Alive and Kicking

by Chris Lynch

  And those three, sticking out either side of the Batboy’s rib section and out of his belly button, are even more of a team than the rest of us. Because the two are like the left and the right side of one big dope of a person while the third is, I guess, the hard abdominal center.

  And I’m certain they have no idea how lucky they are with that.

  We are all just getting up from the table, from breakfast, in the mess, which is a mess, no matter how much they clean it. We’re getting up together because we do everything together, whether we like it or not.

  Each one of the six of us would tell you not. And each one of the six of us would be lying. We’ve been cooped up together, almost twenty-four hours a day, since we plunked down in Shipdham not even a month ago. If we aren’t doing our business in the cramped and freezing, earsplitting, and bone-rattling B-24, then we are likewise huddled like a den of badgers in the newly built living quarters the RAF has provided just for the lucky men of the USAAF. More honestly, the facilities seem like they were newly built for the fighters of the previous Great World War or whatever they called it, or possibly for the Great One before that. The only thing that’s for sure is that the place we currently call home makes us yearn for the comforts of the aircraft.

  We complain loudly about the living conditions, the weather, the food, the officers, the assignments, the boredom, and anything else that we can think of, which doesn’t take much thinking power. But most of all, we complain about each other, so relentlessly that any outside observer would be amazed that all six of us are highly trained gunnery school graduates handling high-powered weapons every day and not one of us has shot any of the others. Yet.

  “Okay,” Boyd pipes up as we cross the field and approach the waiting and ready Batboy. “I’m sold, Sarge. It’s a beautiful idea.”

  “Yeah,” I say, “the kind of beauty you don’t run into every day, unless you live in a maximum-security prison, I suppose.”

  “Wouldja listen to Ol’ Sergeant Sunshine over there,” Dodge calls out. “Remember, Rosie Nosegun, I’m the official listener up there in my radio observatory seat when I’m not too busy giving them rotten German birds a little buckshot. And from what I can hear outta your direction, I could make quite a recording of what comes out of your mouth once the shootin’ starts.”

  I have no idea what he is referring to. I honestly don’t.

  “Ah, man, Dodge, you’re just making stuff up now.”

  “Ha!” he yells. “You really don’t know, do ya? Even nuttier than I thought there, bats-in-the-belfry boy. I for sure have to see if I can get you recorded. And then you better be nicer to me, ’cause I’m pretty sure if I sent the evidence off to the Geneva Convention folks or whoever, you could already be up for war crimes based on your mouth alone.”

  From the way every other guy is laughing and pointing in my direction, I’m afraid I can neither defend myself nor completely rule out his possible truthfulness.

  That should be worrying, I guess.

  Guys are slapping my back and pushing me along a kind of instant honor-guard lineup as I approach the entrance to the plane. We’ve developed this kind of semiofficial routine, where we enter in order of distance from the opening. So, Rosie Nosegun gets first go.

  “Thank you, thank you,” I say, bowing and waving as each back smack gets harder, then the odd kick gets in.

  It goes like this now. The closer we get to the hour, the closer we get to the plane, to the air and the target and the enemy action, the more mania we can feel bubbling up among us.

  In a slight disruption of protocol, Couley slips in behind me ahead of Dodge. He bumps me pretty hard, knocking me forward just as I step on the narrow plank of the walkway.

  “Hey, easy, man,” I say, and I hear nothing in return. This is unusual and makes me realize that I don’t think I have heard him speak a word yet today. When we get to the point where he is to mount his engineer’s station and I am to continue onto the nose where I will trade elbows with the officer grade of knucklehead for a while, I stop. I grab hold of Couley’s arm before he can climb up into his seat. “What’s wrong with you today? You all right?”

  For a couple of seconds he just stares, like he’s giving thought to whether or not he’s even going to respond. Eventually he decides he will.

  “What are we doing here, Theo?”

  My turn to stare. “That? That’s your answer to my question of what’s bothering you? Another question? A question, I might add, that could take some time to answer in any meaningful way.”

  “I mean, come on, what are we doing going after U-boats in open water? We’re not built for that. There are actually other craft that are specifically tailored to that.”

  “I’m sure they’ll be there, too.”

  He just shakes his head a lot for a bit, then pats me hard on the shoulder. “Never mind. I’m just shooting off my mouth. Bad mood I guess.”

  “Okay, guy,” I say and punch his shoulder twice as hard before stepping toward my nose gun.

  “I just seem to have these moods come over me, you know, strangely enough, every time it occurs to me that the people running the Mighty Eighth Air Force do not know what they are doing, here in the European Theater of Operations and as a result we are all, each and every one of us in his turn, going to die in a really gruesome, fiery way because of them.”

  I stop short and execute easily the crispest pinpoint toe-heel about-face since basic training. I find Couley already settled into his station. And, I should add, looking so poised and professional that it’s spooky. It hardly seems possible the words that caught me from behind came out of the face that’s regarding me now.

  “Jeez, Couley, and to think somebody just called me Sergeant Sunshine. Nice pep talk there, boy.”

