The Bridges at Toko-ri (2 page)

“We’ll make it,” Tarrant grumbled as his ships plowed resolutely on toward the crucial hundred fathom curve which he dare not penetrate for fear of shoals, mines and submarines. But he turned his back upon his problem, for he could do nothing about it now. Instead, he checked to be sure the
Savo
’s deck was ready and in doing so he saw something which reassured him.
Far aft, standing upon a tiny platform that jutted out over the side of the carrier, stood a hulking giant, muffled in fur and holding two landing-signal paddles in his huge hands.
It was Beer Barrel, and if any man could bring jets surely and swiftly home, it was Beer Barrel.

He was an enormous man, six feet three, more than 250 pounds, and his heavy suit, stitched with strips of fluorescent cloth to make his arms and legs easier to read, added to his bulk. He was a farmer from Texas who before the perilous days of 1943 had never seen the ocean, but he possessed a fabulous ability to sense the motion of the sea and what position the carrier deck would take. He could judge the speed of jets as they whirled down upon him, but most of all he could imagine himself in the cockpit of every incoming plane and he seemed to know what tired and jittery pilots would do next and he saved their lives. He was a fearfully bad naval officer and in some ways a disgrace to his uniform, but everyone felt better when he came aboard a carrier, for he could do one thing. He could land planes.

He could reach out with his great hands and bring them safely home the way falconers used to bring back birds they loved. In the Pentagon they knew he broke rules and smuggled beer aboard each ship he served upon. Carrier captains knew it, and even Admiral Tarrant, who was a terror on navy rules, looked the other way when Beer Barrel staggered back after each drunken liberty, lugging his two ridiculous golf bags. The huge Texan had never once played golf and the two clubs sticking out were dummies. Once a deck hand, fearful that drunken Beer Barrel might slide back down the gangplank, had grabbed one of the outsize golf bags to help, but the surprising weight of it had crumpled.
him
to the deck. Beer Barrel, barely able to heft the bag himself, had got it onto his massive shoulder, whispering beerily to the boy, “Thanks, Junior, but this is man’s work.” And he had carried the bags full of beer into his quarters.

For he believed that if he had a can of cold beer in his belly it formed a kind of gyroscope which made him unusually sensitive to the sea and that when this beer sloshed about it harmonized with the elements and he became one with the sea and the sky and the heaving deck and the heart of the incoming pilot.

“Land jets!” moaned the bull horn.

“Let’s hear the checks,” Beer Barrel said to his spotters, staring aft to catch the first jet as it made its 180° turn for the cross leg and the sharp final turn into the landing run. Now the jet appeared and Beer Barrel thought, “They’re always pretty comin’ home at night.”

“All down!” the first watcher cried as he checked the wheels, the flaps and the stout hook which now dangled lower than the wheels.

“All down,” Beer Barrel echoed unemotionally.

“Clear deck!” the second watcher shouted as he checked the nylon barriers and the thirteen heavy steel wires riding a few inches off the deck, waiting to engage the hook.

“Clear deck,” Beer Barrel grunted phlegmatically.

He extended his paddles out sideways from his shoulders, standing like an imperturbable rock, and willed the plane onto the deck. “Come on, Junior,” he growled. “Keep your nose up so’s your hook’ll catch. Good boy!” Satisfied that all was well, he snapped his right paddle dramatically across his heart and dropped his left arm as if it had been severed clean away from his body. Instantly the jet pilot cut his flaming speed and slammed his Banshee onto the deck. With violent grasp the protruding hook engaged one of the slightly elevated wires and dragged the massive plane to a shuddering stop.

Beer Barrel, watching from his platform, called to the clerk who kept records on each plane, “1593.
Junior done real good.
Number three wire.” Never did Beer Barrel feel so content, not even when guzzling lager, as when one of his boys caught number three wire. “Heaven,” he explained once, “is where everybody gets number three wire.
Hell is where they fly wrong and catch
number thirteen and crash into the barrier and burn. And every one of you’s goin’ straight to hell if you don’t follow me better.”

