James Salter - Burning the Days

The fighter aces had names like Adolph and Sailor, Ginger and Don. They had five or more kills and appeared suddenly and unseen, in the first terrifying seconds letting loose a stream of fire. A kind of blood poured from the plane being hit — black smoke really, but it foretold everything. Pieces of metal were flying off, the whole carefully constructed machinery was coming apart miles above the earth, shedding wings, hurtling out of control.

At Pointe de la Baumette on the southern coast of France there is a lighthouse with a tablet recording the end of St.-Exupéry. He disappeared in July 1944, his aircraft one of the many simply lost without trace in the great sweep of the war. Blue sea of glittering beauty, the sea on which Cervantes fought and where history was born — somewhere within it lie the bones of this secular saint.

We were replacements, new wingmen — fighters fly always in pairs — and it would not be long before we too were sleek for murder, crammed with gear into the cockpit, like overcoated gangsters in limousines, high above North Korea in the late afternoon, the sun low, the ground lost in reflection and haze. Farther and farther north we go. “Dentist” is the call sign of the ground radar. Nothing is being reported by them yet. Cautious voices in the dusk in a sky that is ominously empty.

—

Just as, they say, in North Africa during the war the thing to have immediately to hide your innocence was desert boots, so the first requirement of a pilot in Korea was a folding plastic-covered map of the long peninsula that projected down from China into the Yellow Sea, the muddy Yalu its northern border, the spattering of numerous islands, and midway, the enemy capital, Pyongyang. Over the area of North Korea we drew a fan of lines, all converging on our base. This gave headings, especially to home. Arcs of distance crossed these vectors to show at a glance how far you had gone or had to go.

From the front lines, which crossed the country at the waist, it was about two hundred miles, twenty-five minutes or so, to the river and only a few more to the enemy fields in China, where we were forbidden to go. There was no struggle for possession of the air. Like a backroom deal, that had already been decided. The MIGs entered the sky over North Korea at will, fought if they chose to, and went back to their fields. We were trying to exterminate the enemy, but even the boy who mows the lawn knows that you do not kill wasps one by one, you destroy the nest. The nests, however, were not to be touched. Everything in between was contested.

We sought to keep them from attacking our fighter-bombers that were heading north, laden and often low-flying, to cut railroads and bomb bridges. We did not escort but patrolled instead. The noses of the MIGs were sometimes yellow, afterwards red, then purple, then black.

It turned out that this was because their ideas were the opposite of ours. We had only two wings of air-to-air fighters in Korea and they remained there, replenished constantly with pilots to keep them up to strength. Thus there were always veterans with eighty or ninety missions and brave boys ready to scatter who had none, plus the in-betweens. The Russians — they were mainly Russians — whom we fought moved entire air regiments through, probably to initiate as many of them as possible. They would arrive with very little experience and leave three or four months later, battle-hardened. But it meant they were all bathed in innocence at the same time and learned together, and this proved costly.

What occurred in the rest of the war meant little to us. There remains with me not the name of a single battle of the time or even general other than Van Fleet, who had an honest face and the history of having risen, like Grant, belatedly, a colonel in Normandy when his classmates were commanding corps — Van Fleet and of course Ridgway.

In the sky were weather and widely separated operations conducted by the Navy, Marines, and Air Force. We had little to do with one another. It was only in the headquarters, approached on rutted roads and the dusty, tree-shaded avenues of Seoul, in the theatrical evening briefings with the commander sitting silver-haired, stars on his collar, smoking a cigar and in a woman’s voice saying thank you after each presentation, that orchestration took place. Here were all the strikes, targets, losses — everything a general might need to know.

War is so many things. It is an opportunity to see the upper world, great houses that have become hospitals or barracks, precious objects sold for nothing, families with ancient names at the mercy of quartermaster sergeants. In the familiar footage the guns jump backwards as they fire, the tanks roll past and forgotten men wave. It is all this and also the furnace of the individual in a way that a life of labor is not. Its demands are unending, its pleasures cruel. Goya knew them, and Thucydides, and Isaac Babel. One morning there is the wonderful smell of breakfast, and on the next the sudden arrest and hasty sentencing. The fate that seemed impossible, the justice Lorca knew. He could not cry out, I am a poet! They know he is an intellectual, or worse. They put him in a truck and he rides, with others and without a shred of hope, to an outlying district, where he is handed a shovel and told to dig. It is his grave he is digging, and in silence, the silence he will soon be part of, he begins, who was raised in this country, who became its very voice. Death laid eggs in the wound, he once wrote, at five in the afternoon. From far off the gangrene is coming, at five in the afternoon. His wounds were burning like suns, at five in the afternoon, and the crowd was breaking the windows … In his grip is the smooth wooden handle, and the first shovelful of earth is one of the most precious moments of his life, if only it could last. But in war nothing lasts and the poets are killed together with the farm boys, the flies feast on their faces.

For us it was simple and always the same: Who was scheduled, what was the weather, what had the earlier missions seen?

—

The first morning light over the top of the wing. The first, easy missions. Out of the dust of memory, with a faint coating of dust himself, childlike, shrewd, comes Amell, the squadron commander.

A name is a destiny. It is the first of all poems. Even after death it keeps its power; even half-buried in newsprint or dirt, something catches the eye. Paavo Nurmi had such a name. So did Jean Genet; a stunt pilot named Lamont Pry; the Swedish Match King; a small-time fascist, Adrian Arcaud — I am beginning to portray an era — and in the huge graveyard my toe kicks up another: Zane Amell.

I don’t remember how I first saw him. He remains fixed, in any event, as in a photograph, with a fur hat like a cossack and a navy revolver in a holster under his arm. He had a husky, somewhat thespian voice. As an actor his speeches tended to be slightly long, although he could be succinct on occasion. One morning on leave, arriving back in Tokyo in a staff car, in a wrinkled uniform and reeking of alcohol, he was awakened by the Japanese driver and asked if there was some particular place he would like to be dropped. “Yes,” Amell answered hoarsely.

“Where?”

“Anywhere,” he muttered and fell back asleep.

His first words to me that I recall were at a briefing. I was flying as his wingman on my second combat mission. The task of a wingman can be easily described: it is to stay with the leader and to look, especially behind — almost all danger comes from there. I knew I was being tried out. I was ready for advice or words of warning. As the aircraft numbers were written next to our names, he commented genially, “Great. You have old No Go, and I’ve got the Guzzler.” They were two of the oldest and slowest airplanes, but he didn’t have them changed.