by John Hersey
12/
Bins led the General and his staff officers to a trestle table not far from that side of the square in which the injured and the nurses were stationed.
The General made a short speech of a sort he must have made many times. We got from it a sincere feeling (not his, perhaps, so much as ours) that no one was fighting the war the way we were.
Then, with utmost simplicity, Colonel Bins began to call forward men to receive decorations at the General’s hand. At first we had the automatic decorations—Purple Hearts and Air Medals. There were so many Air Medals, which fliers earned simply by having flown a prescribed number of missions, that they were handed out in sets of boxes, crew by crew, to the first pilots of the ships. Men stepped forward for Purple Hearts with a definite crispness of step and straightness of back not often seen among aviators. The General murmured a few words to each, and each would come back to the ranks with a flaming face and proud eyes. The General went to the men in wheelchairs, carrying the medals to them, and he stood for some minutes chatting with the man on the hospital cot.
All this, under a broken sky, in a seasonable breeze which made the shiny nylon flag above the tower’s water tank slap and chatter, to a profound silence all around us on the parade ground, broken there only by the murmurs of the Colonel and the General—all this moved me deeply. I cannot say that the emotion was one of happiness, for there was a sharp sense of pain in it, yet I felt, all in all, very good about life.
We had returned from Southport the previous Saturday; Daphne had come at once to her room in Bartleck, and after our separation our pleasure in each other’s company had been almost unbearably strong. She had stayed on until Thursday; we had been peaceful together. Just that morning she had gone back to Cambridge to settle up some things she had left unfinished on her job. Lynch had worried me, for I had found him, on my return, pale, drawn, and apathetic, and he no longer read poems and made odd announcements on the Tannoy. I felt, by the very measure of his decline, refreshed by my own rest, but I felt that he should have such a rest, too. It had been exciting to see the sergeants of our crew again, after a week apart. Prien had come back with what seemed a chronic diarrhea, and I had visited him in sick quarters, where he was on sulfaguanadine, and he had wept, gripping my hand, because his physical symptoms were going to keep him from flying any more with the greatest crew in the E.T.O. It had done me good to see that Marrow seemed to have recovered some of his old pepper. Four or five days after our return he had discovered that Butcher Lamb had salvaged a big piece of armor plate from the current Hangar Queen, and Butch had screwed it onto the bulkhead of his radio room, for his own sense of well-being, and Marrow had ordered him, with beautifully mordant language, to rip it out, and he had stood over Lamb and watched him take the nut off every bolt. Another day we had been handed instructions for loading leaflets in the bomb bays—the boxes should be attached to the uppermost bomb racks, and to inboard racks when possible, and so on—and Marrow had shouted in the briefing room that he was one pilot who was never, never going to carry a lot of crap paper in his bomb bays.
Above all, I suppose, I felt on top because we of The Body hadn’t flown a combat mission since the Fourth of July Picnic, and this was the twenty-third.
After the Purple Hearts and the Air Medals (I sneaked open the blue velveteen box in which my own Air Medal had come and read with a hurrying pulse the mimeographed form which spoke of my courage in action), a few men were called forward who had really earned their decorations. Bins himself got a D.F.C., and when Silg was given a D.F.C. in absentia a kind of shudder ran along the sides of the square. Braddock got a posthumous Silver Star. All this was in a continuing silence; where I stood we heard only the sounds of blowing cloth atop the tower.
Then something happened that I’ll never forget. Marrow was called forward for his decoration. As the General’s hands went up to pin the ribbon to Buzz’s tunic someone in the back of the ranks—not in our crew; it was off to one side—gave out, in a subdued voice, so it sounded distant, as a kind of ventriloquist’s lob of a sound, a small and perhaps sarcastic “Hurray!” Then there were other shouts, a bit louder, and gradually an amazing roar of approval, laughter, and deep feeling came pouring out from all four sides of the square. The nurses began waving their white caps. There were ear-piercing whistles, like those Bob Hope had received when he had played one night with a U.S.O. group in the enlisted men’s mess. I found that I was shouting and that tears were gathering in my eyes, and I was thumping Max Brindt on the back.
