by James Salter
We crossed Gibraltar, like a pebble far below, and then brown, hard Spain. We were going home with new airplanes, the first of those that could routinely fly faster than the speed of sound. They landed at high speed, touching down at a hundred and eighty miles an hour. On the luxurious runways and in the smooth air of North Africa this was not a challenge, but our own field was much smaller. We were at thirty-seven thousand feet, and letting down, I felt a nervousness I couldn’t get rid of. We entered traffic, dropped gear on the downwind leg, turned onto final. Everything looked all right. Two hundred and twenty on approach, then across the end of the runway, power off, waiting to touch. A faint jolt. The ground is streaming by. As we park, the group and wing commanders hand up cold beer.
In the end I missed North Africa. I missed its desolation and the brilliance of the light. We, too, were nomads there. We traveled and lived in tents; we had our time-worn code, our duties, and nothing more: to fly, to sit in the shade of the canvas and eat a white-bread sandwich with grimy hands, to fly again.
We were equals there, all ranks. “Hit me,” the colonel says. “I can’t, I’ll get court-martialed,” Geraghty, who is dealing, squeals. They are drunkenly comparing Rolexes. “What’s wrong with yours? It has no calendar, must be experimental,” Geraghty says. All these faces, so well known. All these lives, so momentarily intimate.
In formation with Minish one day, coming back from a mission, I on his wing—without a word he pulled up and did an Immelmann, I as close as you can get, then another and another, then some loops and rolls, two or three away from me, all in hot silence, I had not budged a foot, the two of us together, not a word exchanged, like secret lovers in some apartment on a burning afternoon.
——
We went in the autumn, a squadron at a time, to the Gironde, in the southwest of France, for more gunnery. The field there, Cazaux, girlishly white, was beside a lake. A squadron from another wing, one I had for a time flown with, was already there. They were sitting outside the barracks when we arrived, like ranch hands, sucking blades of grass. It often seemed not so much a profession as a way of wasting time, waiting for something to happen, your name to come up on the scheduling board, the scramble phone to ring, the last flights to land. The faces of these others had not changed in the year or two since last seen: Vandenburg, Paul Ingram, Christman, who married a countess, Vandevander, Leach. They greeted us casually. It was as if we had come to graze and they were another clan, peaceful if not friendly, now obliged to share.
We laze through the days. They become the sacred past. The days that Faulkner said were the most exciting of his life. He said that to Sylvester, a major who’d been an information officer stationed in Greenville, Mississippi, not far from Faulkner’s home, during the Korean War. A librarian Sylvester knew had offered to introduce him to Faulkner as a favor. At the agreed-upon time, Faulkner appeared. He was drunk. He was wearing a wrinkled planter’s suit in the coat pocket of which was a bottle, Sylvester took it to be gin. They talked about flying and the days, Faulkner said, when he had been a flyer in France. He had never been that. He had told it many times, to women, to men. Perhaps he had come to believe it.
There is a feeling Faulkner probably had—I have had it myself—that somewhere the true life is being lived, though not where you are. He may have heard the sound of it in Greenville, the rich, destructive roar not of planes such as he had known but ones far more potent. Something in him responded to that, the same thing most likely that had made him pose as an officer in the Royal Flying Corps, invent combat missions, crashes, a silver plate in his head. He was a small man. He could sit in a chair and his feet sometimes might not touch the floor. His world was small, an illiterate county seat, a backward state, though from it he fashioned something greater, far greater perhaps than even he knew. A writer cannot really grasp what he has written. It is not like a building or a sculpture; it cannot be seen whole. It is only a kind of smoke seized and printed on a page.
One thing about Faulkner I like, apart from the simplicity, on the whole, of his life, was that he wrote on the bedroom walls. That seems to me the true mark of a writer. It is like a pianist practicing in the middle of the night when the whole household is asleep or trying to sleep—the music is greater than any of their lives.
