James Salter - Burning the Days

Occasionally there were even toasts: The boys on the wall! The rarest moment was the first evening of someone new in the flight. Whoever it was dared not openly disbelieve, even if every instinct said to, and the least hint of reverence delighted the liars who were posing. It led to absolute refusal, on the part of the duped, to stir whenever someone rose and announced, “The wall!”

—

Every six weeks or so we were given a few days in Japan.

In Tokyo it was different. We came in from what amounted to the front, unsophisticated, raw, and found the city in the possession of those who were stationed there and had everything: cars, comfortable billets, telephone numbers. It was the life of conquerors, brothels and floorshows, sensual nights. The taxis were ancient and took you wherever you liked, down ill-lit boulevards and nameless streets.

The Imperial Hotel, the eastern palace Lloyd Wright designed that had survived the great earthquake and the war, was standing then. Horizontal, deep-eaved, with green-tiled tubs and the feeling of a ship, its very bricks had been specially made. In its rooms and lounges were civilians, dignitaries, Red Cross girls. They were indifferent to the war in Korea, at least to its unconfirmed heroes. Their interests lay in the capital and the life they were arranging. Looking at them, talking to them, seeking information from them, you saw that they had everything. But there was one thing they did not have, as believers say: They did not have the truth — that was in the Stars and Stripes one morning in early April. I read it sitting in the lobby of a hotel, hotel without a name and day without a date, though they had them then. Kasler had gotten his first. It was strange how, in a single moment I lacked all interest in anything; envy can do that. Coming back from Tokyo it was as if I had never been away, but there was a void, three days during which the war had gone on and which were irreversible.

Something begins and you have your run, like a player at the table or a batter. Kasler’s second I actually saw, by chance, hit the ground in a bright splash during a big fight. I was with Colman at the time; we were chasing two but never got close. In the debriefing afterwards I recognized a new contender, one hand bending abruptly behind the other to show how he had done it, the sooty marks of an oxygen mask still on his face. We had been among the uncounted, he and I, and I watched as if from afar.

At the beginning of May, Colman and Kasler each got their third. I saw them landing afterwards, the planes sleek and bare.

The fourth and the fifth I will tell about later.

—

There were so many things that could happen, a large part was chance. Perhaps it has rained for days — the planes sit out in the weather and dampness affects them, the radios become unreliable. Break! they are crying in a fight and you hear nothing. The silence is uncanny. Break right! they are shouting, break right! For some reason you look back and there, behind you, is an intake the size of a locomotive. In fright you pull too hard and the plane shudders, snaps, begins to spin. The earth is revolving, dirt from the cockpit floor is floating up, and they are following you down; when you pull out at low speed they’ll be waiting.

There were days one felt a dread, when something was wrong, something impalpable. Like a beast lying in a field sensing danger, you could not run from it, you did not even know what it was. It was an eclipse, not total, of courage. People were getting hit, Woody, Bambrick, Straub. Carey was lost, Honecker. Sharp, with his savoir-faire and black moustache, was shot down — the MIG dropping out of the clouds behind him — and rescued. While turning final one day I had the controls freeze — something had gone wrong with the hydraulics, I could not move the stick — and barely missed being killed. Still you went to the briefing, carried your gear to the plane.

Late in April we heard that more Russian squadrons were coming in. They were crowded onto their fields, wingtip to wingtip. The sky was filling with the bright cumulus that comes with fair weather.

I was with Colman, just the two of us. We had been four but had become separated — it was the alert flight and we’d been scrambled. The radar was directing us; enemy flights were in the air. We might never find them, wandering as we were among monumental clouds and talking occasionally to the absent pair with the vague idea of rejoining.

That was when I saw them for the first time.

“Two bogies back at eight o’clock high,” I called.

“Roger. I’ve got them,” Colman said lazily. He was like a veteran fielder watching a high fly ball. We continued on.

“They’re closing, Lead,” I said a few moments later. “They’re turning in on us.”

“Roger,” he said.

They were at seven o’clock then, only a few thousand feet back.

“They’re MIGs,” I said.

“I’ve got them,” he said again, confidently; it hardly occurred to me then that he hadn’t. I couldn’t imagine what he was thinking.

“They’re going to six o’clock. They’re firing! Break left!” At last Colman saw them and was turning. I was with him, outside and trailing. We had waited too long. We were in a stream of fire that was moving with and ahead of us. I was not aware of it, but Colman was being hit.

Behind us they had the scent of the kill, they could see the strikes; nothing would dislodge them. I was in panic but also calm, as if observing from some higher, safer place. We were turning as hard as we could and they were turning with us. The altimeter was unwinding. Straining to look back, I could see them, steady and unmoving, like the pods behind you on an amusement park ride that rise when you rise and go down when you go down, mechanical and effortless. There were fights, I knew, that went down to the deck and swept across the hills just above the trees, roaring, relentless.

Somehow we had pulled ahead a little. We were flying too desperately for them to lead us. The other element was calling — they could hear us — to ask where we were and whether they could help us, but neither Colman nor I could answer. It was pitiless. It was like being held by a python — the least relinquished space, it constricts to hold. We were being crushed in boundless air. We were below twenty thousand feet when Colman tightened his turn even more and pulled the nose up. He was going to dance with them this way, at low speed, having gained nothing at high.

They didn’t stay. They broke away; I saw them beneath us heading for home. I called to him to reverse his turn and follow, but for some reason he didn’t and they became specks. We picked up speed and began to climb. He said something about almost having been unconscious — his oxygen hose becoming unplugged — and then asked me to close in and take a look at his plane.

“What’s wrong?”

“I think I may have been hit,” he decided.

From a distance I could see the holes in his tail and, when I drew closer, the wing.

Almost out of fuel but full of exuberance I landed too long that day, amateurishly long, and ended by collapsing one of the landing gear. I have made that landing a hundred times and never failed to put the plane down as gently as a glass figurine on a cabinet shelf, the wheels seem to touch with a feline softness, but the single time it was not in my imagination, I failed. The group commander was forgiving. I would make up for it, he declared. He’d had a serious accident himself, in England, colliding with a friendly bomber and killing all on board. This was Mahurin and a greater trial awaited him; he became a prisoner in North Korea and made statements for the benefit of the enemy. I could never, despite it, bring myself to dislike him.