The Purple Decades - a Reader

by Tom Wolfe

  For Dowd, like every other military pilot, the flying fraternity turned out to be the sort that had outer and inner chambers. No sooner did the novitiate demonstrate his capabilities in the outermost chamber and gain entrance to the next … than he discovered that he was once again a novitiate insofar as entry through the next door was concerned … and on and on the series goes. Moreover, in carrier training the tests confronted the candidate, the eternal novitiate, in more rapid succession than in any other form of flying.

  He first had to learn to fly a propeller-driven airplane. Perhaps a quarter of an entering class might be eliminated, washed out, at this stage. Then came jet training and formation flight. As many as 50 percent of those left might wash out at these stages. But in naval flying, on top of everything else, there was the inevitable matter of … the heaving greasy skillet. That slab of metal was always waiting out in the middle of the ocean. The trainees first practiced touching down on the shape of a flight deck painted on an airfield. They’d touch down and then gun right off. This was safe enough—the shape didn’t move, at least—but it could do terrible things to, let us say, the gyroscope of the soul. That shape—it’s so damned small! And more novitiates washed out. Then came the day, without warning, when they were sent out over the ocean for the first of many days of reckoning with the skillet. The first day was always a clear day with little wind and a calm sea. The carrier was so steady it seemed to be resting on pilings—but what a bear that day was!

  When Dowd was in training, aviators learned to land on the flight deck with the aid of a device that bore the horrible, appropriate name of the “meatball.” This was a big mirror set up on the deck with a searchlight shining into it at a 3-degree angle—the angle of the flight deck—so that it reflected at the same angle. The aviator was to guide himself onto the deck by keeping the great burst of light, the meatball, visible in the center of the mirror. And many, many good souls washed out as they dropped like a brick toward the deck and tried to deal with that blazing meatball. Those who survived that test perhaps thought for a brief moment that at last they were regulars in Gideon’s Army. But then came night landings. The sky was black, and the sea was black, and now that hellish meatball bobbed like a single sagging star in outer space. Many good men “bingoed” and washed out at this juncture. The novitiate was given three chances to land on the deck. If he didn’t come in on his first or second approach and flew by instead, then he had to make it on his third, or the word “bingo!” would sound over his earphones—and over the entire flight deck, as he well knew—meaning that he would have to fly back to shore and land on a nice, safe immovable airfield … where everyone likewise knew he was a poor sad Bingo coming in from the carrier. It didn’t take many bingos to add up to a washout.

  One night, when Dowd had just started night training, the sea and the wind seemed to be higher, the clouds seemed lower, the night blacker than he thought possible. From up in the air the meatball seemed to bob and dart around in a crazy fashion, like a BB under glass in one of those roll-’em-in-the-hole games you hold in the palm of your hand. He made two passes and leveled off a good two hundred feet above the ship each time. On the third time around … it suddenly seemed of supreme, decisive, eternal importance that the word “bingo” not sound over his earphones. He fought the meatball all the way down in a succession of jerks, shudders, lurches, and whifferdills, then drove his plane onto the deck through sheer will, practically like a nail. The fourth and last deck wire caught him, and he kept the throttle pushed forward into the “full military power” position, figuring he was on the verge of boltering off the end and would have to regain altitude instantaneously. He had his head down and his hand thrust forward, with his engine roaring—for how long? —God knows—before it dawned on him that he was actually down safe and could get out. The whole flight deck was waiting for him to shut off his damned engine. As he climbed down from the aircraft, he heard the skipper’s voice boom out over the speaker system:

  “How do you like flying now, Lieutenant?”

  He noted with some satisfaction, however, that they then closed down the deck because of the weather. And was he now in the fraternity at last? … Hardly. He was just beginning. Everything he had learned to do so far became merely the routine. He was now expected to perform such incredible stunts day in and day out, under conditions of fleet operations and combat.

  Being a carrier pilot was like being a paratrooper in that it took a while to learn how many different ways you could be killed in the course of an ordinary operation. A fellow F-4 jock, a friend, an experienced aviator, comes in one night low on fuel, not sure he has enough for a second pass, touches down long, bolters, tries to regain altitude, can’t, careens off the far end of the deck, fifty thousand pounds of metal and tubes, and sinks without a trace. It all happens in a matter of seconds, just like that. Another friend, with even more experience, a combat veteran, gets his without moving a muscle. He’s in his F-4, in the flight line, waiting for his turn on the catapult, when the ship up ahead somehow turns at the wrong angle, throttles up without a deflection shield behind it, and the whole fifteen tons of thrust hits his F-4, and the man and his guy-in-back and the ship are blown off the deck like a candy wrapper and are gone forever—in an instant, a snap of the fingers, just like that.