That day in Greenville, Faulkner, ten years from his death, offered to write a story about the Air Force if in exchange he might have a ride in a jet. Sylvester promptly called the base commander, a colonel, who listened to the proposal. At the end his reply was only “Who’s Faulkner?”
——
One Monday, just after the pilots’ meeting, the phone rang. It was a clerk in combat operations. Did I know that one of my pilots had bailed out over Chaumont? Chaumont? In France? It must be a mistake—we had nobody flying yet, I said.
Then I remembered the two planes being ferried.
The preceding Friday night, in the camaraderie at the club, someone had suggested that the planes being sent to the depot at Châteauroux for overhaul, since they still had some hours remaining on them before inspection, be released to fly over the weekend. Why not? I thought. Pilots always wanted flying time. I did not check where they had gone. It was of no importance. They were heading for Châteauroux by a roundabout route.
We waited uneasily to hear something more. After a while it came. One pilot, it was reported, had bailed out on the approach. The second had landed; it was Carney. Of DeShazer, nothing further was known.
It developed that they had gone to Munich, where the ground crew had signed off the planes as fully serviced but failed to check the oil. After the weekend they had left early in the morning for Châteauroux. At thirty-five thousand feet DeShazer had a loss of power. It was the oil-operated main fuel regulator failing. He went over to his emergency fuel system and headed for the nearest field: Chaumont.
They made a long, straight-in final to Chaumont. Carney, flying on DeShazer’s wing, saw a burst of flame, brilliant and terrifying, come out of the tailpipe. The bearings had failed. The engine was devouring itself. “Get out, Bill!” he called, but DeShazer anticipated him. The canopy shot away. The seat followed, up and over, tumbling behind the airplane, DeShazer’s arms fluttering wildly. All our planes were equipped with a device that opened the safety belt automatically and allowed the pilot and seat to come quickly apart—all planes, it turned out, except one. The seat fell and fell, Carney trying to keep it in sight. Finally the seat and pilot separated. A long white writhing shape streamed out and reached full length but never completely bloomed before going into the trees. The sum of trivialities had reached a certain number—the result was the disappearance of a man.
They looked for him all day. At last, in midafternoon, they found him. He was dead.
Unmarried, homely, balding, with widely spaced teeth like pickets, he was good-natured. Someone had asked to borrow money and DeShazer said there was some in the bureau in his room. It was Kelley, I think, who went there and found five or six hundred dollars lying loose and uncounted among the clothes.
After it was over and the reports had been sent in, I stopped at the club for a drink on the way home. An accident occurring in another squadron seemed a consequence of some kind; in one’s own squadron it was fate, heavy and humbling. The days became divided, those before and those to come. DeShazer’s name would be taken from the board on which pilots were listed, the loss probably of his chief distinction. His personal effects would be packed and shipped home. The squadron commander, Norman Phillips, would compose a letter to his parents. In the year to come, four or five new pilots would arrive in the squadron to begin their tours, none of them having heard of DeShazer or prepared to believe in the sudden amazing flare, like the gust before a magician’s act, announcing the unfathomable.
Yet he would not be forgotten. Like others he would reappear, like the fair-haired, imaginary aces Faulkner wrote poems about. DeShazer, far more unassuming, with his wide, cracked-lip smile, would remain in one’s life. Arms flapping
, he would tumble endlessly, his parachute, long and useless, trailing behind.
Not at first, and not until you accept that you are mortal, do you begin to realize that life and death are the same thing. DeShazer had gone elsewhere. Into the stars.
——
Munich for the last time, glittering in the darkness, immense—the shops, the avenues, the fine cars. The wingman’s ship is out to one side near a crescent moon. The Arend-Roland comet is visible, its milky tail flying southwards for thousands of miles, an inch in the sky. I lean back and gaze at it, my helmet against the padding. I will never see it again or, just this way, all that is below. Some joys exist in retrospect but not this, the serenity, the cities shining in detailed splendor. From the deeps of the sky we look down as if upon our flocks.
