Flight (32 page)

Now they were telling stories. Will remembers the end of Johnson’s. The guy wound up shooting his own horse’s leg by mistake and being forced to finish it off. No one could resist this ending, even though they were all sick of dead animal stories. Johnson’s story was declared a success.

Will went next. He had yet to win, or even to succeed at getting sympathy, and his share of the bar tabs was adding up. Somehow he couldn’t bring himself to play the game in earnest. It was an odd feeling, sifting through one’s past looking for shreds of pathos. It made him feel sullied, slightly obscene. For some reason, whenever he tried to think of a story, an image of his father would take shape in his head; his father standing alone in the west cornfield.

Who’s gonna hold things together here?
he had demanded as Will packed for his first base assignment in Texas.

Will cleared his throat. “I’ve just arrived at Nellis for fighter training,” he began, reluctant to the last. “And the first guy I see is this instructor from my old base who hates me.”

There’s so much to tell Kit. For instance, there’s the wild beauty of Vietnam. How, after refueling over Laos, they flew in high over jungle that draped the mountains like a rumpled bedspread. How, east of Hanoi, the ocean was jewel blue, punctuated with strange, barren islands that looked like giant boulders floating in the sea. How, farther south, it flattened into patchwork farmland, miles of green rectangles edged by tree lines, just like in Michigan. Will describes how clouds and fog rolled in quickly, as if manufactured by a machine, one more thing launched against them, along with the MiGs, the SAMs, the flak from antiaircraft guns. Avoiding that mess, Will sometimes flew upside down, looking up to see the ground. Its beauty was a strange backdrop to terror.

One thing’s for sure, he tells Kit: pilots had it better than grunts. The guys on the ground spent their days slogging through undergrowth thick with heat and snakes, in constant fear of an ambush. For pilots, the terror was concentrated in the two hours flying in and the one crazy, adrenaline-skewed hour jinking and dodging in a sky full of shrapnel and smoke. If you survived that, you were bright and shiny for another day, heading home to Thailand for dinner and Jim Beam and a bed that wasn’t the Hilton but was better than the hard ground.

Will’s hootch, like most guys’, had photos from home taped on the wall over his bed. One photo was framed and sat on his bedside table. It was a picture of Carol holding a small brown creature with a frowning face and a tiny fist raised as if in defiance—Margaret, born that August. He had never seen her. Every night he picked up the picture and looked at it for a long time. No matter how long he stared at it, she remained a mysterious creature, part of another world, no more than an idea to him there.

Another wake.

“So my mother turns to me and says, ‘You’ve got the letter from your brother, right?’”

Julep Schneider is on the spot. He’s already won once, with a story about his sister’s death from cancer, and now he’s trying to bring an edge of misery to a story that might otherwise be funny. The others listen, fascinated to see if he’ll pull it off.

“Of course I don’t. But I nod. ‘Let’s see it,’ she says. So I reach into my jacket pocket and pull out the first thing handy. I hold it up, and it looks like that’s gonna satisfy her.”

A couple of guys chuckle, anticipating the screwup. Julep is a southerner with a heavy drawl. He’s good at telling stories. He doesn’t pause and grope for words the way Will does when he speaks. Will has already told his story, a quick recounting of how his father refused to come to his high school graduation after hearing that Will had enlisted in the Air Force.

“What was it, Julie-boy?” someone shouts, and Julep tries to keep a smirk from his own face.

“It was a letter from my girlfriend,” he says. “She was freaking out because she thought she might be pregnant.” He pauses to let the laughter roll over. “My mom goes ballistic, of course. She starts shouting and whacking me with the letter.” More laughter as everyone envisions the scene. Will raises his hand to the Thai serving girl. He puts his thumb and first finger two inches apart, the sign for a double shot.

“Here’s the killer thing, guys,” Julep is saying. “Here’s the real sad part: I was still a virgin!”

There’s more laughter and groaning, and then somebody shouts, “I don’t know about that one.”

The girl hands Will his bourbon, and he raises it to Julep. “I say it’s okay,” he says. “I’m feeling bad for you, Jule.”

