Call to Arms

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Jesus, Flem,” the general manager protested. “That’s going to be hard. This town is full of sailors and Marines, and most of them, the officers anyway, brought their wives and their families.”

  “A little house on the beach, or with a view of it, and someplace where the lady can entertain an overnight guest on a regular basis without any embarrassing questions being asked.”

  “It’s a good thing I know you’re a straight arrow, Flem,” the general manager said. “Or otherwise—”

  “The young lady, you dirty-minded old man, you, is the closest thing Patricia and I have to a daughter. She is visiting a young Marine officer. I don’t know for how long.”

  “It’s going to be hard finding a place.”

  “Do whatever has to be done, Charley,” Fleming Pickering said. “And with your well-known tact and finesse. And get back to me.”

  When he put the phone back in its cradle, he looked at his wife. She was sitting back in the chair, tapping the balls of her extended fingers together.

  “Done,” he said.

  “I hope we know what we are doing,” Patricia Pickering said.

  “Me, too,” he said.

  She shrugged and rose out of the chair.

  “Where are you going to be at, say, one?”

  “Here, probably,” he said.

  “I’ve got a few things to do,” she said. “After which I thought I would drop by the apartment. Say about one?”

  “Oh,” he said.

  “I would hate to drag you away from something important,” she said.

  He picked up another of the telephones on his desk.

  “Mrs. Florian,” he said. “If I have anything scheduled between one and three, reschedule it.”

  He put the phone back in its cradle.

  “There was a time,” Patricia Pickering said, “when you would have taken the whole afternoon off.”

  “I can always call back,” he said.

  “Braggart,” Patricia Pickering said, and went through the door.

  (Two)

  Pensacola Navy Air Station

  18 January 1942

  If they are asked, aviators will tell you there is no such thing as a “natural” or “born” pilot. The human animal, they will explain, is designed to move back and forth and sideways with one foot planted on something firm. But aircraft move in a medium that is more like an ocean than solid ground; and they move more like a fish swimming than a man walking. Controlling an aircraft, consequently, does not come naturally; a pilot has to be taught how to move around in the sea of air.

  Aviators will also modestly point out that while it is not really much more difficult than riding a bicycle, flying requires a certain degree of hand-eye coordination. And this must be taught and learned. It is for instance often necessary for one hand to do one thing, while the other does something else. And meanwhile, the feet might be doing still another thing.

  Making a climbing turn, for example, requires both rearward and sideward pressure on the control stick (or as the originally scatological term, now grown respectable, has it, the “joystick”) between the legs, while the feet apply the appropriate pressure to the rudder pedals. And while he makes these movements, the pilot’s eyes must take into consideration where the aircraft is relative to the horizon; and at the same time he must monitor the airspeed, vertical speed, and all the gauges indicating engine function and condition.

  Almost without exception, pilots will relate that the first time they were given the controls by their instructor pilot (IP), they were all over the sky.

  They will often add by way of explanation that fledgling birdmen usually “overcontrol,” which is to say that they apply far more pressure to the controls than should be applied. What results is that the plane goes into a steep dive, or a steep climb, or veers sharply off to one side or the other…. It goes all over the sky.

  This condition is made worse by the fledgling birdman’s lack of experience operating with his body on its side, and/or tipped steeply upward or downward.

  One’s first flight at the controls, aviators will all agree, is a traumatic experience. But over a period of time—long or short, depending almost always on the skill of the instructor pilot—those student pilots who ultimately make it (there are many who simply cannot learn) gradually pick up the finesse that permits them to smoothly control their aircraft. And their bodies. They no longer are quite so dizzy, or disoriented, or nauseous.

  Like riding a bicycle, aviators will affirm, piloting an aircraft is something you have to be taught to do—always under the watchful eye of a skilled instructor pilot. The way you learn to do it well is with a great deal of practice, slowly growing a little better.

