack and told Marrow that Prien was sick—looked like the bends or some sort of reaction to altitude.

  Right away Marrow began laughing and diving the plane. I shall never forget that macabre descent, the immense Fortress screaming down the sky and my ears full of Marrow’s crazy cackling and pealing. Marrow had understood at once what the trouble was: that in rarefied upper airs a man may be unable to belch or break wind. Prien’s stomach was already famous among us, for he stored immense amounts of gas in it, and sometimes he emitted flatus per rectum for what seemed like minutes on end. And indeed, that was all there was to it. At twelve thousand Prien took his oxygen mask off and got relief, via both exits. In a big way. I mean, it was remarkable. Right away he was himself again—a mousey, blond man, rather cold, inflexible, and remote, except that on the surface he could turn on a mechanical enthusiasm, always said everything was just great; he was in the best crew in the E.T.O.; Marrow was a better flier than Jimmy Doolittle. You wondered whether he meant what he said or just the opposite.

  As soon as we landed, Prien began stiffly saying that Captain Marrow had saved his life.

  9/

  A notice went up on our officers’-mess bulletin board that the American Red Cross Aeroclub, properly the enlisted men’s social center on the base, was offering lessons in ballroom dancing to both enlisted men and officers who had never happened to enter into this pastime. Marrow, who regarded himself as an accomplished dancer, announced that he was going to take the lessons, as a gag, for he thought there might be a number of Red Cross nifties on hand as teachers, possibly Arthur Murray girls gift-wrapped in Red Cross uniforms just for him, and he did in fact attend the first session. His joke fell disastrously flat. He was the only officer who turned up. Some thirty enlisted men, who were bashful and really wanted to learn to dance, were his companions. The sole teacher was Miss Lobos, the manageress of the Aeroclub, a remarkable woman of about fifty-five with a profile that might have belonged to a pioneer woman a hundred years ago—a face of iron determination, yet one dominated by sweetness and a full-blooded but controlled feminity. I heard afterwards that she had put Marrow in his place. Quickly discovering his bluff, she had made him demonstrate steps to the enlisted men. He came back to our quarters afterwards and vented his evident shame and anger in a blistering attack on sergeants that came from the blue. This was not the first time he had done such a thing. Indeed, one of the themes of Marrow’s war was that enlisted men, and especially sergeants, were “weak.” They were a bunch of gold-brickers, lazy, ingenious only in avoiding peril and work. But this time the tirade was out of all proportion to the occasion—a sickening outburst, a kind of nausea of obscene, violent verbalizations of hatred, a torrent of vague generalities about weakness, inadequacy, shirking, cowardice.

  10/

  The Tannoy pulled me up from a sound sleep, blaring out a deep Georgia drawl: “ ’tintion to ’nouncemint…’tintion to ’nouncemint…Evabody proceed to shelters at once…. Air-raid wawnin’, red…Repeat…” I had a bruiser of a time waking Marrow, but when he heard what it was he jumped out of his sack, and we were outdoors by the time the sirens in Bartleck began to moan with their triple-throated Cerberus howl. Searchlights, like huge staves, began to belabor the scattered clouds, and we could hear a throb of planes somewhere far away. Buzz had picked up some lore. “When you hear those motors say, “It’s for you, it’s for you, it’s for you, that means it’s Jerries. They’re lousy engineers, don’t know how to synch their motors.” I was in favor of the shelters, but Buzz said, “We’ve got to see this,” and we climbed up a ladder on the big water tank on top of the control tower, and when we got there all we could see was the play of the sticks of light.

  Buzz said that the sound of the planes reminded him of a day when he was six years old, seeing and hearing a tri-motored Ford fly over his house in Nebraska. He thought he’d decided to be a flier that day. He said in a booming voice that he loved the roar of that big Ford ship.

  I thought he was talking about the sky, and I told him that I vividly remembered having had powerful feelings about the sky from childhood days, myself. I recalled standing on the porch at home all one afternoon, when I was about seven, having overheard Father mention that a new Philadelphia-to-Pittsburgh mail plane was due to fly over Donkentown at about two o’clock, and I watched the clouds and the i
nterstices of blue, and I had the impression that the clouds were moving with an incredible swiftness, as if they were big potatoes rolling down the sky; I never saw the plane; later in the afternoon several direct stares at the sun gave me my first experience of multiple black suns burning in the retinas of my eyes.

