Then the crew did the most gallant thing I have ever heard of. They removed their masks and gathered the children around them. Their self-sacrifice could in no way save the kids. But these brave men decided that it was not only preferable but also strangely appropriate that they die with the children.
Later, they learned that there was no gas; the Scuds had conventional explosives only. An airman had suffered an epileptic seizure, which resembles the sinister effects of nerve gas, and thus the alert had been issued.
Although above-average courage is expected of a person in uniform, it remains uncanny to me how America has always been blessed with warriors whose integrity and honor exceed those of the general populace. We joke a lot about that closing statement in Michener's
Fourteen.
Dawn Patrol
Looking like dirty brown cirrus clouds, the normally blue skies overhead are corrupted with ominous, oily mares tails. The sky grows dimmer and greasier to the north, and as we begin our descent into the northern Saudi base at Jubail, we see a long, tarry black line where the horizon ought to be. The Iraqis have set fire to hundreds of oil wells in a despotic act of denial and defiance. Yet I've seen this before. It wasn't on this grand a scale, but it was a desperate struggle under murky skies like these. And it was a different kind of war-one fought right after Viet Nam, for me, and close to home. These smoky skies vividly remind me of one day in that campaign.
The telephone's ring was murderous. My hand fumbled in the dim morning light, trying to find the blasted receiver. I mumbled something and heard the operations dispatcher's pitched voice.
'The Loop's blown up!'
No more talk was necessary. I acknowledged and hung up the phone. It had finally happened. Our territory had been attacked by a vicious and relentless enemy. Attacked at our most vulnerable point. The campaigns of the last few weeks had been skirmishes by comparison.
I rushed to the airfield and dashed into the hangar, switched on the lights, and shoved open the big door. The dawning light spilled into the cavernous structure, bathing the sleeping planes in morning. I trotted over to the winged mongrel, picked it up by the tail handle and heaved it out backward. It was like pulling an unwilling dog out of his house by the hind legs. I could almost feel the wings stretching around behind me, rubbing sleepy windshield eyes.
'Naw, go away. lt's too early for this, man,' whispered the Cub. I answered it as I strained to drag the main wheels over the hangar door tracks. 'Gotta go, Buddy. Today's the big one. The Loop blew last night.'
I ran through a quick preflight of N29FC, the 1952 model Piper Super Cub. She was a simple airplane, built of aluminum tubing covered with fabric, doped, and painted a shade of puke green, a 150horsepower Lycoming under her cowling and an old tube radio with a single frequency mounted in her wing root. 'ALA FORESTRY COMM.' was painted boldly under her wings.
The familiar sour, pungent odor of old fabric airplanes filled my senses and roused my spirit as I strapped on the Cub and primed the engine. The craft fit me well. It was good to sit centerline again and to have a stick control instead of the wimpy wheel that I had become accustomed to. I flipped the two magneto switches, which clicked with an irreverent loudness in the early silence of the airfield. Then I cracked the throttle and engaged the starter.
The starter motor sang. The prop swung. One revolution. Two. The engine coughed, shuddered, died. But still the prop swung to the starter's strained song.
Then came that explosion of the engine bursting into life, that blessed awakening of this noble creature. My heart soared at the engine's rumble and the sight of the prop blurring, then disappearing. A shudder ran through the airframe from nose to tail, like that of a dog shaking off a douse, as the heavy prop induced its torque.
I nudged the throttle and leaned to the side, peering ahead as the little tail-dragger rolled out. I taxied fast, checking the magnetos and flight controls as I went; there was no time to waste. The battle was raging, and I had a twenty-minute flight to reach it. I checked the final approach for traffic and took the runway, ramming the throttle home and walking the rudder pedals as the Cub surged ahead. Almost immediately, I applied forward pressure on the stick. The tail lifted and the Cub scurried ahead on its two main wheels. One quick glance inside and I saw that the speed was fifty knots. Enough. I eased off the forward pressure, brought the stick back slightly, and we were airborne. And what a glorious word it is: airborne, born of the air, born once again, renewed, refreshed-sweet release.
I held the nose low for a few seconds to let the Cub accelerate, then rolled quickly to the right, banking sharply as we climbed over the forest, coming about to a northwest course. The day had dawned gloriously clear, with a fresh southerly breeze; not a cloud was in sight. But that's what the enemy wanted. It was his kind of day, as yesterday had been and the several days before. And as we climbed above the tall pines, I saw that he had struck with a vengeance.
I was stunned by the magnitude of it. A great, towering mushroom cloud loomed ahead on the horizon. I switched on the radio, and excited voices began to boom through my headset. Our ground forces were being mobilized and sent into the fray. Desperate calls were going out for reinforcements. I announced that I was airborne and en route, but no one seemed to take notice. I announced again, and the dispatcher admonished me to hurry. But the Cub was giving me her all, blazing through the sky at eighty-five knots, her top speed.
I pulled out my charts as we drew closer to the imposing smoke column, but I wondered if my presence could make a difference. Normally, my job was to find each of the little pockets of intruders and call one of our ground teams in to repel it. There was little else I could do. The Cub was unarmedfar too small to carry the heavy ordnance needed to attack this determined foe from the air. But our people were already well aware of the enemy's brutal strike at the place known as the Loop. Our advance ground forces were already engaged. So what was I to do?
As we approached the besieged area, the details of the gigantic cloud began to break out. Broom and black smoke thick enough to crash into boiled, rolled, and churned its way upward, carried northward with the winds. Down sun of the inferno the landscape was eclipsed by darkness. Closer still, the orange brilliance of fierce conflagrations began to show beneath it. What an awesome feeling; the Cub was so small and frail against the nefarious thing ahead. I was no more than a mosquito flying toward a roaring campfire.
Finally we arrived and began to scout the battlefield. It appeared that it happened exactly as one of the old- timers had predicted. 'Happens every three or four years,' he had said. The Loop is a great bend in the railroad, winding its way around a canyon nearly to the point of meeting itself again, like a horseshoe bent inward. Sparks spew onto the railside from the trains' hot brakes, as they enter the Loop. Sooner or later, the inevitable happens. The sparks catch in the brush and explode into rampaging fires racing up the ravines, devouring the lifeblood of this regionits timberand threatening the dwellings of the nearby town.
I circumnavigated the fire, trying to determine its extent and to find possible roads or trails through which the trucks could approach it. The big flatbeds carried bulldozers, but the slow dozers were useless unless they could be deposited at a strategic point downwind and near the fire. I could easily tell the trucks and dozers where best to counterattack, but they had no radios then. I could only communicate with the base station and towers. I watched, frustrated, as the trucks wandered about, the drivers blindly discussing and planning their action.
I was an outsider here, a temporary pilot, flying only for the season, then I would be gone. But the forest rangers down there had lived around these parts all their lives. They knew the land well. And I was a stranger with whom they were guarded, standoffish, and skeptical. I overheard a lookout tower operator once refer to me, in a transmission to the base station, as 'that airplane pilot.' They really were good people, but from time to time I was the object of their humor, like the time a tower man asked me to check out a smoke sighting. Not knowing the countryside, I relied on highly detailed maps using the section-township-range gridwork system, maps that the
