I am foolish. Here I am as nervous as a cat, thinking of a storm that has probably already died away off course. And above 30,000 feet even the worst storms are not so violent as they are at lower altitudes. As I remember, it is rare to find much hail at high altitudes in storms, and lightning has never been shown to be the direct cause of any airplane crash. These elaborate precautions are going to look childish after I land in half an hour at Chaumont and walk up the creaky wooden stairway to my room and take off my boots and finish my letter home. In two hours I will be sound asleep.
Still, it will be good to get this flight over with. I would never make a good all-weather interceptor pilot. Perhaps with training I could become accustomed to hours and hours of weather and storms, but at this moment I am quite happy with my fighter-bomber and the job of shooting at things that I can see.
I have heard that interceptor pilots are not even allowed to roll their airplanes: hard on the electronic gear. What a dismal way to make a living, straight and level and solid instruments all the time. Poor guys.
I might, just a little, envy the F-106 pilot his big delta-wing interceptor. And he might, just a little, envy me my mission. He has the latest airplane and an engine filled with sheer speed. His great grey delta would make a good air combat plane, but he flies day on day of hooded attacks toward dots of smoky green light on his radar screen. My ’84F is older and slower and soon to be changed from sculptured aluminum to a seamless swept memory, but my mission is one of the best missions that a fighter pilot can fly.
FAC, for instance. Pronounced fack. Forward Air Controller. The blast of low-level and gunsight on the truck columns of the Aggressor. FAC. “Checkmate, Bipod Delta here. I’ve got a bunch of troops and two tanks coming toward my position. They’re on the high ground just south of the castle on the dirt road. You got ’em in sight?”
The greening hills of Germany below me, the chessboard in another war game. What a job for a fighter pilot, to be a FAC. Stuck out with the Army in the mud with a jeep and a radio transmitter, watching your friends come in on the strikes. “Roj, Delta. Got the castle and the road in sight, not the target.” A sprinkling of dots in the grass by the road. “As you were, got ’em in sight. Take your spacing, Two.”
“What’s your armament, Checkmate?”
“Simulated napalm and guns. First pass will be the napalm.”
“Hurry up, will you? The tanks are pouring on the coal; must have seen you.”
“Roj.”
I melt into stick and throttle, my airplane leaps ahead and hurls itself in a sweeping burst of speed at the road. There are the tanks, feathers of dust and grass spraying long behind their tracks. But it is as if they were caught in cooling wax, I move fifteen times faster than they. Take it down to the deck, attacking from behind the tank. In its wax, it begins to turn, grass spewing from beneath its right track. I bank my wings, ever so slightly, and feel confident, omnipotent, as an eagle plunging from height to mouse. Men are riding on the tank, clutching handholds. They do not hear me, but they see me, looking back over their camouflaged shoulders. And I see them. What a way to make a living, clinging with all your strength to the back of a 50-ton block of steel hurtling across a meadow. In the time it takes me to count three, the tank, frozen in its turn, frames itself for a moment in my windscreen, and the lowest diamond of my gunsight flicks through it and my thumb has released tanks of jellied gasoline from beneath the wings. Wouldn’t be a tank driver in wartime for all the money in the world. Pull up. Hard turn right. Look back. The tank is rolling to a stop, obedient to the rules of our game. Two is snapping his black swept shadow over the hatch of the second tank. Tanks make such easy targets. I guess they just hope that they won’t get caught in an air strike. “Nice job, Checkmate. Work over the troops, will you?” A friendly request, from a man who is seeing from the ground the sight that so often has been caught in his forward windscreen. In the war we would worry now about small-arms fire and shoulder-mounted antiaircraft missiles, but we would already have decided that when our time comes, it will come, and the worry would be a transient one. Down on the troops. Most unwarlike troops, these. Knowing the game, and not often having the chance for their own private and special airshow, they stand and watch us come in. One raises his arms in a defiant V. I bank again, very slightly, to hurtle directly toward him. He and I have a little personal clash of wills. Low. I climb up the slope of the long meadow toward my antagonist. If there are telephone wires across the meadow, I will have plenty of clearance going beneath them. In war, my antagonist would be caught in the hail of Armor Piercing Incendiary from six Browning 50-caliber machine guns. But though this is not real war, it is a real challenge he throws to me. I dare you to make me duck. We are all such little boys at heart. I make one last tiny adjustment so that my drop tanks will pass on either side of his outflung hands if he does not duck. I see the arms begin to falter as he flicks from sight beneath the nose. If he hasn’t ducked, he is due for a flattening burst of jetblast. But he does have determination, this man. Usually we scatter the troops like flocks of chicks around the hilltops. I turn on another pass from another direction, looking, from sudden height of my pullup, for my friend. One dot looks like another.
Another pass, carried perhaps a little too low, for my friend dives for the ground even before I pass over him. That is really very profound. One dot looks like another. You can’t tell good from evil when you move 500 feet per second above the grass. You can only tell that the dots are men.
On one FAC mission near the hem of the iron curtain we were asked to fly east for two minutes in order to find our Controller. Two minutes east would have put us over the border and into Soviet airspace. Enemy airspace. The Controller had meant to say “west.” The hills did not look any different on the Other Side. As we circled and turned west I had looked across into the forbidden land. I saw no fences, no iron curtains, no strange coloring of the earth. Only the green rolling of the constant hills, a scattering of little grey villages. Without my compass and map, with the East-West border heavily penciled in red, I would have thought that the villages of men that I saw in the east were just as the villages of the west. Fortunately, I had the map.
“How about a high-speed run for the troops, Checkmate?”
“Sure thing,” I say, smiling. For the troops. If I were a fighter pilot marooned on the ground with the olive-drab Army, nothing would ease my solitude quite so much as the 500-knot rapport with my friends and their airplanes. So, a pass for the troops. “Open her up, Checkmate.” And throttle full open, engine drinking fuel at 7,000 pounds per hour. Across the meadow, faster than an arrow from a hundred-pound bow, heading this time for the cluster of dots by the radio-jeep of the FAC. 510 knots and I am joy. They love my airplane. See her beauty. See her speed. And I, too, love my airplane. A whiplash and the FAC and his jeep are gone. Pull up, far up, nose high in the milkblue sky. And we roll. Earth and sky joyously twined in a blur of dwindling emerald and turquoise. Stop the roll swiftly, upside down, bring the nose again through the horizon, roll back to straight and level. The sky is a place for living and for whistling and for singing and for dying. It is a place that is built to give people a place from which to look down on all the others. It is always fresh and awake and clear and cold, for when the cloud covers the sky or fills the place where the sky should be, the sky is gone. The sky is a place where the air is ice and you breathe it and you live it and you wish that you could float and dream and race and play all the days of your life. The sky is there for everyone, yet only a few seek it out. It is all color, all heat and cold, all oxygen and forest leaves and sweet air and salt air and fresh crystal air that has never been breathed before. The sky whirs around you, keening and hissing over your head and face and it gets in your eyes and numbs your ears in a coldness that is bright and sharp. You can drink it and chew it and swallow it. You can rip your fingers through the rush of sky and the hard wind. It is your very life inside you and over your head and beneath your feet. You shout a song and the sky sweeps it away, twisting it and tumbling it through the hard liquid air. You can climb to the top of it, fall with it twisting and rushing around you, leap clear, arms wide, catching the air with your teeth. It holds the stars at night as strongly as it holds the brazen sun in the day. You shout a laugh of joy, and the rush of wind is there to carry the laugh a thousand miles.