  Yet once an aviator was in combat, all that, too, became simply the given, the hazards of everyday life on the job, a mere backdrop. From now on one found new doors, new tests, coming up with a mad rapidity. Your first day in combat … your first bombing run … first strafing run … the first time you’re shot at … the first time you see a SAM … which also means the first time you dive for the deck straight into the maw of the flak cannons … the first time your ship gets dinged by flak … and the first time you see someone else in your own formation blown out of the sky over the North—and in many ways what an aviator saw with his own eyes was more terrible than the sudden unseen things happening to himself.

  For Dowd and Garth Flint this came one day during a bombing run near the Iron Triangle. They were closing in on the target, barreling through the eternal cloud cover, unable to see even the ships in their own wing, when all at once a great livid ghost came drifting straight across their path, from left to right. It was an F-4. It had taken a direct hit, and smoke was pouring out of the cockpit. The smoke enveloped the fuselage in the most ghostly fashion. The pilot had cobbed it to starboard in a furious effort to reach the water, the gulf, to try to bail out where Navy rescue planes could reach them. In the blink of an eye the ghastly cartridge disappeared, swallowed up by the clouds. They would never make it. Dowd and Flint plowed on to the target, following their wing command, even though the gunners below obviously had dead range on the formation. To have done anything else would have been unthinkable.

  Unthinkable, to be sure. By late 1967 thinkable/unthinkable played on a very narrow band. The options had been cut back sharply. Both Navy and Air Force fliers were getting theirs at a rate that was “astronomical and unacceptable,” by ordinary logic, as Jack Broughton had said. But fliers with a hundred missions over the North were people who by now had pulled the rope ladder up into the pulpit. Somehow they had removed their ties with the ordinary earth. They no longer lived on it. Home and hearth, loved ones and dear ones—it wasn’t that they had consciously lost their love or dear regard for such folks and such things … it was just that the dear folks back home were … so far away, back there through such an incalculable number of chambers and doors. The fliers over the North now lived in, or near, the fraternity’s innermost room. Or, at the very least, they now knew who it was, finally, who had access to that room. It was not merely he who could be called “brave.” No, it was he who was able to put his hide on the line in combat and then had the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness to pull it back in the last yawning moment—and then was able to go out again the next day, and the next day, and every next day, and do it all over again, even if the series proved infinite. It was t
he daily routine of risking one’s hide while operating a hurtling piece of machinery that separated military flying from all other forms of soldiering and sailoring known to history.

  Even without going into combat career Navy fighter pilots stood one chance in four of dying in an accident before their twenty years were up, and one chance in two of having to punch out, eject by parachute, at some point. In combat, especially in Vietnam, God knew what the figures were. The Pentagon was not saying. No, the Pentagon itself seemed bent on raising the ante to ridiculous heights, imposing restrictions that every aviator knew to be absurd. And “the nation”? “our country”? “the folks back home”? They seemed to have lost heart for the battle. But even that realization seemed … so far away, back through so many doors. Finally, there was only the business of the fraternity and the inner room.

  All of the foregoing was out-of-bounds in conversation. Nevertheless, there it was. The closest aviators came to talking about it was when they used the term “professionalism.” Many extraordinary things were done in the name of professionalism. And when everything else went wrong, this professionalism existed like an envelope, in the sense that each airplane was said to have a certain “performance envelope.” Inside, inside that space, the aviators remained one another’s relentless judges right up to the end, when not a hell of a lot of people outside seemed to care any longer. They were like casebook proof of something an English doctor, Lord Moran, had written forty years before. Moran had been a doctor treating soldiers in the trenches during the First World War, and he wrote one of the few analytical studies ever addressed specifically to the subject of bravery: The Anatomy of Courage. In the wars of the future, he said, aerial combat, not soldiering, would have “first call on adventurous youth.” But the bravery of these adventurers, he said, would have a curiously detached quality. For the pilot, “love of the sport—success at the game—rather than sense of duty makes him go on.”

  The unspoken things! Bye borty-bibe … every morning when he woke up and rolled out of bed in his stateroom, the components of the game of high-low lit up in every aviator’s brain, and he would all too literally calculate the state of his soul that morning by the composition of his bowel movement, with diarrhea being the worst sign of all. Well, not quite the worst; for occasionally one would hear some poor soul in another cubicle of the head … vomiting. One would be curious … but in another way one would just as soon not know who it was. (After all, he might be in my wing.) Since none of this could be spoken, demeanor was everything. (Only your laundryman knows for sure!) It was like jousting! One did return to the carrier like a knight! … or as near to knightly status as was likely to be possible in an age of mimeographed flight assignments and mandatory debriefings.