  From then on I studied the weather, and what I loved best was to daydream as I gazed at clouds, about what they looked like, and what they meant.

  I told Buzz this: On the first flight I ever took, on a commercial plane, flying eastward into the dawn, I looked back at the cap of night slanting toward the Mississippi Valley astern, and then down at a gray layer of haze and smog so thick as to appear to be the earth itself. Deep in that seeming earth, ahead, I saw a huge flattened vessel of a reddish sun, coming up, it seemed, out of the middle of the world, out of the ooze of time.

  But Marrow was impatient, for he wanted to talk about power, and about speed, and he got me going, up there on the water tower after the all-clear, and I told him what he wanted to hear: about the old Grand Prix, and Blériot, Curtiss, Rougier, Calderara; about speed merchants, about frightful crashes; about all the devil-may-care boys I could name. It was more than an hour before we climbed down and walked home in the weird glow of a flashlight masked with blue paper.

  11/

  Late in the afternoon of April Fools’ Day, when we’d been on the base exactly a month, training, we were taken out to have a look at the ship we had been assigned to fly, eventually, in combat. After a morning of rain it had cleared; the sky to the west was soft and opalescent, and the field was bathed in slanting light. Being taken out to the dispersals, Marrow was sulky, suspicious—thought someone was trying to make an April fool of him. Or, if we really were to be shown our plane, he thought it might be Chug Bug, which was the hexed ship of the Group; she had killed seventeen officers. The driver stopped our recon car, and there, about two hundred yards away, we saw our Fort. A jeep flying a yellow warning flag was inching along the perimeter road, and behind it came a cleat track towing a brand new B-17F that was one of the first, under a new policy, not to be camouflaged; her long tapering fuselage and enormous vertical stabilizer glistened in the fading sun. She was a sight! Max Brindt said, “Holy cats,” and we got out of the jeep on the edge of a hardstand covered with puddles of grease and black oil and watched as she was stacked on her dispersal point.

  In a marvelously honest gesture, to show how the sight made him feel, Buzz raised his arms and flexed his muscles and posed, like Mr. America, and Max said, “What the hell do you think you are, one of those fairy strong men?”

  Marrow pointed to the ship and said, with unaffected sincerity, “It’s part of me, kid.”

  A few minutes later, though, as we walked around the plane he seemed to think of the ship as a her, and he came close to giving her the name she eventually carried. “Some torso, huh?” he said. “Just seeing that thing makes me feel horny. I can’t wait to get my hands on her.”

  12/

  He got his hands on her the very next day, when we took her up in a formation practice flight of the squadron to which we then belonged, under a man named Gurvine, who was later killed. Horncastle, Worcester, and home, three hours in calm air. What a stickler Marrow was then for inspections and checks in his brand-new plane! I think the ship was an object of erotic love for him. At that stage, because he had already fallen for her, his relationships with the ground crew, who also loved her, and particularly with the irascible crew chief, Red Black, were smooth; they were lechers together. After each flight Marrow and Black whispered about The Body like two wide-eyed adolescents talking about a hard dame with elegant gams. Anyway, on that flight I remember the close turn of our six ships at the Worcester apex of our course as, following Gurvine’s lead, we veered to port, and I saw the long, graceful, painted Forts on our left tilt their wings and show their undersides of pale sky blue. The sun was high above us. We flew over Oxford. Spires and courtyards like those of Cambridge, but a bigger city…

  Marrow reached across the aisle and tapped me on the shoulder. He pointed downward beside his window, and then at his own chest. I had seen him peering down. We were over open country. I looked out but couldn’t make out what he meant. He told me to take over, and he crawled down into the nose. On interphone, in a few seconds, he excitedly called the men, two or three at a time, to come forward and see something.

  Finally he said, “Boman, you got to come see this.”

  “And let the gremlins fly us?”

