by John Hersey
The condescending tone in his voice crushed me—as if he were lecturing a flying cadet who still had his diapers on. I guess he was making good on his claim of being one of the super-destructive men of this world.
To me the most interesting part of all, looking back on it, was the extent to which I allowed him to be destructive. I took what he said to heart and fed his madness; my slipped morale let him see what he could do.
After the interrogation I rode out alone on my bike and lay on my back in a meadow of feed grass of some sort that was already two feet tall, so that all around me there was stockade of slender green shoots, tipped with the fuzz of half-formed seed scales, fencing me in from the sunny day.
What was the matter with me, anyway? Was it all because I was small?
My bad flying couldn’t be just because I was short. I’d been over that plenty of times. Being short made a lot of people sorry for me, and others despised me, and others thought they had to take care of me when I wanted it least, and others kidded me to make themselves feel bigger—and I knew all these things, and I knew they had an effect on me. They put me on the defensive and made me try to show what I could do, on my own. But I wasn’t going to let them make me cocky. I wasn’t going to be a typical shorty—noisy and pushy, declaring myself all over the place.
With two minutes of his belittling talk, Marrow had set me right back to the refrain of my teens.
A breeze stirred the grass around me, and I began to study the swaying, juicy tubes, crisscrossing against an unusually crisp blue sky, and I forgot Marrow, and I thought of Daphne, and I was vividly conscious of being alive; intense gratitude fell on me. like a cool shower.
I remembered images from a certain day: the somber steel bascule railway bridge, near home, with its massive concrete counterweight on the far side of the river, and my dog, Lad, a more-or-less collie with a reddish tail curving up and forward over his back, the tail incessantly fanning; a perfect sky; a crazy towhee in the sweet birch in our yard, shouting, “Trick or treat! Trick or treat!” And my gentle father, who had never spanked me, looking at me with a pained expression, saying, “Son, this was supposed to be your job.” He did the job himself, before my eyes, whatever it was.
Yes, I assumed on slightest provocation a disapproving attitude toward myself and readily took the blame for things that were not my fault. How shrewdly Marrow sensed this! And moved in. And, moving in, opened the way to crippling himself, because his appetite for destructiveness was insatiable, insatiable.
14/
The others had gone, and we had been left behind. Buzz and I stood on the hardstand, looking at The Body.
Buzz made a show of being sore at his ship. “The bitch,” he said. “The first time she stood me up. I feel like I caught some guy in bed with one of my girls.”
It was May fourteenth. The Group had taken off on a mission for two big submarine-building yards at Kiel, Germania Werft and Deutsche Werke, but we had been crossed off the list because the previous evening our crew chief, Red Black, had found some trouble in a turbo and had grounded The Body.
Black was up on a wing, opening up the cowling of the ailing engine. Marrow approached, and he called up, “Sergeant Black!”
A screwdriver was put down on the wing with more energy than was necessary, and a dark-haired, pale-faced head appeared over the leading edge of the wing.
“Listen to me, Sergeant,” Marrow said…and out came a tirade, for Marrow could not stand frustration—least of all, frustration of his urge to fly.
Our crew chief was a strange bird. He was subject to lightning changes of temper. Immediately after having been talking with us on the hardstand, early any morning before a take-off, in an obviously jolly mood, beaming like a seraph and going off trolling snatches from I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas or Waltzing Matilda in a loud voice, off key, he could suddenly be heard to have switched, with no apparent cause, to a high pitch of fury, swearing blue flame like a blowtorch and banging tools down on the skin of our poor ship. “And he’s a bastard, too, a second f—ing lieutenant of a bastard.” Black was a small man in his early thirties with a big pocked plow of a nose. Not at all a standardized G.I., he went around in coveralls but swung the upper part off his shoulders and let the loose folds and sleeves hang down from his belted waist, and his dead-white arms were always streaked with black grease marks. I don’t know why he was nicknamed Red, unless as a tribute to his temper. He was outwardly servile toward all officers from the rank of first lieutenant upwards, but he seemed to consider second looeys like me some species of schoolboy, to be hazed and gulled at every turn. Under his fawning manners there lurked a tyrant. Let a corporal from the motor pool make a false move on our dispersal point, and Red would land on him like a hod full of mortar. “You! Where you going? Get that p—pot of a jeep out from under that wing!” But the other members of the ground crew swore by the chief, whose meticulousness as a mechanic and whose worship of The Body were unbounded. He was a dedicated workman—and this was precisely the point on which Marrow attacked him.