  The most beautiful possible moments came when you brought your aircraft back to the deck from battle half shot up. Just a few weeks ago Dowd and Garth Flint came back with an 85-millimeter shell hole shot clear through a rear stabilizer wing. It looked as if you could put your arm through it, and it was no more than a yard from the fuselage. Dowd and Flint had scarcely opened the cockpit before the Mouseketeers, the deckhands, were gaping at the damage. Dowd climbed down to the deck, took off his helmet, and started walking away. Then, as if he’d just remembered something, he turned about and said to the onlookers: “Check that stabilizer, will you? Think maybe we caught a little flak.”

  How gloriously bored! The unspoken, unspeakable things! All the gagged taboos!

  No doubt that was what made American airmen, while on leave, the most notorious bar patrons in the Philippines, Japan, and Thailand during the Vietnam years. In keeping with a tradition as old as the First World War, drink and drunkenness gave pilots their only license to let it out. Not to talk about the unspoken things—not to break the taboo—but to set free all the strangled roars, screams, bawls, sighs, and raving yahoos. Emotion displayed while drunk didn’t count. Everybody knew that. One night Dowd was drinking at a bar at Cubi Point with an A-4 pilot named Starbird. It was getting to that hour of the night when you’re so drunk you can’t hear any more. Your skull itself is roaring and your screams and songs get beaten back by the gale. The bartender announces that the bar is now closed. He slides a brass pole under the handles on the tops of the big beer coolers behind the bar and locks them shut. Starbird reaches across the bar and grabs the brass pole and emits a roar of sheer gorilla fury and pulls it up out of its mooring, until it’s looped in the middle like a piece of spaghetti, and announces: “The bar just reopened.”

  After a long season of such affronts by many roaring souls, Navy bars and officers’ clubs in Subic Bay began ruling themselves off limits to pilots returning from tours in the North (Yankee Station). Then came a gesture from on high that Dowd would never forget. Admiral Red Hyland himself sent out a directive to all clubs and pubs within the purview of the Fleet, saying: It has come to my attention that the cocktail lounge conduct of aviators returning from Yankee Station has occasioned some negative responses. This is to inform all hands that the combat conduct of these men has been exemplary, despite the most trying conditions, and now hear this: THEY WILL BE ACCORDED THE FULL PRIVILEGES OF OFFICERS AND GENTLEMEN! (For you I bend the brass! The bars just reopened!)

  At last!—someone had come close to saying it! to putting it into words! to giving a tiny corner of the world some actual inkling that they just might have … the ineffable … it!

  That memo, like all memos, soon vanished down the memory hole. Yet it meant more to Dowd than any medal he ever got.

  High or low? The weather doesn’t get any better as they pull closer to Haiphong, and Dowd decides to play it low. It looks like the kind of overcast the SAM’s like best, high and solid. Dowd, with Brent off his wing, comes into Haiphong at about two hundred feet at close to Mach 1. Suddenly they break out of the mist and they’re over the harbor. They bank for one turn around it, which immediately cuts their speed down to about 450 knots. It’s peaceful, just another inexplicable stroll in Haiphong Park. The overcast is down to four hundred feet, meaning it’s hopeless so far as a bombing strike is concerned. Besides, the inevitable third-party ships are welded in …

  The weather is so bad, it’s as if the enemy has decided to take a holiday from the war, knowing no bombers will be coming in. There’s no sense loitering, however, and Dowd heads out for a look at Cam Pha and Hon Gay, two ports north of Haiphong. High or low … Dowd stays down low. There’s nothing below but a smattering of islands.

  All at once Dowd sees a streak of orange shoot up over the nose on the port side. Garth Flint, in the back seat, sees another streak come up under the nose on the starboard … They both know at once: tracer bullets … They go to school with the tracer bullets … The tracers show the gunners whether or not they’re near the mark … and without any doubt they’re near the mark. Then they hear a sound like twack … It sounds like nothing more than a good-size rock hitting an automobile … the shot hit the bottom of the nose section … Dowd immediately cobs it, gives it full power in a furious bid to get up into the cloud cover and out over the gulf. Every warning light on the panel is lit up red, but he still has control of the plane. Smoke starts pouring into the cockpit. The heat is so intense he can barely touch sections of the panel. It’s so hot he can hardly hold the controls. The fire seems to be in the hydraulics system of the wheel well. He tries to vent the cockpit, but the vent doesn’t work. Then he blows the canopy off to try to clear the smoke, but the smoke pours out so heavily he still can’t see. Everything metal is becoming fiercely hot. He wonders if the ejection mechanism will still work. He can hardly hold the stick.

