Well, it was true that the drive shaft ran right up the center of the cramped cockpit, that the airplane performed beautifully at low altitudes but was underpowered up high, and that if you stalled it, you might wind up boring a deep hole because it spun like a top going down. But once you had a feel for the ship and understood it, the Thirty-Nine was a fun airplane to fly. Another problem was maintenance. We flew so much, yet there were few old hands among the ground crews working on the airplanes. There was a lot of trial and error, both on the flight line and in the sky.
"Crash" is not a word pilots ever use. I don't really know why, but the word is avoided in describing what happens when several tons of metal plows itself and its pilot into the ground. Instead, we might say, "He augered in." Or, "He bought the farm." However you chose to describe it, we were doing it. Hell, the sky was filled with green pilots practicing night landings, dogfighting, and strafing, so accidents were inevitable, although our kill-rate cost the group commander his job. We lost thirteen pilots in six months. And in nearly every case, the worst pilots died by their own stupidity-making a low-altitude turn that dropped them into the ground, or waiting too long to come out of a dive. One pilot dropped out of formation for no apparent reason and plunged like a boulder into the ground; guys snapped wings off their planes doing crazy power dives, or buzzed into the side of a hill. And if something went wrong, they made the wrong decision about whether to jump or stay. I saw a guy try to land with his engine on fire, Flames streaming, doing at least 150 mph, skidding off the runway in flames and smoke. The crazy bastard hit the ground on the run just as his tail melted off.
A gruesome weeding-out process was taking place. Those who were killed in Nevada were likely to have been the first killed in combat. But those of us who did survive the training were rapidly becoming skilled combat pilots and a cohesive team. I turned my back on lousy fliers as if their mistakes were catching. When one of them became a grease spot on the tarmac, I almost felt relieved: it was better to bury a weak sister in training than in combat, where he might not only bust his ass, but do something (or, more than likely, fail to do something) that would bust two or three other asses in addition to his own.
But I got mad at the dead: angry at them for dying so young and so senselessly; angry at them for destroying expensive government property as stupidly as if they had driven a Cadillac off a bridge. Anger was my defense mechanism. I've lost count of how many good friends have augered in over the years, but either you become calloused or you crack. By the time we flew combat in England, most of us had reached a point where, if a pilot borrowed our Mustang on our day off and was shot down, we became furious at the dead son of a bitch. The dead pilot might have been a friend, but he wasn't as special as our own P-51 that loyally hauled our own precious butt through the flak and tracers. Some losses, of course, tore into your guts as if you'd been shot. Then there was nothing left to do but go out and get blind drunk-which is exactly what we did. Those who couldn't put a lid on their grief couldn't hack combat. They were either sent home or became a basket case.
Death was our new trade. We were training to be professional killers, and one day at Tonopah, we crowded into the day room to hear an early combat veteran in the Pacific, named Tex Hill, describe his dogfights against the Japanese. Man, we were in awe. Shooting down an airplane seemed an incredible feat. I had no idea why the German people were stuck with Hitler and the Nazis and could care less. History was not one of my strong subjects. But when the time came, I would hammer those Germans any chance I got. Them or me. Even a "D" history student from Hamlin High knew that it was always better to be the hammer than the nail.
Those six months of squadron training were the happiest that I've ever been. Now that I was a fighter pilot, I couldn't imagine being anything else. We were hell-raising fighter jocks with plenty of swagger. When we weren't flying, we zipped on our leather night jackets that told the world who we were and crowded into Anderson's 1939 Ford convertible or Willet's Essex and drove into Tonopah, a wide-open silver-mining town. On paydays, we crowded around the blackjack tables of the Tonopah Club, drank ourselves blind on fifths of rotgut rye and bourbon, then staggered over to the local cathouse. Miss Taxine, the madam, tried to keep a fresh supply of gals so we wouldn't get bored and become customers of Lucky Strike, a cathouse in Mina, about thirty miles down the road. But we went to Mina anyway, wrecked the place, and the sheriff ran us out of town. The next morning, a P-39 strafed Mina's water tower.
My roommate and closest buddy was the only other flight officer in the squadron, a lanky Texan named Chuck McKee; I called him "Mack." Being the only two guys in the squadron who hadn't gone to college and weren't commissioned officers, we thought of ourselves as a different breed of cat. We were both rural boys who loved to hunt and fish, and we wore the blue flight officer's bars on our leather jackets as a badge of honor. So, it was natural that we paired off. On Sundays, we would drive jeeps out into the desert and hunt rabbits with Springfield rifles. We raced our jeeps through the sage and rocks and why we weren't killed right then and there, I'll never know. But one Sunday we went roaring up a dirt road into a canyon we had buzzed a few days earlier, causing a herd of cattle to stampede, and to our embarrassment the rancher happened to be on his front porch that morning. Instead of grabbing his shotgun, he signaled to us to stop and say hello. His name was Joe Clifford. His place was called the Stone Cabin Ranch. He invited us to stay for Sunday dinner and introduced us to his two boys, Joe, Jr., and Roy. Ma and Pa Clifford and their boys became like family, not only to Mack and me, but to all the other guys in the squadron. Ma cooked on a wood stove for sometimes as many as ten or fifteen hungry fighter jocks. I remember huge roasts, mounds of mashed potatoes, three different pies and cakes. We'd waddle out of that place.
We buzzed the ranch all the time, and if Pa Clifford came out and waved a bed sheet, it meant yo'all come over tonight for Ma's chow. Mack and I used to fly over and drop the Clifford boys all kinds of ammo for their hunting, whole belts of thirtyought-six, since bullets were hard to come by in wartime. There was a dry lakebed about a hundred yards from the house, and we would practice divebombing over that lakebed dropping practice bombs while Pa Clifford, down below, watched and laughed like hell.
One day I heard Pa mention that he'd like to get rid of a tree that stood near the roadway to the house. The next day, I buzzed that tree in my P-39 and carefully topped it with my left wingtip. I enjoyed that kind of challenge, but when I landed there was hell to pay. The maintenance officer demanded to know why my smashed wingtip looked as if it were taking root-hunks of wood were rammed into it. "l hit a bird," I told him. "Well," he replied, "that son of a bitch must've been sitting in one helluva nest." I was grounded from flying P-39s for a week. But there were several BT-13s available, and I flew them instead. A few nights later, when most of the squadron was seated around Ma Clifford's table, I came in on them in a BT-13, raised the shingles on the roof from my prop wash, while the guys inside never doubted who was buzzing them. "I wonder which crazy hillbilly did that?" I was always up to something.