Read Once They Were Eagles Online
Authors: Frank Walton
Once They Were Eagles (27 page)
“On 16 October 1945 when I got out, I called him, and he explained how the seniority system worked. I told him to put me in the first class, and I drove straight through from Columbia to Wichita, spent the night at my mother's, and arrived in Kansas City in time to report for class that morning. That way, I got a lot of seniority on the guys who took time off before looking for a job. As it was, a lot got in ahead of me because the Army Air Corps released them earlier.
“I stayed in the Organized Reserves and got called up for Korea. Because of my airline experience, I was sent to Honolulu to fly transport, moving supplies to Korea; then to Japan supporting the First Marine Air Wing over Korea. I was released after 14 months, stayed in the Reserves. I started getting checked out for Captain with TWA and had to move to New York. It was difficult to make the schedule commuting to Anacostia [District of Columbia]; one day the squadron CO made an example of me for needing to leave the weekend drill early for a flight. I was transferred to the inactive reserve.”
By 1955, Emrich was a TWA Captain, then worked his way up to flying the 747. As a respected senior pilot, he took a lot of flak over the TV Black Sheep show.
“I was disappointed in that show; it made us all out to be dumbbells, somebody nobody wanted, and through the grace of God and Greg Boyington, he took us over and saved us. That wasn't the case at all. It was just that everything fell togetherâthe command in the right place at the right time. We were very fortunate in winding up where we were for that particular job.”
Chris Magee
Chris “Wildman” Magee was perhaps the ultimate combat fighter pilot. Utterly fearless and totally aggressive, he had the knack of knowing where the action was, plus complete mastery of the airplane; he could make it do things no other pilot could. His record of nine Zeros was exceeded in our squadron only by Boyington's total.
Maggie turned out to be one of the most difficult Black Sheep to locate. When I finally found him, I understood why. He'd had a most colorful career.
After the war, he'd joined the Israeli Air Force during their war of independence. Following that service and his return to the States, he had run into some difficulty with the law; as a result, it took the assistance of my friend, the Chief of Police of Los Angeles, and the FBI to locate him. Finally, I received a letter from Maggie.
Greetings, Frank,
Strange how a few words can do more to reveal something of the nature of time than all the equations a team of Einsteins could formulate in a lifetime of blackboard gymnastics. It isn't so much that words throw a bridge across a considerable gulf between “now” and “then” events as it is that they collapse all intervening activities below consciousness, and unite the “now” with the “then” as if by some alchemical implosion, some magic infusion.
Such, somehow dramatized, was the effect of your letters, which I picked up recently when I dropped by my former pad in Chicago Southside to check the possibility that mail may have strayed that way.
I've been to Florida a couple of times this year, roving the Gulf Coast, into the Everglades, and down through the Keys. And Westward Ho! too. Colorado, etc.
A change of pace after six years as editor/writer/reporter for a Chicago community newspaper of approximately 30,000 circulation.
Aside from two days and nights of intense involvement every week, I was free to set my own pace, so there was some compensation in terms of freedom, which I needed.
There was further compensation in the form of a discipline imposed by the ever-present demand of the next deadline. But once a week for six years is a bit too much of that kind of compensation for me.
The paper was sold and the new owner brought in his own editor, so I'm free of the printer's ink mold, and have spent a number of months recuperating from a bad case of brainlock, induced by overexposure to journalese.
Before that job, I edited another community newspaper for a couple of years.
Previous to these forays into the legitimate, I was a house guest of J. Edgar Hoover at his resorts in Atlanta and Leavenworth, where due to SNAFU bureaucratic behavior in the manner of record keeping, teamed with a paranoiac penchant for secrecy, my durance vile went considerably beyond what had evidently been intended.
During my sojourn, I taught a wide variety of high school classes, picked up some 80 college credits via extension courses, and became editor of Leaven-worth's quarterly magazine, “New Era,” a slick, 50-plus-page organ with pretensions to literary excellence. In fact, it was included in a survey and index
of literary “Little Magazines.” We also had close and friendly ties with Engel's famed Writers' Workshop at the State University of Iowa.
Some of my work was reprinted in other publications around the world that are oriented to more esoteric fare. For instance, the Sai Aurobino Ashram in Pondicherry, India. I was deep into the psycho-spiritual thing long before the recent boom began. And I
don't
mean the Tim Leary, Baba Ram Das, Allen Ginsberg, Holy Man circuit bit, or any of this swooning over Eastern mysticism. The West has its own tradition, only touched upon by C.G. Jung.
Anyway, retreating further yet, timewise, I was active in the Caribbean area in the mid-1950s, and before that was working with construction crews in Greenland, above the Arctic Circle, setting up the air warning network. Earlier, in 1949, I was in Aspen, Colorado, tape recording highlights of the Goethe Bicentennial Celebration, the event that kicked off Aspen's ascent to an off-the-beaten-path cultural center. Albert Schweitzer (âReverence for Life') was guest of honor; his first absence from Africa in 25 years.