Our lives depended on Black’s carefulness, yet Marrow accused him, in vile, insulting terms, of being too cautious.
Black appeared to be in an agony of agreeableness as Marrow undermined his talent, his triple-checking cautiousness. Marrow said Red should have let the turbo go another day, so The Body would not have missed a mission; if we’d lost an engine—so what? Ships came home every day on three. Marrow made it out that Black’s care was a kind of timidity, and that such timidity would lose us the war.
In the end Marrow made Black’s finest quality as a mechanic seem traitorous.
15/
We played in a pickup ball game with some ground-grippers while the mission was being flown, that day, and Marrow was ecstatic, again, about Haverstraw’s throwing arm. Funny: that made me sore. I guessed I was as bright as Haverstraw, taking aptitudes for number concepts and for verbal concepts together. It was just that I wasn’t a lousy idiot savant. Your mathematical nut (Haverstraw) would always be flashier than your all-round, socially adjusted, intelligent high achiever (Boman). And when Buzz found out that Haverstraw could remember his dames’ phone numbers for him and peg a ball like Peewee Reese, he went all the way off his conker. Phooey on that.
Later that afternoon I felt low. I wanted to quit the whole show. I sat in our room, alone, and I could hear test-firing at the clay bank, and as I looked through the window at the meadow on the near side of the flight line, an English farmer crossed in the middle distance, plodding behind six Guernsey cows, oblivious, apparently, to the firing; he looked neither to right nor left but simply kept on walking with a heavy plowman’s stride. I wanted to go to Daphne. My chest ached for Daphne.
16/
At the interrogation after a mission we flew the next day, May fifteenth, we caught, as our interrogating officer, an apple-cheeked captain from Wing Headquarters, who wore an unconvincing mustache, more a plea than a declaration. This mother’s boy got off on the wrong foot with us right away, by asking which mission this had been for us.
It was our sixth.
“Oh,” he said, on a groaning note, which had the effect of dismissing us as beginners, and therefore unreliable. We had thought ourselves rather seasoned.
The interrogation was held in the briefing hut, into which a number of small tables had been moved. An interrogator sat at each table, with a stack of report forms before him, and he took on one crew at a time. When our turn came, we of The Body gathered around the pink-faced young captain’s table, some sitting and some standing; we were still in flying gear, with our jackets unzipped, our flying helmets flopping on the backs of our heads, and several of us held white mugs of coffee.
Well, our child captain began giving us a hard time. It seemed that neither he nor any of the other interrogators, even our own from the Group, were too well satisfied with our day’s work. They didn’t quite believe we’d b
een where we said we’d been—or that we knew where that was.
By rights, the mission should have hiked our morale, because, having been briefed for some sub yards at Wilhelmshaven, our Group had led the mission out over the North Sea, and we hadn’t climbed to altitude until twelve minutes before the target, so we had been comfortable and warm all that time, and not even on oxygen. The primary target, besides throwing up considerable flak, which Handown now called “iron cumulus,” had been under ten-tenths cloud, so, with no briefed secondary target, we had wheeled full circle and had gone out to sea and had bombed what Colonel Whelan had taken to be the Helgoland Naval Base.
What made us think it was Helgoland?
Under pressure from the baby captain, Marrow grew ugly, and he began to jump his own crew.
