James Salter: The Hunters

Within an hour they had landed at Seoul. It was a blue, bitter February afternoon. Cleve stepped off the plane onto Korean ground frozen as hard as plaster. A sharp wind was keening across the flats. It stung his cheeks and made the rims of his ears ache. It came with the sharpness of steel into his lungs when he breathed. His eyes watered.

He followed along in the string of debarking passengers. They walked across a bare expanse of earth toward buildings near which were mounds of baggage, barracks bags, and groups of waiting men huddled in their overcoats. He walked past them and into the biggest hut. Inside it was crowded, too, and almost as cold. Men were clustered about the two oil stoves, warming their hands. Cleve hesitated, then began pushing through them with difficulty toward a counter he could see at the far end of the room. There he inquired, as soon as he had an opportunity to, about going on to Kimpo. He had no idea how long an additional trip it might be.

“I’ll find out for you, Captain,” the corporal said, turning away. “Hey, how do you get from here to Kimpo?”

“To where?”

“Kimpo.”

“There’s a bus that goes there.”

“When does it run?”

“How should I know? Look at the schedule.”

“Where’s the schedule?”

“Oh, Christ.” The other man walked over with an expression of disgust on his face. He was a sergeant. He leafed through a foliage of paper tacked on the wall and quickly located the schedule. He ran a finger down its columns.

“The next one is due to leave here in,” he looked at his watch, “thirty-five minutes.” He turned to Cleve. “Are you the one who’s going to Kimpo, Captain?”

“That’s right.”

“You can catch it just outside, on the road.”

“Thanks.”

Cleve sat down on one of the benches near the counter to begin an uncomfortable wait. He had meant to ask how long a ride it would be, but he suddenly felt it did not make any difference. He listened to pieces of conversation. Everybody seemed to be on the way back to Japan. In Japan, everybody had been going back to the States. He was moving alone against this tide. It was always that way, he reflected, the feeling of arriving late, after everything was over.

When half an hour had passed, he walked outside. There was no bus yet. He waited for five minutes, bundled against the wind. The warmth soon left him. A numbing cold penetrated the soles of his shoes and seemed to reach the bone. Finally, a truck appeared with a small wooden sign that said KIMPO wired to its radiator. He took his bags and threw them up over the tailgate. Then he went to sit in the cab with the driver. He was the only passenger.

They left the airfield, crossed a trestle bridge, and drove along the outskirts of Seoul. Everything seemed dirty and poor. The unfinished wood of the houses was blackened, and even the snow was gray on the roofs. It was a bleak, merciless time of the year. Ragged children trailed begging after soldiers. The trees were bare, and outside the city the rice paddies were frozen. A few old men had chopped holes in the ice of the river to fish.

Cleve removed his gloves and lit a cigarette. There was not much taste to it, only a thin sensation of air that did not have the chill of crystal. He sat smoking as they jarred along. The road climbed and traveled an embankment overlooking an industrial section. Then it was lined with stunted trees for a way, before it emerged in open country.

“How far is it to Kimpo?” Cleve asked.

The driver shrugged. He had a plump, dull face framed in long sideburns.

“Fifteen miles, maybe,” he said.

“Is the road this bad all the way?”

“It’s about the same.”

“Do you ever say ‘sir’?”

The driver looked at him.

“Yes, sir,” he said briefly.

The drive took three quarters of an hour. At the end they passed through a small, impoverished town, which was Kimpo. The airfield was just beyond it. The guard at the gate waved them through. Cleve had the driver take him to the wing headquarters. He got off there. It was a low brick building on the edge of the flying area. The nearest fighters were in sandbag revetments not fifty yards away, showing their clipped tails above the level of the bags, like dorsal fins.

Inside the headquarters it was reasonably warm. He unbuttoned his coat and took off his gloves, stuffing them into the pockets. A sergeant looked up from his typewriter.

“Can I help you, Captain?”

“I’m reporting in.”

“Do you have copies of your orders?”

Cleve produced them. The sergeant read them hurriedly.

“You’re Captain Connell?” he asked.

“That’s right.”

“Let me check with the adjutant,” he said, leaving his desk.

He returned shortly. Cleve would have to wait for a few minutes, he explained. The adjutant was busy. Cleve nodded. He stood by the stove, idly, his thoughts a vague flurry of the journey that was now all behind him.

He became aware of a familiar sound in the background and turned quickly to the window to watch. A mission was taking off. He saw the first ships moving evenly across a visible length of the runway. Two at a time they went, leader and wingman, booming down the flat strip and then lifting easily up. The thin, dirty panes of glass before him rattled. Two more appeared, then two more, and two by two, in fierce majesty, trailing streams of black smoke, until Cleve felt impelled to try to count them. Colonel Imil was leading, north to the Yalu. A second squadron followed. Cleve watched until the final pair of ships faded in the distance, leaving silence behind them.

He knew Colonel Imil, the wing commander. He knew that monumental head and walk like a boxing champion. Dutch Imil, the grinning football player even after three teeth had been knocked out of his mouth one afternoon, the fourteen-victory ace of the second war, the first of the jet pilots, the golden boy, no longer really a boy, of the air force. Everybody who had seen him fly said that he was reckless, took too many chances, that sooner or later he was going to kill himself. He never did, though. He killed other men, but never himself. One rainy morning in Panama—Cleve had flown with him that day—he took sixteen ships up for a formation show over Balboa when the ceiling was only seven hundred feet. He lost two of them in the overcast, slung off against the mountains.

“The only thing a fighter pilot needs is confidence,” Imil had said at the briefing, “and I’ve got enough for all of us.”

Everybody had stories about him. They were as well known as old jokes. One Cleve had heard a long time before and never forgotten. Someone had told him that Imil had once been to bed with four different women in the same night. He was a brute, a big man. He was the kind of a man who could eat two steaks at a sitting, a man who found the normal world undersized in the shadow of his imposing body.

Cleve turned from the window and walked over to the stove again. He stood there, palming his hands to the heat. There was a strange mood here, he felt. He could not be sure what it was, an ill-fitting sobriety perhaps. He could see through an open door into the operations section. There was a large map of the peninsula stapled on the wall in there. It was covered, especially in the vicinity of the front, with military hieroglyphics of units and positions. The usual block of photographs was on the wall, too, in order of rank: General Muehlke, Far East Air Forces; General Breck, Fifth Air Force; then Imil; and lastly one he did not recognize, probably the group commander. Every office in the headquarters was decorated with that set, he guessed. For a few unreal minutes, a feeling that he had been in Korea much longer than two or three hours was generated in him. He remembered so many other headquarters, all alike.