A Gift of Wings

As the filming went into the final week, painters converged on the drab German airplanes and brushed them into the flying rainbows of the Richthofen Circus. We flew the same airplanes as before, but now it was a point of fun to fly the all-red Fokker that would appear on the screen as Von Richthofen himself, or the black Pfalz that would be Hermann Goering’s.

I drew the red Fokker once for the ignoble scene of having one of my wingmen shot down by the Englander. Then once again as the Red Baron to come roaring to the rescue of Werner Voss, shooting an SE off his tail.

The next day I was Roy Brown, chasing Von Richthofen (a red Fokker Triplane, now) and shooting him down for the final scene of the film.

I tried saying it when I climbed out of the cockpit after that flight, carrying my parachute through the quiet evening to our trailer. “I shot down the Red Baron.”

I thought about that. How many pilots can make that statement? “Hey, Chris,” I said. He was stretched out in his half of the trailer. “I shot down the Red Baron!”

His reply was incisive. “Hm,” he said. He didn’t even open his eyes.

Which was to say, So what? So it’s just a movie we’re flying for, and a B movie besides and if it wasn’t for the flying scenes, I wouldn’t cross the street to see the picture, at home.

That’s when it occurred to me that it’s the same in a real war as it was in ours of make-believe. Pilots don’t attend wars or films because they like the blood or the sex or the B-level plots of the things. More important than film is the flying; more important than war is the flying.

It’s probably a shame to say: neither films nor wars will ever lack for men to fly their airplanes. I am myself one of a great many who volunteered for both. But surely someday, a thousand years from now, we can build a world where the only place to log combat time is in the lens of some director shouting, “SMOKE NOW, SMOKE!”

All we need is the will to do it, some replica MIGs, some antique Phantoms with dummy guns, sawdust missiles … If we wanted to, a thousand years from now, we could really make some great films.

Prayers

“You’d better be careful what you pray for,” somebody once said, “because you’re going to get it.”

I thought of that, twisting a Fokker D-7 hard through my little part of the Great Mass Dogfight scene in Von Richthofen and Brown. The scene had looked neat and safe when we chalked it out on the briefing-room blackboard, but now, in the air, it was scary—fourteen replica fighters crushed into one small cube of sky, each one chasing the other, a few losing position and diving blindly through the rest, rainbow paints flashing colored sunlight, the loud quick blast of a Pfalz engine as the plane flashed beneath without seeing, smoke trails and the thick smell of fireworks in the wind.

Everyone survived that morning, but I was still shaking a bit when I thought about being careful what we pray for. Because the very first magazine article I wrote, twelve years ago, was one in which I prayed that those of us who learned to fly in closed-cockpit airplanes might have a place to rent an open-cockpit one, for the fun of it, “… and fly a Fokker D-7 airframe with one hundred fifty modern horses in the nose,” I had written. And here I was this moment in helmet and goggles and scarf, pilot of a yellow-blue-white-green airplane, Fok. DVII lettered authentically on the fuselage. I came home from the film with forty hours in Fokkers and Pfalzes and SE-5s, my prayers answered so completely that I had all that kind of flying I cared to do for quite some time.

A few years after I had prayed for the Fokker, I had gone for a ride in Chris Cagle’s J-3 Cub, at the Merced Fly-in. Cagle had a thousand hours in that Cub alone, I guess, and as we flew across the afternoon he showed me how to fly at zero miles per hour and how to loop and roll the thing. I remember looking out the open door at the puffed yeast-doughnut tire, and past it to the ground way down below, thinking what a great little airplane, and some day, by God, I’ll own me a Cub! Today I own it, and it has big puffy yeast-doughnut tires and the doors open in flight and I look down and remember, Sure enough, it happened again: I got what I prayed for.

Time after time I’ve watched it happen, in my life and the lives of people I know. I’ve tried to find somebody who didn’t get what he prayed for, but to date I haven’t found him. I believe it: whatever we wrap away in thought is opened for us, one day, in experience.

There was a girl I met in New York, who lived in a tight-packed Brooklyn tenement, acred about by old concrete and cracking brick, by frustration and fear and quick wild violence in the street. I wondered aloud why she didn’t get out, move to Ohio or Wyoming country, where she could breathe free and touch the grass once in her life.

“I couldn’t do that,” she said, “I don’t know what it’s like out there.” And then she said a very honest and knowing thing. “I guess I’m more afraid of what I don’t know than I hate what I have right now …”

Better to have riots in the streets, better squalor and subways and sardine crowds, she prayed, than the unknown. As she prayed, she received; she meets nothing now that she hasn’t met before.

All at once I saw the obvious. The world is as it is because that is the way we wish it to be. Only as our wish changes does the world change. Whatever we pray for, we get.

Look about, sure enough. Every day the footsteps of answered prayer are ours to walk, we have only to lean forward and walk them, one by one. The steps to my Fokker were many. I helped a man with his magazine, years ago, and so came to know him. His prayers were in old airplanes and business deals and motion pictures, and he took his chance to buy, in a business deal with a film studio, the fleet of World War I fighters. When he mentioned this, I said I’d be ready if he ever needed a pilot to fly one; that is. I took one step that offered itself to be taken. A year later he needed two American pilots to join the group, in Ireland, flying the Fokkers. When he called, I was ready to finish the path I had begun with the first article, that first prayer about the D-7.

From time to time, when I was barnstorming the Midwest a few summers ago, a passenger or two would say, “What a great life you have, free to go wherever you want, whenever … Sure wish I could do it.” Wistful, like that.

“Come along, then,” I’d say. “You can sell tickets, keep the crowds behind the wing, strap the passengers into the front seat. We might make enough money to live on, we might go broke, but you’re invited.” I could say this, first because I could always use a ticket seller, and second because I knew what the answer would be.

Silence first, then, “Thanks, but you see, I’ve got my job. If it wasn’t for my job, I’d go …” Which was only to say that each wistful one wasn’t wistful at all, each had prayed harder for his job than for the life of a barnstormer, as the New York girl had prayed more for her tenement than for the grass of Wyoming or for any other unknown.

I consider this from time to time, flying. We always get what we pray for, like it or not, no excuses accepted. Every day our prayers turn more into fact; whom we most want to be, we are. It all sounds like justice to me; I can’t say as I mind the way this world is built, at all.

Return of a lost pilot

We had been flying north, low-level formation in a pair of F-100 day fighters out over the Nevada desert. I was leading, that time, and Bo Beaven’s airplane was twenty feet away at my right wingtip. It was a clean morning, I remember, and we were cruising three hundred feet above the ground. I was having some trouble with the radiocompass, leaning down in the cockpit, resetting a circuit breaker, clicking the control from ANT to LOOP to COMP, to see if the needle would show any life. Then about the time I thought that the probl

em was in the antenna itself, and that maybe I shouldn’t plan on having any help from the radio at all, there came Beaven’s voice filtered in my earphones. It was neither a command nor a warning … it was a simple calm question: “Do you plan on flying into this mountain?”

I jerked my head up, startled, and there angled in front of us was a rugged little mountain, all brown rock and sand and tumbleweed, tilting, flying toward us at something over three hundred nautical miles per hour. Beaven said nothing more. He didn’t loosen his formation or move to break away. He spoke in the way that he flew his airplane … if you choose to fly straight ahead, there will be not one hole in the rock, but two.

I eased the control stick back, wondering where the hill had come from, and it flicked a hundred feet beneath us and was gone, silent as a deadly dark star.