Gods of Tin

by James Salter

and he was seen spinning rapidly at a long, low angle to the ground. He had four kills, a Silver Star, a couple of DFCs and a spot majority. He’d commanded a squadron for six months and

  was a favorite of Thyng’s, a real tiger. It was his 95th mission.

  In addition to Asla, five planes were damaged today. Bambrick came back with five hits in his, one of them a 37mm—two in

  the left wing (one through the gas tank), one in the canopy, one in the tail, and one through the left speed brake.

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  One more mission to go.

  6 August 1952. So strong now, again, the sad feeling of not being part of it, detached, with no stake in things.

  Near evening I stand along the ridge that runs behind the

  barracks and the officers’ club, looking towards the runway

  where they are taking off for the last mission.

  Later, they come whistling in, in flights or pairs, peeling off and landing with the sun already down behind the hills.

  Today, a Meteor failed to make it off and crashed at the

  downhill end of 32, going into the Korean huts there and

  exploding. The pilot was killed. On such a nice, sunny day.

  m

  It was like leaving an old love. There was so much more than he could ever remember. He stared down at the hand-sized earth

  that had drifted by beneath him so slowly every time before.

  Now he seemed to be crossing it with great speed, as if running with the current of time. Ribbons of ocher road, highlands and villages were all floating swiftly out of sight under the wing. He felt an overwhelming, captive sadness. It was his farewell. He twisted around in the seat to look behind, to see in the unclear corner of his vision just once more the river, the silent, muddy Yalu. It was already far behind and dropping back more every

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  minute, a languid trace of reflection among the hills and

  flatlands. He had never heard of it before he had come, and the closest he had been to it was a distance to be measured in verti-cal miles, but he felt that he knew it as well as a familiar street—

  its mud flats and wide mouth, its bridges, cities, bare banks, islands, and the lonely way it came from the interior. It seemed unbelievable that he would never see it again.

  m

  In the end there is a kind of illness. A feeling of inconsequence, even lightness, takes hold. It is, in a way, like the earliest days, the sense of being an outsider. Others are taking one’s place, nameless others who can never know how it was. It is being

  given to them, the war with all its fading, romantic detail, its disasters and lucky chances. They will be coming home through the intense skies of autumn, settling gracefully in over the boundary of the field. The smooth black runway floats up to

  meet them. The ships are empty, featherlight, the fuel tanks almost drained, the belts of ammunition vanished; they are

  bringing back nothing except that thing we prized above all.

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  I finished with one destroyed and one damaged, which I would sometimes, among the unknowing, elevate to a probable, never more; to do that would be soiling the very thing fought for.

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  When I returned to domestic life I kept something to

  myself, a deep attachment—deeper than anything I had

  known—to all that had happened. I had come very close to

  achieving the self that is based on the risking of everything, going where others would not go, giving what they would not

  give. Later I felt I had not done enough, had been too reliant, too unskilled. I had not done what I set out to do and might have done. I felt contempt for myself, not at first but as time passed, and I ceased talking about those days, as if I had never known them. But it had been a great voyage, the voyage, probably, of my life.

  I would have given anything, I remember that. The

  moments of terror—alone, separated from the leader, and see-

  ing, like a knell, drop tanks with their foreign shape and thin, vaporous trails falling silent to both right and left—the sometimes ominous briefings and preparation, the dark early mornings which for me were the worst—none of it mattered. A few

  years afterwards I won a gunnery championship in North

  Africa and led an acrobatic team—I had in short, learned

  equitation. We dropped from the sky into distant countries

  and once in a while in a locker room or bar I would hear a

  remark that someone, a name from those days, had been killed in a flying accident, but like Conrad’s shipmates on the Narcis-sus, I never saw any of them again.

  III.

