Memoir From Antproof Case (20 page)

"Why is it," she would ask, "that whenever I find you in the kitchen you're bent into that sink like an ostrich, and when you straighten up you're dripping with ice-cold water as if you've just gone down with the Titanic?"

"I don't know," I'd say, and then all would be lost as she opened her silk robe.

But the only reason I could spend three hours on the steam table with Constance was that I was alive. If I had been dead I wouldn't have been able to do it, although she had a way of showing me her body, which (while I'd been sneaking chocolate cherries) had already been primed and would be just slightly engorged, rosy, and relaxed, a condition that could, perhaps, have awakened the dead. But I couldn't have met her had I been killed in the war, and that I wasn't was partly the result of my three-week ordeal at the hands of Larry Brown, my flying instructor.

Everything he knew, he copied onto me. Even as we ate—no coffee, no coffee ice cream—he went over theory or criticized my technique. I logged more than 150 hours of flying time, of which the last fifty hours were solo and the final twenty-five spent in dogfights. I nearly crashed at least a dozen times, I cut a couple of telephone lines, and I got to love flying not only for what it was, but for the way I learned it.

In May of 1942 the weather was perfect. I would skim the Hudson at 150 miles an hour within two feet of the water to fly beneath the bridges, and then rise into a full roll by launching myself over the banks and their high treetops as if I were the stone from a slingshot. He taught me how to appear from nowhere and disappear almost as fast. He showed me that every shape on the land is cushioned with beds of moving air, that the mountains and hedgerows and hills have along them invisible rivers that flow like water over a weir, and that you can use them to tighten your turns, cushion your dips, and bounce yourself to high altitude faster than you ever thought you could go.

He never came back from San Antonio, this Larry Brown. It happened like that all the time. Too many planes had to be built too fast. Even the P-51, a majestic fighter, was designed in a hundred days. Now it takes a hundred days to put together a seat-belt buckle.

It had taken Larry Brown a lifetime of flying to see the rivers of air. Perhaps, he felt that he was never coming home, and did not want those beautiful, silvery waves to flow unrecognized over the Hudson and its green hills. Perhaps it was the great intensity of my course. Perhaps it was the perfect weather. I don't know. I do know that, before the three weeks were over, I could see them too.

 

No matter what I did, and despite my special preliminary, my reflexes were not as fast as those of pilots fifteen years my junior. Nor could I shed a lifetime's inhibition in regard to g-force, being upside down, and doing barrel rolls. These things were not incorporated into my nervous system with the same accommodation afforded by my younger colleagues.

It was obvious as we flew that I had neither their agility nor their daring. I was the old man, even though I had dropped ten years from my age and joined at "twenty-seven." And as the war continued, I reached my fortieth year and then my fortieth birthday, and I was dogfighting ME-109's over Germany.

When we were based in Italy doing the transalpine run, a flight surgeon who was examining me figured out that I had been basting the goose.

"How old are you?" he asked.

"Thirty, sir," I answered.

"Like hell," he said. "You're older than I am."

"How old are you, Colonel?"

"Fifty-five."

"Actually, I'm eighty-nine," I told him.

"Fifty?"

"No."

"Forty-five?"

"Of course not."

"Forty. You're forty, and you shouldn't be flying combat missions. I tell you, you're not in shape for that anymore."

"I'm in excellent shape for my age, considering what I'm doing."

"I could ground you either because you're overage or because, for someone who's supposed to be thirty, you're a wreck. I think I will. You'll get someone killed."

"No. I won't. I've put down eleven ME-109's, and although they're getting harder and harder to find, I know I'll put down more. I'm forty years old, that's correct. I don't have such great reflexes, but I compensate with tactics and technical modifications. And I don't drink coffee."

"I want to talk to your wing man."

"I don't have a wing man. My group has flown dispersal and convergence since Tunisia. My favorite situation, sir, is when I meet an enemy fighter element and it's one against three."

"Why?"

"Because then I use the flaming peacock. I use it when outnumbered or if I'm desperate. It works."

"The what?"

"Flaming peacock."

"And what is that, exactly?"

