Memoir From Antproof Case (23 page)

Looking north, I saw something upright, and walked toward it, thinking that it might be a man, or, better yet, a woman. Had I met a woman, let us say Ingrid Bergman, in similar straits, I am sure that we would have achieved love and intimacy that would have made us happy for the rest of our lives.

It was not Ingrid Bergman but a pole supported by rocks, a signpost with two whitewashed boards across which were written in black paint the words
CANTIERE di BONIFICA, Azi SAFI EDDIN EL SENUSSI Ca, 148 KM,
and an arrow pointing south.

I waited by this sign for most of the day, and then, after I began to worry that I actually might die there, I saw a column of dust. It was moving toward me. After half an hour I could see that the dust had been kicked up by a group of British trucks.

When they reached me, they stopped, and fifty men jumped to the ground. I stared at them without speaking. A tall officer, a major as I recall, approached me and, when he realized that the creature before him was still alive, took off his hat. I have always loved British officers' caps, and even in the scarlet and green gardens of Niterói I remember their inimitable red.

Clutching a mahogany swagger stick capped at one end by a 50mm shell casing and at the other by an empty Enfield cartridge, he bent over and said, "Hello. Do you speak English?"

I looked at him for a moment, watching him await my answer. "From your point of view, probably not," I told him.

 

My sojourn in Northern Italy was my undoing as a flier, for it was there that a number of factors coalesced and deprived me of the edge I had had in the air over the Mediterranean.

The first was age. I was forty. I did not believe that I would live, as I have, to be eighty, for at the time people like me—which is to say unhappy, unmarried, mesomorphic investment bankers who felt that skimming millions off corporate and public bond issues was no more worthwhile than a fly shitting in the Gulf of Mexico—lived to about sixty-five. Many pressure-cooked and ate themselves to death—you would not believe the sauces available to a partner at Stillman and Chase—in their fifties, and some even in their forties. A few of my colleagues managed to achieve cardiac arrest in their middle thirties. One even checked out at twenty-seven, of apniated dyspnea, and with him went the economic future of the Sudan. These are the things about which historians seldom have the slightest hint. They look for structural causes and subject their readers to transactional analyses, when all they need to know is that Frederick Parts III had an overwhelming yen for lamb brains in double cream sauce. If you are five foot three, weigh 425 pounds, and your arteries are 85% sealed with lard, chicken fat, and marisco, it pays not to exert yourself in the Chutney School Alumni Squash Tournament. He died with his teeth clenched.

Being naturally pessimistic, I figured that (assuming I would get through the war) I had twenty years remaining, or perhaps only ten, and the forty years I had known had passed so quickly that they seemed misplaced. In memory, I groped for their meaning as if they were my glasses and I had lost them in the dark, and as I found no meaning I became intensely jealous of the years ahead, however many they might be. This made me sometimes unduly cautious, which greatly increased my chances of dying in the air.

I did not have the stamina of boys of twenty and even thirty, and unlike them I was unable to recover quickly as one mission bled into another. This was dangerous.

And, then, we sensed that the war was almost over. That we would win was a foregone conclusion. Every death past the point of that acknowledgment seemed not a sacrifice but a waste. Every action, even those in aerial combat, was laden with reluctance. Split seconds were lost, those marvelous, warriorlike split seconds that arise from desperation and anger and make the difference between living and dying.

The weather was terrible over Germany: many fighters collided with our own bombers or their own flights, and others, badly crippled, could not find their way home through the smothering clouds. I know the oppression they felt, tunneling into the gray without respite, because it almost happened to me once, when, instruments gone and surrounded by cloud, I flew in what I took to be a southerly direction, at an altitude I guessed would take me over the Alps, and suddenly I found myself over France, in an explosion of blue, in clear cold air, buffeting in a wind storm at the vanguard of a front that had come from the ocean or the Arctic, and was my salvation.

