Burning the Days (22 page)

Late in April we heard that more Russian squadrons were coming in. They were crowded onto their fields, wingtip to wingtip. The sky was filling with the bright cumulus that comes with fair weather.

I was with Colman, just the two of us. We had been four but had become separated—it was the alert flight and we’d been scrambled. The radar was directing us; enemy flights were in the air. We might never find them, wandering as we were among monumental clouds and talking occasionally to the absent pair with the vague idea of rejoining.

That was when I saw them for the first time.

“Two bogies back at eight o’clock high,” I called.

“Roger. I’ve got them,” Colman said lazily. He was like a veteran fielder watching a high fly ball. We continued on.

“They’re closing, Lead,” I said a few moments later. “They’re turning in on us.”

“Roger,” he said.

They were at seven o’clock then, only a few thousand feet back.

“They’re MIGs,” I said.

“I’ve got them,” he said again, confidently; it hardly occurred to me then that he hadn’t. I couldn’t imagine what he was thinking.

“They’re going to six o’clock. They’re firing! Break left!” At last Colman saw them and was turning. I was with him, outside and trailing. We had waited too long. We were in a stream of fire that was moving with and ahead of us. I was not aware of it, but Colman was being hit.

Behind us they had the scent of the kill, they could see the strikes; nothing would dislodge them. I was in panic but also calm, as if observing from some higher, safer place. We were turning as hard as we could and they were turning with us. The altimeter was unwinding. Straining to look back, I could see them, steady and unmoving, like the pods behind you on an amusement park ride that rise when you rise and go down when you go down, mechanical and effortless. There were fights, I knew, that went down to the deck and swept across the hills just above the trees, roaring, relentless.

Somehow we had pulled ahead a little. We were flying too desperately for them to lead us. The other element was calling—they could hear us—to ask where we were and whether they could help us, but neither Colman nor I could answer. It was pitiless. It was like being held by a python—the least relinquished space, it constricts to hold. We were being crushed in boundless air. We were below twenty thousand feet when Colman tightened his turn even more and pulled the nose up. He was going to dance with them this way, at low speed, having gained nothing at high.

They didn’t stay. They broke away; I saw them beneath us heading for home. I called to him to reverse his turn and follow, but for some reason he didn’t and they became specks. We picked up speed and began to climb. He said something about almost having
been unconscious—his oxygen hose becoming unplugged—and then asked me to close in and take a look at his plane.

“What’s wrong?”

“I think I may have been hit,” he decided.

From a distance I could see the holes in his tail and, when I drew closer, the wing.

Almost out of fuel but full of exuberance I landed too long that day, amateurishly long, and ended by collapsing one of the landing gear. I have made that landing a hundred times and never failed to put the plane down as gently as a glass figurine on a cabinet shelf, the wheels seem to touch with a feline softness, but the single time it was not in my imagination, I failed. The group commander was forgiving. I would make up for it, he declared. He’d had a serious accident himself, in England, colliding with a friendly bomber and killing all on board. This was Mahurin and a greater trial awaited him; he became a prisoner in North Korea and made statements for the benefit of the enemy. I could never, despite it, bring myself to dislike him.

——

When the weather was bad, as it was that spring, we did not fly. In the long days of rain there was restlessness and a kind of melancholy. The hours passed slowly; the hand-wound phonograph playing “China Night,” singsong and shrill. Remembering the girls at Miyoshi’s (officers only, pilots and artillerymen from every part of the war), the firecrackers bursting at the feet of hostesses in vast neon nightclubs, the special houses outside the gate at Fuchu, the bowing Japanese, Amell in his rain-soaked uniform getting out of a car, he had no idea where, it looked like the main railroad station … Thinking of it all and waiting for the weather to change, to pull onto the runway again and, in the rush of noise with its chilling central shriek, tremble to go.

One day down at the flight line, in the latrine, I came across a
broad-faced pilot named Braswell who had been first captain a year or two after I graduated. He was flying fighter-bombers and had landed, low on fuel, on the way home from a mission. The ground crew was attending to his airplane, an F-84, exotic to them, with straight wings and heronlike landing gear. We stood for a while and talked. What was it like, fighting MIGs? he asked.

I described it. I remember the pride I had in telling him, a pride I was careful to conceal. He was listening intently. I knew he felt I was giving testimony that he could trust. There are really only two kinds of officer, those with virtue and those without. Not that either is preferable—there are times when virtue is a terrible defect—but I felt myself to be one of the former. Braswell was an exemplar, of course. I was handing over to him something he may have recognized—though incomplete and not in correct order, it was everything I had learned. There passed before me all the ranks of cadet lieutenants and captains, football players, bloods, as the English might call them. I say passed before me, but it was I who passed before them, walking up to the privileged figure who stood alone, if only for a brief moment, at the head of them all and speaking to him, not as a subordinate but like two men in a field. We were both captains now, of another sort. If I were to meet him years later he would not remember this—neither landing there, nor me, nor anything I said—but I had given it nevertheless, and to someone who might matter. I felt shriven.

——

It was May when Colman flew what no one except he knew would be his last mission.

He had four victories by then, and that day, in a fight near the Yalu, Kasler, leading an element, got his fourth as well and then got behind another MIG and followed it down to the deck. They roared across the mud flats wide open, needles crossed, the MIG like a beast of legend fleeing ahead. Kasler strove to get closer. The
controls were unyielding. The ground rushed beneath them. Destiny itself, unrehearsed, shimmered before his eyes.

They were coming to the open water, the delta where the river widened, and suddenly the MIG pulled straight up, climbing, and continuing around. Colman was above with his wingman, watching it all. In his pocket, figuratively speaking, was a telegram he had received that morning—his father was gravely ill, he must come home—when the MIG rose in front of him, the long-sought fifth, entire and slow. It was his final chance.

