James Salter - Burning the Days

—

When the weather was bad, as it was that spring, we did not fly. In the long days of rain there was restlessness and a kind of melancholy. The hours passed slowly; the hand-wound phonograph playing “China Night,” singsong and shrill. Remembering the girls at Miyoshi’s (officers only, pilots and artillerymen from every part of the war), the firecrackers bursting at the feet of hostesses in vast neon nightclubs, the special houses outside the gate at Fuchu, the bowing Japanese, Amell in his rain-soaked uniform getting out of a car, he had no idea where, it looked like the main railroad station … Thinking of it all and waiting for the weather to change, to pull onto the runway again and, in the rush of noise with its chilling central shriek, tremble to go.

One day down at the flight line, in the latrine, I came across a broad-faced pilot named Braswell who had been first captain a year or two after I graduated. He was flying fighter-bombers and had landed, low on fuel, on the way home from a mission. The ground crew was attending to his airplane, an F-84, exotic to them, with straight wings and heronlike landing gear. We stood for a while and talked. What was it like, fighting MIGs? he asked.

I described it. I remember the pride I had in telling him, a pride I was careful to conceal. He was listening intently. I knew he felt I was giving testimony that he could trust. There are really only two kinds of officer, those with virtue and those without. Not that either is preferable — there are times when virtue is a terrible defect — but I felt myself to be one of the former. Braswell was an exemplar, of course. I was handing over to him something he may have recognized — though incomplete and not in correct order, it was everything I had learned. There passed before me all the ranks of cadet lieutenants and captains, football players, bloods, as the English might call them. I say passed before me, but it was I who passed before them, walking up to the privileged figure who stood alone, if only for a brief moment, at the head of them all and speaking to him, not as a subordinate but like two men in a field. We were both captains now, of another sort. If I were to meet him years later he would not remember this — neither landing there, nor me, nor anything I said — but I had given it nevertheless, and to someone who might matter. I felt shriven.

—

It was May when Colman flew what no one except he knew would be his last mission.

He had four victories by then, and that day, in a fight near the Yalu, Kasler, leading an element, got his fourth as well and then got behind another MIG and followed it down to the deck. They roared across the mud flats wide open, needles crossed, the MIG like a beast of legend fleeing ahead. Kasler strove to get closer. The controls were unyielding. The ground rushed beneath them. Destiny itself, unrehearsed, shimmered before his eyes.

They were coming to the open water, the delta where the river widened, and suddenly the MIG pulled straight up, climbing, and continuing around. Colman was above with his wingman, watching it all. In his pocket, figuratively speaking, was a telegram he had received that morning — his father was gravely ill, he must come home — when the MIG rose in front of him, the long-sought fifth, entire and slow. It was his final chance.

“May I?” he asked politely.

Kasler, blood pulled from his face, did not answer. He passed by himself, up, up, and brilliantly over, fierce with lust, heading down again. At the bottom the MIG, going too fast, misjudged and hit near the water. Kasler barely pulled out.

I had landed half an hour earlier from a mission which encountered nothing, and was standing by the barracks watching when they came back. The first thing I saw was that they were without drop tanks. They turned off the runway at the near end, close to the road. I could recognize Colman’s head, small, like a bird’s, in the first ship. His gun ports were clean. So were his wingman’s. The other two planes had just reached the end of their landing roll. Theirs were black — they had been firing.

Kasler had gotten two and his wingman one. The single daring act — it was hard to imagine the enormous distance that it placed between us. The fifth was more than just another; it was beatification, the step across the gulf. On the tail of another plane at top speed, determined, closer than one dared, not knowing the other pilot or what he would do, down to the treetops, to the fatal earth — I had flown this very flight myself, it had been my initiation, though I hardly imagined repeating it in war. Kasler had his fifth, but more than that, he had reordered the state of things; he had begun like me, as a gunbearer, and now was where boldness had placed him, on the other side.

Colman left that day. In the wake of his leaving I realized that I knew very little about him. He was married and I think had children. He was lighthearted and self-promoting. Day-to-day truth was probably not in him, but a higher kind of integrity was, a kind not wasted on trivial matters. He had an infectious spirit. We were unalike. I adored him.

The farewells were the briefest. He merely picked up and left as if the game had meant little to him; he walked out without a backward glance. Finis.

I have forgotten when Kasler left, sometime later and after another victory. The MIGs had come down south of Anju on the early mission. He saw them low, but couldn’t catch them and then it developed there was an unknowing one behind him. His sixth.

I went to find him as he was getting ready to leave. I had a flight of my own by then and other loyalties, but part of me had stayed behind. We said goodbye. He was somewhat taciturn, as usual. I wondered if he was as yet aware of what he had won and would have for a long time thereafter, the luster of those hunting days when his name became storied.

Later he came by to say a few words — to console me, I think. There would be other chances. Of course, I said. We would see each other sometime, we agreed. It was heartbreaking to see him go, not for the slender friendship we had, but for the achievement he was carrying off with him. I saw his name one other time, in an article all down a column of the Times during the Vietnam War. He was flying there. He was known, it said, by name in the war room of the White House itself. He had the bad luck later to be shot down and made a prisoner, but even then he was invincible. He was held for seven years. Torture did not break him. Nothing could.

I know how they appeared to me, and I try to step aside for a moment to observe myself, how I seemed to them. Even now I cannot be sure — a marked figure, certainly, convivial and aloof at the same time, not uncourageous, driven, impetuous, a bit unwise. They may sometimes have wondered what happened to me in the aftermath. Word grew infrequent. Did I go on, did I rise?

—

The first good weather in a week. The fighter-bombers are going north again in strength, to someplace up near the border. The briefing room is crowded and electric. It’s maximum effort — everything that can fly. Six hundred enemy aircraft have been counted on their fields. We are sending up forty.

Far beneath us the silver formations were moving slowly, it seemed, across barren hills. Enemy flights were being announced, one after another, and then someone saw them along the river at thirty thousand feet. Blood jumping after the idle days, we dropped tanks and began to climb. We broke through a thin layer of clouds and into emptiness.

Moments later, coming from nowhere, they are on us, four of them at eight o’clock. We turn into them, they pass behind and disappear.

The flight has split up, we’re in two’s. By this time MIGs are being called out everywhere. The radio is brimming with voices, among them someone calling out MIGs south of the river at twenty-four thousand feet. How many? someone asks.