James Salter - Burning the Days

—

In November, in northern Maine, you might see two of them from far off, at the end of the runway set amid the fields. They are barely identifiable, early F-86s with thin, swept wings. Nearer there is the sound, wavering but full, like a distant cataract. Then, close, it becomes a roar with the smoke billowing up behind. They are being run up, engines full open, brakes on, needles trembling at their utmost.

The pilot of the first airplane has his head bent forward over the instruments as if examining them closely. Red-haired, gaunt, he had so far said almost nothing to me. His name was Stewart. I knew little about him. He was a Korean veteran and a maintenance officer. Lined up beside him, I waited. Why do you remember some things above all others and men who have hardly spoken a word to you? I was new in the group and nervous. I was determined to fly good formation, to be a shadow, almost touching him. We were taking off just before sunset. No one else would be flying.

His head rose then and turned towards me. His hand came up and hesitated. I nodded. The hand dropped.

Wreathed in thunder we started down the runway. Gathering speed I saw his arm suddenly swinging wildly in a circle. I had no idea what it meant, was I to go on, was he aborting? In a moment I saw it was neither, only exhilaration; he was waving us onward as if whipping a bandana around in the air. The noses came up; we were at liftoff speed. I saw the ground fall away and from that moment for him I ceased to be.

There was a low overcast through which we shot, and above it brilliant reddening sky. I was barely twenty feet from him but he never so much as glanced at me. He sat in the cockpit like a prophet, alone and in thought, head turning unhurriedly from side to side. We had reached thirty thousand feet when the tower called. Weather was moving in, our mission had been canceled. “Operations advises you return to base,” they said.

“Roger,” I heard him say matter-of-factly. “We’ll be in after a few minutes. We’re going to burn out some petrol.”

With that he rolled over and, power on, headed straight down. I didn’t know what he intended or was even doing. I fell into close trail, hanging there grimly as if he were watching. The airspeed went to the red line; thousands of feet were spinning off the altimeter. The controls grew stiff, the stick could be moved only with great effort as we went through rolls and steep turns at speeds so great I could feel my heart being forced down from my chest.

We burst through the overcast and into the narrow strip of sky beneath. I’d moved to his wing again. We were well over five hundred knots at about fifteen hundred feet. It was almost impossible to stay in position in the turns. I had both hands on the stick. All the time we were dropping lower. We were not moving, it seemed. We were fixed, quivering, fatally close.

Five hundred feet, three hundred, still lower, in what seemed deathly silence except for an incandescent, steady roar, in solitude, slamming every moment against invisible waves of air. He was leading us into the unknown. My flying suit was soaked, the sweat ran down my face. A pure pale halo formed in back of his canopy and remained there, streaming like smoke. I began to realize what it was about. Never looking at me, absorbed by the instruments in front of him and by something in his thoughts, sometimes watching the world of dark forest that swept beneath us, hills and frozen lakes, he was gauging my desire to belong. It was a baptism. This silent angel was to bring me to the place where, wet and subdued, I would be made one with the rest. If, like a scrap of paper held out the window of a speeding train, my airplane were to instantly come apart, torn bits tumbling and fluttering behind, he would only have begun a large, unhasty turn to see what had happened, his expression unchanged.

I had surrendered myself to all of it and to whatever might come when unexpectedly he turned towards the field. We had already crossed it two or three times. This time we entered on initial approach and dropped dive brakes, slowing as we turned. I had a feeling of absolute control of the airplane. It was tamed, obedient. I could have gently tapped his wing with mine, I felt, and not left a dent. I could have followed him anywhere, through anything.

I remember that moment and the smoothness of landing in the fading light. Now that the sound of our passing violently overhead had disappeared, on the field all was still. There was unbroken calm. Our idling engines had a high-pitched, lonely whine.

Afterwards he said not a word to me. The emissary does not stoop to banter. He performs his duty, gathers his things, and is gone. But the snowy fields pouring past beneath us, the terror, the feeling of being for a moment a true pilot — these things remained.

—

My closest friend in the squadron, a classmate, had hair flecked with gray and a wry way of talking that I liked. William Wood was his name. He was older — he’d been perhaps twenty when we became cadets, and afterwards had gone right into fighters; he’d been in them since the beginning. He was relaxed and could be very droll.

Early that winter, he and I went to Korea. We had eagerly read — it passed from hand to hand — the first definitive report, a sort of letter about the enemy airplanes that had suddenly appeared in the war, Russian planes, MIG-15s, and when the chance came, like men running to a claims office, we had raced to volunteer. There were two openings that month and we got them. It was not only the report, the war itself was whispering an invitation: Meet me. Whatever we were, we felt inauthentic. You were not anything unless you had fought.

Come now, and let us go and risk our lives unnecessarily. For if they have got any value at all it is this that they have got none. We arrived in Korea, as it happened, on a gloomy day. It was February, the dead of winter, planes parked among sandbag revetments and bitter cold lying over the field adding to the pall. The ranking American ace — mythic word, ineffaceable — a squadron commander named Davis, had just been shot down. With the terrible mark of newness on us, we stood in the officers’ club and listened to what was or was not fact. We were too fresh to make distinctions. We had come, it turned out, to join a sort of crude colonial life lived in stucco buildings in plain, square rooms, unadorned, with common showers and a latrine that even the wing commander shared.

We were there together for six months, cold winter mornings with the weak sunlight on the hills, the silvery airplanes gliding forth like mechanical serpents not quite perfected in their movement and then forming on the runway amid rising sound. In the spring the ice melted in the rivers and the willows became green. The blood from a bloody nose poured down over your mouth and chin inside the rubber oxygen mask. In summer the locust trees were green and all the fields. It comes hauntingly back: silent, unknown lands; distant brown river, the Yalu, the line between two worlds.

That first night they were talking about the MIGs, how good they were, how superior at altitude. Whatever anyone said we accepted as truth. I stayed close to Wood, as if to suggest we were equals. The group commander, an older, admired figure — Preston was his name — was there. He had been leading the fatal mission on which Davis, with only a wingman, had attacked a large formation of MIGs. He’d gotten the leader and then slowed down to try for one more. He was successful but it killed him. He was hit just behind the cockpit by cannon fire from still another airplane. The last victory was his twelfth.

Fighters don’t fight, as St.-Exupéry said, they murder. He did not fly one himself — he spoke as their possible victim, which in the end he became. He was flying a reconnaissance plane when it happened, unarmed and relying only on speed, though they are never quite that fast. He was too old for the war and too civilized.