From his own bridge, Admiral Tarrant watched the jets come home. In his life he had seen many fine and stirring things: his wife at the altar, Japanese battleships going down, ducks rising from Virginia marshes and his sons in uniform. But nothing he knew surpassed the sight of Beer Barrel bringing home the jets at dusk.

There always came that exquisite moment of human judgment when one man—a man standing alone on the remotest corner of the ship, lashed by foul wind and storm—had to decide that the jet roaring down upon him could make it. This solitary man had to judge the speed and height and the pitching of the deck and the wallowing of the sea and the oddities of this particular pilot and those additional imponderables that no man can explain. Then, at the last screaming second he had to make his decision and flash it to the pilot. He had only two choices. He could land the plane and risk the life of the pilot and the plane and the ship if he had judged wrong. Or he could wave-off and delay his decision until next time around. But he could defer his job to no one. It was his, and if he did judge wrong, carnage on the carrier deck could be fearful. That was why Admiral Tarrant never bothered about the bags of beer.

On they came, the slim and beautiful jets. As they roared upwind the admiral could see their stacks flaming. When they made their far turn and roared downwind he could see the pilots as human beings, tensed up and ready for the landing that was never twice the same. Finally, when these mighty jets hit the deck they weighed well over seven tons and their speed exceeded 135 miles an hour, yet within 120 feet they were completely stopped and this miracle was accomplished in several ways. First, Tarrant kept his carriers headed into the wind, which on this day stormed in at nearly 40 miles an hour, which cut the plane’s relative speed to about 95 miles. Then, too, the carrier was running away from the plane at 11 miles an hour, which further cut the plane’s speed to 84, and it was this actual speed that the wires had to arrest. They did so with brutal strength, but should they miss, two slim nylon barriers waited to drag the plane onto the deck and chop its impetus, halting it so that it could not proceed forward to damage other planes. And finally, should a runaway jet miss both the wires and the barriers, it would plunge into a stout nylon barricade which would entwine itself about the wings and wheels and tear the jet apart as if it were a helpless insect.

But it was Beer Barrel’s job to see that barriers and the barricade were not needed and he would shout curses at his pilots and cry, “Don’t fly the deck, Junior. Don’t fly the sea. Fly me.” An air force colonel watching Beer Barrel land jets exclaimed, “Why, it isn’t a landing at all! It’s a controlled crash.” And the big Texan replied in his beery voice, “Difference is that when I crash ’em they’re safe in the arms of God.”

Now he brought in three more, swiftly and surely, and Admiral Tarrant, watching the looming mountains of Korea as they moved in upon his ships, muttered, “Well, we’ll make it again.”

But as he said these words his squawk box sounded, and from deep within the
Savo
the combat intelligence director reported coolly, “1591 has been hit.
Serious damage.
May have to ditch.”

“What’s his position?”

“Thirty-five miles away.”

“Who’s with him?”

“His wingman, 1592.”

“Direct him to come on in and attempt landing”

The squawk box clicked off and Admiral Tarrant looked straight ahead at the looming coast. Long ago he had learned never to panic, but he had trained himself to look at situations in their gloomiest aspects so as to be prepared for ill turns of luck. “If this jet limps in we may have to hold this course for ten or fifteen more minutes. Well, we probably can do it.”

He studied the radar screen to estimate his probable position in fifteen minutes. “Too close,” he muttered. Then into the squawk box which led to the air officer of the
Savo
he said, “Recovery operations must end in ten minutes. Get all planes aboard.”

“The admiral knows there’s one in trouble?”

“Yes. I’ve ordered him to try to land.”

“Yes, sir.”

The bull horn sounded.
“All hands.
We must stop operations within ten minutes. Get those barriers cleared faster. Bring the planes in faster.”

The telephone talker at the landing platform told Beer Barrel, “We got to get ’em all aboard in ten minutes.”

“What’s a matter?” Beer Barrel growled.
“Admiral running hisself out of ocean?”

“Looks like it,” the talker said.

“You tell him to get the planes up here and I’ll get ’em aboard.”

So the nineteen dark ships of the task force sped on toward the coastline and suddenly the squawk box rasped, “Admiral, 1591 says he will have to ditch.”

“Can he ditch near the destroyers?”

“Negative.”

“Is his wingman still with him?”