“Why did it help?” Kit asks. Will pauses, stumped. It was never clear why the game made them feel better. The stories they told were all ten times less awful than the stuff they saw every day: guys parachuting into nests of ground gunners, planes blowing apart, pilots breaking their necks on a rough ejection and floating to the ground like dead baby birds. In the game, no one mentioned the war; it was an unspoken rule. Somehow there was something comforting in the thought of all the shitty stuff that happened back home as well. The war might be a tragedy. But it wasn’t the only one.

“It was partly about respect,” Will says at last. Incomplete but true. There was nothing more important than paying respect to a downed pilot. The game became part of that. What else could they do? Whether the guy was KIA or MIA, he was gone. There was no body to recover, no cigarettes to finish, no personal talismans to pull from the guy’s pocket. There was paperwork to file, and then somebody threw the guy’s stuff in his locker and taped it shut.

The game was their ritual, played every time someone went down. They played even if there was entertainment that night, or journalists visiting the base, or desk jockeys from Saigon having dinner with the commander to rack up combat pay. The only time they lost a guy without playing was when some visitors came from Takhli. Takhli was a newer base than Korat, and an informal competition had grown up between them. Everyone kept track of the stats: target hits, MiG kills, rescues. It made the war more like a football game, something you could win or lose, then walk away from.

A small delegation had been sent from Takhli to see how Korat’s repair setup worked. The Wild Weasels lost a guy that day. Weasels were always the first in and last out. They were Thuds—F-105 fighter-bombers—with two seats. Built as trainers, they’d been altered during the war to carry a radar operator and Shrike missiles. Shrikes were filled with shrapnel and equipped with a guidance system that honed in on the SAM site’s radar. When they exploded, they took the whole site with them. The day’s flight had nailed the site, but not before it got off a couple of SAMs. One of them hit its mark.

When the Takhli guys heard a pilot had been downed, they bought a round of drinks. Then the wing commander, Baz, bought a round, and then Julep Schneider did, because he was squadron leader of the Weasels. After that they all sat around until, one by one, they started to drift back to their hootches. Lying in bed that night, Will felt worse than he had since he arrived at Korat.

Goddamn Takhli pukes,
he thought.
They don’t know how to survive a war.

Across from him, he could see a light burning in Rogoff’s hootch. The crazy guy was probably reading Latin poetry. He had walked home with Will that night. When they got near their hootches, he didn’t say good night. Instead, he stood there for a second, shoving one foot back and forth on the dirt path, scraping a little trench.

“
Vita humana est supplicium
,” he said. “Human life is punishment.”

Kit is silent, listening. Will charges ahead. He tells the young man how, after each mission, a pilot penciled an X on his helmet. How he considered it a crossing-out. One more done and gone, buried behind the black mark. Will tells him how one mission wouldn’t stay that way. How it regularly dragged him back, replayed itself in his head when he turned off the lights. It’s the story he needs to tell.

“The time I went on a Wild Weasel run,” he says.

The Weasels were looking for a one-seater to complete their flight. For a week, SAMs had been coming from a new neck of the woods, and they had downed the Weasels’ fourth plane.

“Yesterday the strike force pickled a load on what they thought was the site,” Julep told Will. “But they’re still coming hot and heavy. It’s a Weasel job.” Will just nodded. It would be a counter. One more mission toward his hundred.

They told Will to hold his position and follow their lead. They flew in on the deck, fast and low. Will flew fourth, disoriented by being so close to the ground. Weasels flew low on purpose, they wanted to be seen. Shrikes couldn’t zero in on the SAM site until it was zeroed in on them.

As they roared along at six hundred miles an hour, Will started to enjoy seeing what the place really looked like. The ground was covered with a lush green blanket of trees, heavy from the constant rain. Winding dirt roads cut through the woods occasionally, but for the most part, it looked almost uninhabited.

When they got closer to the target site, the land flattened out and became farmland. Occasionally, Will thought he could see someone working the land, wading in a flat green field. They always zipped by too fast for him to see what they were doing. But suddenly he had a strange feeling of vertigo, as if he were watching someone else fly a two-million-dollar piece of equipment loaded with ordnance. He saw it from the point of view of the guy on the ground, thinking about his crop, looking up in surprise as four impossibly fast, loud killing machines zoomed ninety feet over his head.
Ain’t no way.