“May I?” he asked politely.

Kasler, blood pulled from his face, did not answer. He passed by himself, up, up, and brilliantly over, fierce with lust, heading down again. At the bottom the MIG, going too fast, misjudged and hit near the water. Kasler barely pulled out.

I had landed half an hour earlier from a mission which encountered nothing, and was standing by the barracks watching when they came back. The first thing I saw was that they were without drop tanks. They turned off the runway at the near end, close to the road. I could recognize Colman’s head, small, like a bird’s, in the first ship. His gun ports were clean. So were his wingman’s. The other two planes had just reached the end of their landing roll. Theirs were black—they had been firing.

Kasler had gotten two and his wingman one. The single daring act—it was hard to imagine the enormous distance that it placed between us. The fifth was more than just another; it was beatification, the step across the gulf. On the tail of another plane at top speed, determined, closer than one dared, not knowing the other pilot or what he would do, down to the treetops, to the fatal earth—I had flown this very flight myself, it had been my initiation, though I hardly imagined repeating it in war. Kasler had his fifth, but more than that, he had reordered the state of things; he had begun like me, as a gunbearer, and now was where boldness had placed him, on the other side.

Colman left that day. In the wake of his leaving I realized that I knew very little about him. He was married and I think had children. He was lighthearted and self-promoting. Day-to-day truth was probably not in him, but a higher kind of integrity was, a kind not wasted on trivial matters. He had an infectious spirit. We were unalike. I adored him.

The farewells were the briefest. He merely picked up and left as if the game had meant little to him; he walked out without a backward glance. Finis.

I have forgotten when Kasler left, sometime later and after another victory. The MIGs had come down south of Anju on the early mission. He saw them low, but couldn’t catch them and then it developed there was an unknowing one behind him. His sixth.

I went to find him as he was getting ready to leave. I had a flight of my own by then and other loyalties, but part of me had stayed behind. We said goodbye. He was somewhat taciturn, as usual. I wondered if he was as yet aware of what he had won and would have for a long time thereafter, the luster of those hunting days when his name became storied.

Later he came by to say a few words—to console me, I think. There would be other chances. Of course, I said. We would see each other sometime, we agreed. It was heartbreaking to see him go, not for the slender friendship we had, but for the achievement he was carrying off with him. I saw his name one other time, in an article all down a column of the
Times
during the Vietnam War. He was flying there. He was known, it said, by name in the war room of the White House itself. He had the bad luck later to be shot down and made a prisoner, but even then he was invincible. He was held for seven years. Torture did not break him. Nothing could.

I know how they appeared to me, and I try to step aside for a moment to observe myself, how I seemed to them. Even now I cannot be sure—a marked figure, certainly, convivial and aloof at
the same time, not uncourageous, driven, impetuous, a bit unwise. They may sometimes have wondered what happened to me in the aftermath. Word grew infrequent. Did I go on, did I rise?

——

The first good weather in a week. The fighter-bombers are going north again in strength, to someplace up near the border. The briefing room is crowded and electric. It’s maximum effort—everything that can fly. Six hundred enemy aircraft have been counted on their fields. We are sending up forty.

Far beneath us the silver formations were moving slowly, it seemed, across barren hills. Enemy flights were being announced, one after another, and then someone saw them along the river at thirty thousand feet. Blood jumping after the idle days, we dropped tanks and began to climb. We broke through a thin layer of clouds and into emptiness.

Moments later, coming from nowhere, they are on us, four of them at eight o’clock. We turn into them, they pass behind and disappear.

The flight has split up, we’re in two’s. By this time MIGs are being called out everywhere. The radio is brimming with voices, among them someone calling out MIGs south of the river at twenty-four thousand feet. How many? someone asks.

“Many many!”

We head that way and see two, far out, sail past us on the left. We turn to follow, and they climb and begin to turn also. The sky is a burning blue, a sky things seem black in. I am on my back, Immelmanning up to get between them and the river, rolling out slightly beneath the leader, who is turning hard to the right and cannot see me. I duck my head and try to find the gunsight, which is an image projected onto a thick, slanted piece of glass that serves as the windshield. There’s nothing there—turning has pulled it all the way off the glass. The MIG begins to level out and
the sight drifts into view. About a thousand feet back I press the trigger. The tracers fall behind him. He begins to climb again and I am cutting him off, closing, glancing quickly back to see if my wingman is still there, firing again. A few hits in the right wing, then tremendous joy, at closer range a solid burst in the fuselage. The flashes are intense, brilliant, as of something vital shattering. He abruptly rolls over and I follow, as if we are leaping from a wall. He begins to pull it through. I am still shooting and something flies off the plane—the canopy. A moment later a kind of bundle, the pilot, comes out.

“Cope! Did you see that?”

“Roger,” my wingman says. He may have been talking to me all along, telling me I was clear, but this single word is the only one that remains.

The MIG, now a funeral craft that bore nothing, was falling from thirty thousand feet, spinning leisurely in its descent until its shadow unexpectedly appeared on the hills and slowly moved to join it in a burst of flame.

Six enemy planes were claimed on this mission and two of our own were lost, an ace and his wingman. The leader was rescued but the wingman drowned.

Here then, faintly discolored and liable to come apart if you touch it, is the corsage that I kept from the dance.

——

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,
feather-light, the fuel tanks almost drained, the belts of ammunition vanished; they are bringing back nothing except that thing we prized above all.

North for the last time, north again on a
razzia.
The radios are silent, only an occasional brief word crosses the air. We are hoping to surprise them, but it is a vain hope, already we are greenish marks on some radar. They are speaking a dark language, it flickers back and forth, deciding where we are going and what they will do.