Stranger to the Ground

I was amazed at myself. What is so funny about one of my best friends flying into a target on the desert? I should be sad. Dying is a horrible and terrible thing. I must be sad. I must wince, grit my teeth, say, “Oh, no!”

But I cannot keep from smiling. What is so funny? That is one way to hit the target? The ’84 always was reluctant to change direction in a dive? The odds against the only Negro fighter pilot in all the USAF gunnery school at this moment flying into the ground? Willy’s dead. Look sad. Look shocked. Look astounded. But I cannot keep from smiling because it is all so very funny.

The briefing is done and I walk outside and strap my airplane around me and push the throttle forward and go out to strafe the rocks and lizards on Range Number Three. Range Number Two is closed.

It happened again, a few months later. “Did you hear about Billy Yardley?” I had not heard from Bill since we graduated from cadets. “He flew into the side of a mountain on a weather approach to Aviano.” A ringing in my ears. Billy Yardley is dead. And I smile. Again the wicked unreasoning uncontrollable smile. A smile of pride? ‘I am a better pilot than Jason Williams and Billy Yardley because I am still alive’? Kenneth Sullivan crashed in a helicopter in Greenland. Sully. A fine man, a quiet man, and he died in a spinning cloud of snow and rotor blades. And I smile.

Somehow I am not mad or insane or warped, for I see it once in a while on the faces of others when they hear the ringing in their ears at the death of a friend. They smile, just a little. They think of a friend that knows now what we have wondered since we were old enough to wonder: what is behind the curtain? What comes after this world? Willy knows it, Bill Yardley knows it, Sully knows it. And I do not. My friends are keeping a secret from me. It is a secret that they know and that they will not tell. It is a game. I will know tonight or tomorrow or next month or next year, but I must not know now. A strange game. A funny game. And I smile.

I can find out in a minute. Any day on the range I can wait two seconds too long in the pullout from the strafing panel. I can deliberately fly at 400 knots into one of the very hard mountains of the French Alps. I can roll the airplane on her back and pull her nose straight down into the ground. The game can be over any time that I want it to be. But there is another game to play that is more interesting, and that is the game of flying airplanes and staying alive. I will one day lose that game and learn the secret of the other; why should I not be patient and play one game at a time? And that is what I do.

We fly our missions every day for weeks that become uneventful months. One day one of us does not come back. Three days ago, a Sunday, I left the pages of manuscript that is this book piled neatly on my desk and left for Squadron Operations to meet a flight briefing time of 1115. The mission before mine on the scheduling board was “Lowlevel,” with aircraft numbers and pilots’ names.

391—Slack

541—Ulshafer

Ulshafer came back. Slack didn’t.

Before he was driven to Wing Headquarters, Ulshafer told us what he knew. The weather had gone from very good to very bad, quickly. There were hills ahead that stretched into the clouds. The two ’84F’s decided to break off the mission and return to the clear weather, away from the hills. Slack was in the lead. The weather closed in as they began to turn, and Ulshafer lost sight of his leader in the clouds.

“I’ve lost you, Don. Meet you on top of the weather.”

“Roj.”

Ulshafer climbed and Slack began to climb.

The wingman was alone above the clouds, and there was no answer to his radio calls. He came back alone. And he was driven, with the base commander, to Wing Headquarters.

The schedule board changed to:

51-9391—Slack AO 3041248

541—Ulshafer

A map was drawn, with a red square around the place where they had met the weather, southwest of Clemont-Ferrand. The ground elevation there changes from 1,000 feet to a jutting mountain peak at 6,188 feet. They had begun their climb just before the mountain.

We waited in Operations and we looked at our watches. Don Slack has another 10 minutes of fuel, we told ourselves. But we thought of the peak, that before we did not even know existed, and of its 6,188 feet of rock. Don Slack is dead. We call for the search-rescue helicopters, we fret that the ceiling is too low for us to fly out and look for his airplane on the mountainside, we think of all the ways that he could still be alive: down at another airport, with radio failure, bailed out into a village that has no telephone, alone with his parachute in some remote forest. “His fuel is out right now.” It doesn’t make any difference. We know that Don Slack is dead.

No official word; helicopters still on their way; but the operations sergeant is copying the pertinent information concerning the late Lieutenant Slack’s flying time, and the parachute rack next to mine, with its stenciled name, Slack, is empty of helmet and parachute and mae west. There is on it only an empty nylon helmet bag, and I look at it for a long time.

I try to remember what I last said to him. I cannot remember. It was something trivial. I think of the times that we would jostle each other as we lifted our bulky flying equipment from the racks at the same time. It got so that one of us would have to flatten himself against a wall locker while the other would lift his gear from the rack.

Don had a family at home, he had just bought a new Renault, waiting now outside the door. But these do not impress me as much as the thought that his helmet and chute and mae west are missing from his rack, and that he is scheduled to fly again this afternoon. What arrogant confidence we have when we apply grease pencil to the scheduling board.

The friend whose parachute has hung so long next to mine has become the first recalled Air National Guard pilot to the in Europe.

A shame, a waste, a pity? The fault of the President? If we had not been recalled to active duty and to Europe, Don Slack would not be twisted against a French mountain peak that stands 6,188 feet high. Mrs. Slack could blame the President.

But if Don was not here with his airplane, and all the rest of the Guard with him, there might well have been many more dead Americans in Europe today. Don died in the defense of his country as surely as did the first of the Minutemen, in 1776. And we all, knowingly, play the game.

Tonight I am making a move in that game, moving my token five squares from Wethersfield to Chaumont. I still do not expect to fly into a thunderstorm, for they are isolated ahead, but there is always one section of my mind that is devoted to caution, that considers the events that could cost me the game. That part of my mind has a throttle in it as controllable as the hard black throttle under my left glove. I can pull the caution almost completely back to off during air combat and ground support missions. There, it is the mission over all. The horizon can twist and writhe and disappear, the hills of France can flick beneath my molded plexiglass canopy, can move around my airplane as though they were fixed on a spinning sphere about me. There is but one thing fixed in war and practice for war: the target. Caution plays little part. Caution is thrown to the 400-knot wind over my wings and the game is to stop the other airplane, and to burn the convoy.

When the throttle that controls caution is at its normal position, it is a computer weighing risk against result. I do not normally fly under bridges; the risk is not worth the result. Yet low-level navigation missions, at altitudes of 50 feet, do not offend my sense of caution, for the risk of scratching an airplane is worth the result of training, of learning and gaining experience from navigating at altitudes where I cannot see more than two miles ahead.

Every flight is weigh

ed in the balance. If the risk involved outweighs the result to be gained, I am nervous and on edge. This is not an absolute thing that says one flight is Dangerous and another is Safe, it is completely a mental condition. When I am convinced that the balance is in favor of the result I am not afraid, no matter the mission. Carried to extremes, a perfectly normal flight involving takeoff, circling the air base, and landing is dangerous, if I am not authorized to fly one of the government’s airplanes that day.