  And then, after they have gone through all this explanation, a puzzled look will very often come onto their faces, and there will be a caveat:

  “Yeah, but I remember a guy at Pensacola [or Randolph Field, or wherever]…the IP just didn’t believe him. He thought he’d come to basic with at least a couple of hundred hours and was being a smart ass…who just got in the sonofabitch and could fly it like he really had three, four hundred hours in it. No problem at all, not even when the IP did his best to disorient him. Looped it, whatever. When he gave him the controls, he just straightened it out. And he knew where he was.

  “Just that one guy, though. Little [or Great big, or Perfectly ordinary] guy. I forget his name. But he just knew how to fly. All they had to do was explain to him what the propeller was doing, spinning around like that.”

  Captain James L. Carstairs, USMC, had heard all the stories himself, of course, about that one character in ten thousand—or a hundred thousand—whom Mother Nature in her infinite wisdom had elected to equip naturally with a feeling for the air that others could acquire only after much time and great effort.

  But until he took Second Lieutenant Malcolm S. Pickering, USMC, up for his orientation flight in an N2S1 he had never personally met one.

  Captain Carstairs had been annoyed, but not surprised, when he learned from the records of Lieutenants Pickering and Stecker that neither had been afforded the opportunity of an “orientation flight” before they had been ordered to Pensacola.

  The “orientation flight” was something of a misnomer. It was designed primarily to disqualify would-be Naval aviators from the training program. If the SOP (Standing Operating Procedure) had been followed, the two second johns whom a cruel fate had placed in his hands would have been given their “orientation flights” before they came to Pensacola. And they’d have passed them; otherwise they would not have been sent to Pensacola at all.

  It made much more sense to take would-be birdmen up for a ride—a ride in which the IP would do his very best to frighten and/or sicken his passenger—to determine before the kid was actually sent to Pensacola that he really wanted to be a pilot and was physically able to endure the physical and mental stresses of flight. They would thus eliminate before they began training those who had second thoughts about becoming aviators, or who proved unfit for flight. In that way time and money were saved.

  His two second johns had slipped through that hole in the sieve, too. Neither of them should have been sent to Pensacola in the first place, so it made a certain perverted sense that they had been sent without having taken the required orientation flight. Captain Carstairs realized there were two ways the omission could be rectified. He could write a memorandum outlining the facts and requesting that the two officers named above be scheduled for an orientation flight. He could then have a clerk type it up and send it over to Mainside and let it work its way through the bureaucracy. This would take at least a week, and probably two. Or he could load his second johns in his Pontiac coupe and drive them to Saufley Field right then and take them for a ride in a Yellow Peril himself.

  Second Lieutenant Stecker went first. Captain Carstairs loaded him into the backseat, carefully adjusted his mirror so that he could see Stecker’s face, and then took off. He left the traffic pattern at Saufley an
d flew up to U.S. 98 in the vicinity of the Florida-Alabama border. There, climbing to eight thousand feet, he put the Yellow Peril through various aerobatic maneuvers, frequently glancing in his mirror to examine the effect on Second Lieutenant Stecker.

  Stecker was a picture of grim determination. From time to time, his face grew deathly pale, and he frequently swallowed and licked his lips. He otherwise stared grimly ahead, as if afraid of what he would see if he looked over the side of the cockpit.

  But he neither closed his eyes to shut out the horror, nor did he get sick to his stomach. Just about the reaction he expected, Captain Carstairs realized when he thought about it. Stecker was young and in superb physical condition. And, significantly, he was a West Pointer. Himself an Annapolis graduate, Carstairs was willing to grant that the U.S. Military Academy probably did nearly as a good a job as the U.S. Naval Academy to instill self-discipline in its students. That meant that by pure willpower, Stecker was able to keep his eyes open and stop himself from being sick.

  Forty minutes into the flight, after just about half an hour of violent aerobatics, Captain Carstairs put the Yellow Peril into straight and level flight. He then conveyed via the speaker tube that Second Lieutenant Stecker was to put his feet on the rudder pedals and his hand on the joystick and “follow through” as Carstairs maneuvered the airplane, so that he would acquire some sense of what control motions were required to go up and down and side to side.

