James Salter - Burning the Days

In Paris, a lifetime later, in a hotel room I watched as on screens everywhere he walked dreamily in space, the first American to do so. I was nervous and depressed. My chest ached. My hair had patches of gray. White was turning slowly, upside down, tethered to the spacecraft by a lazy cord. I was sick with envy — he was destroying hope. Whatever I might do, it would not be as overwhelming as this. I felt a kind of loneliness and terror. I wanted to be home, to see my children again before the end, and I was certain it was near the end; I felt suicidal, ready to burst into tears. He did this to me unknowingly, as a beautiful woman crossing the street crushes hearts beneath her heel.

White burned to ashes in the terrible accident on the launching pad at Cape Canaveral in 1967. He died with Virgil Grissom, with whom I had also flown. His funeral was solemn. I attended, feeling out of place. To be killed flying had always been a possibility, but the two of them had somehow moved beyond that. They were already visible in that great photograph of our time, the one called celebrity. Still youthful and, so far as I knew, unspoiled, they were like jockeys moving to the post for an event that would mark the century, the race to the moon. The absolutely unforeseen destroyed them. Aldrin went instead.

White is buried in the same cemetery as my father, not far away. I visit both graves when I am there. White’s, though amid others, seems visible from some distance off, just as he himself was if you looked intently at the ranks.

—

You remember the airfields, the first sight of some, the deep familiarity of others.

Apart from those that finally appeared when you were coming in, nose high, in fog or heavy rain, the most beautiful field I ever saw was in Morocco, down towards the south. It was called Boulhaut, a long, flawless black runway built for strategic bombers and never used, the numbers at each end huge and clear — no tire had ever marked them. You could not but marvel at its extraordinary newness.

I liked fields near the sea, Westhampton Beach on Long Island, Myrtle Beach, Langley, Eglin, Alameda, where we landed in the fall, ferrying planes to be shipped to the fighting in Korea, and went on to Vanessi’s with the navy pilots’ wives. I liked Sidi Slimane for its openness and the German fields, Hahn and Wiesbaden, Fürstenfeldbruck.

There are fields I would like to forget, Polk, where one night, as a rank amateur, I nearly went into the trees, trying clumsily to go around with my flaps down. Later, in the wooden barracks, came another lesson. Two men in flying suits, drab in appearance, paused at the open door of the room where I sat on a bed. “Are you the one flying the P-51? Where are you from?” one asked.

“Andrews,” I said. I felt a kind of glamour, being connected with the silvery plane and its slim, aggressive shape, parked by itself on the ramp. It was not hard to deduce that they were lesser figures, transport pilots probably. I told them I was in the Fourth Group rather than going into the less interesting facts — I was actually a graduate student at Georgetown. They did not seem very impressed. “Ever hear of Don Garland?” I said, naming a noted pilot in the Fourth.

“Who’s that?”

“One of the best pilots in the Air Force.”

“Oh, yeah?”

I offered a few exaggerations I had overheard at one time or another in the Andrews Club. Garland flew the slot position on the acrobatic team, hanging there with his bare teeth, so to speak, the proof of it being the blackened rudder of his ship, stained by the leader’s exhaust and as a mark of pride always left that way — no mechanic would dare to rub it clean. He was a wild man, Garland — I could tell them any number of stories.

“What does he look like?”

I gave a vague answer. Was he a decent guy? they wanted to know.

I had almost been in a fight one evening at Andrews, not with Garland but with another member of the team. “Not particularly,” I said.

Suddenly one of them began laughing. The other glanced at him. “Shut up,” he said.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” the first one said. Then to me, “This is Garland,” he said, gesturing.

I was speechless.

“What the hell’s your name?” they wanted to know.

I left early in the morning, before they were up.

Later, when I actually joined the Fourth, they were luckily gone by then. There were other Garlands. At Bitburg one of the wing lieutenant colonels used to sit in my office, aimless as a country lawyer, looking at the board on which there were photographs of our pilots — I was squadron operations officer then — and ask, if war broke out, which of them would become aces? We sat examining the faces together. “Emigholz,” I said.

“Who else?”

A pause. “Cass, probably. It’s hard to say. Minish.”

There was no real way of judging. It was their skill but also their personalities, their remorselessness. “Maybe Whitlow,” I added. I was trying to match them to the memory of aces or near-aces in Korea. Emigholz was like Billy Dobbs, Cass was like Matson. “And Cortada,” I finally said. He was from Puerto Rico, small, excitable, and supremely confident. Not everyone shared his opinion of his ability — his flight commander was certain he would kill himself.

With the instinct that dogs have, you knew where in the order anyone ranked. Experience counted, and day-to-day performance. Pilots with few flying hours, in the early years of their career, were the most dangerous. They were young, in the well-being of ignorance, like flies on a sunny table, unaware of the fate of countless others. As regards flying, they had only a limited idea of the many ways to fail, most of them deadly.

With a lanky, indecisive lieutenant named Kelly, I left Bitburg late one day bound for Marseille. Destination weather was forecast to be scattered clouds and eight miles’ visibility. I had put him in the lead. It was important to give pilots the chance to make decisions, gain confidence. The ships in a flight, for whatever reason, might become separated, setting every man on his own, or a leader’s radio could go out and force a wingman to take over. In an instant the responsibility for everything could shift.

Over Marseille at thirty-five thousand feet we had just under eighteen hundred pounds of fuel remaining. The field, Marignane, was not visible. It was hidden by a deck of clouds that had moved in unexpectedly from the sea. In addition, neither Marignane nor Marseille Control would answer our calls.

The sun had already set and the earth was dimming. Kelly signaled for speed brakes and we dove towards a corner of the great lagoon that lay east of the field. We leveled out at three hundred feet. Ahead, like a dark reef, were the clouds. Squeezed as we were into a narrow layer of vanishing light and haze — the bottom of the overcast was perhaps a hundred feet above us — we missed the field. Suddenly the ground began to rise; it disappeared in the clouds just ahead, and we pulled up, breaking out on top at two thousand feet. It had grown darker. I looked at the fuel gauge: a thousand pounds. Kelly seemed hesitant and we were at the threshold of real difficulty.

“I’ve got it,” I said. “Get on my wing.” I could hear something he could not, the finality of the silence in which we found ourselves, in which the sole sound was that of the Marignane radio beacon — I rechecked the call letters against my let-down book, FNM.

I turned immediately towards the beacon and examined the letdown diagram. The light was dim. The details were complex — I noted only the heading to the field from the beacon, and the distance and time to fly. At 175 knots this was a minute and twenty-seven seconds.

When things do not go as planned and the fuel gauge is slowly going down, there is a feeling of unreality, of hostile earth and sky. There comes a point when the single fuel needle is all you think about, the focus of all concern. The thought of bailing out of two airplanes over Marseille because we could not find the field in low clouds and darkness was making me even more precise. It was the scenario for many accidents. Did I have the right frequency and beacon? I checked again. It was right. A moment later, for the first time, the tower came on the air. I suspected they had been waiting for someone to arrive who could speak English. Talking to them, although they were hard to understand, gave some relief: the field was open; there were lights.