In the world of man/airplane, I live in an atmosphere of understatement. The wingman pulling a scarlet contrail in the sunset is kinda pretty. Flying fighters is a pretty good job. It was too bad about my roommate flying into his target.
One learns the language, what is allowed to be said and what is not. I discovered, a few years ago, that I was not different from all the other pilots when I caught myself thinking that a wingman and his contrail in the last light of the sun is not a single thing but beautiful, or that I love my airplane, or that my country is a country for which I would gladly lay down my life. I am not different.
I learn to say, “Single-engine flying is all right, I guess,” and any other pilot in the Air Force knows exactly that I am as proud to be a jet fighter pilot as anyone is proud of any job, anywhere. Yet nothing could be more repelling than the term “jet fighter pilot.” Jet. Words for movie posters and nonpilots. Jet means glamour and glory and the artifical chatter of a man who wishes he knew something of fighter airplanes. Jet is an embarrassing word. So I say single-engine, for the people I speak with know what I mean: that I have the chance to be off and alone with the clouds every once in a while, and if I want, I can fly faster than sound or knock a tank off its tracks or turn a roundhouse into a pile of bricks and hot steel under a cloud of black smoke. Flying jets is a mission for supermen and superheros dashing handsome movie actors. Flying single-engine is just a pretty good job.
The white jagged fence of the Alps was not a fence to a Fox Eight Four, and we had ambled across them at altitude almost as uncaring as the gull that floats above the predators of the sea. Almost. The mountains, even under their tremendous blanket, were sharp, like great shards of splintered glass on a snowy desert. No place at all for an engine failure. Their spiny tops jutted above the stratus sea in the ancient way that led one pilot to call them “Islands in the Sky.” Hard rock islands above soft grey cotton sea. Silence on the radio. I flew wing silently, watching the islands drift below. Three words from the flight leader. “Rugged, aren’t they?”
We have together been watching the islands. They are the most tortured masses of granite and pending avalanche in the world. Raw world upthrust. A virgin treacherous land of sliding snow and falling death. An adventure-world for the brave and the super-humans who climb because they are there. No place at all for a bewilderingly human thing called an airplane pilot and depending on a great many spinning steel parts to go on spinning in order that he might stay in the sky. That he loves.
“Roj,” I say. What else was there to say? The mountains were rugged.
It is always interesting. The ground moves below, the stars move overhead, the weather changes, and rarely, very rarely, one of the ten thousand parts that is the body of an airplane fails to operate properly. For a pilot, flying is never dangerous, for a man must be a little bit insane or under the press of duty to willingly remain in a position that he truly considers dangerous. Airplanes occasionally crash, pilots are occasionally killed, but flying is not dangerous, it is interesting.
It would be nice, one day, to know which of my thoughts are mine alone and which of them are common to all the people who fly fighter airplanes.
Some pilots speak their thoughts by long habit, some say nothing at all of them. Some wear masks of convention and imperturbability that are very obvious masks, some wear masks so convincing that I wonder if these people are not really imperturbable. The only thoughts that I know are my own. I can predict how I will control my own mask in any number of situations. In emergencies it will be forced into a nonchalant calm that is calculated to rouse admiration in the heart of anyone that hears my unruffled voice on the radio. That, for one, is not strictly my own device. I talked once with a test pilot who told me his way of manufacturing calm in emergencies. He counts to ten out loud in his oxygen mask before he presses the microphone button to talk to anyone. If the emergency is such that he does not have ten seconds to count, he is not interested in talking to anyone; he is in the process of bailing out. But in lesser emergencies, by the time he has counted to ten, his voice has accustomed itself to a background of emergency, and comes as smoothly over the radio as if he were giving a pilot report on the tops of some fair-weather cumulus clouds.
There are other thoughts of which I do not speak. The destruction that I cause on the ground. It is not in strict accord with the Golden Rule to fly down an enemy convoy and tear its trucks to shreds with six rapid-fire heavy machine guns, or to drop flaming jellied gasoline on the men or to fire 24 high-explosive rockets into their tanks or to loft an atomic bomb into one of their cities. I do not talk about that. I rationalize it out for myself, until I hit upon a certain reasoning that allows me to do all these things without a qualm. A long while ago I found a solution that is logical and true and effective.
The enemy is evil. He wants to put me into slavery and he wants to overrun my country, which I love very much. He wants to take away my freedom and tell me what to think and what to do and when to think and when to do it. If he wants to do this to his own people, who do not mind the treatment, that is all right with me. But he will not do that to me or to my wife or to my daughter or to my country. I will kill him before he does.
So those legged dots streaming from the stalled convoy beneath my guns are not men with thoughts and feelings and loves like mine; they are evil and they mean to take my way of life from me. The tank is not manned by five frightened human beings who are praying their own special kind of prayers as I begin my dive and put the white dots of the gunsight pipper on the black rectangle that is their tank; they are evil and they mean to kill the people that I love.
Thumb lightly on the rocket button, white dot on black rectangle, thumb down firmly. A light, barely audible swish-swish from under my wings and four trails of black smoke angle down to converge on the tank. Pull up. A little shudder as my airplane is passed by the shock waves of the rocket explosions. They are evil.
I am ready for whatever mission I am assigned. But flying is not all the grim business of war and destruction and rationalized murder. In the development of man/machine, events do not always conform to plan, and flight shacks and ready rooms are scattered with magazines of the business of flying that point up the instances when man/machine did not function as he was designed.
Last week I sat in a soft red imitation-leather armchair in the pilots’ lounge and read one of those well-thumbed magazines from cover to cover. And from it, I learned.
A pair of seasoned pilots, I read, were flying from France to Spain in a two-seat Lockheed T-33 jet trainer. Half an hour from their destination, the pilot in the rear seat reached down to the switch that controls his seat height, and inadvertently pressed the release that fires a blast of high-pressure carbon dioxide to inflate the one-man rubber liferaft packed into his ejection seat cushion. The raft ballooned to fill the rear cockpit, smashing the hapless pilot tightly against his seat belt and shoulder harness.
This had happened before with liferafts, and in the cockpits of the airplanes that carry them is a small sharp knife blade to use in just such emergencies. The rear-seat pilot reached the blade, and in a second the raft exploded in a dense burst of carbon dioxide and talcum powder.
The front-seat pilot, carrying on the business of flying the airplane and unaware of the crisis behind him, heard the boom of the raft exploding and instantly his cockpit was filled with talcum powder, which he assumed to be smoke.