  Second Lieutenant Stecker’s orientation flight lasted one minute less than an hour. When Carstairs taxied the Yellow Peril to the place where Second Lieutenant Pickering was waiting for his turn, he saw that Pickering was eating.

  Enterprising merchants from Pensacola had been given permission to roam the edges of the parking aprons at Saufley, Correy, and Chevalier fields, selling box lunches to civilian mechanics and service personnel. Pickering had obviously bought himself a snack.

  When he came closer, Captain Carstairs saw that what Pickering was eating an oyster loaf. This consisted of maybe eight fried-in-batter oysters in a highly Tabasco-flavored barbecue sauce on a long, soft roll. It was not the sort of thing someone about to experience violent aerobatic maneuvers in an airplane should put in his stomach. And Pickering, he saw, was about to make a bad situation worse. He was washing the oyster loaf down with a pint bottle of chocolate milk.

  There was no question whatever in Captain Carstairs’s mind that Second Lieutenant Pickering was going to throw up all over the Yellow Peril. But there was a silver lining in that black cloud, Carstairs decided. For one thing, the student rode aft of the instructor. None of what erupted from Pickering’s stomach would reach Carstairs.

  Getting sick, moreover, would teach Pickering the important lesson that an aviator must consider what he eats or drinks before flight. And cleaning up what he threw up from the aircraft would serve two additional purposes. It would emphasize the importance of lesson one, and it would serve as a test of Pickering’s determination to become a Naval aviator.

  “If you have finished your snack, Pickering, get in,” Captain Carstairs said.

  Second Lieutenant Pickering stuffed the rest of his oyster loaf in his mouth, then washed it down with the rest of his chocolate milk, after which he climbed into the rear seat of the Yellow Peril.

  Captain Carstairs flew the same course he had flown with Stecker. And once he was near the Florida-Alabama border, to start things off, he rocked the Yellow Peril from side to side. In his mirror, he saw Lieutenant Pickering’s eyebrows raise in surprised delight.

  Next Carstairs pulled back on the joystick and put the Yellow Peril in a climb. Eventually inertia overcame velocity and the airspeed fell below that necessary to provide lift. The Yellow Peril stalled, which is to say, it suddenly started falling toward the earth.

  In his mirror, Captain Carstairs saw that Pickering’s face now reflected happy surprise at this new sensation.

  Carstairs recovered from the stall by pushing the nose forward until sufficient airspeed had been regained to permit flight. He pulled it straight and level for a moment, and then peeled off into a steep dive to the left.

  Pickering’s stomach was stronger than Carstairs would have believed. But there would be an eruption soon, either when he pulled out of the dive, or when he rolled the Yellow Peril: The aircraft would turn upside down as he reached the apex of his climbing maneuver.

  When, in inverted flight, Captain Carstairs looked in his mirror at his passenger, his passenger’s face bore the enchanted look of a little boy finding an unexpected wealth of presents under the Christmas tree. He was smiling from ear to ear and gazing in pure, excited rapture all around this strange and wonderful inverted world he was seeing for the first time.

  An additional fifteen minutes of intricate aerobatics not only failed to make Second Lieutenant Pickering sick to his stomach, but it failed to wipe the smile of joyous discovery off his face. Indeed, if possible, each more exotic maneuver seemed to widen proportionally his ecstatic grin of delight.

  Captain Carstairs was willing to admit that he was capable of making an error in judgment, and fair was fair. He put the Yellow Peril into straight and level flight and conveyed the order that Pickering was to follow him through on the controls. In a moment he felt a slight resistance to both joystick and rudder movement. This told him that Pickering had his feet on the pedals and his hand on the joystick.

  Carstairs moved the aircraft up and down, and from side to side, and then made a sweeping turn. Then his own very sensitive hand on the controls told him that Pickering had let go of the controls. There was no longer any resistance when he moved them.