Lastly, I suppose, Italy itself offers such a beautiful alternative to war that you lose your taste for fighting, a taste always sharpened by the simple failures of civilization. In Italy I saw in the operations of daily life continual reference to greater themes and purposes, and there seemed no need to throw it all over, angrily, in a fireball, as I believe the Germans always want to do, vexed as they are by their painfully efficient darkness.

I used to walk along a river from the airfield to the town, on a path under rustling willows. The river was narrow, fresh, and clear. You could see brown-shadowed trout making the circles of their society in translucent pools covered with dancing rain. In places the water flowed over weirs or spillways, where it took on velocity and a coat of silver that cooled the air. The flawless tongues of water forced through the teeth of the weirs reminded me of piano keys, and by looking at them I could summon the memory of pieces written to honor the beauty of such things as dancing rivers and tempestuous rain.

In town I traded my coffee allotment for virgin olive oil, pasta, peppers, tomatoes, and tiny portions of long-cured prosciutto. It was remarkable to me that anyone would part with such things in return for a few handfuls of nauseating brown gravel. The other day, on the train to the naval academy, I saw a poster intended for Brazilian mothers. The gist of its message was that if their children poisoned themselves with various substances listed in the midst of the advice, they should make the children throw up. And how do you do this? You make them eat either a brown paper bag or coffee grounds.

I carried the coffee in a sealed pouch at the end of a pole. At the market, I would take the pole off my shoulder and maneuver the pouch onto a table for trade. The first time I did this they thought I had brought explosives, and everyone ran. Eventually they grew accustomed to my method of delivery, but they never understood it. I didn't want to demean my goods in trade, so I told them that in America coffee is carried at the end of a pole to assure that it does not reach the same temperature as the human body, which harms the flavor.

The food was, of course, better by far than Army Air Force rations. It was the only kind of meal I could eat if I knew that the next day I was going to escort a daylight raid on a heavily defended target. Even after the war, even now, when faced with something that I fear, I tend to eat spaghetti.

When I eat pasta primavera, or linguine with crushed tomatoes and hot pepper, I become tranquil and melancholy, and if I close my eyes I see dozens of planes, with propellers spinning like silver water thundering over a weir, waiting to get onto the runway and fly off to the battle across the Alps.

 

When the aircraft of three or four squadrons gather for a group assault, the air and the earth shake all around them. The planes crowd together at imprecise angles, and as those at the edges taxi away into the wind, the ones that remain are seized by the fear of inaction. The assemblage of camouflaged aircraft has appeared as if by magic from Quonset huts and revetments, from hangars and shops, and in the moments before takeoff, the airfield is the most exciting place in the world. But as soon as the last has ascended, all you can hear is the wind.

As the field was overcome by quiet I would be on my way north, seeking a great roll of air over the Alps that would lift me like a glider pilot to the top of an invisible platform from which I would descend an invisible ramp into battle over the ruins of Germany.

From the beginning our method of operation had been dispersal and convergence. It made tactical sense only when we did not have command of the air, but even after German fighters were as rare as jets—mainly because they were jets—the pilots we were aloft to protect were comforted by the perfection of our timing no less than by our particular method of appearance.

We would pick them up one by one, coming from the sun if it were available, or from above. We didn't like the idea of rising to meet another aircraft, and had been strongly habituated against it in all forms, so that we preferred not to rise even to meet our own bombers. The opposite of this was the approach of whatever was left of the Luftwaffe, which, at the end, always seemed to have been taken by surprise, perhaps because its communications net had been shattered, and which, at the end, always had to climb into a fight.

Holding back beyond the sight of the bomber wave, we would let it fly alone for a moment after our counterparts from British fields turned for home. In musical terms I suppose you could call it a rest; in gastronomy the water between courses; in poetry a caesura; in theology the test of remoteness, which is the great test of existence.

We knew that we overshadowed them in an immense hollow dome of light and air, that our eyes were upon them, that they feared, that in their huge planes they were silently looking for fighters either to rise from below to fight or descend on their wing to keep them safe. We knew that they were like us. I knew that any one of them could have been my son, that, indeed, they were sons, and that this was why we were above them in the air, holding back and ready to go forward.

