Stranger to the Ground

by Richard Bach

  I nodded again. “Who was it?”

  The squadron commander looked at the paper. “Second Lieutenant Jason Williams.”

  Like a ton of bricks. Second Lieutenant Jason Williams. Willy. My roommate. Willy of the broad smile and the open mind and the many women. Willy who graduated number four in a class of 60 cadets. Willy the only Negro fighter pilot I had ever known. It is funny. And I smiled and set down my cup.

  I was amazed at myself. What is so funny about one of my best friends flying into a target on the desert? I should be sad. Dying is a horrible and terrible thing. I must be sad. I must wince, grit my teeth, say, “Oh, no!”

  But I cannot keep from smiling. What is so funny? That is one way to hit the target? The ’84 always was reluctant to change direction in a dive? The odds against the only Negro fighter pilot in all the USAF gunnery school at this moment flying into the ground? Willy’s dead. Look sad. Look shocked. Look astounded. But I cannot keep from smiling because it is all so very funny.

  The briefing is done and I walk outside and strap my airplane around me and push the throttle forward and go out to strafe the rocks and lizards on Range Number Three. Range Number Two is closed.

  It happened again, a few months later. “Did you hear about Billy Yardley?” I had not heard from Bill since we graduated from cadets. “He flew into the side of a mountain on a weather approach to Aviano.” A ringing in my ears. Billy Yardley is dead. And I smile. Again the wicked unreasoning uncontrollable smile. A smile of pride? ‘I am a better pilot than Jason Williams and Billy Yardley because I am still alive’? Kenneth Sullivan crashed in a helicopter in Greenland. Sully. A fine man, a quiet man, and he died in a spinning cloud of snow and rotor blades. And I smile.

  Somehow I am not mad or insane or warped, for I see it once in a while on the faces of others when they hear the ringing in their ears at the death of a friend. They smile, just a little. They think of a friend that knows now what we have wondered since we were old enough to wonder: what is behind the curtain? What comes after this world? Willy knows it, Bill Yardley knows it, Sully knows it. And I do not. My friends are keeping a secret from me. It is a secret that they know and that they will not tell. It is a game. I will know tonight or tomorrow or next month or next year, but I must not know now. A strange game. A funny game. And I smile.

  I can find out in a minute. Any day on the range I can wait two seconds too long in the pullout from the strafing panel. I can deliberately fly at 400 knots into one of the very hard mountains of the French Alps. I can roll the airplane on her back and pull her nose straight down into the ground. The game can be over any time that I want it to be. But there is another game to play that is more interesting, and that is the game of flying airplanes and staying alive. I will one day lose that game and learn the secret of the other; why should I not be patient and play one game at a time? And that is what I do.

  We fly our missions every day for weeks that become uneventful months. One day one of us does not come back. Three days ago, a Sunday, I left the pages of manuscript that is this book piled neatly on my desk and left for Squadron Operations to meet a flight briefing time of 1115. The mission before mine on the scheduling board was “Lowlevel,” with aircraft numbers and pilots’ names.

  391—Slack

  541—Ulshafer

  Ulshafer came back. Slack didn’t.

  Before he was driven to Wing Headquarters, Ulshafer told us what he knew. The weather had gone from very good to very bad, quickly. There were hills ahead that stretched into the clouds. The two ’84F’s decided to break off the mission and return to the clear weather, away from the hills. Slack was in the lead. The weather closed in as they began to turn, and Ulshafer lost sight of his leader in the clouds.

  “I’ve lost you, Don. Meet you on top of the weather.”

  “Roj.”

  Ulshafer climbed and Slack began to climb.

  The wingman was alone above the clouds, and there was no answer to his radio calls. He came back alone. And he was driven, with the base commander, to Wing Headquarters.

  The schedule board changed to:

  51-9391—Slack AO 3041248

  541—Ulshafer

  A map was drawn, with a red square around the place where they had met the weather, southwest of Clemont-Ferrand. The ground elevation there changes from 1,000 feet to a jutting mountain peak at 6,188 feet. They had begun their climb just before the mountain.