The farewell party a few weeks later seems like any other though it is the last; drinking, singing, the end of the tour and an occasion that fixes everything but that is also something else, not quite animate, an episode in the life of a squadron that will go on without you, without everyone. All will be superseded, all forgotten.
Uden and Tucker have come with German girls. The father of Uden’s had been a pilot, a Luftwaffe pilot, she said. He had never returned from his third raid over England. They never had any further news. She had been five or six years old when it happened, a child of the war, handsome now and composed.
For me it is particularly poignant, not her lost father but the evening. At the appropriate time, rising to my feet, I try to say something of what I feel, the allowable portion. I cannot simply say I’ve liked being in the squadron, I tell them—my life has been the squadron, a life, I do not explain, that I am abandoning. A few months earlier, Spry, who had graduated a few classes after me and was in group operations, had told me he was resigning. Almost at that instant—he had somehow given me the freedom, hurled the first stone—I made the decision. It was far from decisive. I discussed it with my wife who, with only a partial understanding of what was involved, did not attempt to change my mind. I had perhaps waited too long, but there was still part of me that existed when I was a schoolboy and had never really died—it was in me like a pathogen—the idea of being a writer and from the great heap of days making something lasting.
The Air Force—I ate and drank it, went in whatever weather on whatever day, talked its endless talk, climbed onto the wing to fuel the ship myself, fell into the wet sand of its beaches with sweaty others and was bitten by its flies, ignored wavering instruments, slept in dreary places, rendered it my heart. I had given up the life into which I had been born and taken up another and was about to leave that, too, only with far greater difficulty.
To those that night, among whom there were some that fate would beckon, I said I would see them again. Good luck.
——
I was on leave at Langley and drove up to Washington to resign. It was June, the tenth, the day on which I’d been born. It seemed fitting.
All the way, in anguish, I weighed the choices. I had published a book that year, the first, written at night and on weekends, page by unsuspected page. The Hunters appeared under a nom de plume. Salter was as distant as possible from my own name. It was essential not to be identified and jeopardize a career—I had heard the sarcastic references to “God Is My Copilot” Scott. I wanted to be admired but not known. I was thirty-two years old and had been in uniform since I was seventeen. I had a wife and child with another coming soon. As I walked into the Pentagon I felt I was walking to my death.
On various floors I stopped and looked at the directories, brigadiers and major generals one had never heard of, hard at work in their bureaus: Plans, where I used to drop in and talk to Beukema about fighters. Would it be difficult, he wanted to know, for him to make the transition to them? He’d been trained in B-29s.
He had been in my company, a class ahead of me at West Point, outstanding in studies and captain of the hockey team. Superior in every way, charming, unsuperficial, an exceedingly rare type, he had grown up at West Point in an idyllic boyhood, the son of a professor there. He had married General Bradley’s daughter and was marked—though not by that—everyone agreed, for greatness. I knew the room in barracks he had lived in, the exact color of his blond hair. I could easily see him as a fighter pilot—it seemed natural.
He was ultimately assigned to Langley and F-84s, a plane with a fine appearance but underpowered and with a long takeoff roll. At thirty thousand feet one day, as squadron commander—designate, he told his flight leader he wanted to try something. He began a shallow dive. It continued and began to steepen, more and more. It was a characteristic of the airplane, which may have come into effect here, that when maximum speed, the red line, was exceeded there was a control reversal, and pulling back on the stick made the nose go further down rather than come up.
He crashed in the water off Langley at high speed. He perished, not from having flown too near the sun—he was the sun’s angel—but from taunting the demon of speed.
