W.E.B. Griffin - The Corps IV - Battleground

"I don't think you really do, Dave," Ward said. "Let me tell you something about yourself, Dave. Most of the time you're a pretty good guy; but hiding inside you-I guess all the time-is a real prick struggling to get out. I don't like you much when that happens."

Schneider looked at Ward for a time, and then he said slowly, "Your attitude wouldn't have anything to do with the relationship between Galloway and your Aunt Caroline, would it?"

"Probably that has something to do with it," Ward said. "But what I think it is, what I hope it is, is loyalty to my commanding officer."

Schneider snorted.

"You weren't sent here," Ward said. "You volunteered, so you could get out of flying R4Ds and into fighters. Galloway fixed it. If it wasn't for him, you'd still be at Quantico. You knew what Charley-Captain Galloway- was like when he let you volunteer. All you had to say was no."

"I can't believe that you are actually condoning what you saw him do with your own eyes."

Ward turned away and managed to get the door open. Then he walked quickly around the front of the car and intercepted Schneider as he was getting out.

"I never thought I would enjoy something like this," he said, "but I was wrong. You will recall, Lieutenant, that I am senior to you. By the authority therefore vested in me by the goddamned Naval Service, Lieutenant, I order you (a) to get back in the car; (b) to shut your fucking mouth; (c) and to sit there and don't move until I send for you. And be advised, Lieutenant, that if it comes down to it, I will swear on a stack of Bibles that when Sergeant Oblensky spoke with us, he was dressed like a fucking recruiting poster and said not one fucking word about a goddamned generator. You got that, Lieutenant?" "Jim," Schneider said. "Obviously, I..." "Your orders, Lieutenant, are to sit there with your fucking mouth shut," Ward said, spun on his heel, and walked to the door.

(Two)

THRESHOLD, RUNWAY 17

EWA MARINE CORPS AIR STATION

OAHU, TERRITORY OF HAWAII

1450 HOURS 7 JULY 1942

Captain Charles M. Galloway, USMCR, had a dark secret, a true secret, shared with no one else. He wasn't sure if it was a character flaw, or whether it was something that happened to other people, too. But he knew that he didn't want it known, and that he could never ask anyone else if they were similarly affected. Or maybe similarly afflicted.

The cold truth was that in situations like this one-in the cockpit, with all the needles in the green, in the last few instants before he would shove the throttle forward and then touch his mike button and announce to the tower, with studied savoir faire, "Five Niner Niner rolling"-he was afraid.

He could tell himself that it was irrational, that he was a better pilot than most people he knew, that the aircraft he was about to fly was perfectly safe, that he had so many hours total time; and he could even remind himself that a study by the University of California had proved beyond reasonable doubt that a cretin (defined as the next step above morons) could be taught to fly; but it didn't work. At that moment- and all those other times-he had a very clear image of the airplane going out of control, smashing into the ground, rolling over, exploding. And it scared him. Sometimes his knees actually trembled. And more than once he had taken his hand from the stick so he could try to hold his shaking knees still.

Today, as he sat there waiting, he reminded himself of the command decision he had made vis-…-vis himself and Lieutenant Bill Dunn: who would fly what and why. Dunn was a good pilot, and he had done something Galloway had not done. He had met the enemy in aerial combat and shot down two airplanes. Galloway believed that there was no way to vicariously experience what it was like to have someone shooting at you.

That did not change, however, his belief that good pilots were a product of two qualities: natural ability and experience. He really believed that he was a better natural pilot than Dunn, and there was no question that he had much more experience.

The mission of VMF-229 at the moment was to become operational, which is to say its eighteen F4F-4 Wildcats and their pilots had to be made ready to go where the squadron was ordered to go, and to do what the squadron was ordered to do.

All his pilots were of course rated as Naval Aviators. Someone in authority had decreed that they were qualified to fly. But with Galloway's certain and Bill Dunn's possible exception, the pilots VMF-229 had so far were for all practical purposes novices. They were highly intelligent young men in superb physical condition who had passed through a prescribed course of training. But none of them had been flying for more than a year; and none of them, so far as Galloway had been able to determine, had ever been in trouble in the air.

And they were all impressed with Lieutenant Bill Dunn- understandably... if, in Galloway's judgment, rather naively. Dunn had been in combat, and he'd been hit and wounded, and he'd returned alive and with two kills.

All the same, just as soon as Big Steve Oblensky was able to make flyable two of the Wildcats they had trucked to Ewa from the docks at Pearl Harbor, Galloway flew against Dunn in half a dozen mock dogfights. He had no trouble outmaneuvering him the first time out, or the second, or the third; and he was starting to wonder if he should, so to speak, throw a dogfight, because consistently whipping Dunn was likely to humiliate him.

Then he thought that through and realized that humiliating Dunn was precisely the thing he should do. As the privates in a rifle squad should think, believe, that their sergeant was the best fucking rifle shot in the company, so should the lieutenant pilots of a fighter squadron believe that The Skipper was the best fucking airplane driver in Marine Aviation.

That policy seemed to have worked out well, even better than Galloway foresaw. For one thing, Dunn wasn't impressed with his own heroic accomplishment at Midway. So he was not humiliated when he was bested by a pilot who'd been flying when he was trying out for the junior varsity football team in high school.

For another, as the other pilots drifted into the squadron, Dunn let each of them know that The Skipper was really one hell of a pilot. Coming as it did from a pilot who had been wounded and scored two kills at Midway, Dunn's opinion was taken as Gospel.

And Galloway didn't let either himself or Dunn sit and rest on their accomplishments. He believed the simple old Marine Corps adage that the best way to learn something was to teach it. So he had Dunn up all the time teaching techniques of aerial combat and gunnery to the kids, honing his own skills in the process, and picking up time, which meant experience.

As for Galloway, whenever possible he did the test flying himself-simply because he was the best qualified pilot to do it. Most test flights were simply routine. If everything worked, they could be flown by one of the University of California's cretins. It was only when something went wrong that experience became important. An experienced pilot often sensed when something was about to go wrong, and so he could act to reduce the risk to the airplane before things went seriously bad. Even when some major system failed unexpectedly, an experienced pilot could often recover, and put the airplane back on the ground in one piece, while a pilot without his experience was likely not only to get himself killed, but to send the airplane to the junkyard, as well.

No aircraft assigned to VMF-229 had been lost-or even seriously damaged-during test flights. In Galloway's view this was a pretty good record... especially when you considered that three times the test pilot-C. M. Galloway- had lost power on take-off: When the fan of a Wildcat stopped spinning, the Wildcat didn't want to fly anymore; as soon as the power quit, the nose got heavy, and it started to stall. (Although the manual usually read like a sales brochure for Grumman, it nevertheless warned-in small print-that the aircraft became "excessively nose heavy in a power loss situation.") And then, even if you could keep it from stalling by getting it into a glide, the Wildcat sank like a rock.