Marrow came back to us grinning the way he had used to do in the early days, and he leaned over and said in my ear, “See those nurses wave? I’m going to clamp it to ’em, one by one.”
Was all the hullaballoo in Marrow’s honor? Was he so much admired? I don’t know. I think that the very first hurray had had a lot of mockery in it; indeed, so had the whole outburst. There had certainly been a great deal of laughter. Perhaps the men had been trying to tell Marrow they were sorry for him because he’d been passed over in favor of Bins—though now, dispassionately, from a distance, I can see that Marrow never had had a prayer of being given the Group command; I doubt if the higher-ups ever considered him. Perhaps all the shouting was simply because Marrow was a character, the sort of man who would holler in the briefing room that he wasn’t going to carry leaflets. Perhaps the great shout was simply an outpouring of the kind of good feelings I myself had felt standing there—rare feelings which wanted expression and were bound to find some excuse for ventilation. Or perhaps it was a deep, raucous protest against the absurdity of this formal show, for we knew who was durable and who wasn’t, among us, and each man knew in his own heart whether he was sound or not, as of that day. We wanted no part of portentous words like bravery, gallantry.
Marrow himself took it very simply: It meant that he was the best aviator in the Group.
“Did you hear any cheering for that mother-f—er Bins?” he asked afterwards.
When we broke up, Marrow showed his gong, as he called it, to all comers; a formée cross on a square of rays, and superimposed on the cross a four-bladed propeller, all in bronze. On the back was engraved, “For Gallantry in Action—CAPT. WM. MARLOW.” So, as usual, someone had goofed off, and the Great God-Damn System had got its hero’s name wrong.
13/
I spent the evening with Lynch. I asked him what he had felt during the cheering.
He said he had felt a wild elation, a kind of ecstasy, a strong pressure in his chest, a desire to weep. He had shouted loud. It had had nothing to do with Marrow, for him, he said, except that he had sensed a grim yet somehow comical incongruity—the boastful, foul-mouthed Marrow, with his huge head and tiny feet, receiving that small symbol of man’s never-ending holding of bridges and forts and hills against his worst enemy, himself. Lynch said he thought that for him the shout had had to do with trying to tell the General to go back to his plush life in London. It had definitely had to do with the snapping of the flag. “It was very mysterious,” Lynch said, in his strained, tired voice. “It was as if something had had hold of my throat.”
Later in the evening we tried to talk to each other about courage, and suddenly Lynch said he suffered phobic terrors on missions. “Oh, yes,” he said, in the voice of an old man, “I’ve had them since my first strike.” Even when he’d been his most light-hearted self—“back in the Tannoy days.” He was convinced that hatches might fall out of the plane, and he with them, or that the ship would blow up any minute, or that the walls of the plane would collapse. The dread ebbed and flowed; some days there was much, others he was nearly free. “Now I’ve told you,” he said, and he looked at me as if ashamed.
I determined to go and speak with Doc Randall later that very evening, before turning in, to urge Lynch’s grounding.
When I left Lynch’s room I was flooded with a sense of how well off I was. Daphne! Darling! I was lucky! For some reason—perhaps because a
n alert for a raid sounded as I was walking home—I decided to wait till morning to speak to Doc about the Kid.
14/
Far into that night I had a terrifying dream—particularly terrifying because it was an auditory dream. I did not see pictures but heard sounds. The sounds broke into the catacomb silence of what seemed to be a dreamless sleep. A voice spoke, and I could not tell whether it was mine or someone else’s speaking to me, and if it was mine, I couldn’t tell whether it was speaking to Lynch or to Marrow or to me or to whom. Somewhere at the outer edge of the dream there was a sense of Lynch and of Marrow, and of certain other aviators, too, I think. Daphne was not in it. The voice had great force and authority, and it spoke only one sentence.
“You are going to die tomorrow.”