  During the years 1954–1957, Salter was stationed in Europe at Bitburg, an airbase in Germany. They flew from there and also, at times, from fields in France, the Netherlands, Morocco, and Libya. Life was both routine and uneven. This was his last posting as a regular officer.

  m

  In those days there was nothing in the world but us. The rarity was fine. There were other squadrons, of course. Some you

  knew quite well. Ships from all three squadrons in the group and also from other fields came in past the little shack on

  wheels by the side of the runway. Many times it is you yourself who are returning, coming back beneath the clouds, seeing the long straight runway, or the hangars alongside it blurring in the rain—an incomparable happiness, the joy of coming home.

  m

  We had pilots named Homer and Ulysses, country boys

  unfrivolous by nature who took good care of their cars. Farm

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  boys, for some reason, always seemed the truest men. They

  were even-tempered and unhurried in the way of someone

  who will watch a man doing something foolish and not make

  any comment—the joke will come at the end. They became

  flyers instead of going to the city though of course it was not the same thing, and they saw the world from a distance—the

  Grand Canal like a gray thread winding among the barely dis-

  tinguishable piazzas far below, the unmistakable narrowing

  spire of Paris rising above the haze. Beneath them passed all the miracles of Europe, few of great interest—their wonders

  were more elemental, in a room, standing naked with a mem-

  ber like a grazing horse’s, in front of a full-length mirror with a German whore. Some married waitresses.

  You knew them, that is to say their ability and to an extent their character, but much was hidden. After two or three years you knew little more than at the start, but still you were attached to their silence, the honesty of their thoughts. One night one of them, on a motorcycle, sped into the concrete pillar of a bridge and was in the hospital for weeks, legs broken, jaw bound

  together with silver wire. Nevertheless when I came into the room he managed to smile. He had a willing nature and the name of an ace, strange and abrupt: Uden. Broad and capable hands, fearless eyes, yet somehow it all came to nothing. Face-to-face for the last time at the noisy farewell party, the blue, farm-country eyes suddenly filled with tears. “I know I’ve disappointed you.”

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  Squadron party in quarters at Bitburg: Salter’s wife,

  Ann, himself, and Mary Hall Lee whose husband,

  M/G Robert Lee, commanded 12th AF

  “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 the sky undivided between the darkness of the a
ir 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

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  the lights of the fleeing leader, the number-three man, low in the roaring nightmare, determined to do well, went into the

  sea. Uden.

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  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.

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  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.

  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

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  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 letdown 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 bea-

  con, 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

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  I have the right frequency and beacon? I checked again. It was 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 me 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.

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  A taxi drove us into town. We talked about what had hap-

  pened, 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.

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  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

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  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.

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  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.

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  At midday, silvery and slow, the courier floated down the final approach and then skimmed for a long time near the ground

  getting ready to touch. Nose pointed high, it taxied in. Phipps went to meet it. He stood off to one side and watched it swing around, the grass quivering behind and pebbles shooting off

  the concrete. When the engines died he walked up and waited

  for the door to open. There was mail, spare parts, and one pas-senger, a second lieutenant wearing an overcoat. His baggage was handed down. It turned out he was joining the squadron.

  “This is the 44th, right?”

  “Yeah, this is it. We’ll, you’re lucky.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing,” Phipps said. “It’s just what they told me.”

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  The new man’s name was Cassada. He was Phipp’s height

  with hair a little fairer and combed back, Anglo style. Phipps helped him carry his bags while being careful not to be too

  responsive to questions. Cassada was looking around as they

  walked. Were these their planes, he wanted to know. Were

  pilots assigned a plane? Were their names painted on them?

  Phipps answered yes.

  “I’ll take you over to meet Captain Isbell,” he said.

  “Is he the squadron commander?”

  “Who, Captain Isbell? No, he’s ops.”

  “Oh,” Cassada said.

  He was just out of flying school but he’d served as an

  enlisted man for two years before. He didn’t look that old.

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  It was Friday night, the night for drinking. It would go on for hours. Isbell sat, not really listening, his gaze moving over the crowd, casual but searching, he was not sure for what. True

  comrades perhaps. Even friends.

  Who among them, then, Isbell wondered, someone nearly

  overlooked, silent and reflective, or another, arguing and

  intense? Godchaux—he was what it was all about. Grace. The