  We waited in Operations and we looked at our watches. Don Slack has another 10 minutes of fuel, we told ourselves. But we thought of the peak, that before we did not even know existed, and of its 6,188 feet of rock. Don Slack is dead. We call for the search-rescue helicopters, we fret that the ceiling is too low for us to fly out and look for his airplane on the mountainside, we think of all the ways that he could still be alive: down at another airport, with radio failure, bailed out into a village that has no telephone, alone with his parachute in some remote forest. “His fuel is out right now.” It doesn’t make any difference. We know that Don Slack is dead.

  No official word; helicopters still on their way; but the operations sergeant is copying the pertinent information concerning the late Lieutenant Slack’s flying time, and the parachute rack next to mine, with its stenciled name, Slack, is empty of helmet and parachute and mae west. There is on it only an empty nylon helmet bag, and I look at it for a long time.

  I try to remember what I last said to him. I cannot remember. It was something trivial. I think of the times that we would jostle each other as we lifted our bulky flying equipment from the racks at the same time. It got so that one of us would have to flatten himself against a wall locker while the other would lift his gear from the rack.

  Don had a family at home, he had just bought a new Renault, waiting now outside the door. But these do not impress me as much as the thought that his helmet and chute and mae west are missing from his rack, and that he is scheduled to fly again this afternoon. What arrogant confidence we have when we apply grease pencil to the scheduling board.

  The friend whose parachute has hung so long next to mine has become the first recalled Air National Guard pilot to the in Europe.

  A shame, a waste, a pity? The fault of the President? If we had not been recalled to active duty and to Europe, Don Slack would not be twisted against a French mountain peak that stands 6,188 feet high. Mrs. Slack could blame the President.

  But if Don was not here with his airplane, and all the rest of the Guard with him, there might well have been many more dead Americans in Europe today. Don died in the defense of his country as surely as did the first of the Minutemen, in 1776. And we all, knowingly, play the game.

  Tonight I am making a move in that game, moving my token five squares from Wethersfield to Chaumont. I still do not expect to fly into a thunderstorm, for they are isolated ahead, but there is always one section of my mind that is devoted to caution, that considers the events that could cost me the game. That part of my mind has a throttle in it as controllable as the hard black throttle under my left glove. I can pull the caution almost completely back to off during air combat and ground support missions. There, it is the mission over all. The horizon can twist and writhe and disappear, the hills of France can flick beneath my molded plexiglass canopy, can move around my airplane as though they were fixed on a spinning sphere about me. There is but one thing fixed in war and practice for war: the target. Caution plays little part. Caution is thrown to the 400-knot wind over my wings and the game is to stop the other airplane, and to burn the convoy.

  When the throttle that controls caution is at its normal position, it is a computer weighing risk against result. I do not normally fly under bridges; the risk is not worth the result. Yet low-level navigation missions, at altitudes of 50 feet, do not offend my sense of caution, for the risk of scratching an airplane is worth the result of training, of learning and gaining experience from navigating at altitudes where I cannot see more than two miles ahead.

  Every flight is weigh
ed in the balance. If the risk involved outweighs the result to be gained, I am nervous and on edge. This is not an absolute thing that says one flight is Dangerous and another is Safe, it is completely a mental condition. When I am convinced that the balance is in favor of the result I am not afraid, no matter the mission. Carried to extremes, a perfectly normal flight involving takeoff, circling the air base, and landing is dangerous, if I am not authorized to fly one of the government’s airplanes that day.

  The airplane that I fly has no key or secret combination for starting; I merely ask the crew chief to plug in an auxiliary power unit and I climb into the cockpit and I start the engine. When the power unit is disconnected and I taxi to the runway, there is no one in the world who can stop me if I am determined to fly, and once I am aloft I am the total master of the path of my airplane. If I desire, I can fly at a 20-foot altitude up the Champs Elysées; there is no way that anyone can stop me. The rules, the regulations, the warnings of dire punishment if I am caught buzzing towns means nothing if I am determined to buzz towns. The only control that others can force upon me is after I have landed, after I am separated from my airplane.

