I had to stop going to restaurants. The sight of people enjoying coffee was so offensive that I stormed out half the time anyway. They drink it with zombie-like expressions that suggest the union of sexual pleasure, religious fervor, and state ceremony.
The users and apologists look at me with wonder, and say, "Ah, but I enjoy it!" Yes, you enjoy it! Heroin addicts enjoy heroin, perverts enjoy their perversions, and Hitler enjoyed invading France. You enjoy it, furthermore, mainly because without it you suffer. The mechanics are similar to those of blackmail and extortion, and the gangster in the piece is a tiny bean that has seized control of half the world.
"How are you?" the commandante asked.
"I'm fine."
Never had he asked me such a tender question. As far as I can remember, from the beginning of time, no one in uniform had ever asked me this. Given that you might be vaporized at any moment or ripped in three by a cannon shell, queries such as "How are you feeling?" seem ridiculous. I believe it has always been this way, the world 'round, even in armies at peace.
"I was fascinated to hear," the commandante said, continuing his formal tone, "that you have a knowledge of aeronautics."
I said nothing.
"And it occurred to me that we have never spoken about your background."
I said nothing, but my expression hardened.
"What did you do before you came to us?"
I rose to my feet and turned toward the door. As I was beginning to move, he said, "No! Wait. Sit down. I didn't mean to offend you. I'm just curious."
"I worked for a bank," I said, having decided on the instant to answer him. I was not afraid of offending the commandante—they needed me more than I needed them—but I knew that if I made myself a total mystery he would become far more interested than if I threw him some shrimp.
"What kind of a bank?"
"A very small bank," I said, thinking of its physical size, "in New York."
"Not Manufacturing Handover Truss?" he asked, trying to impress me with the fact that he could (sort of) name a New York Bank.
"Oh no, nothing like that. Manufacturing Handover Truss has many, many branches, and we had only one." I excluded foreign cities and domestic affiliates, of course.
"What you did there?" the commandante asked in his smoothest English.
"I was a clerk-messenger," I replied, going back to 1918.
"And why you come here?" he asked.
"It hot here," I said, adapting to his syntax. "No snow. Good for body. Very relaxing."
"No treaty of extradition?" he asked.
"What that?"
"Why you leave little bank?"
"A discrepancy."
"A discrepancy?"
"Yes. I myself decided to leave, entirely of my own volition, after I became responsible for a discrepancy. It was the kind of thing that could easily have been rectified by a simple journal entry, and probably was."
The commandante, who was no fool, closed one eye, lifted one eyebrow higher than the other, and asked, "How many zeros?"
Deciding that he was asking me about my war record, and wanting to avoid tooting my own horn, I took advantage of the fact that I had shot down only Messerschmitts and Heinkels. "Absolutely none," I averred. "Zero Zeros."
"Then your leaving the bank was strictly a matter of honor?" he said, returning to his own language.
"A matter of honor and entirely my decision."
He seemed much relieved, though I cannot imagine why he might have been anxious.
"The air force guy whose name is Popcorn, you know him?"
"He's in my class."
"He says you have to have been a fighter pilot, but he can't figure out which war."
"Of course he can't," I said. "I was born in nineteen-hundred and four. I was fourteen when we signed the Armistice at the end of the First World War, and thirty-seven when we entered the Second, well beyond draft age." I did not volunteer that I had volunteered.
"So you were not a fighter pilot."
"All my life I have been interested in aeronautics and the principles of flight," I continued, truthfully. "I read books. I imagine. I believe that I could fly a 747 purely by logic, and I often dream of being the passenger who is called to land the plane after the three pilots have had heart attacks."
"That's a strange dream."
"Yes. The only thing I don't like about it is that I would be very uncomfortable dressed as a nun. But I love to fly! In fact, let me take you up in a small plane, and I'll show you how well theoretical knowledge can be translated into practice."
"No!" he said, holding both hands in front of him with his fingers spread. "That won't be necessary. Obviously, Popcorn is crazy."
"Very."
"You won't go up with him, will you?"
"No no," I said. "I'm too old to fly."
I'm too old to fly. With these words, I was magically thrown back to the war. I felt as if I were in a fog on a moor, and I could hardly see the commandante or feel the heat of Rio in summer, for suddenly I was a much younger man, in the sky, over Europe.
I must have made my way from the commandante's office blindly, for I remember neither how I exited nor if I departed politely, mesmerized as I was by the roar of the Merlin engine in my P-51. I used to think of the Merlin as if it were fifteen-hundred and twenty horses that could work continuously for twelve hours. Although my father bought an automobile when I was six years old, until then we traveled about on horseback or in a wagon, and even after that we used the automobile only on special occasions, because it was hard to start and you had to change the tires all the time.
I had thought that people would always have horses, and was amazed that before I was twenty the streets of New York were crowded with automobiles, and that people used them, for example, to go from Albany to Syracuse.
Horses were my first language. I knew the power of one good horse, and it was impressive, for one good horse could pull a wagon that, fully loaded, weighed a ton. It would have to be on fairly level ground; if you wanted to pull a wagon like that up a gradual incline you'd hitch up another animal. With a four-horse team you could run the steepest hills of Ossining all day long, even when winter had captured the town, icicles hung from the gutters, and escaped slabs of packed snow slid down Main Street at fifty miles an hour.
