by James Salter
“That’s true.”
“I just wanted you to know one thing—I won’t do it the next time.”
That was true also. There was no next time. A year later someone was describing an accident at Myrtle Beach, a night takeoff with full fuel load, 450-gallon drop tanks, the planes wallowing, the overcast seamlessly black. The join-up was in sky undivided between the darkness of air and water, a sky without top or bottom; in fact there was no sky, only total blackness in which, banking steeply to try and catch up with the lights of the fleeing leader, the number-three man, low in the roaring nightmare, determined to do well, went into the sea. Uden.
The leader of that flight was one of the great war aces; highly visible and bulletproof; there were a number still around. Combat had never really ended for them. The sign on the desk of one read, The mission of the Air Force is to fly and fight, and don’t you ever forget it. Blakeslee, another, an untamable fighter whose reputation was one of temper and violence, I met only once, in my final year of flying. It was at a dinner dance in Germany and he walked into the bar of the club not in uniform with two or three significant ribbons but dressed like the owner of a 1930s nightclub in an out-of-fashion tuxedo with a stiff shirt. He stood down at the end, a little apart; I would not have known who he was had the bartender not greeted him by name.
A couple of young officers, transients like myself, approached him as he stood waiting for his order. They were F-104 pilots from England. In war it is not like other things, where youth is arrogance. War is terra incognita. The young are usually eager to have the curtain lifted, even slightly, by one of the greats.
“Evening, Colonel,” they said.
He looked at them without expression. His power was such that he could destroy the ego of all but the most aggressive.
“Sir,” one of them said, “I just wanted to ask you a question. It’s something I’ve never been able to get an answer to. It’s about German aces.”
Blakeslee, who had been a colonel and then reduced in rank, possibly for cause, so he was now a lieutenant colonel, stood there. He listened without showing the least sign of interest.
“Is it true,” the young captain went on, “that the Germans counted their kills by the number of engines and would get four victories for, say, shooting down a B-17?”
Perhaps Blakeslee knew the answer. Perhaps he was weighing the real intent of the question. His face was heavier than it once had been, his body thicker. The electric skies over the Reich with their decks of clouds, shouts on the radio, confusion and vertical descents, those legend skies were gone. Finally he spoke.
“I don’t know,” he said slowly. He was picking up three or four glasses. “I only know one thing: it’s all phoney,” he said.
They like to say you cannot understand unless you’ve been there, unless you’ve lived it. You could not argue with his scorn.
——
How well one remembers that world, the whiff of jet exhaust, oily and dark, in the morning air as you walk to where the planes are parked out in the mist.
Soon you are up near the sun where the air is burning cold, amid all that is familiar, the scratches on the canopy, the chipped black of the instrument panel, the worn red cloth of the safety streamers stuffed in a pocket down near your shoe. From the tailpipe of the leader’s plane comes an occasional dash of smoke, the only sign of motion as it streaks rearwards.
Below, the earth has shed its darkness. There is the silver of countless lakes and streams. The greatest things to be seen, the ancients wrote, are sun, stars, water, and clouds. Here among them, of what is one thinking? I cannot remember but probably of nothing, of flying itself, the imperishability of it, the brilliance. You do not think about the fish in the great, winding river, thin as string, miles below, or the frogs in the glinting ponds, nor they of you; they know little of you, though once, just after takeoff, I saw the shadow of my plane skimming the dry grass like the wings of god and passing over, frozen by the noise, a hare two hundred feet below. That lone hare, I, the morning sun, and all that lay beyond it were for an instant joined, like an eclipse.
One night in early spring there were two of us—I was wingman. No one else was flying at the time. We were landing in formation after an instrument approach. It was very dark, it had been raining, and the leader misread the threshold lights. We crossed the end of the runway high and touched down long. In exact imitation I held the nose high, as he did, to slow down, wheels skipping along the concrete like flat stones on a lake. Halfway down we lowered the noses and started to brake. Incredibly we began to go faster. The runway, invisible and black, was covered with the thinnest sheet of ice. Light rain had frozen sometime after sundown and the tower did not know it. We might, at the last moment, have gone around—put on full power and tried to get off again—but it was too close. We were braking in desperation. I stop-cocked my engine—shut it off to provide greater air resistance—and a moment later he called that he was doing the same. We were standing on the brakes and then releasing, hard on and off. The end of the runway was near. The planes were slithering, skidding sideways. I knew we were going off and that we might collide. I had full right rudder in, trying to stay to the side.