  But I have learned that it more interesting to play the game when I follow the rules; to make an unauthorized flight would be to defy the rules and run a risk entirely out of proportion to the result of one more flight. Such a flight, though possible, is dangerous.

  At the other extreme is the world of wartime combat. There is a bridge over the river. The enemy depends upon the bridge to carry supplies to his army that is killing my army. The enemy has fortified his bridge with antiaircraft guns and antiaircraft missiles and steel cables and barrage balloons and fighter cover. But the bridge, because of its importance, must be destroyed. The result of destroying the bridge is worth the risk of destroying it. The mission is chalked on a green blackboard and the flight is briefed and the bombs and rockets are hung on our airplanes and I start the engine and I take off and I fully intend to destroy the bridge.

  In my mind the mission is not a dangerous one; it is one that simply must be done. If I lose the game of staying alive over this bridge, that is just too bad; the bridge is more important than the game.

  How slowly it is, though, that we learn of the nature of dying. We form our preconceptions, we make our little fancies of what it is to pass beyond the material, we imagine what it feels like to face death. Every once in a while we actually do face it.

  It is a dark night, and I am flying right wing on my flight leader. I wish for a moon, but there is none. Beneath us by some six miles lie cities beginning to sink under a gauzy coverlet of mist. Ahead the mist turns to low fog, and the bright stars dim a fraction in a sheet of high haze. I fly intently on the wing of my leader, who is a pattern of three white lights and one of green. The lights are too bright in the dark night, and surround themselves with brilliant flares of halo that make them painful to watch. I press the microphone button on the throttle. “Go dim on your nav lights, will you, Red Leader?”

  “Sure thing.”

  In a moment the lights are dim, mere smudges of glowing filament that seek more to blend his airplane with the stars than to set it apart from them. His airplane is one of the several whose dim is just too dim to fly by. I would rather close my eyes against the glare than fly on a shifting dim constellation moving among the brighter constellations of stars. “Set ’em back to bright, please. Sorry.”

  “Roj.”

  It is not really enjoyable to fly like this, for I must always relate that little constellation to the outline of an airplane that I know is there, and fly my own airplane in relation to the mental outline. One light shines on the steel length of a drop tank, and the presence of the drop tank makes it easier to visualize the airplane that I assume is near me in the darkness. If there is one type of flying more difficult than dark-night formation, it is dark-night formation in weather, and the haze thickens at our altitude. I would much rather be on the ground. I would much rather be sitting in a comfortable chair with a pleasant evening sifting by me. But the fact remains that I am sitting in a yellow-handled ejection seat and that before I can feel the comfort of any evening again I must first successfully complete this flight through the night and through whatever weather and difficulties lie ahead. I am not worried, for I have flown many flights in many airplanes, and have not yet damaged an airplane or my desire to fly them.

  France Control calls, asking that we change to frequency 355.8. France Control has just introduced me to the face of death, I slide my airplane away from leader’s just a little, and divert my attention to turning four separate knobs that will let me listen, on a new frequency, to what they have to say. It takes a moment in the red light to turn the knobs. I look up to see the bright lights of Lead beginning to dim in the haze. I will lose him. Forward on the throttle, catch up with him before he disappears in the mist. Hurry.

  Very suddenly in the deceptive mist I am closing too quickly on his wing and his lights are very very bright. Look out, you’ll run right into him! He is so helpless as he flies on instruments. He couldn’t dodge now if he knew that I would hit him. I slam the throttle back to idle, jerk the nose of my airplane up, and roll so that I am upside down, watching the lights of his airplane through the top of my canopy.

