mistake. The MAC command post gave me the wrong room number. I'll have their asses for this, don't worry, buddy. Get on back in there and get some sleep. I'll straighten this mess out right now.' We usher him back to the bunk.
We find the real Lemanski, who somehow learned of the alert, already moving bags down in the lobby, and join in the bag drag out to curbside, where the bus is waiting. On a shuttle back into the lobby, we see that the boomer has come down to see us off. He stands there like the creature from the black lagoon but still looks confused. I don't know if he intends to attack or what. I grab a couple of bags and call out to him. 'Lemanski, get on back to bed, son. We'll check on you later.'
'What?' the real Lemanski shouts from the doorway.
'Huh? Never mind, I'll explain later. Let's get out of here.'
Seven.
Pain of a Different Death
When a pilot dies in the harness, his death seems something that inheres in the craft [flying] itself, and in the beginning the pain it brings is perhaps less than the pain sprung of a different death.
Our Starlifter is cruising back uprange, straight into the setting sun, away from the gathering storm of war. Ahead is the Red Sea with the jagged, ocher Egyptian mountains beyond. Cockpit instrument lights are being turned on. Sunglasses are being stowed. We're prepping the jet for dark flight.
Unencumbered by haze and pollutants, the sun departs with a great brilliance at this altitude. But the panoramic splay of crimson and orange lasts much longer tonight because we're chasing the sun. We will of course lose the race; the earth turns twice as fast as our speed, but the lingering spectacle inspires a kind of silent reverence through the cockpit. Only the rush of the slipstream and the occasional crackle of modulated radio voices intrude on our sunset ponderings.
'MAC Victor 6522, Red Crown, you're radar contact, cleared area transition.'
'6522, roger,' I reply, staring at the sunset, with visions of Dave's little plane silhouetted against it. It seemed we were always flying late in the evening, the closing of the day forcing us back to the world.
And I remember how we, the group of us, sat there on that old concrete fence rail until the sun went down, watching the Cessnas take off and land. Watching with envy. Trading dreams. Breaking out of the egg of adolescence, feeling a calling swell within us. Certain that it would be fulfilled but electrified with impatience, we sensed our day was coming.
We were about evenly endowed then with the traits of future professional fliers. And if God had combined the three of us into one pilot, Gene Key would have been the brain and I the hands. But the heartthat would have been Dave DeRamus.
The three of us were cut from the same mold: products of financially comfortable working-class families, the oldest sons, townies who lived at home while attending college, the seeds of flight planted in us by fathers who themselves were occasional fliers. But Dave was different in a delightful, inspirational way.
He was the extrovert, the talker, the dreamer, the romanticizer. And he grew to love flying with every fiber of his being. While Gene quietly, confidently calculated his course in life, and t ambled toward my goal, depending on luck and divine help, Dave swaggered ahead with bold declarations and unabashed single-mindedness, leaving in his wake a reputation of cockiness.
Dave had a stocky athletic build. He had a passion for football and water skiing and pursued them with intensity and determination, as he did everything. Yet his eyes were soft and far-focused, as if he were discontented and a bit melancholy. His slight smile was always there except when he was directing scorn at his two favorite targets: government bureaucracy and rotten flying weather. He had a tremendous sense of humor and loved to laugh but was also moody. In those early years Dave was a model young Christian who was active in church. He often delivered the invocation at our Air Force ROTC social functions. But change came. An elective course in religious studies, he claimed, had opened his mind. He questioned some of the teachings of his faith and left the church after someone told his mother that Dave was going to Hell for doubting.
His intellectual departure from traditional belief troubled Gene and me, who stayed the course, but we all remained steadfast friends, bonded by our passion for flight.
And finally our day came, but the Air Force sent us to different bases for flight school and later gave us sharply different flying assignments. Gene became an instructor, I went to tactical fighters, and Dave was assigned to the secretive world of electronic warfare. Soon Gene and I had taken wives, while Dave chose a single life. But we stayed in touch and visited when we could.
On one such visit Dave and I met in Spokane, Washington. I recall so clearly what he said that crystal clear afternoon, there in the beautiful, forested mountain countryside north of Spokane. I had a weekend off from the rigors of Survival School at Fairchild AFB, and he had driven over from Malmstrom AFB at Great Falls, Montana, to see me. Neither of us yet had an airplane of our own. We noticed a lone biplane performing aerobatics over a large deserted meadow. Dave and I stopped and watched as the red wings rolled, looped, and spun, the little engine reverberating in the silence of the valley. The pilot obviously intended his private air show for the eyes of God only, but we watched, beholden. And as the plane finally faded away he remarked that he expected his life would end some day in the cockpit of an airplane. I berated him for being a fatalist. Now I wish he had been right.
I got a letter from him while I was stationed in Thailand. He had bought an airplane, a used Grumman Yankee. He wrote of the plane's sporty handling characteristics and fighterlike appearance. I decided that if he could afford one on first lieutenant's pay, then so could I. And so I too bought a plane as soon as I returned Stateside, an old Cessna 140. But when I visited with Dave and flew the wonderful little low-wing two-seater that embodied the sheer joy and exaltation of flight, I knew I had to have a Yankee as well. I sold the '140.
We flew together military style whenever we met, wing to wing with only a few feet of separation, waltzing in cumulus-studded skies, pursuing one another in mock air battles. Afterward we would sip Mountain Dew, which was his drink of preference, and rap at length about the stuff of flying. As always, I listened mostly and watched the flash in his eyes as he talked about aspect ratios, power loadings, and corner velocities. He would sketch out dreams of elaborate modifications to his Yankee and talk of plans for air journeys to fascinating places. And he talked of new friends he had made. Friends, he said, who were open-minded and unpretentious, who shared his spirited views and philosophies.
Dave was clearly jealous of me when I landed a fighter assignment out of pilot training. He was a good flier, but there were no fighter slots available for his class, so he settled for flying EB-57s. The old 1950s vintage twin jet bomber had been converted so that it could carry electronic equipment to test the defensive capabilities of the more modern interceptors of the North American Air Defense Command. Dave's ho-hum job, as he described it, was to fly around and be blown out of the northern skies by imaginary missiles. And I knew, as I learned and practiced fighter tactics in the southwestern deserts, that he felt destiny had forsaken him. But Dave had a plan to find his way into a fighter cockpit and eventually to his ultimate dream: test pilot school.
We took chances in those days that we would never take now. We flew cross-country one summer in formation from Montana to Alabama. Low clouds stranded us in Springfield, Missouri, and we became impatient. Neither of our planes were equipped for safe instrument flying. While waiting we began to compare the planes and discovered that, together, we had the basic tools to make an instrument flight. He had a good attitude indicator; mine was mushy. I had a transponder; he didn't. We both had VOR receivers. We could back each other up! We didn't have the capability to make a precision instrument approach but reasoned that it didn't matter because the weather was reported to be improving along our intended route. We would make our two planes one. We would pierce the gray clouds glued to one another's wings. We had both done it in Air Force jets. Why not now? We decided to file an instrument flight plan and launch in formation.
The guy at the flight service station counter looked over our flight plan and pointed to an obvious error. We had written in two different aircraft numbers in the box reserved for such identification. Dave advised him to read
