of airspeed!
“Come on, Jake.” Morgan’s calm voice.
The pilot rolled the plane ninety degrees and let the nose drop toward the horizon. Slowly, slowly it came down and the airspeed crept up. When the nose reached the horizon, he rolled wings level.
They were at 13,000 feet. He was shaking uncontrollably. What had he done? He had almost killed them!
Morgan must have sensed how shaken he was. As they droned around on autopilot in a lazy circle with Jake shivering, the bombardier had talked to him. Jake could never remember what Morgan had said. He had just talked to let Jake hear the sound of his voice, calm and soothing; he talked until Jake was over his panic. And when they had landed, McPherson never mentioned the incident to anyone, had never reported the near disaster. He merely shook Jake’s hand in the parking lot and gave him a parting smile.
And he had saved both their lives!
Now he was dead. Two years and hundreds of thousands of miles later, he was dead.
Jake began to write. After three drafts he had the semblance of an acceptable letter. It wasn’t really acceptable, but it was the best he could manage. Two more drafts in ink gave him a letter he was prepared to sign.
Dear Sharon, By now you have been notified of Morgan’s death in action.
He was killed on a night strike on a target in North Vietnam, doing the best he could for his country. That fact will never fill the emptiness that his passing leaves but it will make him shine even brighter in my memory.
I flew with Morgan for over two years. We spent over six hundred hours together in the air. I knew him perhaps as well as any man can know another.
We both loved flying and that shared love sealed our friendship.
Since I knew him so well, I am well aware of the depth of his love for you and Bobby and realize the magnitude of the tragedy of his passing. You have my deepest and most sincere sympathy.
Jake What would she think when she read it? Would she save it and get it out in those moments when the pain must be revisited? Ten or twenty years from now, on a cool spring day when she’s cleaning the attic, would she find this letter from her lost past? The paper would be faded and yellow then. She would remember how he looked when she received it, the final notice that dreams of her youth had died far away, in a forsaken land, in a forgotten cause. Perhaps she would show it to her son when he asked about his father.
He stared at himself in the mirror over the sink. Where would he be in twenty years? Dead like McPherson and the nameless men who died under his bombs Or selling insurance and paying off a mortgage, but with the day- to-day affairs that fill up life yet somehow leave it empty?
He turned off the light and lay down on his bunk. Tired as he was, sleep would not come. He reviewed that last flight from beginning to end. There must be something he could have done differently.
But that bullet had come out of nowhere; he couldn’t have avoided it. Now Morgan was dead, and for what?
He wanted to get the bastards for that! He remembered the RockEye attack on the guns. God, that had felt good! He had pickled the four cluster bombs at precisely the right moment. Too bad the A-6 didn’t have a gun like the A-7 Corsair had. If only he had a gun! He could just drop the nose, put the pipper in the sight a fraction below the target, pull the trigger, and walk those slugs right up onto the gomers. As he lay there in his bunk, he could feel the recoil from the hammering weapon. The sensation was so real he panicked and groped for the light.
With the light on there was only the small room. He found Lundeen’s bottle and, sitting down in his desk chair, took a pull of the liquor.
Camparelli’s words came back to him. “I don’t want anybody in those planes who thinks he’s John Wayne on a vengeance mission.” But it was damn hard not to want revenge. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a body for a body….
So he’s dead and nothing can bring him back. He died bombing a bunch of trees in a shitty little place in a shitty little war that we don’t have the guts to try to win, and he would get a flag for his coffin. Jesus, you lose him like that and you want something more than a flag. You can’t help wishing that if he had to die that he’d died bombing a target that might have meant something. So you could honestly say, so Sharon could truthfully say, so his son could say with pride in the years to come: He died for…. My dad helped win the war by…. He died in the name of…. What? Nothing. Christ, what you want is for his death to mean something. You want a reason.
Maybe you can make his death mean something. You could sneak north some dark night and bomb something worth the trip. Really kick the gomers in the nuts.
He was up and pacing around the little room. It is possible, he told himself. Yes. No one but your bombardier knows where you go after you cross the beach. The Americans can’t follow you on radar, and the gomers have no idea where you’re supposed to go. So you can go anywhere you please and attack any damn thing.
What crazy thoughts! You pull a stunt like that, Jake, and you’ll be court-martialed … crucified.
Fuck that. So what? McPherson’s dead. I want a target that will make the gomers bleed. Like they made Morgan bleed. And Sharon.
And me….
When he lay down on his bunk again, he left the light on and concentrated on the creaks and groans of the ship as its steel beams and plates moved to meet the stresses of the swells.
He lay a long time listening to the sounds of the ship.
FOUR
It waSARotten night in the tropics. The rain had resumed just after sunset. On the bridge of the ship the officer of the deck made a note of the time for the log.
After a few minutes the OOD ordered the bridge windshield wipers turned on, and he searched the blackness for the lights of the destroyer that should be out ahead of the carrier. She had been visible only a moment ago. He checked the radar screen. Still just where she should be, five thousand yards ahead.”
“Let me know if the Fannon gets out of position,” he said to the junior officer of the watch, then called down to the Combat Information Center and repeated the order to the watch officer who sat surrounded by surface-and- air-search radar consoles. Even the air on the bridge was laden with moisture. The one hundred percent humidity prevented sweat from evaporating, so damp hair, shirts, and underwear gave each man his o particular odor.
The OOD walked over to the port wing of the bridge and looked at the rain-whipped flight deck below. The airplanes were huddled together in the blurred red light. Their up-thrust wings reminded him of arms raised in supplication. The tropical rain was good for the planes; it would wash off some of the grime and salt spray. The sound of the rain pounding on the bridge’s steel and the rhythmic swish-swish of the wipers made the watch officer feel alone in the night.
This line period would be over in two days time. Then the ship would leave Yankee Station for the pleasures of Subic Bay, a thirty-six-hour trip across the South China Sea. On that cheerful morning, the jungle-covered mountains that encircled the U.S. Navy’s home in the South Pacific would rise from the sea and break the monotonous horizon. Five glorious and mostly carefree days and nights of maximum liberty awaited most of the men. For some, of course, there would still be long hours of hard work, but even they could look forward to evenings on the beach.
U.S. Naval Station Subic Bay and the adjoining U.S. Naval Air Station Cubi Point, the Philippines, were not places normally advertised on travel posters, but dry land is dry land. Well, it was dry land until a tropical storm opened heaven’s gates, but then a sailor could always rationalize that mud is preferable to saltwater.
When sailors on liberty grew tired of drinking in the bars, or playing golf in the blazing sun, or strolling through the navy exchanges, they could then amble across the bridge that spans the Perfume River, really a drainage canal, and sample the exotic delights of Olongapo City. Some 150,000 people struggled to stay alive in this crowded town of half-dirt-half-paved streets.
Most of the people of Po City made a living, of sorts, chasing the Yankee dollars brought across the bridge by thirsty, sex-starved American servicemen momentarily free of Mother, God, and the U.S. Navy.
A kaleidoscope of sensual delights, the city offered cheap booze and horse-piss beer and legions of little
