We have much in common, we men.
Tonight I, who love my airplane with all its moods and hardships and joys, am looking out upon the stars. And tonight, 20 minutes to the east, there is another pilot, another man who loves his airplane, looking out at these same stars. These symbols.
My airplane is painted with a white star, his with a red star. It is dark, and paint is hard to see. In his cockpit is the same family of flight instruments and engine instruments and radio control panels that is in my cockpit. In his airplane as in mine, when the stick is pressed to the left, the airplane banks to the left.
I know, unquestioningly, that I would like the man in that cockpit. We could talk through the long night of the airplanes that we have known and the times that we were afraid and the places that we have been. We would laugh over the half-witted things that we did when we were new in the air. We have shared many things, he and I, too many things to be ordered into our airplanes to kill each other.
I went through flying training at a base near Dallas, he went through it at a base near Stalingrad. My flight instructors shouted at me in English, his at him in Russian. But the blue fire trickles once in a while across his windscreen as it does across mine, and ice builds and breaks over his wings as it does mine. And somewhere in his cockpit is a control panel or a circuit breaker panel or a single switch that he has almost to stand on his head to reach. Perhaps at this moment his daughter is considering whether or not to accept a pair of Siamese kittens. Look out for your curtains, friend.
I wish that I could warn him about the kittens.
Fifty miles from Chaumont. Fifty miles and Through the Looking-Glass of cloud and rain and Hi there, ace, how’d the crosscountry go? Fifty miles is a very long way.
I have a not-working radio, above the clouds. Not a great problem, but enough of one so that I force my attention from the peaceful meadow of black to the task of putting my airplane back on the earth. Throttle forward at 33,000 feet, and again the rumble and whines and squeaks and moans from my comic in spinning steel.
No radio. I can fly on to the west, looking for a hole in the clouds, descend, fly back to Chaumont and land. A very poor plan for the fuel that remains in my tanks and for the vagaries of French weather.
I can fly a triangular pattern to the left, with one-minute legs. After a few patterns, a radar site will notice my path and its direction, vector an interceptor to me, and I will fly a letdown and instrument approach as his wingman. A drastic plan, but one to remember as a last-ditch, last-resort action.
I can fly a letdown at Chaumont as I had planned, hoping that the weather is not so bad that I need a Ground Controlled Approach in order to find the runway. At last report the weather was not so bad. If I do not break out of the weather at the TACAN low-approach minimum altitude, I will climb back on top and try a penetration at my alternate, Etain Air Base, ten minutes to the north. I have just enough fuel for this plan, and I shall follow it. For interest’s sake, I will try my radio once more when I am directly over Chaumont. One can never tell about UHF radios.
Forty miles. Five minutes. To home. But months still to a home where there is a wife and daughter and where the people in the towns speak English.
The bulletin board in the Chaumont pilots’ quarters is a mass of newspaper clippings from that older Home. On the board are charges and countercharges concerning the wisdom of recalling the Guard without a war to make it necessary. There are letters to the editors from wives and families and employers, asking questions and offering answers. The newspapers tell of poor conditions into which we were forced, of our trials and our difficulties, of the state of our morale. The picture they paint is a bleak one, but our lot is not really so bleak.
I left an interesting civilian job, flying small airplanes and writing for an aviation magazine, and was ordered back into the Air Force. It was disrupting, of course. But then I have never before been needed by the country to which I owe so much. I would be happier in the freedom of my old life, but my country has come fearfully close to war. The recall was not convenient for me or for my family, but it was a wise plan of action. The recall showed that Air Guard pilots were not merely sportsmen at government expense; a feeling that I sometimes harbored, guiltily, after pleasant weekends spent flying military airplanes, at $80 per weekend.
My squadron crossed the Atlantic in three hops. It made the crossing without air refueling, without proper air navigation stations covering the route, without an incident. We landed at Chaumont Air Base one month after we were called to active duty, flying whenever ceilings were higher than 500 feet.
The multiengine pilots in their tremendous airplanes brought hundreds of tons of support equipment and parts and supplies. We listened to briefings from NATO pilots about the strange new world of European air traffic control. Ammunition specialists emptied boxcars of 50-caliber machinegun bullets and racks of olive-drab, yellow-striped high-explosive bombs and long aluminum tanks of napalm and rack on rack of slim unpainted rockets. We were assigned areas of battle and we met with the army that we were to support. We held practice alerts that began as chaos, progressed through orderly confusion, and became, finally, quick and efficient.
Though the complaints are made and duly printed, though the crisis that called us has subsided, we accomplished the task set for us. We arrived in France with all our pilots and all our airplanes. Today the Alert pilots play bridge and chess and pingpong near the red telephone.
Not all without cost, of course. To date, our readiness has cost Don Slack, pilot, and the flags are still at halfmast.
For us who fly the ’84F, the mobilization is one long weekend of Air Guard duty. In town the people speak a different language, and there are sentries and rolls of barbed wire surrounding the flight line, but we fly with the same friends (except one) and the same airplanes (except one) that we have always flown with, and the life is not cause for complaint (except one). We fly, and the sky of France is much the same as the sky of home. Wind and rain and sun and stars. It is its own kind of home, the sky, and for the brief hours of my flight I do not miss the other home across the sea. I do miss Don Slack.
The stars glow steadily in the darkness of their meadow, part of my world. I think, for a moment, of all that has been said of the enchantment of this cathedral of air. A million words, written and spoken and turned to photograph, in which people who fly risk the curse of sentiment, that deadly curse, to tell of what they have seen. The enchantment does not lend itself to paper and ink or to syllables, or even to sensitized film, but the people’s risk of the curse is itself witness to the sight and the mood that awaits the man who travels the high land. Cloud and star and bow of color are just so many words to be laid carefully in a shallow grave of corrasable bond. The sky, in the end, can only be called an interesting place. My beloved sky.
The wide needle of the TACAN wobbles, the distance-measuring drum turns through 006, and it is time to put my set of plans into action.
I begin the left turn into the holding pattern, and my right glove half-turns the cockpit light rheostats, soaking itself in soft red. The IFF dial goes to Mode Three, Code 70. I should now be an identified and expected dot on the radar screen of Chaumont Radar. Thumb down very hard on microphone button, throttle back, speed breaks out and the rumble of shattering air as they extend from the side of the plane. “Chaumont Approach Control, Jet Four Zero Five, high station on the TACAN, requesting latest Chaumont weather.” There is a sidetone. A good sign. But there is no reply.