I sat at a desk in Separations and typed out my letter; then, like the survivor of some wreck, I roamed, carrying it, through the corridors for more than an hour. Finally I saw a colonel I knew, Berg, coming out of a doorway. He worked in Personnel, in charge of promotion boards. Needing the confidence of someone, I told him what I was about to do. He made no effort to dissuade me. He merely nodded. He mentioned several other officers who had recently resigned. I found it of little comfort. Late in the afternoon, feeling almost ill, I handed in the letter. It was the most difficult act of my life.
In thick heat I drove up Connecticut Avenue to an apartment we had the use of. Alone, I began to weep—the emptiness, the long years, all the men, the places. My former wing commander from Bitburg who had come back to Washington some months earlier was in Arlington, in the suburbs. I still felt close to him, one of his own. I called him on the telephone and, in unhappiness, managed to tell him what I had done. “You idiot,” he said.
I went there for dinner. Why had I done it? he wanted to know. I had intended to tell the truth but broke off at the last moment knowing it would sound foolish to him and instead, as an apology, brought forth something from the schoolroom. I had done it, I said, because the future looked unpromising to me. As Napoleon had remarked at his coronation, if he had been born under Louis XIV, the most he could have hoped to be was a marshal, like Turenne. I cannot imagine what he thought.
Over and over during the days that followed, with nothing to do, I watched the cars going down the avenue in the morning or looked at the lighted Capitol and the city spread brilliantly around it at night. A baby, my daughter, was crying in the next room. Never another city, over it for the first time, in the lead, the field that you have never landed on far below, dropping down towards it, banking steeply one way, then the other, calling the tower, telling them who you are. Never another sunburned face in Tripoli looking up at you as you taxi to a stop, the expression asking, ship OK? A thumb raised, OK. And the dying whine, like a great sigh, of the engine shutting down, the needles on the gauges collapsing. It is over.
We went back to Langley. A strange, bottomless reaction had set in. With Paula and Leland, in whose house we were staying, I could hardly talk and found it impossible to laugh. Paula said she admired my courage, though what I’d had felt gone. We spent that evening talking about God. They were firm believers. It all seemed unimportant and beside the point.
——
Dreams remained. For years afterwards in nightmares stark as archive footage, I was what I had been. We were in Asia somewhere. Disaster was in the air. We were surrendering and there had been a warning from the enemy, a written warning, that because of the many atrocities we had committed there could be no guarantee of safety. I was standing in a hospital near three or four pilots, one of whom I knew. They were going to try to cross to where their planes were parked, take off, and continue fighting. They started for the field. There was firing, heavy and relentless. Someone came to ask if I would take the fourth plane. A
n F-100. I hadn’t been in one for years …
I did fly, however. On weekends I flew with the National Guard and went with them to summer camp in Cape Cod or Virginia. In the fall of 1961 we were placed on active duty—it was the so-called Berlin crisis—and went to France for nearly a year, to Chaumont, where DeShazer had crashed and where my agent, Kenneth Littauer, had flown during the First World War. They had lit bonfires at the corners of the field, he said, to guide planes home after dark.
It was September. We landed in a light rain, the first ones, having flown the planes across the Atlantic, stopping in the Azores and Seville. I asked the crew chief who met me what the town was like. He answered without hesitation, “Looks all right.”
That year, I understood quite well, was the close of things. We were reserves—I had looked down upon such as we were now. I wore the uniform still, the colored ribbons, but the genuineness was gone, even when Norstad, the glamorous theater commander, came on a visit and lay sideways in an easy chair in his flying suit, chatting about the outbreak of war and what it would bring as he saw it, or even the brusque appearance of LeMay himself, with a retinue that filled an entire plane. We were able to conduct ourselves well enough if called upon and convincingly say “Sir,” but it was only for a time.
This transparency set me free. All that before had been insignificant, unmartial, caught my eye, buildings, countryside, towns, hotels. As a lieutenant colonel I had a room of my own at the head of the stairs. There, late at night, back from a restaurant, back from the bar, I sat writing. I had three lives, one during the day, one at night, and the last in a drawer in my room in a small book of notes.
