I don't know if it was through instinctive habit or an inflated ego, but even as I began a desperate attempt to emerge alive, I pressed the strike. Holding down the bomb release button, I jerked the stick back into my gut, grunting under the tremendous "G" pressure pressing me down into the seat. The G-suit swelled furiously around my thighs and belly, staving off the blackout. It was so intense that my vision narrowed as though looking through a hideous tunnel. My heart pounded, and I felt flush with fear, stupidity, and embarrassment.
In a few seconds, with the nose pointed safely up, I managed a glance over my shoulder and saw where the twenty-five-pound practice bomb had impacted. The white smoke was flowing in a wicked curl up into the wake turbulence created by my near collision with the parked F-84. If the bomb had been a standard 500-pound Mark 82, I would have been blown out of the sky by its fragmentation pattern. It was a perfect hita "shack." But the boss, fiddling with his radar high above, noticed neither the direct hit nor the near crash.
When we stepped into the crew van back at the base, Colonel Nelson asked how the attack went, and I croaked a response. But Duane just looked at me, expressionless, then slowly shook his head. He'd seen it. He knew he was looking at a sweating, quivering, imbecilic tester of fate's ragged boundaries. I remember that brush with fate as clearly as if it were yesterday. Somehow I escaped the desert's snare. But those guys back there didn't.
We bore on through the North Atlantic night, pondering the cargo, unsuccessfully trying to restrain our imaginations from their twisted propensity to probe the contents of the boxes. But the dead fighter pilots aren't really what bothers me. I know they probably have weeping, heart-shattered relatives waiting-teary-eyed children maybe. They died in the cockpit; their deaths are sufferable. And of the third box I know nothing other than that it is someone from the armed forces in Europe, a traffic victim perhaps. It's the fourth box that really haunts me. It is short and smallas if it contains the body of a child.
They gave me a new crew and a new mission after a couple of days at home, and now we're headed west again after another mission downrange. The weather across the Northern Hemisphere is becoming wintery now. That's good news if you're flying eastbound with the winter jet stream and bad if you're going west against it. And it's just plain bad-all-around news if you're planning on landing anywhere in Europe or the U.S. eastern seaboard.
I'm relaxing in the seat, listening to my tape player. We've discovered that the little micro speakers will fit neatly under our military headsets, and if we turn the aircraft radio volume up a little higher than the music, we can still hear any radio traffic that might be intended for us. Of course we wouldn't do this during a critical phase of flight such as takeoff or landing, but still, it has become a tremendous source of relaxation during the long cruises. Some headquarters desk jockey has discovered that the crews were listening to music with their cassette players while flying, and he issued an order to cease and desist. The bureaucrats are trying to get into our cockpits with their paltry regulations and fly for us. We know which rules are prudent for safety and which we can snub. Some were made to be broken, and this is one. We blow it off.
Greg Carpenter, my new copilot, is known to us as the Baby Pilot. BP is such a young-looking lad that we constantly jerk his chain about his boyish appearance. He often finds pacifiers attached to his helmet bag or a bottle in his flight lunch, but he always reacts with a gigantic grin and joins the laughter. He is as unpretentious and unassuming as a person could be. You'd have to be a colossal jerk to get the Baby Pilot sore at you.
BP hears a familiar voice working Cairo Control and alerts me. I take off the speakers and listen closely to the transmissions. It's Tommy Sledge. Elated, I transmit on Cairo's frequency and ask him to come up on Channel 10.
"Tango Sierra, if that's you, come up and talk to me on Button 10."
We're not supposed to use Channel 10 for personal conversation, only for official stuff like weather checks or communication relays and such. Countless factions of unfriendlies all along the Mediterranean and down into the AOR could monitor the frequency, and doubtless they do. But Sledge is my buddy, and I want to palaver. One thing we will do, however, is avoid using real names, knowing that they would probably be recorded somewhere in a dark, smelly room by a guy with a cigarette, a stubbled growth of whiskers, and an AK-47.
Tommy recognizes my voice. "Is that you Tidy Boy?" This is a crude reference, practiced by Sledge and certain other of my associates, to "Tide," as in Crimson Tide.
"Yeah. Hey, Hammer, did you hear about the Ole Miss graduate who married the Greek gal?"
Across a couple hundred miles of airspace he suffers me to continue.
"Well, they wanted to give their son a name which reflected each of their respective cultures, so they called him Zorba the."
"MAC Bravo 2557, contact Jeddah on 133.9." It's Cairo, interrupting the punchline on the VHF radio. I repeat it after Sledge responds to Cairo's instructions.
But he knows the joke, and I know that I have gotten out of my league. Sledge is not one to be challenged to a collegiate joke sluglest. He fires a stinging retaliation against my alma mater, as the bewildered man with the cigarette shakes his head and records the strange American secret codes.
We dwell for a while on Sledge's favorite topic, Southeastern Conference football, and then catch up on bits of news around the squadron. Unlike the active squadrons, where friendships are kindled and quickly left dangling as people come and go, a Reserve or Guard squadron is a family. Many of us have known one another for years. News about where our comrades are and how they are faring is important, and we seek it at every encounter.
"Have you seen hide or hair of George lately?"
"No, but I saw Blair Jernigan yesterday. He claims a Fondten sighting last week at Rhein Mein."
I miss George, I want to see him, to sip his Kahlua coffee with him, to talk of the late great oil business.
Then comes unhappy news. "Did you hear that Steve Watkins got released?"
A vision of Steve's grinning face flashes in me. I will not see him again.
"No. Why? His kids?"
"Yeah."
To be released from service after the president had called us into active duty was a very difficult transaction. It could only be done for reasons of health or extreme family problems, and the decision was made at a lofty level in the command chain. And once released, there was no returning. Steve was gone. I grieve for his loss, but I understand. It has been about seven years since that tragic night when the weight of the universe slammed down on Steve's shoulders.
He had been with us for a couple of years, had separated from the active service as a B-52 pilot, and had settled down in his hometown of Crystal Springs. There he became active in the family furniture business and indulged weekly in the gratifying pleasure of flying the C-130s of the Magnolia Militia. He was a quiet fellow in those days, very soft-spoken, with an ever-smiling, cherubic face. But even after the inevitable "new guy" periodusually a yearpassed, Steve still acted a bit like an unsettled stranger. We didn't know much about him. We would ask him about the furniture business. He would reply that it was good, but with a subtle measure of discontent in his face. Beyond that I never intruded.
Steve was out flying when it happened. It was a three-ship, formation airdrop mission at night. The supervisor of flying had received the call and transmitted a radio message directing Steve's plane to land. There had been a natural gas explosion in the furniture store. Steve's wife, mother, and sister had been killed in the blast, which leveled the building. Steve was led away from the operations room in a daze, oblivious, his life changed forever.