When they neared the previous day’s target area, the red launch light lit up on Will’s control panel. They rolled right and dove in, following the missile’s guidance. In the last few seconds of the dive, he saw it. As his right wing dipped, it appeared, no more than a thousand feet off target: a village, a circle of huts in the middle of a large field, still smoking. Every hut was flattened.

He heard Julep on the radio screaming at him to fire his missile, and somehow he pushed the button. The whole thing flashed by so
quickly he could hardly remember pulling out again and following the others up to a safer altitude. He jinked right and left, as much because he wanted to see that village again as to avoid enemy fire. But it was too far back. They headed forward, because Julep had two more sites he wanted to take out that day. Will didn’t know this part of the country well enough to know exactly where he’d been.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he tells Kit. “We all made mistakes. We bombed the wrong bridge, missed the target, came in too fast or too slow and had to abort. There’s always collateral damage.” There were even stories about guys who bombed civilians on purpose. They’d get to their coordinates and couldn’t find the intended target, or got locked out by the weather, so they’d find a village and pickle the bombs there instead.
Fraggin’ villes,
they called it. Will had tried to believe it was a myth, a story made up by pilots looking to sound vicious instead of merely incompetent.

Even if no one ever fragged villes, accidents were bound to happen. In the rush of battle, everybody had the same feeling: get the thing done and get out.
Hit my smoke
was the motto. There was no time to think about whether the first guy had dropped his bombs with total accuracy, whether the wing commander had calculated the coordinates right, whether intel had chosen a valid target in the first place. The nature of the game was imprecise.

Still, the vision of the bombed-out village haunted Will. At night he lay on his bed and stared at the ceiling. The roof was a slab of corrugated plastic, and there was a swirling pattern in it. In one place the swirls were irregular, as if they had once melted, and he had come to see the flaw as the village. He still had no idea what he was seeing. For all he knew, it could be his handiwork haunting him, the results of his bombing run the day before. He wasn’t sure where they’d been that day, in Hanoi or blasting the staging area just north of the seventeenth parallel. He couldn’t remember even the day of the Weasel run, and he found that suspicious, as if he were hiding something from himself.

What really happened? It was ambiguous. He needs Kit to see
that. It could have been a civilian village; it could have been a military supply camp. It could be no village at all but a SAM site disguised as a village. That wasn’t unknown. Maybe they stopped it from downing even more guys. Maybe they killed old men and babies. Will would stare at the ceiling and rearrange the village huts; now it was a group of farms; now it was a Vietcong outpost, deadly and still. He imagined himself on the ground, a farmer, looking up at the sky and seeing planes coming to flatten his fields, his family. He imagined running into the hut. There was a missile launcher hidden beneath the brush roof. He saw himself listening for the planes as they came, firing the missiles to take them down. He saw himself falling from the sky.

Rogoff’s wake. It’s the only time Will ever wins the game. He’d been flying as Rogoff’s wingman. They’d just pickled a load when Rogoff’s voice came on in Will’s headset, sounding cool as ever.

“Shit, my hydraulics are fluctuating. Come in and look me over, will you, see if there’s anything leaking out.”

Without hydraulics, the Thud was a brick. Will got as close as he could. He was twenty feet to Rogoff’s right, scanning the other plane for fluid, when the SAM hit it from behind. There was no time for Rogoff to eject. The whole plane burst into flame as if it had been waiting to do so. Will saw Rogoff inside. His helmeted head was shaking back and forth. It didn’t look like terror, but like surprise. Then the black smoke rolled over them, and Will had to dive to avoid the fireball.

“I’m in second grade,” Will tells the guys. “I went to a one-room schoolhouse. All the kids went for lunch and recess at the same time.” He doesn’t feel his usual reluctance. For once he hasn’t racked his brains for a story. The memory flooded into his head, complete, while he was flying back from the mission. It filled him with outrage and sadness and loss. Strangely, he wants to tell it.