John Katzenbach: Hart’s War

"Find us the way home. Tommy, willya?"

There was a lilt to the words, almost a singsong quality.

After more than fifty years, they still rang in his ear with the same easygoing grinning tones, just as they had once, coming across the tinny intercom of the bomber, the drawl defeating even the most deafening noise from the engines and the bursts of flak exploding outside.

And he answered out loud, just as he had back then dozens of times "Nobody worry about a damn thing. I could find the base blindfolded."

He shook his head. Except for the last time. Then all his skills, reading radio beacons, dead reckoning, and marking the stars with an octant, none had done them any good.

He heard the voice again: "Find us the way home. Tommy, willya?"

I'm sorry, he said to the ghosts. Instead of finding the way home I found death.

He took another swig of beer, then held the cool glass of the bottle to his forehead. With his free hand he started to reach into his shirt pocket, where he had placed a page torn from that morning's New York

Times. He stopped his fingers, just as they reached the paper. He told himself that he didn't need to read it again. He could remember the headline: FAMED EDUCATOR DIES AT 77; WAS INFLUENTIAL WITH DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTS.

Now, he said, I must be the last who was there that knows what truly happened.

He took a deep breath. He remembered suddenly a conversation he'd had with his eldest grandchild, when the boy was only eleven and had come to him holding a picture. It was one of the few photos the old man had of that time when he himself was young, not that much older than his grandson. It showed him sitting by an iron stove, reading intently.

His wooden bunk was in the background. Some rough woolen clothes were hanging from a makeshift line. There was an unlit candle on the table beside him. He was very thin, almost cadaverously so, and his hair was cropped short. In the picture, he had a small smile on his face, as if what he was reading was humorous. His grandson had asked:

"When was this taken, grandfather?"

"During the war. When I was a soldier" "What did you do?"

"I was a navigator on a bomber. At least, that's what I was for a while. Then I was merely a prisoner, waiting for the war to end."

"If you were a soldier, did you kill anyone, grandfather?"

"Well, I helped to drop the bombs. And they probably killed people."

"But you don't know?"

"That's right. I don't know for sure."

But that, of course, was a lie.

He thought to himself: Did you kill anyone, grandfather?

And then the honest answer: Yes, I did. I killed a man. And not with a bomb dropped from the air. But it's a long story.

He felt the obituary in his pocket, tapping the fabric of his shirt with his hand.

And now I can tell it, he thought.

The old man stared up into the sky once again, and sighed deeply. Then he turned to the task of discovering the narrow inlet into Whale

Harbor. He knew all the navigation buoys by heart, knew each light that dotted the Florida shoreline. He knew the local currents and the daily tides, could feel the slip of the boat through the water, and knew if it was being pulled even slightly off its course. Steering through the darkness, he traveled slowly, but steadily, with the utter confidence of a man walking late at night through his own house.

He had just awakened from the dream when the tunnel coming out beneath Hut 109 collapsed. It was just before dawn, and it had been raining hard off and on since midnight.

It was the same dream as always, a dream about what had happened to him two years earlier, as close to being as real in the dream as real was until the very end.

In the dream, he didn't see the convoy.

In the dream, he didn't suggest turning and attacking.

In the dream, they didn't get shot down.

And in the dream, no one died.

Raymund Thomas Hart, a skinny, quiet young man of unprepossessing appearance, the third in his family after both his father and grandfather to carry the saint's name with its Unusual spelling, lay cramped in his bunk in the darkness. He could feel damp sweat gathered around his neck, though the spring night air was still chilled with the leftover cold of winter. In the short moments before the wooden supporting beams eight feet underground snapped under the weight of the rain-soaked earth and the air filled with the whistles and shouts of the guards, he listened to the thick breathing and snores of the men occupying the bunk beds around him.

There were seven other men in the room, and he could recognize each by the distinctive sounds they made at night. One man often spoke, giving orders to his long-dead crew, another whimpered and sometimes cried. A third had asthma, and when the weather turned damp wheezed through the night.

Tommy Hart shivered once and pulled the thin gray blanket up to his neck.

He went over all the familiar details of the dream as if it were being played out like a motion picture in the darkness surrounding him. In the dream, they were flying in utter quiet, no engine sound, no wind noise, just slipping through the air as if it were some clear, sweet liquid, until he heard the deep Texas drawl of the captain over the intercom: "Ahh, hell boys, there ain't nothin' out here worth shootin' at. Tommy, find us the way home, willya?"

In the dream, he would look down at his maps and charts, octant and calipers, read the wind drift indicator and see, just as if it were a great streak of red ink painted across the surface of the blue

Mediterranean waves, the route home. And safety.

Tommy Hart shivered again.

His eyes were open to the nighttime, but he saw instead the sun reflecting off the whitecaps below them. For an instant, he wished there was some way he could make the dream real, then make the real a dream, just nice and easy, reverse the two. It didn't seem like such an unreasonable request. Put it through proper channels, he thought.

Fill out all the standard military forms in triplicate. Navigate through the army bureaucracy.

Snap a salute and get the commanding officer to sign the request.

Transfer, sir: One dream into reality. One reality into dream.

Instead, what had truly happened was that after he had heard the captain's command, he'd crawled forward into the Plexiglas nose cone of the B-25 to take one last look around, just to see if he could read a landmark off the Sicilian coastline, just to be completely certain of their positioning. They were flying down on the deck, less than two hundred feet above the ocean, beneath any probing German radar, and they were blistering along at more than two hundred fifty miles per hour. It should have been wild and exhilarating, six young men in a hot rod on a winding country road, inhibitions left behind like a patch of rubber from tires squealed in acceleration.

But it wasn't that way. Instead, it was risky, like skating gingerly across a frozen pond, unsure of the thickness of the ice creaking beneath each stride.

He had squeezed himself into the cone, next to the bomb sight and up to where the twin fifty-caliber machine guns were mounted.

It was, for a moment, as if he were flying alone, suspended above the vibrant blue of the waves, hurtling along, separated from the rest of the world. He stared out at the horizon, searching for something familiar, something that would serve as a point on the chart that he could use as their anchor for finding the route back to the base. Most of their navigation was done by dead reckoning.

But instead of spotting some telltale mountain ridge, what he'd seen just on the periphery of his field of vision was the unmistakable shape of the line of merchant ships, and the pair of destroyers zigzagging back and forth like alert sheepdogs guarding their flock.