"It's a secret."

He sent me back up even though he thought I was crazy, or perhaps because he did think I was crazy, but I did have a flaming peacock. I invented it in Tunisia, and it saved my life on more than one occasion.

From the beginning, my group was assigned to individual patrol. Even later, when escorting bombers from England, we'd rendezvous with them on their way in, picking up a flight individually, like guerrillas appearing one by one from the forest to join a column on the march, our transit over Germany having been accomplished always alone.

In Tunisia we were based at a field near Monastir, and our patrol area ran deep into the Tyrrhenian, although there we did not often find the enemy, and if we did want to find him all we had to do was approach Sicily. The Licata-Malta-Pantelleria triangle was like an arena. If you entered it, you had a fight. North of Sicily, you could patrol for a week and see nothing, unless of course you increased your radius and approached the Italian coast. As we didn't use drop tanks, we seldom got that close to the mainland, but after Anzio we flew from Sicily and could refuel in Calabria.

For some, the question of fuel was fatal. You didn't want to get into a fight carrying a lot of fuel. First, the weight was paralyzing. Messerschmitts were lighter and smaller. They could climb faster and were more agile, although not by much. They carried far less fuel, and when we were fully loaded we tried to avoid them for reasons of maneuverability alone.

If you could fly out your wing tanks, you were in better shape, because they were more exposed, and without armor. When they were empty the aircraft could roll faster and change direction better, as the center of gravity migrated to a more advantageous position in the fuselage. You felt cleaner, lighter, less encumbered.

On the other hand, everything in the air is a trade-off, and the less fuel you had, the less likely you were to get back. For a while I believed that the Luftwaffe was doomed not because we were better in combat, but because of Germany's position as a compact land power with short central lines of communication. They never had the range. We and the British had always designed for vast distances. The Messerschmitt carried 160 gallons of fuel, and I carried 269. When they used drop tanks, which they didn't like to do because then they had to forgo their wing cannons, they could add another 140 gallons. We could carry that and an additional twenty-five gallons, without sacrificing armament. Even if the ME-109's bested us in combat, they often did not make it home. This, anyway, was my theory, which arose as a corollary to the desire to be light in combat.

We were better in combat anyway and I'm not entirely sure why. The Luftwaffe had an enormous array of planes, most of which were very capable, complicated, and imaginative. Maybe that was it. They looked menacing and cruel, whereas our aircraft seemed mild and unpretentious. They were smooth and not very warlike to behold. But the gentlemanly, graceful Spitfires and P-51's, with no armament showing, engaged the terrifying and barbaric German planes that bristled with weapons and aerials and experimental protuberances, and we slid through the air like lightning to strike them down and husband the sky for ourselves, and ourselves alone.

 

Though I patrolled almost every day, and often fought for my existence, the months at Monastir were for reasons that I still cannot discern the most peaceful and tranquil of all my life.

I lived alone in an airy tent with open sides. Rising before dawn, I washed, dressed, and attended a ten-minute briefing that consisted of a dissertation on the perfect weather and the winds aloft, and the assignment of patrol sectors: which sector never made much of a difference. On rare days, we escorted a flight of bombers over Sicily, but mostly our job was air superiority, which meant hours of lonely flying that sometimes led to mortal combat.

I returned to the field by noon. After my debriefing and then talking to the mechanics, I had a lunch of soup and salad. Then I went back to the tent and lay on my cot, immobile, exhausted, and subdued. When I was rested, I exercised, which was what kept me young and able to fly.

I ran six miles by circling the field. I did calisthenics, lifted weights, and swam a mile in the sea. In laps accomplished in the surf, the body must continually adjust for the absence of water or its sudden swell from beneath. You are always rolling off the back of one slick whale onto the back of another, but the hard going gives you grace and makes you part of the sea. Undisturbed by waves or foam or sudden deep immersions, you learn to move and breathe like a dolphin.

After exercise, I made a fire and boiled water for shaving, something for which I had no time in the morning. At first I used the dinner fire to heat the water, but the bottom of the pot got fouled with drippings. Then I discovered that doing all this in the late afternoon, after an hour in the sea, was refreshing. The water always seemed astonishingly sweet, and that it was hot was a miracle.

