After a while he sat up. His feet hurt. His head pounded. The hut was darker and the sweat smell was stifling. Nearly everyone was awake. He could tell by the breathing. A little army of insomniacs, all listening, waiting, paying close attention to the night. He got off his bunk and started to walk and a voice said, “Watch the glasses, bub.” He headed for an upright shape on Lewis’s bunk. It turned out to be Snowberry.
Lewis was lying as he had been hours ago, hands behind his head. It seemed to Bryant a feat of some sort.
Snowberry whispered, “Somebody can’t sleep,” and Lewis grunted. Bryant slowly crouched beside the bed. They were quiet, and he felt like an intruder.
He became aware of another sound, a quiet and asthmatic sort of sniffing. Snowberry’s head was turned from both of them and he was crying.
Lewis wasn’t saying anything. Bryant was at a complete loss. He grimaced when he felt his own mouth trembling. Snowberry stopped for stretches, and swallowed, or made little tsking sounds with his tongue on his teeth. He did not rub his eyes or nose. Lewis seemed to be helping, though he didn’t move.
When Bryant’s knees hurt enough, he stood. Snowberry was still turned away. He crossed quietly to his bunk and climbed back into it, pulling the sheet up to his chin, remembering his grandmother in the doorway. He did not look back over at Snowberry and Lewis. He stared at the ceiling of the hut, which rippled in the darkness. He thought, tomorrow is just another mission, and, you need to sleep, and he closed his eyes to the ripples and to calm himself thought of Audie sitting blind and imperturbable in the Plexiglas nose while Ciervanski took her picture.
Someone hit the lights and he came out of what seemed a daze thinking something was wrong. He squinted and opened his eyes to slits and his watch said 1:15 a.m. All around him men were groaning and cursing. Snowberry was sitting upright already, blinking painfully. Lewis said, “Oh my God,” at the extent of his fatigue and the inhumanity of the hour.
With a refined touch of cruelty the orderly on wake-up duty read the bomb group’s timetable instead of repeating up-and-at-’em exhortations: breakfast, 0200; briefing, 0300; stations, 0515; alert, 0530; taxi, 0540; takeoff, 0550. “0550, gentlemen,” he repeated. “Let’s go.” He wasn’t going. He would be filling out forms and loafing around the day room for the next twelve hours while they did God knew what. Men swung without looking when he shook their covers, and near the door a gunner stood and shoved him with such force he cleared a bed and landed on his back. He lay stunned and winded with his arms and legs in the air like a baby’s. His breath returned with the sounds a long-distance runner makes.
“Hey,” he said, scrambling to his feet, alert for a general uprising. “Hey.” He was used to verbal abuse, and his voice registered his acute sense of the unfairness of physical abuse. He negotiated his way to the door and turned, a hand on the frame. “Stay in bed. See if I care. I hope they break all of you.” He turned off the lights and left, affecting triumph, but everyone was up.
They dressed. Bryant had saved for this mission a fresh pair of long underwear. The idea was to have something to absorb the pre-takeoff sweat before reaching altitude and the paralyzing cold. The hope was that the wait before takeoff would be short, to minimize the soaking the underwear had to absorb.
Bean was powdering his feet. Bryant borrowed some of the powder without asking. He pulled on his beat-up GI shoes. That was the prevailing wisdom: in case of hard luck, something comfortable enough to walk miles in, and dirty enough not to arouse suspicion.
Bean and Lewis, Snowberry and Ball were all without discussion putting on their best Class A uniforms — olive drab, pressed and folded wool — beneath their flying suits. Ball carefully straightened a leg and his pants fell as if new, creaseless, to the shoetops. Bean was straightening his cuffs with a special slow care. Even Lewis was working on his tie, struggling slightly with the knot: none of them held any hope that this would be a normal mission, and they were not going to be killed or captured in the worn General Issue they usually wore.
At breakfast the coffee kept coming, and was served in thick white mugs that were pleasing to handle and drink from. Every cook in the squadron was on duty, and they were asking the men in line how each wanted his eggs done. There was ham and corned beef hash and bread and a little butter. They sat before their trays staring at the excess in wonder and fear. The place was packed with crews, including guys they recognized who had to have arrived within the last week, some of whom looked younger than Snowberry. Bryant thought: Suppose we’re in formation next to some of these guys?
Ball was evidently thinking the same thing. He said, “Man, if we’re incompetent, what does that make them?”
Everyone was talking about Berlin. Bryant was able to eat all of his hash and none of the eggs. Beside him Lewis and Snowberry ate without speaking. Bean sat before his plate and did not move. Piacenti drank three mugs of coffee and went back for more.
In the briefing room there were not enough seats, and men were leaning against the walls. One young staff sergeant who looked as if he were wearing his father’s jacket sat on the floor next to the door, his eyes half closed and his mouth ajar. The extra people crowded toward the front, peering closely at the sheet covering the mission board in an attempt to see through it.
“The pulley,” Snowberry said. They were squeezed into the second row. The pulley was near the top. All the yarn had been used. They looked at the bare metal spindle with the hope there had been some mistake. “Christ, where’re they sending us?” Lewis asked. “Arabia?”
It took some time to get everyone quiet enough to begin. “I know a guy,” Lewis said wistfully, “flew fifty missions, two whole tours, and never fired a shot.”
The Ops captain stepped up to the sheet. He put a hand on it and looked at them.
“Can you imagine milking something like this?” Snowberry said under his breath. If they could have killed the Ops captain at that moment, they would have.
The sheet was pulled back. The red yarn went all the way through Germany nearly to the Austrian border.
The room was in total shock. The Ops captain who’d pulled the sheet stood quietly beside it, hands clasped, and leaned forward and gazed at it again, as if wondering if the silence were due to an empty board.
The room exploded. There were protests and loud exclamations. One group was booing. Everyone was shouting questions. Bryant sat silently and thought, What idiot dreamed this up? Lewis said clearly through the noise, “Look at the map. Their entire fighter strength has to be within eighty-five miles of that course. How many fucking fighters do you think that is?”
Snowberry was white. “How can we go that far without fighter escort?” he asked.
It took five minutes to calm everyone down. The briefing continued.
“Schweinfurt,” Snowberry said. “I’ve never heard of it.”
A major whom Bryant hadn’t seen before centered himself beside the screen, eclipsing the captain. “The primary targets,” he said, lowering his volume as the crews quieted, “are the three major ball-bearing factories at Schweinfurt.”