But caution. Careful during the last seconds of the firing run; don’t become too concerned with putting a long burst into the cloth, I remember for a moment, as I always do before the first gunnery run of the day, the roommate of cadet days who let his enthusiasm fly his airplane a second too long, until his airplane and its target came sharply together on the ground. That is not a good way to die.
Power to 96 percent on the base leg, airspeed up to 300 knots, watch Three go in on his target.
“Ricochet Three’s in, white and hot.” And down he goes, a twisting silhouette of an ’84F.
It is interesting to watch a firing pass from the air. There is no sound from the attacking airplane as it glides swiftly toward its target. Then, abruptly, grey smoke breaks noiselessly from the gunports at the nose of his airplane, streaming back to trace the angle of his dive in a thin smoky line. The dust of the ground begins to spray the air as the airplane breaks away, and a thick brown cloud of it billows at the base of the target when he is gone and climbing.
Now the only untouched target is target number four.
The warning panel on the ground by the spotting tower is turned red side down, white side up; the range is clear and safe for my pass. I note this, and fly along the base leg of the pattern, at right angle to my target. It is a mile away on the ground to my right. It drifts slowly back. It is at one o’clock low. It is at one-thirty low. I recheck the gun switch to guns. It is at two o’clock low and slam the stick whips to the right under my hand and my airplane rolls like a terrified animal and the sky goes grey with the G of the turn and the G-suit inflates to press me in a hard vise of trapped air. Beneath the canopy is pivoting blurred ground moving. It is the beginning of a good firing pass. The microphone button is down under my left thumb, “Ricochet Four is in, white and hot.”
White and hot. The target is clear and the guns are ready to fire. Airspeed is up to 360 knots in the dive, and my wings roll level again. In the windscreen is a tiny square of white cloth with the speck of a black dot painted. I wait. The white dot called the pipper, the dot that shows on the windscreen where my bullets will converge, bounces in lazy slow bounces as it recovers from the sharp turn that began the pass. It settles down, and I touch the control stick back very gently in the dive so the pipper ambles up to cover the square of the target. And the target changes swiftly, as I wait, to become all things. It is an enemy tank waiting in ambush for the infantry; it is an antiaircraft gun that has let its camouflage slip; it is a black and puffing locomotive moving enemy supplies along a narrow-gage track. It is an ammunition dump a fortified bunker a truck towing a cannon a barge in the river an armored car and it is a white square of cloth with a black spot painted. It waits, I wait, and all of a sudden it grows. The spot becomes a disc, and the white pipper has been waiting for that. My finger squeezes slowly down on the red trigger. A gun camera starts as the trigger is half closed. Guns fire when the trigger is all the way down.
Like a rivet gun finishing a last-minute sheet metal job on the nose of the airplane, the guns sound; there is no ear-splitting roar and thunder and confusion in the cockpit. Just a little detached tututut while beneath my boots hot brass shell casings shower down into steel containers. I smell powder smoke in my oxgyen mask and idly wonder how it can find its way into a cabin that is supposed to be sealed and pressurized.
In ultra-slow motion I watch the target on the ground; it is serene and quiet, for the bullets have not yet arrived. The bullets are on the way, somewhere in the air between the blackening gunports on the nose of my airplane and the pulverized dust on the range. I once thought of bullets as being such fast things, and now I wait impatiently for them to touch the ground and verify my gunsight. Finger is off the trigger; a one-second burst is a long burst of fire. And there is the dust.
The ground comes apart and begins throwing itself into the air. A few feet short of the target the dust flies, but this means that many bullets will have found their way to the meeting point shown by the white dot in the center of the gunsight. The dust is still flying into the air as my right glove pulls back on the many-buttoned stick and my airplane climbs in the pattern. As my airplane and its shadow flick across the square of canvas, the bullets that are able to tear a concrete highway to impassible crushed rock still whip the air and rain on the ground. “Ricochet Four is off.”
I bank to the right in the pattern and look back over my shoulder at the target. It is quiet now, and the cloud of dust is thinning in the wind and moving to the left, covering Three’s target with a tenuous cloud of brown.
“Ricochet Lead is in.”
I fired low that time, short of the target. There goes my 100 percent score. I must move the pipper up a little next time; place it on top of the disc of black. I smile at the thought. It is not very often that the air is smooth enough to let me think of placing the pipper inches high or inches low on the black spot of the target. I am normally doing very good to keep the pipper somewhere on the square of the strafing panel. But today is a good day for gunnery. Let the tanks beware the days of calm.
“Ricochet Two is in.”
“Lead is off.”
I watch Two, and in the curved plexiglass of the canopy I see myself reflected as I watch; a Martian if I ever saw one. Hard white helmet, smooth-curved glare visor down and looking like a prop for a Man in Space feature, green oxygen mask covering all the face that the visor does not cover, oxygen hose leading down out of sight. No indication that there is a living thinking creature behind the hardware. The reflection watches Ricochet Two.
There it is, the grey wisp from the gunports in the nose. The target is still and waiting as though it will stand a year before seeing a sign of motion. Then, suddenly, the thick fountain of dust. To the left of the panel a twig on the ground jumps into startled life and leaps into the air. End over end, slowly it turns, shifting after its first instant into the familiar slow motion of things caught in the swift rain of machinegun bullets. It twists two full turns above the fountain and sinks gracefully back beneath the thick cloud of it. The concrete highway is torn to rock and the twig survives. That should carry a moral.
“Two is off.” Smoke disappears from gunports. The airplane turns its oval nose to the sky and streaks away from the target.
“Three is in.”
What is the moral of the twig? I think about it and I turn sharply into the base leg of the pattern, rechecking the gunsight, right index finger pointing forward at the altimeter. What is the moral of the twig?
The wisp of smoke trails from the gunports of the smooth aluminum nose of Ricochet Three, and I watch his pass.
There is no moral. If the target was a pile of twigs, the hail of copper and lead would turn it into a scattered blanket of splinters. This was a lucky twig. If you are a lucky twig, you can survive anything.
“Three is off.”
The safety panel is white, the gun switch is at guns, and slam the stick whips to the right under my glove and my airplane rolls like a terrified animal to the right and the sky goes grey with the G of the turn and the G-suit inflates to press me in a hard vise of trapped air.
I have never been so rushed, when I fly my airplane, that I do not think. Even in the gunnery pattern, when the airspeed needle is covering 370 knots and the airplane is a few feet from the ground, the thinking goes on. When events happen in split seconds, it is not the thinking that changes, but the event. Events fall obediently into slow motion when there is a need for more thought.