We slid off the end of the runway together and went about two hundred feet on the broken earth before we finally stopped. Just ahead of us was the perimeter road and beyond it, lower, some railroad tracks.
When I climbed out of the cockpit I wasn’t shaking. I felt almost elated. It could have been so much worse. The duty officer came driving up. He looked at the massive, dark shapes of the planes, awkwardly placed near each other, the long empty highway behind them, the embankment ahead. “Close one, eh?” he said.
This was at Fürstenfeldbruck, the most lavish of the prewar German airfields, near Munich. We came there from our own field, Bitburg, in the north, the Rhineland, to stand alert or fire gunnery close by. Zulu alert, two ships on five-minute, two on fifteen. The long, well-built barracks, the red tile roofs and marble corridors. The stands of pine on the way to the pilots’ dining room, where you could eat breakfast in your flying suit and the waitresses knew what you preferred.
We were not far from Dachau, the ash-pit. One of them. I had seen its flat ruins. That Otto Frank, Anne Frank’s father, had served as an officer in the German army in the First World War, I may not have known, but I was aware that patriotism and devotion had not saved him or others. They might not save me, though I swore to myself they would. I knew I was different, if nothing else marked by my name. I acted always from two necessities; the first was to be like everyone, and the second—was it foolish?—was to be better than other men. If I was to be despised I wanted it to be by inferiors.
Munich was our city, its great night presence, the bars and clubs, the Isar green and pouring like a faucet through its banks, the Regina Hotel, dancing on Sunday afternoons, faces damp with the heat, the Film Casino Bar, Bei Heinz. All the women, Panas’s girlfriend in the low-cut dress, Van Bockel’s, who was a secretary and had such an exceptional figure, Cortada’s, who smelled like a florist’s on a warm day. Munich in the snow, coming back to the field alone on the streetcar.
I flew back to Bitburg with White, one of the two men in the squadron to become famous—Aldrin was the other—on a winter day. It was late in the afternoon, everything blue as metal, the sky, the towns and forests, even the snow. The other ship, silent, constant on your wing. With the happiness of being with someone you like, through it we went together, at thirty-five thousand, the thin froth of contrails fading behind.
White had been the first person I met when I came to the squadron and I knew him well. In the housing area he and his wife lived on our stairway. He had a fair, almost milky, complexion and reddish hair. An athlete, a hurdler; you see his face on many campuses, idealistic, aglow. He was an excellent pilot, acknowledged as such by those implacable judges, the ground crews. They did not revere him as they did the ruffians who might drink with them, discuss the merits of the squadron comman
der or sexual exploits, but they respected him and his proper, almost studious, ways. God and country—these were the things he had been bred for.
In Paris, a lifetime later, in a hotel room I watched as on screens everywhere he walked dreamily in space, the first American to do so. I was nervous and depressed. My chest ached. My hair had patches of gray. White was turning slowly, upside down, tethered to the spacecraft by a lazy cord. I was sick with envy—he was destroying hope. Whatever I might do, it would not be as overwhelming as this. I felt a kind of loneliness and terror. I wanted to be home, to see my children again before the end, and I was certain it was near the end; I felt suicidal, ready to burst into tears. He did this to me unknowingly, as a beautiful woman crossing the street crushes hearts beneath her heel.
White burned to ashes in the terrible accident on the launching pad at Cape Canaveral in 1967. He died with Virgil Grissom, with whom I had also flown. His funeral was solemn. I attended, feeling out of place. To be killed flying had always been a possibility, but the two of them had somehow moved beyond that. They were already visible in that great photograph of our time, the one called celebrity. Still youthful and, so far as I knew, unspoiled, they were like jockeys moving to the post for an event that would mark the century, the race to the moon. The absolutely unforeseen destroyed them. Aldrin went instead.