  The arrogant sonofabitch is bored; he’s taken his hands off the controls. He thinks I’m up here to take him for a ride!

  He set the Yellow Peril up in a steep climbing turn to the left, and then took his own feet off the rudder pedals and his hand off the joystick.

  The Yellow Peril would continue in the attitude that he had placed it in until it ran out of airspeed, whereupon it would stall. And since it would be moving leftward when it stalled, it would not fall straight through, but would slide in a sickening skid to the left. With just a little bit of luck, it would enter a spin.

  That would catch Second Lieutenant Pickering’s attention.

  He watched the airspeed indicator as it moved downward toward stall speed, so that he would be prepared. And he frequently glanced at Second Lieutenant Pickering’s face for the first glimmer of concern. This would be shortly followed by bewilderment, and then terror.

  When the airspeed indicator needle showed about five miles above stall speed, Captain Carstairs sensed first that the angle of climb was diminishing, and then that the aircraft was coming out of its turn. He looked at the joystick between his legs. It was moving. And when he looked at the rudder pedals, so were they.

  In a moment, the airspeed indicator began to rise again, and shortly after it did that, the control stick moved again, returning the aircraft to its turn and to a climbing attitude. But in a more shallow climb than before, one that it could maintain more or less indefinitely.

  This wiseass sonofabitch is a pilot, and not too bad a pilot. That was the natural, practiced reflex action of somebody who feels in the seat of his pants that he’s about to stall. He did what had to be done to recover.

  Captain Carstairs put his mouth to the speaking tube. “Okay, Pickering, take us back to the field and land it,” he ordered.

  For the first time, a look of confusion and concern appeared on Second Lieutenant Pickering’s face.

  “When I give you a command, you say ‘Aye, aye, sir,’” Carstairs ordered.

  “Aye, aye, sir,” Lieutenant Pickering responded.

  The Yellow Peril entered a 180-degree turn.

  Steep, Carstairs thought, but smooth.

  Ten minutes later, after an arrow-straight flight, the traffic pattern over Saufley Field came into view. Eight or nine other Yellow Perils were waiting their turn to make their approach to the runway.


  “Sir,” Pickering’s voice came over the tube to Carstairs’s ears, “what do I do now?”

  “Sit it down, Pickering.”

  There was a moment’s pause, then, “Aye, aye, sir.”

  Pickering moved the Yellow Peril to a position behind the last Yellow Peril in the stack.

  Carstairs finally found something to fault in Pickering’s flying technique. They were a little too close to the Yellow Peril before them before Pickering retarded the throttle.

  And then it was their turn to land.

  “Sir,” Pickering’s voice came over the tube, “I’ve never landed an airplane before.”

  “Do the best you can, Lieutenant,” Carstairs replied.

  Pickering aimed the Yellow Peril at the runway.

  When he was over the threshold, he chopped the throttle and skewed the Yellow Peril from side to side as he tried to line it up with the runway.

  Carstairs made a quick decision. While it was entirely possible that Pickering was going to be able to get it safely on the ground the way he was doing it, he was coming in way too high.

  “I’ve got it,” Carstairs said over the speaking tube. He shoved the throttle forward and put his hands and feet on the controls, and they went around.

  Carstairs put the Yellow Peril at the tail of the stack of Yellow Perils, and then spoke again.

  “The way this is supposed to be done,” he said, “is that you run out of lift the moment you level the wings. We like you to do that about ten feet off the runway, not one hundred.”

  Pickering shook his head to signal his understanding.

  On his next attempt to land, Pickering greased the Yellow Peril in two hundred feet from the threshold. The Yellow Peril’s main gear touched, and then a moment later, it settled gently onto its tail wheel.

  And then, for the first time, there was terror in Pickering’s voice. “I can’t see to steer!”

  “I’ve got it,” Captain Carstairs responded. He braked, turned onto a taxiway, and taxied the Yellow Peril back to where Second Lieutenant Stecker waited for them.