  He came up and relieved me, and I crawled down, and my first impression was of the ample space in the greenhouse of the B-17F, and of how open it seemed without the metal ribs that divided the plexiglass in the earlier E’s that we had been flying. Then, far below, I saw what had excited Buzz so much. On the surface of the silvery ground haze six swift shadows of Forts moved in formation. Around only one of them, on the rear right side, the shadow of our ship, there was a shining nimbus, a halo, like a ring around the moon. Haverstraw later explained to us the physics of this phenomenon, which we often saw, but the way the sun singled us out from the six shadows, that first time, seemed so eerie that I couldn’t put away a feeling of uneasiness as I remembered Buzz’s pointing at his own chest when he had first seen this apparently magical sign of our distinction.

  13/

  Marrow’s last flight before he was cleared as a combat pilot was an afternoon’s joy ride he took with three Army nurses. He had left me on the ground. “S—,” he’d said to Haverstraw, “Boman’s engaged, he wouldn’t want to go.” But I didn’t feel engaged any more, not having had a letter from Janet for three weeks, and I had wanted to go. Marrow took Handown to keep an eye on the engines and Haverstraw to navigate and Max Brindt, who was crazy to be a pilot, to keep the plane level while he, Marrow, entertained the ladies.

  That evening Marrow hopped around like a kid on a pogo stick, mysterious and all charged up. Finally he took me into his confidence. “That’s the first time—the first three times—I ever had it in the air.”

  “Was it good?” I asked, but I didn’t really have my heart in the question, because I was still miffed, now more than ever miffed, at having been left on the ground.

  “Listen!” Marrow said. “Flying’s as good as getting it, and when you do it, too, bang bang! You’re as big as a Fortress up there. I mean, the whole thing is just twice as good as real.”

  “Six times as good, you mean,” I bitterly said, multiplying for him.

  But now I believe it was all imaginary. I asked Haverstraw and Handown about it, and Haverstraw said he’d been too busy trying not to get lost to notice anything, and Handown was wild with excitement at the idea that he’d been sitting in the co-pilot’s seat when right back there in the radio room…It was later that we came to realize that Handown considered sex a spectator sport.

  But I don’t think they missed a thing. I think Marrow made it all up in his head.

  14/

  The following day was the sixth of April, the twenty-sixth anniversary of the entry of the United States into the war that made the world safe for democracy, and the weather was cold and windy, and they stuck a little notice up on the Ops bulletin board, saying we were cleared to go on the next mission, and I read it over the shoulders of some of the old hands, and they began discussing Marrow.

  “He’s green,” one of them said. “A real country rookie.”

  “He’s got diapers on,” another said. “I had him on my wing that last practice mission.”

  It was obvious what was eating those joes: they knew they could fly a hundred years and never touch Marrow. I didn’t even bother to tell them what they were full of, I just raced over to see Stormy Peters, to see how the weather looked. It looked stinking, for days to come. And that was just our luck: there was no mission for nine days.

  15/

  Marrow said that if we were going to fly missions we’d have to have the name painted o
n our ship, which we had had for about a week, and of course a suitable picture to go with it, so one afternoon when the day’s showers had cleared Marrow and I rode out to the dispersal point with Chan Charles, the squadron painter, to explain the project to him, and we stood throwing three long splinters of shadows across the hardstand while Marrow gave orders, and Charles, a bald-headed man with heavy tortoise-shell glasses who had a way of wrinkling his nose as if subject to twinges of pain, was sour on life and on our idea, said he couldn’t promise to get it done before the next alert, but we knew he would, and he did. Chan was in his fifties and was dyspeptic and negative—complained about having far too much work and cursed the childishness of pilots. He would never engage to do anything on time, yet he always quickly finished exactly what was wanted, and his little paintings on the noses of the ships had great wit and warmth. His deep bitterness, declared to the world, was that he wanted to be a creative artist but had somehow been forced to do his bit in the war as a glorified sign painter for a lot of cheap-minded men with banal ideas who only wanted replicas of Petty and Varga girls on their ships, anyhow. It never occurred to him, as it did to us, that he was exactly fitted for what he was doing. He seemed to get no pleasure whatsoever from the delight the men took in his work.

  Two days later he painted us the name: The BODY, and he did it in such a way that the emphasis seemed to be on the first of the two words; and he put a nude above the name that justified the emphasis. We had sergeants hanging around for days gaping at her. Marrow stood around with them by the hour, too, drooling.