I return to the room and relay the information to the stirring Curt. He agrees to alert the rest of the crew while I find Lemanski. I get into my flight suit and proceed to his room. He doesn't answer the knock. Again I rap furiously on the door, but there is no response. I'm perturbed over this. The pool pilots know the rules. Like us they're supposed to remain in their rooms during their "legal" period (usually a twelve-hour window), or else notify the command post if they venture away from the telephones. I knock again and test the door. It's not locked. I peek inside. A young man is lying unconscious on the bed. The air reeks of alcohol. A whiskey bottle lies on its side on the bedstand. Clothes and flight gear are strewn about the room. I touch the foot and shake it.
"Lemanski. Lemanski, wake up. This is an alert, man." He moves not a whisker. I shake him again violently, yet still he doesn't move. My God, I think. He's dead! I look around for signs of drugs that he may have taken with the liquor, but there are none. Then Curt appears in the open doorway.
"Curt, I think he's dead."
Curt comes over and shakes him vigorously, spoiling my search for a pulse. Then the man resurrects. Eyes slowly open and stare at me through a stupid glaze.
"He's drunk as a skunk!" declares Curt, informing me of the obvious. We shake him some more and raise him to an upright position.
"Lemanski, don't you understand, we've been alerted. The crew bus will be here in a few minutes. You gotta get going, man!" This was a serious breach of the Uniform Code of Military Justicesomewhat like being drunk on guard duty. I know we are all under tremendous stress, and some handle it better than others. I don't want him to be caught, but he is too far gone.
Curt continues his prodding. "Come on, Lemanski, GET UP! GET UP!"
I interject, rebuking him. "Lemanski, I can't handle this. You're not fit to fly with us. I'm gonna call the command post and tell them you're sick. Understand?"
"Leave him alone, Curt," I admonish as we leave the room. "He's too far gone."
But then we look back, and there he stands in the door, looking like death warmed over. His lips quiver and try to formulate a word. Curt goes to his side. "What is it, man? Come on, spit it out. What is it with you? Don't you know what you're doing?"
The words come slowly, painfully from a dry, writhing tongue: "Wh-who. . are y-you?"
"For God's sake, man, I'm your aircraft commander. You've been assigned to my crew."
A hand goes up to an obviously pain-laden head. "A-aircr. . corn. . wh-what kind of air. . craft?"
Curt and I eye one another. Something is very wrong here. "Why, C-141, of course. You're a pool pilot, right?"
"P-p-p-pool pilot?" He gropes for words. I look up at the number on the door. It's 230. Lemanski is in 130, on the floor below. I look back into the room. The crumpled flight suit bears a Strategic Air Command patch but has no rank on the shoulders. The man is a tanker crewman, a boomer. And he's recovering.
Painful babble begins to issue from fluttering lips as the glazed eyes search for telltale signs of a bad dream. Listening intently, as if trying to garner secrets from a dying prospector, we're able to glean a few clipped words from the gibberish. "I. . I. . I. . what you're talkin' ab. . twenty hour. . missi. . refuel. . fight. . I didn't even t-touch. . gr. . man, for eighteenhey man, who. . who are you? What you want fr' me?"
I think quickly.
Still using the name of the man down below, I proffer a hurried explanation. "Lemanski, there's been a great mistake. The MAC command post gave me the wrong room number. I'll have their asses for this, don't worry, buddy. Get on back in there and get some sleep. I'll straighten this mess out right now." We usher him back to the bunk.
We find the real Lemanski, who somehow learned of the alert, already moving bags down in the lobby, and join in the bag drag out to curbside, where the bus is waiting. On a shuttle back into the lobby, we see that the boomer has come down to see us off. He stands there like the creature from the black lagoon but still looks confused. I don't know if he intends to attack or what. I grab a couple of bags and call out to him. "Lemanski, get on back to bed, son. We'll check on you later."
"What?" the real Lemanski shouts from the doorway.
"Huh? Never mind, I'll explain later. Let's get out of here."
Seven.
Pain of a Different Death
When a pilot dies in the harness, his death seems something that inheres in the craft [flying] itself, and in the beginning the pain it brings is perhaps less than the pain sprung of a different death.
Our Starlifter is cruising back uprange, straight into the setting sun, away from the gathering storm of war. Ahead is the Red Sea with the jagged, ocher Egyptian mountains beyond. Cockpit instrument lights are being turned on. Sunglasses are being stowed. We're prepping the jet for dark flight.
Unencumbered by haze and pollutants, the sun departs with a great brilliance at this altitude. But the panoramic splay of crimson and orange lasts much longer tonight because we're chasing the sun. We will of course lose the race; the earth turns twice as fast as our speed, but the lingering spectacle inspires a kind of silent reverence through the cockpit. Only the rush of the slipstream and the occasional crackle of modulated radio voices intrude on our sunset ponderings.
"MAC Victor 6522, Red Crown, you're radar contact, cleared area transition."
"6522, roger," I reply, staring at the sunset, with visions of Dave's little plane silhouetted against it. It seemed we were always flying late in the evening, the closing of the day forcing us back to the world.
And I remember how we, the group of us, sat there on that old concrete fence rail until the sun went down, watching the Cessnas take off and land. Watching with envy. Trading dreams. Breaking out of the egg of adolescence, feeling a calling swell within us. Certain that it would be fulfilled but electrified with impatience, we sensed our day was coming.
We were about evenly endowed then with the traits of future professional fliers. And if God had combined the three of us into one pilot, Gene Key would have been the brain and I the hands. But the heartthat would have been Dave DeRamus.
The three of us were cut from the same mold: products of financially comfortable working-class families, the oldest sons, townies who lived at home while attending college, the seeds of flight planted in us by fathers who themselves were occasional fliers. But Dave was different in a delightful, inspirational way.
He was the extrovert, the talker, the dreamer, the romanticizer. And he grew to love flying with every fiber of his being. While Gene quietly, confidently calculated his course in life, and t ambled toward my goal, depending on luck and divine help, Dave swaggered ahead with bold declarations and unabashed single-mindedness, leaving in his wake a reputation of cockiness.
Dave had a stocky athletic build. He had a passion for football and water skiing and pursued them with intensity and determination, as he did everything. Yet his eyes were soft and far-focused, as if he were discontented and a bit melancholy. His slight smile was always there except when he was directing scorn at his two favorite targets: government bureaucracy and rotten flying weather. He had a tremendous sense of humor and loved to laugh but was also moody. In those early years Dave was a model young Christian who was active in church. He often delivered the invocation at our Air Force ROTC social functions. But change came. An elective course in religious studies, he claimed, had opened his mind. He questioned some of the teachings of his faith and left the church after someone told his mother that Dave was going to Hell for doubting.