Амброз Бирс - Flight or Fright - 17 Turbulent Tales

“Don’t get comfy,” he said. “As soon as the chopper’s clear, we’re loading you up.” He nodded over his shoulder.

I looked out over the shimmering taxiway. Coffins. Rows and rows of dull aluminum funerary boxes gleamed in the unforgiving tropical sun. I recognized them from my flights out of Saigon six years ago, my first as Loadmaster. Maybe my insides did a little flip because I’d had no rest, or maybe because I hadn’t carried a stiff in a few years. Still, I swallowed hard. I looked at the destination: Dover, Delaware.

The ground crew loaded a fresh comfort pallet when I learned we’d have two passengers on the outbound flight.

The first was a kid, right out of high school by the look of it, with bristle-black hair, and too-large jungle fatigues that were starched, clean, and showed the rank of Airman First Class. I told him, “Welcome aboard,” and went to help him through the crew door, but he jerked away, nearly hitting his head against the low entrance. I think he would have leapt back if there had been room. His scent hit me, strong and medicinal—Vicks VapoRub.

Behind him a flight nurse, crisp and professional in step, dress, and gesture, also boarded without assistance. I regarded her evenly. I recognized her as one of a batch I had flown regularly from Clark in the Philippines to Da Nang and back again in my early days. A steel-eyed, silver-haired lieutenant. She had been very specific—more than once—in pointing out how any numbskull high school dropout could do my job better. The name on her uniform read Pembry. She touched the kid on his back and guided him to the seats, but if she recognized me, she said nothing.

“Take a seat anywhere,” I told them. “I’m Tech Sergeant Davis. We’ll be wheels up in less than a half hour so make yourself comfortable.”

The kid stopped short. “You didn’t tell me,” he said to the nurse.

The hold of a StarLifter is most like the inside of a boiler room, with all the heat, cooling, and pressure ducts exposed rather than hidden away like on an airliner. The coffins formed two rows down the length of the hold, leaving a center aisle clear. Stacked four high, there were one hundred and sixty of them. Yellow cargo nets held them in place. Looking past them, we watched the sunlight disappear as the cargo hatch closed, leaving us in an awkward semidarkness.

“It’s the fastest way to get you home,” she said to him, her voice neutral. “You want to go home, don’t you?”

His voice dripped with fearful outrage. “I don’t want to see them. I want a forward facing seat.”

If the kid would have looked around, he could have seen that there were no forward facing seats.

“It’s okay,” she said, tugging on his arm again. “They’re going home, too.”

“I don’t want to look at them,” he said as she pushed him to a seat nearest one of the small windows. When he didn’t move to strap himself in, Pembry bent and did it for him. He gripped the handrails like the oh-shit bar on a roller coaster. “I don’t want to think about them.”

“I got it.” I went forward and shut down the cabin lights. Now only the twin red jump lights illuminated the long metal containers. When I returned, I brought him a pillow.

The ID label on the kid’s loose jacket read “Hernandez.” He said, “Thank you,” but did not let go of the armrests.

Pembry strapped herself in next to him. I stowed their gear and went through my final checklist.

Once in the air, I brewed coffee on the electric stove in the comfort pallet. Nurse Pembry declined, but Hernandez took some. The plastic cup shook in his hands.

“Afraid of flying?” I asked. It wasn’t so unusual for the Air Force. “I have some Dramamine…”

“I’m not afraid of flying,” he said through clenched teeth. All the while he looked past me to the boxes lining the hold.

Next the crew. No one bird was assigned the same crew, like in the old days. The MAC took great pride in having men be so interchangeable that a flight crew who had never met before could assemble at a flight line and fly any StarLifter to the ends of the Earth. Each man knew my job, like I knew theirs, inside and out.

I went to the cockpit and found everyone on stations. The second engineer sat closest to the cockpit door, hunched over instrumentation. “Four is evening out now, keep the throttle low,” he said. I recognized his hangdog face and his Arkansas drawl, but I could not tell from where. I figured after seven years of flying StarLifters, I had flown with just about everybody at one time or another. He thanked me as I set the black coffee on his table. His flight suit named him Hadley.

The first engineer sat in the bitchseat, the one usually reserved for a “Black Hatter”—mission inspectors were the bane of all MAC aircrews. He asked for two lumps and then stood and looked out the navigator’s dome at the blue rushing past.

“Throttle low on four, got it,” replied the pilot. He was the designated Aircraft Commander, but both he and the co-pilot were such typical flight jocks that they could have been the same person. They took their coffee with two creams each. “We’re trying to outfly some clear air turbulence, but it won’t be easy. Tell your passengers to expect some weather.”

“Will do, sir. Anything else?”

“Thank you, Load Davis, that’s all.”

“Yes, sir.”

Finally time to relax. As I went to have a horizontal moment in the crew berth, I saw Pembry snooping around the comfort pallet. “Anything I can help you find?”

“An extra blanket?”

I pulled one from the storage cabinet between the cooking station and the latrine and gritted my teeth. “Anything else?”

“No,” she said, pulling a piece of imaginary lint from the wool. “We’ve flown together before, you know.”

“Have we?”

She raised an eyebrow. “I probably ought to apologize.”

“No need, ma’am,” I said. I dodged around her and opened the fridge. “I could serve an in-flight meal later if you are…”

She placed her hand on my shoulder, like she had on Hernandez, and it commanded my attention. “You do remember me.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I was pretty hard on you during those evac flights.”

I wished she’d stop being so direct. “You were speaking your mind, ma’am. It made me a better Loadmaster.”

“Still…”

“Ma’am, there’s no need.” Why can’t women figure out that apologies only make things worse?

“Very well.” The hardness of her face melted into sincerity, and suddenly it occurred to me that she wanted to talk.

“How’s your patient?”

“Resting.” Pembry tried to act casual, but I knew she wanted to say more.

“What’s his problem?”

“He was one of the first to arrive,” she said, “and the first to leave.”

“Jonestown? Was it that bad?”

Flashback to our earlier evac flights. The old look, hard and cool, returned instantly. “We flew out of Dover on White House orders five hours after they got the call. He’s a Medical Records Specialist, six months in the service, he’s never been anywhere before, never saw a day of trauma in his life. Next thing he knows, he’s in a South American jungle with a thousand dead bodies.”

“A thousand?”

“Count’s not in yet, but it’s headed that way.” She brushed the back of her hand against her cheek. “So many kids.”

“Kids?”

“Whole families. They all drank poison. Some kind of cult, they said. Someone told me the parents killed their children first. I don’t know what could make a person do that to their own family.” She shook her head. “I stayed at Timehri to organize triage. Hernandez said the smell was unimaginable. They had to spray the bodies with insecticide and defend them from hungry giant rats. He said they made him bayonet the bodies to release the pressure. He burned his uniform.” She shuffled to keep her balance as the bird jolted.