  For Garth Flint, in back, with the canopy gone, it’s as if a hurricane has hit, a hurricane plus smoke. Maps are blowing all over the place, and smoke is pouring back. It’s chaos. They’re going about 350 knots, and the rush of air is so furious Flint can no longer hear anything on the radio, not even from Dowd. He wonders: Can we possibly get back onto the carrier if the smoke is this bad and Dowd can’t
hear radio communications? Oddly, all his worries center on this one problem. An explosion right in front of him! In the roiling smoke, where Dowd used to be, there’s a metal pole sticking up in the air. It’s made of sections, like a telescope. It’s something Flint’s never seen before … the fully sprung underpinning of an F-4 ejection system, sticking up in the air as they hurtle over the Gulf of Tonkin. This spastic pole sticking up in the front seat is now his only companion in this stricken ship going 350 knots. Dowd has punched out!

  Flint stares at the pole for perhaps two or three seconds, then pulls the ring under his seat. He’s blasted out of the ship, with such force that he can’t see.

  Meanwhile, Dowd’s furious ride is jerked to a halt by his parachute opening. He assumes Garth is floating down ahead of him. In fact, Dowd had yelled over the radio for Garth to eject and assumed he was on his way, not knowing Garth couldn’t hear a word he said. Considering the way he had cobbed the engine and turned the plane to starboard and out over the gulf, Dowd expects to see water as he comes down through the clouds. Instead, little islands—and the live possibility of capture—are rising up toward him.

  Reprieve! The wind carries him about a quarter mile from shore. Just the way the survival training told you, he prepares to shuck his parachute before he hits the water, at the same time keeping his life raft uninflated so the people onshore can’t spot him so easily. He hits the water … it’s surprisingly cold … he inflates the flotation device he’s wearing—but feels himself being dragged under. The water, which looked so calm from above, is running five- to seven-foot swells. It pitches up and down in front of him and beneath him, and he’s being dragged under. He can’t comprehend it—the parachute, which he thought he had so skillfully abandoned at the textbook-proper second, has somehow wrapped around his right leg in the slosh of the swells and he’s going under. He pulls out the knife that they’re issued for just such a situation. But the nylon cords are wet and the damned knife won’t cut them. He’s going under. For the first time since the flak hit, the jaws of the Halusian Gulp have opened. I’m going to die. At first it’s an incredible notion. Then it’s infuriating. To die by drowning out in this squalid pond after a ten-cent shootdown on a weather-recce mission—it’s humiliating! Another fly-boy disappears into the Cosmic Yawn! He’s swept by a wave of the purest self-pity. It’s actually about to happen—his death—the erasure of John Dowd from human existence—in a few seconds—just like that! The ineffable talent, the mystical power—it!—that let him hang his hide out over the Jaws and always pull it back—he doesn’t have it, after all!—he is no more special than the hundreds of other pilots who have already been swallowed up over the North! It’s pathetic. It’s a miserable and colossal affront. His whole life does not roll before his eyes—only the miserable pity of the here and now. He does not think of home and hearth. He does not think of Mom at the shuttling sewing machine late at night or the poignancy of seeing one’s own child daydreaming. No, there is only the here and now and the sum total of this total affront to all that comprises John Dowd—being dragged down in a fish pond by a parachute, holding in his hand a knife that the Navy issued for a task that it won’t perform—it’s utterly piteous and pathetic! … Jesus! How I pity myself now! … And that makes him furious. He gives the parachute a ferocious yank. Whuh?—in that very explosion of the final anger he discovers something: the damned thing is caught—not around his leg but on his knee-board! … The board is attached to his flight suit so he can jot down figures, keep charts handy, whatever … one last breath! Now he’s completely underwater … He can’t see … He grabs the knee-board and rips it off his flight suit … a miracle! … he’s free! … The parachute is gone … the death anchor … He bobs back to the surface … Christ! … the hell with the colossal affront of fate … There’s only now! … Never mind! … He inflates the raft, as it says in the manual … He’s on the side of the manual now! … Oh yes! … Navy-issue! … Why not! … He climbs on the raft … He’s not drowning anymore, he’s on his belly on a raft swooping up and down with the swells of the gulf … Never mind the past! … He scans the water and the nearby island … Not miserable Fate, but islanders with guns … That’s what he’s looking for … Is that one of them? … But on the water … there’s Garth! … Flint is on a raft about two hundred yards away, bobbing in and out of Dowd’s line of vision … It’s all shaping up … Never mind Fate! The hell with colossal affronts! He’s pulled it back after all—out of the Jaws …