A good horse can carry a 150-pound man as if he didn't exist. Many times I have rocketed along blind and dangerous trails because my mount has forgotten that he carries me. If 150 pounds is to one horse an almost inconsequential burden, what of 1,520 horses that carry the five tons of a fully loaded P-51—including armament, ammunition, bombs, fuel, and fuel in drop tanks? And when you were over the target, you were much lighter and leaner, having burned two thousand pounds of fuel and shed your drop tanks. And as you expended ammunition, you grew lighter still.
Simple division says that each horse is carrying six and a half pounds, about the weight of four horseshoes. What we are talking about then is a naked horse that could fly, that never got tired, that had no friction from the ground, less friction in the thin air than near the surface, and the help of gravity in half its maneuvers. A P-51 could really fly. And so could I.
Although in 1941 I was working in the department that advised the bank on political risk, and although I believed the United States would eventually enter the war, I knew very little about the Orient and had estimated that our participation would be delayed until 1943 or 1944, by which time I would have been forty. Forty was then far more significant an indication of diminished physical prowess than it is now, and I believed that, having been too young for the first war, I would as well be too old for the second.
Then came Pearl Harbor. Though thirty-seven, I volunteered. They would have me, however, only as a desk soldier in Washington. As I circulated among the various combat commands, trying to gain entry, I learned that someone who could fly was worth a great many points to the recruiters, who would bend almost any rule to take him in.
I announced th
at I was taking leave from Stillman and Chase, went to an ordinary bank, withdrew $5,000 in cash, and got on the train to Poughkeepsie. Then I walked fifteen miles to Alford Field, found the director of the flying school, and asked him to teach me to fly like an acrobat.
"I can't," he said. "In three weeks I'm going to San Antonio to teach army pilots."
"That's great," I replied. "We've got three whole weeks."
"Not much we can do in that time," he said. "Not safely."
"Did I say safely?"
"No, but I did."
"It's war," I announced. "The whole thing is unsafe. I'll give you five thousand dollars."
"Five thousand for three weeks' work?" It was an immense sum.
"Look, don't get carried away," I said. "I want you to work me fourteen hours a day. That means a lot of flying time, gasoline, extra pay for your mechanic, spare parts, room, board, and the chance that I may crash your plane or even kill you."
"That sounds attractive," he said.
"Hey," I said, "I'm a fast learner. You put me through my paces and I'll wear you out. I can drive just about anything."
He was a few years younger than I, much taller, unsophisticated, and a great pilot. "All right," he said. "For the time remaining to me, which I'm pretty sure is the last three weeks of May, and may be the last three weeks of my life, I'll do it. We're going to be drinking a lot of coffee!"
"The hell we are," I said. "We're not going to drink even one cup."
We started with theory. Sitting down right where we were, I grabbed a pad of paper and he talked for the rest of the day. I was jamming it in like a window-smasher at Tiffany or (as I would later) when I stuffed chocolate-covered cherries into my mouth as I heard Constance coming down the stairs so I could swallow them before she got to the kitchen. I would then pretend to be washing dishes in one of the deep stainless steel sinks, whereas I would actually be drinking a gallon of ice-cold water, because I knew that she wanted to have sex on the steam table, and when I kissed her I didn't want to be found out.
"Why is it," she would ask, "that whenever I find you in the kitchen you're bent into that sink like an ostrich, and when you straighten up you're dripping with ice-cold water as if you've just gone down with the Titanic?"
"I don't know," I'd say, and then all would be lost as she opened her silk robe.
But the only reason I could spend three hours on the steam table with Constance was that I was alive. If I had been dead I wouldn't have been able to do it, although she had a way of showing me her body, which (while I'd been sneaking chocolate cherries) had already been primed and would be just slightly engorged, rosy, and relaxed, a condition that could, perhaps, have awakened the dead. But I couldn't have met her had I been killed in the war, and that I wasn't was partly the result of my three-week ordeal at the hands of Larry Brown, my flying instructor.
Everything he knew, he copied onto me. Even as we ate—no coffee, no coffee ice cream—he went over theory or criticized my technique. I logged more than 150 hours of flying time, of which the last fifty hours were solo and the final twenty-five spent in dogfights. I nearly crashed at least a dozen times, I cut a couple of telephone lines, and I got to love flying not only for what it was, but for the way I learned it.
In May of 1942 the weather was perfect. I would skim the Hudson at 150 miles an hour within two feet of the water to fly beneath the bridges, and then rise into a full roll by launching myself over the banks and their high treetops as if I were the stone from a slingshot. He taught me how to appear from nowhere and disappear almost as fast. He showed me that every shape on the land is cushioned with beds of moving air, that the mountains and hedgerows and hills have along them invisible rivers that flow like water over a weir, and that you can use them to tighten your turns, cushion your dips, and bounce yourself to high altitude faster than you ever thought you could go.
