Alan Cockrell
Tail of the Storm
For Eleanor,
She Who Deserves Better.
Dedicated to
those who flew or served
in the Tail of the Storm.
Finally, their story is told.
A pilot's business is with the wind,
with the stars,
with the night,
with the sand,
with the sea.
He strives to outwit the forces of nature.
He stares in expectancy of the dawn
the way a gardener awaits the coming of spring.
He looks forward to port as a promised land,
and truth for him is what lives in the stars.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Mary Cockrell, my beloved sister-in-law and dispassionate counselor, whose help in putting the manuscript in final form was invaluable. I also thank Walter Sistrunk, Jr., for preparing the illustrations. Quotations of Antoine de Saint-Exupery that appear on page vii and at the beginning of chapter 7 are taken from
In chapter 18, Charles Lindbergh is quoted from
Prologue
Some walls in the house were bare and in dire need of decoration, so we went out on a rare spending spree. But before going we made an agreement. I would pick out a painting that suited my fancy, and she would choose one to her liking. We would not judge one another's selections. Mine would hang in the study, hers in the bedroom.
Almost immediately I spotted mine from a distance. It was a bold painting of a magnificent three-masted bark running before the wind, sails billowing, seas breaking across her decks. Just standing there, staring at it, made you smell salt spray and hear the wind howling through the rigging. Yes, that was for me. The painting glowed with visions of adventure, challenge, and discovery.
She continued to browse while my painting was matted and framed. Then she made her selection. It was done almost entirely in subtly contrasting shades of her favorite color, lavender. A lady, dressed in a flowing, wind- blown gown stood at the shore, her back to the viewer, and in the distance-sails. 'This is me,' she proclaimed, with her characteristic lopsided smile and a subtle sigh. 'I'm she who waits.'
I had voyaged in and out of her life for seventeen years on vessels borne not by sails but by wings. The first time I had departed for the west and an odious, petering war. Not long after we hung the paintings, I left her on the shore again and flew east toward a gathering storm.
One.
The White Snakes
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life's star. .
But trailing clouds of glory do we come.
Something bizarre is being born out there. An embryonic grayish white snake, gnarled and pulsating, twists and grows in the stratospheric hurricanes, then billows into an enormous caterpillar. A long, pointed snout emerges and approaches, imperceptibly at first but then gathers momentum and rockets inexorably toward us, its grotesque body billowing and boiling behind it.
A small arrowhead shape materializes at the point of the tentacle. Growing vestiges of wings, tail, and engines, it flashes underneath us at a closure speed equal to that of the turning Earth. And we fly onward above the wisps and boils of the dying snake, watching as the bluish gray expanse ahead gives birth to yet another white serpent.
On the cloud deck far below is the stain of a long comet on the satin surface. It's the shadow of our own tentacle. At the point is a nucleus which is us crowned with a rainbowlike halo cast by the refraction of the sun's rays around the aircraft. I've noticed at times, when the shadow is nearer, that the center of the halo is the plane's cockpit. I stare at it like a child spellbound before an aquarium.
And I chew absentmindedly at the hole. I'm one of the few heavy jet pilots who still wear gloves a habit, I suppose, from my fighter pilotdays. My right nomex flight glove has a hole in it on the index finger, where I fiddle incessantly with the sharp-edged autopilot controller. I need a new pair, but I like the feel of my old ones. This cockpit fits me like the gloves. It's old but warm and familiar. The seats and upholstery are frayed, like my gloves. The instrument panels and consoles are caked with the paint of countless brushes. I'm surrounded by the switchology and instrumentation of a twenty-five-year-old technology.
Yet, strangely, I sometimes feel like a nineteenth-century citizen cast in a futuristic dream, like a sojourner from the past living out a fantasy. I must have plowed up a magic bottle in a Pickens County cornfield and asked the genie inside to give me wings; to send me to some future world of adventure and excitement. And the genie said I had much to learn if I thought such things were the keys to contentment. Nevertheless, he would make it so.
I clearly remember Dave 'Pink' Floyd's sobering remark that morning nine months ago. He was signing a hand receipt and holstering a.38 caliber revolver. The subject of a nearby conversationone of many in the buzzing operations roomwas the latest news release. Iraqi forces were steadily flowing south into Kuwait. The Saudi oil