White is buried in the same cemetery as my father, not far away. I visit both graves when I am there. White’s, though amid others, seems visible from some distance off, just as he himself was if you looked intently at the ranks.
——
You remember the airfields, the first sight of some, the deep familiarity of others.
Apart from those that finally appeared when you were coming in, nose high, in fog or heavy rain, the most beautiful field I ever saw was in Morocco, down towards the south. It was called Boulhaut, a long, flawless black runway built for strategic bombers and never used, the numbers at each end huge and clear—no tire had ever marked them. You could not but marvel at its extraordinary newness.
I liked fields near the sea, Westhampton Beach on Long Island, Myrtle Beach, Langley, Eglin, Alameda, where we landed in the fall, ferrying planes to be shipped to the fighting in Korea, and went on to Vanessi’s with the navy pilots’ wives. I liked Sidi Slimane for its openness and the German fields, Hahn and Wiesbaden, Fürstenfeldbruck.
There are fields I would like to forget, Polk, where one night, as a rank amateur, I nearly went into the trees, trying clumsily to go around with my flaps down. Later, in the wooden barracks, came another lesson. Two men in flying suits, drab in appearance, paused at the open door of the room where I sat on a bed. “Are you the one flying the P-51? Where are you from?” one asked.
“Andrews,” I said. I felt a kind of glamour, being connected with the silvery plane and its slim, aggressive shape, parked by itself on the ramp. It was not hard to deduce that they were lesser figures, transport pilots probably. I told them I was in the Fourth Group rather than going into the less interesting facts—I was actually a graduate student at Georgetown. They did not seem very impressed. “Ever hear of Don Garland?” I said, naming a noted pilot in the Fourth.
“Who’s that?”
“One of the best pilots in the Air Force.”
“Oh, yeah?”
I offered a few exaggerations I had overheard at one time or another in the Andrews Club. Garland flew the slot position on the acrobatic team, hanging there with his bare teeth, so to speak, the proof of it being the blackened rudder of his ship, stained by the leader’s exhaust and as a mark of pride always left that way—no mechanic would dare to rub it clean. He was a wild man, Garland—I could tell them any number of stories.
“What does he look like?”
I gave a vague answer. Was he a decent guy? they wanted to know.
I had almost been in a fight one evening at Andrews, not with Garland but with another member of the team. “Not particularly,” I said.
Suddenly one of them began laughing. The other glanced at him. “Shut up,” he said.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” the first one said. Then to me, “This is Garland,” he said, gesturing.
I was speechless.
“What the hell’s your name?” they wanted to know.
I left early in the morning, before they were up.
Later, when I actually joined the Fourth, they were luckily gone by then. There were other Garlands. At Bitburg one of the wing lieutenant colonels used to sit in my office, aimless as a country lawyer, looking at the board on which there were photographs of our pilots—I was squadron operations officer then—and ask, if war broke out, which of them would become aces? We sat examining the faces together. “Emigholz,” I said.
“Who else?”
A pause. “Cass, probably. It’s hard to say. Minish.”
There was no real way of judging. It was their skill but also their personalities, their remorselessness. “Maybe Whitlow,” I added. I was trying to match them to the memory of aces or near-aces in Korea. Emigholz was like Billy Dobbs, Cass was like Matson. “And Cortada,” I finally said. He was from Puerto Rico, small, excitable, and supremely confident. Not everyone shared his opinion of his ability—his flight commander was certain he would kill himself.
With the instinct that dogs have, you knew where in the order anyone ranked. Experience counted, and day-to-day performance. Pilots with few flying hours, in the early years of their career, were the most dangerous. They were young, in the well-being of ignorance, like flies on a sunny table, unaware of the fate of countless others. As regards flying, they had only a limited idea of the many ways to fail, most of them deadly.