  He shows almost no facial reaction to me, but when he speaks again, he smiles. “Just do me a favor, will ya? Just to be on the safe side and leave nothing to chance or to the Bomber Command head-scratchers, I’d sure feel a whole lot better if you would kill, oh, everybody out there today. Just kill lots and lots of Germans. ’Cause I do have faith in you, kid. Wouldja do that for me?”

  I give him a salute, just so that we both can see how cockamamie this exchange actually is, and say, “I’m honored. That means a lot to me, even if you are, y’know, nuts. But who cares, right? I don’t. So, consider ’em all dead, pal.”

  He’s smiling broadly as I go, and I am determined once and for all to get to my station, no matter what else I might hear. And that determination comes in good and handy when I hear just this little bit more.

  “I do, now. I consider them all dead. I’m looking forward to it being official. I’m a great admirer of your work.”

  I all but nose-dive into the nose cone just to get to a place where I think I understand how everything is supposed to function, and can rely on it all to make the same sense it did yesterday.

  Everybody at one time or another says that all of us airmen are at least a little insane. And everybody means it to a different degree, and with a variety of different interpretations of insanity.

  That’s all on that subject for now. There’s work ahead.

  “What are we trying to prove with this stuff anyway, huh?” Gallagher says instead of hello, confirming that there is something in the air today that’s making guys act funny, which is giving me a feeling that is anything but.

  “Well,” I say, “since I don’t really quite get the nature of the question and I have no desire to ask you to clarify it, I’m just gonna take a shot and say we’re trying to prove that the Armed Forces of the United States of America are the equal or better of anyone else’s on earth, and that we can lead the world as a moral force for good, opposing tyranny of all kinds. And if we put enough planes in the air and drop enough bombs then that will settle matters so everybody can go home and live peacefully.”

  I am not proud of how easily I seem to be able to ruffle Gallagher’s feathers, or of how frequently I enjoy doing it. But, I’m not not pr
oud of it, either.

  “What?” he blurts. “What are you talking about? I mean this whole daylight raid business. Broad-daylight bombing with almost no fighter escort cover at all. I don’t like it. The Brits and Germans have already been at it over here for what, three years? And they both decided it was a demented idea and switched to night bombing rather than have their planes and their crews falling out of the sky so quickly they might as well have just saved the fuel, kept them on the runways, and shot all their own guys instead.”

  While I am absorbing this rant that has been obviously growing like a gas ball in Gallagher’s stomach — though less obvious is why he was saving it for me — I find myself giving every vital element of my trusted machine gun an extra-diligent going-over. It seems like people here are suddenly getting all inquisitive about the very basic whatall at the core of what we shooter-bomber-flyer operations are achieving. And, sure, that’s fine. They can do that. Maybe the way we are going about our mission to rid the world of evil isn’t perfect, and speaking up and questioning might improve things in the future. You can’t take much for granted, because we sure are seeing the machinery of warfare changing almost by the day with all these countries competing to match and mimic and surpass one another’s newest, fastest, blastiest explosive devices and the systems that deliver them. So maybe there’s room for helpful criticism from a bombardier. Like I said, maybe it’ll amount to something in the future. Good luck with that.

  But me, I’ve been thinking an awful lot lately. And by that I mean filling every second of every day that isn’t bombarded with the noise and chatter and boom and bam of activity that makes up this life I’m in, filling all those seconds with a different sort of thought about the future. And that thought is: I don’t know whether there’s any such thing. I’m not at all sure I even have much of what you’d call a future stretching out in front of me. All those idle seconds, that’s the thought that’s wedging itself in my brain when the noise stops, unless I’m sleeping. Actually, no, the sleeping part isn’t true anymore, I forgot. I do wish there was more of the noise and chatter and boom and bam.

  All doubts about the future aside, I am mostly certain that I have got a right now, and my right now is fast and ferocious and happening at the very front tip of one of the truest sky monsters of all time. All of my sky time has to be considered hot action time, even while it is cold like frostbite.

  So what I mean is, I have now, and I have this, and while that is the case I can only do my best and be prepared and be right at the top of my game because these German boys sure seem to be exactly that.

  I have to kill people. I have to try my hardest and kill as many of those people as I can manage. I understand, that they are also trying to kill me. People I have never met want to kill me. I still stagger a little bit over that one at least once per day when it pops up the reliable way it does. They really want to kill me, I can see how much because from where I work, I see many of these faces.

  And I really want to kill them, preferably, y’know, first.

  Can they see it in my face? Do those guys see me too?

  “You’re not even listening to me, are you?” Gallagher says.

  “Yes, I am,” I say, because luckily I caught the question part there just in time. “But I’m also oiling my machine gun and making sure the armaments guys didn’t leave me short of rounds like they did once before and which, I tell you what, they will never do to me again.”

  “Also,” Lieutenant Bell jumps in, “he’s not listening to you because the kid is learning fast that you are full of bologna.”

  Whoa. The day is picking up already and we haven’t even started the engines yet.

  Buuuu-buuu-buuu-buuuwhaaaarrrr …

  And now we have engines.

  “What are you talking about, Bell?” Gallagher asks defensively.