In 1948, I was flying ME-109-Gs for the Hagannah in Israel (while Herr Hitler did snap rolls in his Nazi hell. Must have been a blowtorch on the bollocks to hear about Jews in Messerschmitts!). But that wasn't until I went through a cloak-and-dagger underground smuggling operation in New York and Europe.
So, that's a fair abbreviation of my post-Black Sheep days. Although there are those who would say, cynically, of course, that for me they never ended, that they in fact became more than an upside down euphemism, more than a play-name adopted by a bunch of great guys whom it would be almost miraculous to reminisce with over a vat of milk punch.
Well, Frank, it was a high, hearing from you. I'd enjoy being on the receiving end of any other information you seine from the stream of years.
Chris enclosed one of his own published poems, entitled “Postscript from One Who, Like His Age, Died Young” and prefaced by the following note: “Several years after World War II, the wreck of a U.S. Marine Corps fighter plane was discovered in the interior jungle of New Ireland, in the Solomons, by a former Royal Australian Navy Coast Watcher. A jungle kit was recovered from the cockpit of the Corsair; among its items of survival gear was a wax-sealed, fungus-resistant plastic folder containing a box of ammunition for a .45 automatic and a sheet of paper with these lines.”
I have skimmed the ragged edge of lightning death
And torn from bloody flesh of sky a thunder song.
Across the nakedness of virgin space
I've blistered my frozen hand in feathered ice
And dared angelic wrath to smash
The snarling will of my demon steed.
Far above sun-glint on winded spume,
High executor of laws no man has made,
I've welded Samurai knights into fiery tombs
And hurled them down like the plumed Minoan
Far down the searing heights to punch
Their livid crates in the sea.
âEnemies,' you say. They were not mine.
More than blood brothers, I swear,
With tawny skin and warrior eye.
Bushido-bred for hell-strife joy.
Much closer my kin, my race than those
Who cud-chew their lives can ever be.
âWar-lover,' you say, âsadist, psychotic'â
That sick cycle of canned clichés masking
Your lust for eternity fettered to time.
Go, epigonic pygmies, make peace with hell,
Drag the myths of our ancient might
Through the miserable muck of a cringer's dream.
What could you know
Who have never heard
The soaring song of the Valkyries,
Felt thunder-gods jousting with livid peaks:
You who have never dared to walk the razor
Across the zenith of your peevish soul?”
Subsequent letters to Chris's address have come back marked “Return to SenderâUnable to Forward.” Possibilities as to where he is and what he's doing are endless. He may be in Central America; he may be involved in another secret mission somewhere in the world; in view of the Middle East situation, he could very well be back with the Israeli Air Force; he may be in Africa. Like Kipling's Cat Who Walked by Himself, “He went through the wet, wild woods, waving his wild tail, and walking his wild lone. But he never told anybody.”
He may have passed on to Fighter Pilot's Heaven. I certainly hope not. The world has desperate need for free spirits, even those who suffer occasional aberrations.
Rollie Rinabarger
To reach Rollie Rinabarger's home in Tulelake, California, I drove north from San Francisco almost to the Oregon border, then turned east through a national wildlife refuge, home of some two million waterfowl. I passed thousands of ducks, geese, swans, and other water species, as well as quail, pheasant and deer.
Tulelake, population 900, is situated in the center of a major rice-growing area, where the clean air is cooled by the 4,000-foot altitude. Hunting and fishing are excellent, local residents usually have a side of venison in their freezers. Nearby is the hundreds-of-years-old Lava Beds National Monument containing ancient petroglyphs and Indian pictographs. Rollie's directions led me to his home in the middle of this relatively unspoiled mountain utopia.
I talked to him in the garage/office from which he runs his active electrical contracting business. During the season, he also flies a crop-dusting plane over the ricefields. The walls displayed memorabilia of Black Sheep days, which for him had ended in a hospital. On 26 September 1943 he had been attacked by a swarm of Zeros over Kahili and his plane severely shot up. A fire in the cockpit and a shell that hit him in the back, shattered on a knife at his hip, and lodged fragments in his back and left leg did not prevent his getting back to usâbut only temporarilyâfor our Sydney trip.
“I was sent to the States on a hospital ship, and in Schumacher Hospital they were still picking pieces of metal out of me months later. Afterward, I was sent to El Toro, then Santa Barbara. I was there when the war ended; I was released from active duty then but stayed in the reserves.
“In 1946 my father and I bought an existing electrical contracting business. Now, though, I'm getting to the point where I can't do some of the heavy lifting and crawling required, so I'm taking just the work I want. I've been doing the crop dusting for over 30 years, since 1951.
“The Black Sheep were a fine group of people. I thought we had a tremendous combat leader. I tried to emulate him when I had my own squadron. I didn't like the way some of the other squadrons were handled; you couldn't find the CO, or the CO would put the best people on his wing instead of having them lead divisions where they'd do the most good.
Rollie Rinabarger
Gelon Doswell