First he piled into Haverstraw, of all people—teacher’s pet; asked for his log of the mission right there at the interrogation table, to check it and prove we’d been to Helgoland, but it turned out from his record that Clint had had no idea whatsoever where we’d flown.
“I figured the Colonel knew what he was doing,” Clint lamely said.
Marrow took off on Brains; really scored Clint for a mental defective.
Next it was Farr’s turn. In the background of the anxious cross-examination, we could hear the Jughead muttering about Wing’s having sent us to a target covered by solid cloud, without a secondary target, and so on; all in Farr’s nastiest whine. Jughead’s complaints about what he considered to be the futile and suicidal missions the bicycle generals had been devising for us were getting on our nerves. Farr, who talked so tough, was like a spoiled child. He made outrageous demands on all of us, and alternately exploded with dangerous rages and wheedled for sympathy, irritated us and charmed us, abused us and flattered us. He blew up over nothing like a child and saw reality with the clear eyes of a child. Indeed, his complaints were largely justified; he railed against conditions the rest of us were doing our best to ignore.
Marrow, in a white heat of defending himself against the baby-face, turned on Farr and told him to shut his big mouth before he, Marrow, pasted it shut.
Farr fell silent, but after the briefing he rounded up several of the crew and, in a barely audible murmur, said that Marrow was too weak to carry legitimate beefs to Wing.
It took our breath away to hear Marrow called a lily-liver, and Handown spoke for all of us when he told Farr he was only bellyaching because Marrow had shut him up. He reminded Farr that Marrow had in fact been to Wing to grouse about the enlisted men’s laundry problem—and that was more than lots of other pilots had done.
17/
It had been a very early mission, and we were all through by lunchtime, and we had just turned in for some luxurious afternoon sack time when a voice on the Tannoy ordered all combat crews to report to the tower in olive drab on the double, to be taken to the dispersals to stand review by some personages.
I had to wake Marrow up, and he was so mad he was speechless.
We got out there and stood around for an hour, and then a batch of about six Rolls Royces and Bentleys whizzed by on the perimeter track, and we could see the procession stop a couple of stands down, at Angel Tread, Wheatley Bins’ ship, for about ten minutes. Then it sped on and ducked in by the hangars and hurried past the Admin building and cut out the main gate.
When we got in, we were told we’d been visited by Their Undoubted Majesties, the King and Queen of England, together with their retinue of gentlemen-in-attendance and ladies-in-waiting, and, to add insult to this injury of cursoriness, Generals Eaker, Longfellow, Hansell, and several other unidentified U.S.A.A.F. officers of whom we hadn’t seen hide nor hair in all those dangerous weeks.
Marrow reacted to this with a crazy fury that Their Royal Jackasses, as he called them, had stopped at Angel Tread rather than at The Body. He went on with an elaborate, carefully detailed, and quite devastating analysis of Wheatley Bins’ flying technique. Buzz made a convincing argument that he was a far better flier than Bins. I think, in justice, that he was.
18/
Through the dance Daphne sat at a table with me in a corner, wearing around her bare shoulders a scarf of pale, blue-gray, gauzy material, something I could have reached out of the cockpit and grabbed on the way to Helgoland that morning, and with her eyes rather heavily made up, she looked as if she had been weeping, though in fact she seemed happy in my company. We talked about the King and Queen. I felt a peacefulness such as I had never experienced before. I was attentive to her; she was acknowledged to be my girl, and I did not have to worry about her drifting off with some guy (Janet’s trick: she used to get me hot as a firecracker at a party and then disappear, just leave the party with a total stranger), and I called fliers over to meet her and talk with her. I danced with her now and then just to have my arm around her; she was responsive, and I felt unhurried and extravagantly alive.
Marrow hung around, but he was plastered. He kept singing, What Shall We Do With a Drunken Pilot? The answer, in successive stanzas, was, “Put him in the nose of a Flying Fortress, so earlye in the morning,” and, “He will bomb the blind and pregnant…he will bomb their homes and churches…he will bomb their turnip patches….” Marrow had a cherubic expression as he sang these macabre lines, and Daphne and I laughed at him too hard.