  “I’m talking about you,” Bell snaps back. He is sounding grouchier than usual, and right now I’m starting to wonder why I didn’t like him more from the start. “And I’m talking about the mission, this mission, all the missions. There are only two groups of B-24s in the Eighth Air Force. Two! There’s gonna be more eventually, but right now, we are it. So unless we want the insufferable B-17 groups to do everything —”

  “No, we don’t!” I blurt.

  “Of course not. So, they tell us to go someplace and bomb something, then we go to that place and we bomb that thing. What do we care, as long as we’re productively destroying stuff?”

  Productively destroying stuff. Constructive destruction. I think I have a new favorite job description.

  “Yeah,” Gallagher says, “but how productive is it if we drop out of the sky before we get to the destroying stuff part? In case you haven’t noticed, bomber groups in the European Theater are starting to lose planes — and crews — at a scary rate.”

  “Ah,” Lieutenant Bell says, sounding a lot like a guy who’s just won at something. He’s turned away from the nose and the glass and Gallagher to address his navigator’s table. I’ve seen him do this a number of times now when he wants to send a message of contempt to somebody. Having been that somebody more than once already, I can testify to the almost irresistible urge to punch the back of that head as soon as he shows it to you. Now, as I keep one eye on our bombardier’s darkening purple face, I’m thinking the back of Bell’s head is not such an awful thing.

  “What do you mean by ‘Ah’?”

  “I mean,” Bell says to his table, which I can see clearly in my mind even with him behind me, “ah, I was wondering which thing scared you the most about the daytime bombings, whether it was the danger or the fact that daytime bombing obviously requires a lot more skill from the bombardier. But, now I know that it’s more the fighters you’re afraid of, and less about your accuracy problems….”

  “Well why don’t we have our own fighter escort, it doesn’t make … wait, ‘accuracy problems’?”

  We are taxiing now, falling into the flight line with our squadron in the middle of the two others assigned to the mission.

  “Well, not problems, as such. But you’re getting the shakes about having to aim at a big ol’ U-boat, and not in open water either, since we are headed right up to their pens. And we hear it all the time about these amazing bombardiers who can hit a tuna in the middle of the ocean from ten thousand feet. Mostly the eagle-eye guys on the Fortresses, of course …”

  “Of course,” I spit. It really is easy to hate the Flying Fortress guys. “They never shut up about how great they are. And anyway, why would a fortress fly, huh? It makes no sense. A fortress is like a castle or a bunker or something that’s solid and dug in and the opposite of flying.”

  My contribution to the debate gets a little lost as we hit our spot and roar our engines and in a few seconds get airborne and on our way to some constructive destruction.

  “Tell you what, Mr. Navigator,” Gallagher says, down and staring through his sights already like he can force it all to come to him right away. “How ’bout you just agree to get us to the IP without your usual zigzags and curlicues, and then I will nail you so much tuna it’ll be tuna salad raining down from the sky and coming out your nose for a month, okay?”

  Disgusting as that wound up at the end there, Gallagher’s readiness is a good thing. The IP is the initial penetration point, the spot where the bomb run officially begins about eighteen-to-twenty miles from the target destination. It’s when control of the aircraft falls from the pilot to the bombardier, making it his show to get us on top of our intended victim. The IP is also the point beyond which standing orders for all bomber missions get extra specific, serious, and maybe a little nerve-wracking if you think about it too much. Every aircraft that makes it past the IP is forbidden to diverge from the course that was laid out at the morning briefing. No evasive maneuvers permitted. Up till then, we would make any number of wide S turns to evade danger — or zigzags and curlicues, as Gallagher would put it — but for the last stretch, boys, you drive straight for that target and
you just gotta put up your dukes and fight whoever and whatever wants to come and have some.

  And it’s only now, as I’m thinking about it, that I remember again how this is the most thrilling and exciting and, yeah, magical part of my day. You would think a guy wouldn’t need to be reminded of a feeling like that, but I do. Great as it is as it’s happening, it’s like a blackout thing, where the memory keeps separating itself from me afterwards.

  “Don’t worry, gentlemen,” I say, swiveling my center machine gun up and down and then jumping on the left cheek gun and then the right cheek gun like I’m some combination of Old West shootist and circus acrobat. “I am in an extra killing mood today so you all can just go about your business and not even look up from your calculations, ’cause I got you covered.”

  No question about it, there is a higher level of true aggressive menace swirling around this aircraft today than anything I have felt before. It’s very special.

  “Well, ah, all right, then. Thank you, Sergeant,” says a surprised-but-pleased-sounding Lieutenant Bell.

  “Yeah, so?” says a predictably jerky and kickable Lieutenant Gallagher. “So, what you’re announcing is, basically, that you are gonna do your job. Peachy. Swell. Will you be wanting extra pay for that, too?”

  Oh, man. Never mind extra pay, I’d work the whole next month for free if they’d just let me shoot him once the mission is completed.

  “That would be very nice, Lieutenant Gallagher,” I say, making the rounds of my guns even more slickly and lightning fast than the last time.

  I swear, even if we get lost, or the enemy gets smart and doesn’t show up to oppose us, I think we’ll all start firing these weapons up here today anyway, because we gotta get it out somehow.