By the time I returned from a tranquil walk in a grove of immensely tall date palms, where I would pace quietly between the rows, listening to the evening breeze in the jalousie-like fronds and spikes above, I would be called to dinner, my only social hour.

Our air wing was grouped in three bases, and at Monastir we had four squadrons, each with twenty-four fighters. There were also bombers, reconnaissance elements, and transport planes. It was a large base, with empty corners.

In one of these we had our tents. Each squadron was divided into four flights, and in each flight were two elements of three aircraft. Little settlements of tents dotted the ground over a huge area. At dusk, fires sparkled across the plain as they undoubtedly had in all the wars there since the beginning of time.

The two other pilots of my element were skinny post-adolescents, Malcolm Gray and Eddy Pond. Malcolm was an ass from Yale who never got the chance to grow out of being an ass, because he was blown out of the air over Darmstadt, and only his parents grieved. Having loved him since he was a baby, they knew that time would probably have made him less of an ass, and besides, you love your child perhaps even the more if he is an ass, because you suffer for him. Who knows, maybe his father was an ass, too, and thought that Malcolm was a prince.

Malcolm's problem as far as I could see was that, because he had gone to Yale, he really thought he was better than everyone else.

"Yale is for preppy shitbirds," I would say to him.

"Oh really?" he would answer. "Where did
you
go?"

"I went to the University of California at Zarazuela," I might say.

"Is that," he would then ask in his full Connecticut, with teeth bolted together inseparably, "a dancing school for Mexican rabbis?" This he found rather funny, and, to be honest, given his way of speaking, so did I.

The Germans hit him when he was on a daylight raid. I was told that he didn't bale out, that his plane broke in two at the cockpit and he went with the rear section, windmilling down.

Eddy Pond, on the other hand, lived through the war so that after it he could sell insurance. I ran into him in Grand Central on a November day in about 1951. He had come to see a Holy Cross football game being played against, I guess, St. John's, and he was walking through the lower level of the station, with a glass of beer in his hand. He was ashamed of the beer, I think, but he had no place to put it, so he held it without drinking as we stood by the information booth for five minutes and talked about Tunisia. Then he went to the football game, and I went home, and I never saw him again.

The three of us would meet for dinner every night in a little sandy place near our tents. We had a Tunisian cook, who found fish, lamb, goat's meat, fowl, and safe vegetables and fruits for us. Tunisia had been a French colony, and after Rommel took it the sanitation did not suffer.

Dessert was always the same: dates. And in the morning our breakfast was always the same: tea, fresh baguettes, cheese, and jam. You couldn't drink more than one cup of tea (or, in my case, hot water), because you would try to avoid peeing into a bottle as you flew. I often brought a chocolate bar and bread with me into the cockpit. If I opened the slide panel and flew upside down, all the crumbs would be vacuumed out.

Perhaps it was because I thought I was going to die, or perhaps it was the otherworldliness and isolation of the place, my laps across the waves, the wind that always blew from ancient lands along the coast, or the sea's great swaths of green, white, and blue. I don't know. But I do know that, somehow, my days there were contented.

All placidity vanished, however, as soon as I started the engine of my plane. Everyone knows that young fighter pilots are arrogant, but few understand that this arrogance is merely a misguided effort to achieve the requisite state for flying an airplane in combat. To do that and survive, you must indeed have something that might seem—to a boy—to be arrogance.

But what you need is not arrogance. It is, rather, enthrallment, and surrender to speed. I used to sing to the accompaniment of my engine. As this is a confession of sorts and will be read (if it does not fall prey to the ants) by only one person, I confess that I would not only sing, but dance.

Up there you are very busy, and you can check your gauges and instruments 'til kingdom come, and you must watch the whole sky, even behind you and, as far as you can, into the sun—especially into the sun—but meticulousness, skill, and care sometimes must be abridged, sometimes must be abandoned in favor of the life in things like engines and air and sudden climbs to great altitudes.