He never came back from San Antonio, this Larry Brown. It happened like that all the time. Too many planes had to be built too fast. Even the P-51, a majestic fighter, was designed in a hundred days. Now it takes a hundred days to put together a seat-belt buckle.
It had taken Larry Brown a lifetime of flying to see the rivers of air. Perhaps, he felt that he was never coming home, and did not want those beautiful, silvery waves to flow unrecognized over the Hudson and its green hills. Perhaps it was the great intensity of my course. Perhaps it was the perfect weather. I don't know. I do know that, before the three weeks were over, I could see them too.
No matter what I did, and despite my special preliminary, my reflexes were not as fast as those of pilots fifteen years my junior. Nor could I shed a lifetime's inhibition in regard to g-force, being upside down, and doing barrel rolls. These things were not incorporated into my nervous system with the same accommodation afforded by my younger colleagues.
It was obvious as we flew that I had neither their agility nor their daring. I was the old man, even though I had dropped ten years from my age and joined at "twenty-seven." And as the war continued, I reached my fortieth year and then my fortieth birthday, and I was dogfighting ME-109's over Germany.
When we were based in Italy doing the transalpine run, a flight surgeon who was examining me figured out that I had been basting the goose.
"How old are you?" he asked.
"Thirty, sir," I answered.
"Like hell," he said. "You're older than I am."
"How old are you, Colonel?"
"Fifty-five."
"Actually, I'm eighty-nine," I told him.
"Fifty?"
"No."
"Forty-five?"
"Of course not."
"Forty. You're forty, and you shouldn't be flying combat missions. I tell you, you're not in shape for that anymore."
"I'm in excellent shape for my age, considering what I'm doing."
"I could ground you either because you're overage or because, for someone who's supposed to be thirty, you're a wreck. I think I will. You'll get someone killed."
"No. I won't. I've put down eleven ME-109's, and although they're getting harder and harder to find, I know I'll put down more. I'm forty years old, that's correct. I don't have such great reflexes, but I compensate with tactics and technical modifications. And I don't drink coffee."
"I want to talk to your wing man."
"I don't have a wing man. My group has flown dispersal and convergence since Tunisia. My favorite situation, sir, is when I meet an enemy fighter element and it's one against three."
"Why?"
"Because then I use the flaming peacock. I use it when outnumbered or if I'm desperate. It works."
"The what?"
"Flaming peacock."
"And what is that, exactly?"
"It's a secret."
He sent me back up even though he thought I was crazy, or perhaps because he did think I was crazy, but I did have a flaming peacock. I invented it in Tunisia, and it saved my life on more than one occasion.
From the beginning, my group was assigned to individual patrol. Even later, when escorting bombers from England, we'd rendezvous with them on their way in, picking up a flight individually, like guerrillas appearing one by one from the forest to join a column on the march, our transit over Germany having been accomplished always alone.
In Tunisia we were based at a field near Monastir, and our patrol area ran deep into the Tyrrhenian, although there we did not often find the enemy, and if we did want to find him all we had to do was approach Sicily. The Licata-Malta-Pantelleria triangle was like an arena. If you entered it, you had a fight. North of Sicily, you could patrol for a week and see nothing, unless of course you increased your radius and approached the Italian coast. As we didn't use drop tanks, we seldom got that close to the mainland, but after Anzio we flew from Sicily and could refuel in Calabria.
For some, the question of fuel was fatal. You didn't want to get into a fight carrying a lot of fuel. First, the weight was paralyzing. Messerschmitts were lighter and smaller. They could climb
faster and were more agile, although not by much. They carried far less fuel, and when we were fully loaded we tried to avoid them for reasons of maneuverability alone.
If you could fly out your wing tanks, you were in better shape, because they were more exposed, and without armor. When they were empty the aircraft could roll faster and change direction better, as the center of gravity migrated to a more advantageous position in the fuselage. You felt cleaner, lighter, less encumbered.
On the other hand, everything in the air is a trade-off, and the less fuel you had, the less likely you were to get back. For a while I believed that the Luftwaffe was doomed not because we were better in combat, but because of Germany's position as a compact land power with short central lines of communication. They never had the range. We and the British had always designed for vast distances. The Messerschmitt carried 160 gallons of fuel, and I carried 269. When they used drop tanks, which they didn't like to do because then they had to forgo their wing cannons, they could add another 140 gallons. We could carry that and an additional twenty-five gallons, without sacrificing armament. Even if the ME-109's bested us in combat, they often did not make it home. This, anyway, was my theory, which arose as a corollary to the desire to be light in combat.
We were better in combat anyway and I'm not entirely sure why. The Luftwaffe had an enormous array of planes, most of which were very capable, complicated, and imaginative. Maybe that was it. They looked menacing and cruel, whereas our aircraft seemed mild and unpretentious. They were smooth and not very warlike to behold. But the gentlemanly, graceful Spitfires and P-51's, with no armament showing, engaged the terrifying and barbaric German planes that bristled with weapons and aerials and experimental protuberances, and we slid through the air like lightning to strike them down and husband the sky for ourselves, and ourselves alone.
Though I patrolled almost every day, and often fought for my existence, the months at Monastir were for reasons that I still cannot discern the most peaceful and tranquil of all my life.