I found myself fully awake at once, with a hammering heart. At first I was sure the voice, even if it was mine, was speaking to me, and I leaped out of bed and stood in the middle of the room, feeling doomed and lost.
Then, as if the dream had been reality, and as if everything were logical and rational, I wanted to know which day would be tomorrow. If it was before midnight, tomorrow would obviously be Saturday, the twenty-fourth. But if it was after midnight, it was already the twenty-fourth, and I might be spared—or someone might be spared—until Sunday.
I patted the desk near the head of my bed and found my watch, and I tried to make out from its luminous symbols what time it was, but I couldn’t see, so I walked down the hall, still trembling with what seemed to be a quite practical and proper fear, and went in the latrine, where a light was burning, and squinted my eyes and saw the time.
It was one seventeen.
It was already Saturday. That meant Sunday. Yet perhaps not Sunday. Perhaps the voice in the dream had talked with a simple tongue; when one stayed up all night, one spoke, even into the small hours, of “tomorrow” as the day that would follow the darkness.
I got back in my bed and lay shivering for a long time. At last I fell into a deep, deep abyss of sleep, only to be wakened almost at once, it seemed, by the anticipation of Sully’s flashlight. Yes, he was there. “Out, boy. It’s nearly three thirty. Briefing at four.”
For a time the dream was only a vague memory; those few minutes of black oblivion just before Sully came on his rounds had apparently almost wiped it out.
But it hit me again at breakfast. I got the shakes.
On the way to the briefing I ran into Doc Randall. I stopped him. I think I meant to speak to him about Kid Lynch, but I said, “What about Prien?”
“He’s out. He’ll fly,” Doc said. “His stools were negative for amoebas. No specific diagnosis. You might suggest to Marrow that he mollycoddle Prien a bit.”
“That’s a laugh,” I said. I wanted to ask Doc about my dream. What it meant.
“Then you mollycoddle Prien,” he said, and he started to walk away. Then he turned his head back and said, “And while you’re at it, mollycoddle your pilot, too.”
There was too much confusion. I was too bothered to think about what he was trying to say.
15/
They briefed us for the longest mission the Eighth Air Force had flown up to that time, the target being the magnesium, aluminum, and nitrate works of Nordisk Lettmetal at Heroya, Norway. Steve Murika told us the plant had just been completed by the German chemical trust, I. G. Farbenindustrie, and had only been in operation for three weeks; our visit would give the Krauts a surprise.
When we took off there was haze and medium cloud in our part of England, and visibility was only a couple of miles. That day for the first time we assembled through bad weather by homing to a splasher beacon for Group rendezvous and then running along three splashers for force formation—and the newness of this procedure compounded my fright. As we went out over the North Sea, low cloud cover built up and we had ten tenths under us for hours on end. Above us the sky was clear. Happily we’d been briefed to fly just above the clouds, mostly at about five thousand feet, until immediately before the target, so we didn’t have all that long time on oxygen. I was fearful all the way. I did not question the validity of my dream. I only wondered which day the voice had meant. I thought a lot about the cold sea hidden beneath the clouds.
Stormy Peters had promised that the clouds would abruptly break just before the Norwegian coast, and they did, and over the target we had thirty miles of visibility. Some of the groups—nine were out that day—apparently had trouble identifying the aiming point and had to go around a second time, but we bombed on our first run. Results were good; the plant was shut down, we later learned, and the Norwegians were impressed by pickle-barrel bombing. Anti-aircraft fire was meager. Only about forty enemy aircraft jumped the formation on the entire trip, and our Group was flying midway along the bomber stream, and we were never touched.
It was, in other words, a milk run, though a long one, but you couldn’t have proved it by me, for I sat stiffly through it all, wondering when my dream was going to come true. I was too busy being afraid to notice how Marrow behaved all that day.
I was weary that evening, from lack of sleep the night before and from ten hours of rigid, self-centered flying during the day, and in the club after dinner I could barely keep my eyes open. I was looking forward to a splendid session of sleep.
