James Salter - Burning the Days

To those that night, among whom there were some that fate would beckon, I said I would see them again. Good luck.

—

I was on leave at Langley and drove up to Washington to resign. It was June, the tenth, the day on which I’d been born. It seemed fitting.

All the way, in anguish, I weighed the choices. I had published a book that year, the first, written at night and on weekends, page by unsuspected page. The Hunters appeared under a nom de plume. Salter was as distant as possible from my own name. It was essential not to be identified and jeopardize a career — I had heard the sarcastic references to “God Is My Copilot” Scott. I wanted to be admired but not known. I was thirty-two years old and had been in uniform since I was seventeen. I had a wife and child with another coming soon. As I walked into the Pentagon I felt I was walking to my death.

On various floors I stopped and looked at the directories, brigadiers and major generals one had never heard of, hard at work in their bureaus: Plans, where I used to drop in and talk to Beukema about fighters. Would it be difficult, he wanted to know, for him to make the transition to them? He’d been trained in B-29s.

He had been in my company, a class ahead of me at West Point, outstanding in studies and captain of the hockey team. Superior in every way, charming, unsuperficial, an exceedingly rare type, he had grown up at West Point in an idyllic boyhood, the son of a professor there. He had married General Bradley’s daughter and was marked — though not by that — everyone agreed, for greatness. I knew the room in barracks he had lived in, the exact color of his blond hair. I could easily see him as a fighter pilot — it seemed natural.

He was ultimately assigned to Langley and F-84s, a plane with a fine appearance but underpowered and with a long takeoff roll. At thirty thousand feet one day, as squadron commander — designate, he told his flight leader he wanted to try something. He began a shallow dive. It continued and began to steepen, more and more. It was a characteristic of the airplane, which may have come into effect here, that when maximum speed, the red line, was exceeded there was a control reversal, and pulling back on the stick made the nose go further down rather than come up.

He crashed in the water off Langley at high speed. He perished, not from having flown too near the sun — he was the sun’s angel — but from taunting the demon of speed.

I sat at a desk in Separations and typed out my letter; then, like the survivor of some wreck, I roamed, carrying it, through the corridors for more than an hour. Finally I saw a colonel I knew, Berg, coming out of a doorway. He worked in Personnel, in charge of promotion boards. Needing the confidence of someone, I told him what I was about to do. He made no effort to dissuade me. He merely nodded. He mentioned several other officers who had recently resigned. I found it of little comfort. Late in the afternoon, feeling almost ill, I handed in the letter. It was the most difficult act of my life.

In thick heat I drove up Connecticut Avenue to an apartment we had the use of. Alone, I began to weep — the emptiness, the long years, all the men, the places. My former wing commander from Bitburg who had come back to Washington some months earlier was in Arlington, in the suburbs. I still felt close to him, one of his own. I called him on the telephone and, in unhappiness, managed to tell him what I had done. “You idiot,” he said.

I went there for dinner. Why had I done it? he wanted to know. I had intended to tell the truth but broke off at the last moment knowing it would sound foolish to him and instead, as an apology, brought forth something from the schoolroom. I had done it, I said, because the future looked unpromising to me. As Napoleon had remarked at his coronation, if he had been born under Louis XIV, the most he could have hoped to be was a marshal, like Turenne. I cannot imagine what he thought.

Over and over during the days that followed, with nothing to do, I watched the cars going down the avenue in the morning or looked at the lighted Capitol and the city spread brilliantly around it at night. A baby, my daughter, was crying in the next room. Never another city, over it for the first time, in the lead, the field that you have never landed on far below, dropping down towards it, banking steeply one way, then the other, calling the tower, telling them who you are. Never another sunburned face in Tripoli looking up at you as you taxi to a stop, the expression asking, ship OK? A thumb raised, OK. And the dying whine, like a great sigh, of the engine shutting down, the needles on the gauges collapsing. It is over.

We went back to Langley. A strange, bottomless reaction had set in. With Paula and Leland, in whose house we were staying, I could hardly talk and found it impossible to laugh. Paula said she admired my courage, though what I’d had felt gone. We spent that evening talking about God. They were firm believers. It all seemed unimportant and beside the point.

—

Dreams remained. For years afterwards in nightmares stark as archive footage, I was what I had been. We were in Asia somewhere. Disaster was in the air. We were surrendering and there had been a warning from the enemy, a written warning, that because of the many atrocities we had committed there could be no guarantee of safety. I was standing in a hospital near three or four pilots, one of whom I knew. They were going to try to cross to where their planes were parked, take off, and continue fighting. They started for the field. There was firing, heavy and relentless. Someone came to ask if I would take the fourth plane. An F-100. I hadn’t been in one for years …

I did fly, however. On weekends I flew with the National Guard and went with them to summer camp in Cape Cod or Virginia. In the fall of 1961 we were placed on active duty — it was the so-called Berlin crisis — and went to France for nearly a year, to Chaumont, where DeShazer had crashed and where my agent, Kenneth Littauer, had flown during the First World War. They had lit bonfires at the corners of the field, he said, to guide planes home after dark.

It was September. We landed in a light rain, the first ones, having flown the planes across the Atlantic, stopping in the Azores and Seville. I asked the crew chief who met me what the town was like. He answered without hesitation, “Looks all right.”

That year, I understood quite well, was the close of things. We were reserves — I had looked down upon such as we were now. I wore the uniform still, the colored ribbons, but the genuineness was gone, even when Norstad, the glamorous theater commander, came on a visit and lay sideways in an easy chair in his flying suit, chatting about the outbreak of war and what it would bring as he saw it, or even the brusque appearance of LeMay himself, with a retinue that filled an entire plane. We were able to conduct ourselves well enough if called upon and convincingly say “Sir,” but it was only for a time.

This transparency set me free. All that before had been insignificant, unmartial, caught my eye, buildings, countryside, towns, hotels. As a lieutenant colonel I had a room of my own at the head of the stairs. There, late at night, back from a restaurant, back from the bar, I sat writing. I had three lives, one during the day, one at night, and the last in a drawer in my room in a small book of notes.

There were wonderful things in that book, things that I am unable to write or even imagine again. That they were wonderful was not my doing — I merely took the trouble to put them down. They were like the secret notebook of the chasseur at Maxim’s, without ego or discretion, and the novel woven around them (A Sport and a Pastime ) owed them everything. The leather-seated car I drove is gone; the house of Lazan and his wife, where we went for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner, I know is off towards Langres somewhere but I doubt I would be able to find it again; the elegant couple in Paris have divorced; the young girl, the essential element — of course, she cannot change; that is the whole point — went to America and became what you might expect. Ironically, the portrait I made of her she never read.