James Salter - Burning the Days

“Many many!”

We head that way and see two, far out, sail past us on the left. We turn to follow, and they climb and begin to turn also. The sky is a burning blue, a sky things seem black in. I am on my back, Immelmanning up to get between them and the river, rolling out slightly beneath the leader, who is turning hard to the right and cannot see me. I duck my head and try to find the gunsight, which is an image projected onto a thick, slanted piece of glass that serves as the windshield. There’s nothing there — turning has pulled it all the way off the glass. The MIG begins to level out and the sight drifts into view. About a thousand feet back I press the trigger. The tracers fall behind him. He begins to climb again and I am cutting him off, closing, glancing quickly back to see if my wingman is still there, firing again. A few hits in the right wing, then tremendous joy, at closer range a solid burst in the fuselage. The flashes are intense, brilliant, as of something vital shattering. He abruptly rolls over and I follow, as if we are leaping from a wall. He begins to pull it through. I am still shooting and something flies off the plane — the canopy. A moment later a kind of bundle, the pilot, comes out.

“Cope! Did you see that?”

“Roger,” my wingman says. He may have been talking to me all along, telling me I was clear, but this single word is the only one that remains.

The MIG, now a funeral craft that bore nothing, was falling from thirty thousand feet, spinning leisurely in its descent until its shadow unexpectedly appeared on the hills and slowly moved to join it in a burst of flame.

Six enemy planes were claimed on this mission and two of our own were lost, an ace and his wingman. The leader was rescued but the wingman drowned.

Here then, faintly discolored and liable to come apart if you touch it, is the corsage that I kept from the dance.

—

In the end there is a kind of illness. A feeling of inconsequence, even lightness, takes hold. It is, in a way, like the earliest days, the sense of being an outsider. Others are taking one’s place, nameless others who can never know how it was. It is being given to them, the war with all its fading, romantic detail, its disasters and lucky chances. They will be coming home through the intense skies of autumn, settling gracefully in over the boundary of the field. The smooth black runway floats up to meet them. The ships are empty, feather-light, the fuel tanks almost drained, the belts of ammunition vanished; they are bringing back nothing except that thing we prized above all.

North for the last time, north again on a razzia. The radios are silent, only an occasional brief word crosses the air. We are hoping to surprise them, but it is a vain hope, already we are greenish marks on some radar. They are speaking a dark language, it flickers back and forth, deciding where we are going and what they will do.

As I fly this time I remember missions over endless sky beaches formed by clouds, the solitude and clear, ionized taste of pure oxygen, looking hard at nothing with no chance, it seemed, of other than nothing, searching along the empty horizon, then a little higher, or back where the enemy sometimes materialized in the rearmost corner of one’s eye — lackluster missions when out of nowhere, suddenly, here they come.

I finished with one destroyed and one damaged, which I would sometimes, among the unknowing, elevate to a probable, never more; to do that would be soiling the very thing fought for.

When I returned to domestic life I kept something to myself, a deep attachment — deeper than anything I had known — to all that had happened. I had come very close to achieving the self that is based on the risking of everything, going where others would not go, giving what they would not give. Later I felt I had not done enough, had been too reliant, too unskilled. I had not done what I set out to do and might have done. I felt contempt for myself, not at first but as time passed, and I ceased talking about those days, as if I had never known them. But it had been a great voyage, the voyage, probably, of my life.

I would have given anything, I remember that. The moments of terror — alone, separated from the leader, and seeing, like a knell, drop tanks with their foreign shape and thin, vaporous trails falling silent to both right and left — the sometimes ominous briefings and preparation, the dark early mornings which for me were the worst — none of it mattered. A few years afterwards I won a gunnery championship in North Africa and led an acrobatic team — I had, in short, learned equitation. We dropped from the sky into distant countries and once in a while in a locker room or bar I would hear a remark that someone, a name from those days, had been killed in a flying accident, but like Conrad’s shipmates on the Narcissus, I never saw any of them again.

IFLEW IN THE 75th, the 335th in Korea, the 22nd in Germany, and at the end with the 119th Squadron in New Jersey, years of it, like cavalry years, the waiting by empty runways, the barren operations rooms, the apocalyptic sound of engines tremendous and uneven, the idleness and cynicism, the myth.

In those days there was nothing in the world but us. The rarity was fine. There were other squadrons, of course. Some you knew quite well. Ships from all three squadrons in the group and also from other fields came in past the little shack on wheels by the side of the runway. Many times it is you yourself who are returning, coming back beneath the clouds, seeing the long straight runway, or the hangars alongside it blurring in the rain — an incomparable happiness, the joy of coming home.

—

We had pilots named Homer and Ulysses, country boys unfrivolous by nature who took good care of their cars. Farm boys, for some reason, always seemed the truest men. They were even-tempered and unhurried in the way of someone who will watch a man doing something foolish and not make any comment — the joke will come at the end. They became flyers instead of going to the city though of course it was not the same thing, and they saw the world from a distance — the Grand Canal like a gray thread winding among the barely distinguishable piazzas far below, the unmistakable narrowing spire of Paris rising above the haze. Beneath them passed all the miracles of Europe, few of great interest — their wonders were more elemental, in a room, standing naked with a member like a grazing horse’s, in front of a full-length mirror with a German whore. Some married waitresses.

You knew them, that is to say their ability and to an extent their character, but much was hidden. After two or three years you knew little more than at the start, but still you were attached to their silence, the honesty of their thoughts. One night one of them, on a motorcycle, sped into the concrete pillar of a bridge and was in the hospital for weeks, legs broken, jaw bound together with silver wire. Nevertheless when I came into the room he managed to smile. He had a willing nature and the name of an ace, strange and abrupt: Uden. Broad and capable hands, fearless eyes, yet somehow it all came to nothing. Face-to-face for the last time at the noisy farewell party, the blue, farm-country eyes suddenly filled with tears. “I know I’ve disappointed you.”

“That’s true.”

“I just wanted you to know one thing — I won’t do it the next time.”

That was true also. There was no next time. A year later someone was describing an accident at Myrtle Beach, a night takeoff with full fuel load, 450-gallon drop tanks, the planes wallowing, the overcast seamlessly black. The join-up was in sky undivided between the darkness of air and water, a sky without top or bottom; in fact there was no sky, only total blackness in which, banking steeply to try and catch up with the lights of the fleeing leader, the number-three man, low in the roaring nightmare, determined to do well, went into the sea. Uden.