An alert was announced, and we in the club greeted it with boos—not exactly a high point in the record of man’s expressions of his patriotism. But little did we know what we were in for, because the fact was, as things turned out, we had launched only the first of a series of attacks which we were to come to know as “the July Blitz.” The Body was to fly six missions in seven days.
After the alert I telephoned Daphne and told her how tired I was, and that we were going out again the next day, and that she might as well stay in Cambridge until we were stood down and I had had a chance to recover. I would call her. By then I had come wide awake, and though I hurried to bed, it was not to sleep. I had worked my dream over so much all day that I guess my head was sick of it, and this night I managed not to think about it much. From time to time a memory of that loud and assured voice forced its way into my mind, but each time I was able to push it down without becoming badly frightened. During the night I prepared, in full detail, a discussion with Doc Randall of Kid Lynch’s problems, and for some reason, in the hazy half-thinking of the night, I grew angry with Doc; then I was angry with Marrow; then I was angry with General Eaker, who seemed at times to be Marrow. I told the General we needed more thorough briefings; that methods of assembly needed improvement, and that time spent in assembling should be shortened; that the wait between briefing and take-off should be cut down. He (he looked like Marrow) seemed deferential; eager for my opinions…. I got a lot off my chest, and perhaps I slept more than I thought I did.
16/
I was awake when Sully came in to get me up, and I arose convinced I hadn’t slept at all; I was exhausted.
Nevertheless, I had a curious feeling of coming out of myself that morning, of noticing much more about the outside world. The day before I had been shut into my own skin, a captive of my fears, and now I felt more open, and I heard what people said, and I reacted to my surroundings. Above all, to Marrow.
It seemed to me that Marrow must have been taken quite drunk by the queer applause during the award ceremony two days before, and that now he was having a dreadful, protracted hangover. He was in an ugly mood. At the same time, he evidently felt compelled to act the part of the slickest pilot in the Group; his maneuvers in the air, particularly evasive ones, had suddenly become flamboyant. “Christ Almighty,” Handown said after we got back, “he thinks he’s winning the war single-handed. In a single-seater airplane.”
The attack that day was on the Blohm and Voss submarine factory at Hamburg. Our Group was Tail End Charlie, and we made a poor showing. The weather worsened as we approached Hamburg, the cover closing from five to seven tenths, and when we look
ed down on the city we had no idea where our target was, for besides the clouds there was a mass of smoke. Murika had off-handedly told us that the R.A.F. had hit Hamburg the night before with one of its devastating Katastrophe raids, but we had never seen the effect of an R.A.F. attack the morning after, and we were, in our various ways, amazed.
Marrow’s way was to jump his crew. “You on it, Max, you on it?”
“I can’t see anything only smoke.”
“Get on it, boy.”
I thought of what Doc Randall had said about mollycoddling Marrow, and I said, “You did a great job getting us here, Buzz. You can’t help it if there’s smoke.”
Marrow answered, “You kiss my ass, Boman. We’ve come out here to drop bombs.” His voice rose through this last sentence, in both pitch and volume, so that the word “bombs” was uttered in a tone very much like his scream at the first contact of each strike.
It was at this moment that my dream came rushing back into my mind, and with it a rush of terror. I was to die that day, or Marrow was to die. I was certain of it.
But we got home, and neither of us died.
I was too tired even to feel much relief at the realization that my dream, like all dreams, had not meant exactly what it had said.
After dinner we got our third alert in a row. I called Daphne. She said, “I wish I hadn’t given up my job.”
17/
I had had a headache ever since our awakening at three o’clock in the morning. In the briefing, when Murika started talking about Hamburg for the second day in a row, I had a queer, paramnesic feeling that precisely what I was experiencing at that moment was also a whole set of memories retreating down my past like images within images in opposite mirrors; Hamburg Hamburg Hamburg Hamburg fading away in echoing cries. At the ground check I was listless and sloppy—gave the tires a swift kick and turned the switches on and let it go at that. I didn’t care. There was an argument about the target, but I didn’t care.
