James Salter - Burning the Days

Colman stood before him with a respectfulness untinged by the least subservience. He was, after all, only tossing the dice. He was that dauntless figure, a free man. Soldier, yes, but only occasional soldier; it was all somehow implicit in the crispness of his salute, his effort to be unsmiling, his stained flying suit. He was an experienced fighter pilot and had been an ace in China only seven years earlier. At the moment, he explained, he was in fighter-bombers, which was a waste of his talent; he would like to come to the Fourth.

Thyng was always on the lookout for able men. Did he have any time in the F-86? he asked Colman. Yes, sir, Colman said, about two hundred hours. He actually had none and had merely picked a figure that seemed probable. Thyng, interested, told him to leave his name and other details with the adjutant and he would see what could be done.

A few weeks later orders for the transfer came through and Colman left for Korea carrying, he said, at his own suggestion, his flight records with him. These records, sometimes sent separately, are a pilot’s full credentials and are sacred. They list everything — every flight, date, weather, type of aircraft. En route to Korea, Colman slid open the window of the transport plane and casually dropped this dossier into the sea. The pages, torn apart, slid under.

Fishes nosed at the Japanese planes shot down, night flights in Georgia and Florida, rail-cuts near Sinanju, the entirety.

In the new squadron, the one I was soon afterwards to join, he was asked for his records. They were being mailed, he said blandly. In the meantime, for convenience, he offered a rough breakdown of his time, very close to the fact but including several hundred hours in the F-86. Like the bill in a fine restaurant it was an impressive sum.

Airplanes are the same in the way that ships and automobiles are the same; they are similar, but there are also specifics. On his first flight Colman climbed into the cockpit and after a few minutes beckoned the crew chief to him. It had been a while since he’d flown this model and he didn’t want to make a mistake; why didn’t the crew chief show him the correct way to start the engine? he asked. The rest was easy — radio, controls, instruments, all these were the usual. He taxied out behind his leader and off they went on a local flight. They were carrying drop tanks but Colman hadn’t found out how to turn them on. As they were flying along about forty minutes later, he saw every needle suddenly wilt. His engine had stopped.

He had a flame-out, he reported.

“Roger,” the leader said. “Try an air start.”

This was another gap in his knowledge. “Just so I do it right,” Colman said, “read it to me off the checklist, will you?”

Item by item they went through the procedure. Nothing happened. The engine was all right and there was plenty of fuel, but it was all in the drop tanks. They tried a second time and then declared an emergency. Colman would have to try and make a dead-stick landing.

He might have done it easily except he was a little short of altitude. Nothing can amend that. At the last, seeing he was not going to make it, he picked out the best alternative he could, railroad tracks, and landed on them wheels-up, which was the right way. He went skating down the rails as if they were a wet street, finally coming to a stop just inside a wire-mesh gate which happened to be the entrance to the salvage yard. The plane, damaged beyond repair, would have ended up there anyway. Eventually the fire trucks came, and an ambulance, and Colman, who had injured his back slightly, was taken to the hospital.

One of the first things noticed in the wreckage was that the drop-tank switches had not been turned on. Amell was in a very unfriendly mood when he arrived at the hospital. As soon as he entered the room, Colman held up his hands defensively. “Major, you don’t have to say it,” he began, “I fucked up. I know I fucked up. But you have to admit one thing. After I fucked up, nobody could have done a better job.”

Impudence saved him. He was in disgrace but at the same time admired. You could not help liking his nerve.

—

He was, in many ways, incomparable. I was a member of his flight and we flew together many times. In place of a hard plastic helmet, he wore an old leather one he had brought with him, probably from China days. His head, as a result, looked very small in the cockpit. Like rivulets feeding a stream the planes would join the main body as it moved towards the runway. The mission was forming. One of the ships seemed to have a mere child piloting it. Who was that? the colonels asked. “Colman.”

He also, for a time, carried binoculars. Someone had suggested they might be a help for distant sightings and he rounded up a pair. We were encumbered in the airplanes — heavy clothing, life vest, pistol, flares — and on top of all this and his knotted, white scarf, the binoculars hung. They were not very practical — their field was small and the sky they jerked across immense. He pretended they were useful. He was like Nelson holding a telescope up to his blind eye. In any situation, he was ready to engage. In this he was like Quixote, with whom he shared certain characteristics though he was not, like the knight, a deeply serious man.

In the air he was imperturbable and, rarer, magnanimous. We were in many fights together, often uneven fights, but his mere presence, he felt, made any odds equal. He was not methodical. He fought the way a man does who has a few drinks and sits down to play poker, the cards may be running right. Calm, congenial, he enjoys the game and if he finds himself over his head can still smile and say good night or, as a famous black champion once addressed reporters, having lost the bout of his life, “Gentlemen, I have had a most entertaining evening and I hope that you have, too.”

One day I watched him turn, in a huge tilting circle, with the leader of a flight of two MIGs. He had hit him earlier, but at long range, and was trying to finish him off. The wingman had disappeared. Into and out of an enormous sun that seemed to burn black in the sky, we flew. In crossing from side to side to stay in position I had moved slightly ahead and called to Colman that it was me passing in front of and beneath him — there had been cases of mistaken identity. “I’m between you and the MIG.”

“Go ahead,” he replied. “You take him.”

It was a lavish gesture, though no more than I expected of him. It would have been a victory we shared. I had already damaged a MIG a week or so earlier and seen they were not untouchable. I knew, with the confidence that assures it, I would have many, entirely my own. “No, you’ve got him,” I said.

I was looking behind. It seemed very leisurely. After a while I heard, “Do you still have him, Two?”

I looked to the front. Nothing.

“I seem to have lost him,” Colman remarked idly.

The sickening losses of more than forty years ago. The leaders have died of old age, the fights along the river in the dusk are forgotten. Still I see it clearly, the silvery fleck that is his plane, the string of smoke that trails from it as he fires, the serenity of it all, the burning fever. The invitation to join at the feast.

We traveled far together, sometimes to forbidden places, deeper and deeper into Manchuria, almost to Mukden, looking for them in the sanctuary, so high that the earth seemed neuter. It was a great, barren country, brown, without features. The Yalu was behind us, no longer even in sight. Farther and farther north. Every minute was ten miles. No one would know what had happened to us, no one would ever hear. My eye returned to the fuel gauge again and again. The needle never moved but then it would be lower. How much do you have? he asks. Nine hundred pounds, I reply. Two brief clicks of the mike; he understood. Finally, giving up, we turned.