During one of the times when we were alone at the table I said I’d heard she’d had some sort of tragedy—lost her first important man, supposed to be a Spit pilot, or something. I thought I was being sympathetic; the illusion that Daph had been crying was strong at that moment.
“Don’t ask me about other men,” Daphne said, and the way she put it made her seem not self-pitying but instead inclined to spare me pain. “Let’s try…”
But impulsively she told me a little about the man. She called him only Dugger; whether this was a last name or a nickname I never asked. He had been a great R.A.F. bomber pilot who, she said, couldn’t get enough, and upon the completion of his regular tour he had transferred to night fighters, and he had grown more and more daring, or suicidal, until, it was said, he had led his entire squadron in pursuit of German bombers, in darkness, too deep into Germany to return to their airdrome in England. Word had come home through prison-camp escapees that Dugger himself had been killed. Then, with a somber expression, Daphne said, “He was like a blood brother to your pilot.”
“Marrow?”
“As like as two peas in a pod. In character, I mean.”
I wasn’t sure I relished that likeness, but Daphne stared at me with a sort of helplessness; she looked as if she were skidding and couldn’t stop. “My father was killed in the Blitz,” she said, “too.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and I knew at once that that was a stupid response.
But Daphne went back to talking, half-heartedly, about Dugger, and then her voice drifted off, and she looked as if she had forgotten what she wanted to say. So I laid off the subject of other men, and she never came back to it until the day we went to Hampton Court.
Soon I forgot where I was. All experience, all purpose, and all meaning seemed to be encompassed in each moment’s perceptions. An edge of Daphne’s scarf against the white tablecloth, an ash tray with our crumpled cigarettes (Daphne’s butts were short, frugal), my Scotch with a ring of shining soda bubbles around the glass at the surface, a sensitive trembling of Daphne’s mouth at the beginning of a smile: I had the impression that each image was immensely important—that the enjoyment of life, which might end some early morning soon high in the sky, could not be more than a savoring of these glimpses. I had seen that Daphne always experienced every moment with deep and easily available emotion, and my own feelings were greatly heightened. I responded strongly to absurd trivialities. Our bar used plastic swizzle sticks embossed with the phrase, BUNDLES FOR BERLIN; some pilot’s old man manufactured such things and had given us a trillion gross of them, though as yet we had by no means the capabilit
y of carrying anything as far as Berlin. I studied the shiny red globe on one end of such a stick, as if it were a marvel of nature, a salmon’s egg or an immense dewdrop on a rose petal, and I experienced a kind of ecstasy; then I felt with my finger tips the sharp edges of the thing, and I took extraordinary pleasure in my sense of touch. I bent the stick. It broke. I felt intensely sad, as if I had snapped something of great value.
At about midnight there was a drumroll and up stood General Minott, himself, our Wing Commander, and in an unbecoming manner, almost groveling, he vindicated us for that morning’s mission; acknowledged that strike photos showed that we had, in truth, hit the Helgoland base and had done damage to naval installations.
The din in the place was deafening; our joy—not at having hurt the enemy but at having bested Wing—was unbounded.
While the celebration of the announcement was still going on, Marrow showed up in the doorway, with a fierce grimace on his face that I didn’t like, holding in his hand a lighted candle.
“Hey, Braddock!” I heard him shout. “Get your ass over here.”
When Brad joined him, Buzz climbed on his shoulders and rode pick-a-back out onto the cleared place that served as a dance floor. Daphne was convinced that he was going to set fire to the mess hall. I said he was a crazy goop but not that far gone. Waving the smoking taper and shouting incoherently, Buzz rode to the center of the floor and, with many a hitch of his balance on poor Braddock’s shoulders, he wrote in smoke on the ceiling: TO HELL WITH HELLAGOLAND.