I remember their faces peering from the glittering glass domes as we descended and came alongside. When they thought there was no one, that they were alone, that they had been abandoned, the first of us dropped from nowhere and quietly rode nearby. And then from another direction another of us would appear, and another, and another, until they were surrounded by more fighters than they could count, and every single fighter was willing to die for them.

Some were boys on their first or a very early mission. I would smile at them and give the thumbs-up, just as our ground crews did with us, for this commonplace was purified, sanctified, by the circumstance that a certain number of us would within hours or minutes go to our deaths.

When they were fully surrounded by our shield, we would expand the envelope and keep watch from a greater distance. If, as we approached the target, we had no fighter challenge, we would speed ahead to join our elements already engaged in flak suppression.

As the bomber wave reached the target, we would rise. This was the moment when I felt the greatest blackness, when I prayed for a quick end to the war. Even thousands of feet above, in clear and insubstantial air, the concussions of the bombs made our planes vibrate like an old car speeding over a washboard road. Though fixed, the glass in the instrument panels somehow managed to rattle, and my goggles moved around my eyes like a piece on a Ouija board.

We knew that down below were armaments factories and railheads, but also children and their mothers, and how many of them we buried we did not know. At this moment, as the bombs found their marks or horribly strayed from them, we would have been easy prey for any fighter that rose to avenge its angels, but at this moment they never did rise, which is why we stayed alive.

We came together only as an accretion to the bomber wave, and we stayed together only until we passed the bombers back to their home escorts. Then we left as we had come, alone. The heart of what we did was that we were alone, our hallmark a single plane the master of a vast ocean of air.

At the very end, in the early spring of 1945, I was flying flak suppression on the outskirts of Berlin. I hated flak suppression, which was completely different from air-to-air combat and not what I was used to. I hated dive-bombing, which was one long note during which you had to overcome at least three very strong inclinations. It is not natural to align yourself along the path of fire and pursue it to its source, as if you wish to lodge yourself in the barrel of a gun. Nor is it natural to point your airplane toward the earth and keep it headed down at high speed. Nor is it natural not to evade enemy fire. That was what my wrists and reflexes had been for, what the musicality of my timing had allowed me to do in quick air battles that had moved like fast dances.

The only thing good about flak suppression was that after getting rid of the bombs loiter time was virtually zero, simply because the more bombs you carried, the less fuel you could take. With merely cannon, we jettisoned drop tanks and switched to internal supply immediately before we joined the bombers, but when carrying bombs for flak suppression we shed the smaller tanks before Nürnberg, and, though lightened for the trip back, would come in with only a teaspoon of gas.

It was very difficult to take out an ack-ack gun. Just because it stopped firing after you attacked it didn't mean that you had hit it. They were often arranged in groups in which one protected another, but they were spread out enough so that you had to hit them one by one. And although with the passage of time we destroyed more and more of them, as the Allied armies closed in, the Germans and their antiaircraft drew into a tighter and tighter circle, until it seemed that the more we hit them, the more there were.

As we watched the circle shrink, we knew that the war was nearly over—in Europe, anyway—and it was excruciatingly hard not to be cautious.

At the point where we were fighting something the size and strength of Rhode Island, a ruined city-state that we were turning to dust, I dropped my tanks one day as Nürnberg came up ahead, and went on to Berlin with a rack of 250-pound bombs. The first flak I encountered was coming from a park, or what had been a park, in the city of Berlin itself. I could see the dust raised by distant columns of Russian tanks, and a circle on the ground in the center of the ack-ack guns, a circle that I judged once to have been a carousel.

The park was sufficiently isolated so that at least I would not have to risk loosing my bombs into a cellar full of children. I climbed to 15,000 feet and then dived at the puffs of smoke. This, I thought, was a unique opportunity, for the ack-ack constellations were always emplaced in fields or forests, maddeningly spread out. Here, they sat in a very tight ring around the carousel, simply because the park wasn't big enough for any other pattern. Undoubtedly, they had been ordered to set up in this park despite the fact that they would probably die in it, and that's what they did.