“Affirmative.”

“How much fuel?”

“Six hundred pounds.”

“Have you a fix on their positions?”

“Affirmative.”

“Dispatch helicopter and tell wingman to land immediately.”

There was a long silence and the voice said, “Wingman 1592 requests permission stay with downed plane till copter arrives.”

The admiral was now faced with a decision no man should have to make. If the wingman stayed on, he would surely run out of fuel and lose his own plane and probably his life as well. But to command him to leave a downed companion was inhuman and any pilot aboard the
Savo
would prefer to risk his own life and his plane rather than to leave a man adrift in the freezing sea before the helicopter had spotted him.

For in the seas of Korea a downed airman had twenty minutes to live. That was all. The water was so bitterly cold that within five minutes the hands were frozen and the face. In twelve minutes of immersion in these fearful waters the arms became unable to function and by the twentieth minute the pilot was frozen to death.

The decision could not be deferred, for the squawk box repeated, “Wingman 1592 requests permission to stay.”

The admiral asked, “What is the absolute minimum of gas with which the wingman can make a straight-in landing?”

There was a moment’s computation. “Assuming he finds the carrier promptly, about four hundred pounds.”

“Tell him to stay with the downed man ...”

The voice interrupted, “Admiral, 1591 has just ditched. Wingman says the plane sank immediately.”

There was a moment’s silence and the admiral asked, “Where’s the helicopter?”

“About three more minutes away from the ditching.”

“Advise the helicopter …”

“Admiral, the wingman reports downed pilot afloat.”

“Tell the wingman to orbit until helicopter arrives. Then back for a straight-in landing.”

The bull horn echoed in the gathering dusk and mournful sounds spread over the flight deck, speaking of disaster. “Get those last two jets down immediately. Then prepare for emergency straight-in landing. A plane has been lost at sea.
Wingman coming in short of fuel.”

For a moment the many-colored figures stopped their furious motions. The frozen hands stopped pushing jets and the yellow jeeps stayed where they were. No matter how often you heard the news it always stopped you. No matter how frozen your face was, the bull horn made you a little bit colder. And far out to sea, in a buffeted helicopter, two enlisted men were coldest of all.

At the controls was Mike Forney, a tough twenty-seven-year-old Irishman from Chicago. In a navy where enlisted men hadn’t much chance of flying, Mike had made it. He had bullied his way through to flight school and his arrival aboard his first ship, the
Savo
, would be remembered as long as the ship stayed afloat. It was March 17 when he flew his copter onto the flight deck, wearing an opera hat painted green, a Baron von Richthofen scarf of kelly green, and a clay pipe jammed into his big teeth. He had his earphones wrapped around the back of his neck and when the captain of the
Savo
started to chew him out Forney said, “When I appear anywhere I want the regular pilots to know it, because if they listen to me, I’ll save ’em.” Now, as he sped toward the ditched pilot, he was wearing his green stovepipe and his World War I kelly green scarf, for he had found that when those astonishing symbols appeared at a scene of catastrophe everyone relaxed, and he had already saved three pilots.

But the man flying directly behind Mike Forney’s hat wasn’t relaxed. Nestor Gamidge, in charge of the actual rescue gear, was a sad-faced inconsequential young man from Kentucky, where his unmarried schoolteacher mother had named him Nestor after the wisest man in history, hoping that he would justify everything. But Nestor had not lived up to his name and was in fact rather stupid, yet, as the copter flew low over the bitter waves to find the ditched plane, he was bright enough to know that if anyone were to save the airman pitching about in the freezing water below it would be he. In this spot the admiral didn’t count nor the wingman who was
orbiting upstairs
nor even Mike Forney. In a few minutes he would lean out of the helicopter and lower a steel hoisting sling for the pilot to climb into. But from cold experience he knew that the man below would probably be too frozen even to lift his arms, so he, Nestor Gamidge, who hated the sea and who was dragged into the navy by his draft board, would have to jump into the icy waves and try to shove the inert body of the pilot into the sling. And if he failed—if his own hands froze before he could accomplish this—the pilot must die. That’s why they gave Nestor the job. He was dumb and he was undersized but he was strong.