With a lanky, indecisive lieutenant named Kelly, I left Bitburg late one day bound for Marseille. Destination weather was forecast to be scattered clouds and eight miles’ visibility. I had put him in the lead. It was important to give pilots the chance to make decisions, gain confidence. The ships in a flight, for whatever reason, might become separated, setting every man on his own, or a leader’s radio could go out and force a wingman to take over. In an instant the responsibility for everything could shift.
Over Marseille at thirty-five thousand feet we had just under eighteen hundred pounds of fuel remaining. The field, Marignane, was not visible. It was hidden by a deck of clouds that had moved in unexpectedly from the sea. In addition, neither Marignane nor Marseille Control would answer our calls.
The sun had already set and the earth was dimming. Kelly signaled for speed brakes and we dove towards a corner of the great lagoon that lay east of the field. We leveled out at three hundred feet. Ahead, like a dark reef, were the clouds. Squeezed as we were into a narrow layer of vanishing light and haze—the bottom of the overcast was perhaps a hundred feet above us—we missed the field. Suddenly the ground began to rise; it disappeared in the clouds just ahead, and we pulled up, breaking out on top at two thousand feet. It had grown darker. I looked at the fuel gauge: a thousand pounds. Kelly seemed hesitant and we were at the threshold of real difficulty.
“I’ve got it,” I said. “Get on my wing.” I could hear something he could not, the finality of the silence in which we found ourselves, in which the sole sound was that of the Marignane radio beacon—I rechecked the call letters against my let-down book, FNM.
I turned immediately towards the beacon and examined the letdown diagram. The light was dim. The details were complex—I noted only the heading to the field from the beacon, and the distance and time to fly. At 175 knots this was a minute and twenty-seven seconds.
When things do not go as planned and the fuel gauge is slowly going down, there is a feeling of unreality, of hostile earth and sky. There comes a point when the single fuel needle is all you think about, the focus of all concern. The thought of bailing out of two airplanes over Marseille because we could not find the field in low clouds and darkness was making me even more precise. It was the scenario for many accidents. Did I have the right frequency and beacon? I checked again. It wa
s right. A moment later, for the first time, the tower came on the air. I suspected they had been waiting for someone to arrive who could speak English. Talking to them, although they were hard to understand, gave some relief: the field was open; there were lights.
We passed over the beacon at two thousand feet, turned to the reciprocal of the field heading and flew for thirty seconds. It seemed minutes. The world was thundering and pouring out. I was determined to do everything exactly, to make a perfect approach. We began a procedure turn—forty-five degrees to the left, hold for one minute, turn back in. The direction-finding needle was rigid. It began to quiver and then swung completely around as we hit the beacon.
We started to descend. The minimum altitude for the field was eight hundred feet, minimum visibility a mile and a half. At five hundred feet we were still in the clouds. Four hundred. Suddenly the ground was just beneath us. The visibility was poor, less than a mile. I glanced at the fuel gauge: six hundred pounds.
A minute had passed. The second hand of the clock was barely moving. A minute and five seconds. A minute ten. Then ahead, like distant stars, faint lines of them, the lights of the field. Speed brakes out, I signaled. Gear and flaps down. We landed smoothly together in the dark.
A taxi drove us into town. We talked about what had happened, what might have. It was not an incident; it was nothing; routine. One flight among innumerable. We could find no place to eat. We slept in a small hotel on a tree-lined street and left early in the morning.
——
Once in a great while there was a letter from Horner. He had resigned his commission and was in his father-in-law’s business, landscaping. Dear Fly-boy, he would write, with a touch of wistfulness it seemed, I hope you’re having a good time in Europe. I used to.
At one reunion, years later, the rumor spread that he had just been seen driving through the main gate with two chorus girls. It turned out to be untrue. The days of chorus girls were past though we had once gone with two from the Versailles when we were in pursuit of everything except wisdom. Susie and I were there the other night, he wrote of another place, and the violinist came up to our table and asked us where the gentleman was who had been so fond of “Granada.” I assumed he was speaking of you, so I told him that you had returned to the front …