  Then, very quickly, he is gone. I see my flashlight where it has fallen to the plexiglass over my head, silhouetted by the diffused yellow glow in the low cloud that is a city preparing to sleep on the ground. What an unusual place for a flashlight. I begin the roll to recover to level flight, but I move the stick too quickly, at what has become far too low an airspeed. I am stunned. My airplane is spinning. It snaps around once and the glow is all about me. I look for references, for ground or stars; but there is only the faceless glow. The stick shakes convulsively in my hand and the airplane snaps around again. I do not know whether the airplane is in an erect spin or an inverted spin, I know only that one must never spin a swept-wing aircraft. Not even in broad light and clear day. Instruments. Attitude indicator shows that the spin has stopped, by itself or by my monstrous efforts on the stick and rudder. It shows that the airplane is wings-level inverted; the two little bars of the artificial horizon that always point to the ground are pointing now to the canopy overhead.

  I must bail out. I must not stay in an uncontrolled airplane below 10,000 feet. The altimeter is an unwinding blur. I must raise the right armrest, squeeze the trigger, before it is too late.

  There is a city beneath me. I promised myself that I would never leave an airplane over a city.

  Give it one more chance to recover on instruments, I haven’t given the airplane a chance to fly itself out.

  The ground must be very close.

  There is a strange low roaring in my ears.

  Fly the attitude indicator.

  Twist the wings level.

  Speed brakes out.

  I must be very close to the ground, and the ground is not the friend of airplanes that dive into it.

  Pull out.

  Roaring in my ears. Glow in the cloud around me.

  St. Elmo’s fire on the windscreen, blue and dancing. The last time I saw St. Elmo’s fire was over Albuquerque, last year with Bo Beaven.

  Pull out.

  Well, I am waiting, death. The ground is very close, for the glow is bright and the roaring is loud. It will come quickly. Will I hear it or will everything just go black? I hold the stick back as hard as I dare—harder would stall the airplane, spin it again.

  So this is what dying is like. You find yourself in a situation that has suddenly gone out of control, and you die. And there will be a pile of wreckage and someone will wonder why the pilot didn’t eject from his airplane. One must never stay with an uncontrolled airplane below 10,000 feet.

  Why do you wait, death? I know I am certain I am convinced that I will hit the ground in a few thousandths of a second. I am tense for the impact. I am not really ready to the, but now that is just too bad. I am shocked and surprised and interested
in meeting death. The waiting for the crash is unbearable.

  And then I am suddenly alive again.

  The airplane is climbing.

  I am alive.

  The altimeter sweeps through 6,000 feet in a swift rush of a climb. Speed brakes in. Full forward with the throttle. I am climbing. Wings level, airspeed a safe 350 knots, the glow is fading below. The accelerometer shows that I pulled seven and a half G’s in my recovery from the dive. I didn’t feel one of them, even though my G-suit was not plugged into its source of pressured air.

  “Red lead, this is Two here; had a little difficulty, climbing back through 10,000 feet. . .”

  “TEN THOUSAND FEET?”

  “Roger, I’ll be up with you in a minute, we can rejoin over Toul TACAN.”

  Odd. And I was so sure that I would be dead.

  The flashes in the dark clouds north of Phalsbourg are more frequent and flicker now from behind my airplane as well as in front of it. They are good indicators of thunderstorm cells, and they do not exactly fit my definition of “scattered.” Directly ahead, on course, are three quick bright flashes in a row. Correct 30 degrees left. Alone. Time for twisted thoughts in the back of the mind. “You have to be crazy or just plain stupid to fly into a thunderstorm in an eighty-four F.” The words are my words, agreed and illustrated by other pilots who had circumstance force them to fly this airplane through an active storm cell.

  The airplane, they say, goes almost completely out of control, and despite the soothing words of the flight handbook, the pilot is relying only on his airplane’s inertia to hurl it through and into smooth air beyond the storm.

  But still I have no intention of penetrating one of the flickering monsters ahead. And I see that my words were wrong. I face the storms on my course now through a chain of logic that any pilot would have followed. The report called them “scattered,” not numerous or continuous. I flew on. There are at least four separate radar-equipped facilities below me capable of calling vectors through the worst cells. I fly on. A single-engine pilot does not predicate his action on what-shall-I-do-if-the-radio-goes-out. The risk of the mission is worth the result of delivering the heavy canvas sack in the gun bay.