The War Lover

by John Hersey

  2/

  Max Brindt snapped me out of it, calling for me on interphone.

  “Yeah, Max.”

  Max asked me if I’d made a note of the co-ordinates of the i.p. “I must’ve wrote ’em down but I can’t find the God-damn thing.”

  Max was a baffling one. He was two people—so mild, dutiful, and damply depressed on the ground, worried about Gross Errors in bombing, convinced at times that we were losing the war; so cocky, aggressive, and energetic in the air. On the early missions he had been a simple guy from Milwaukee with an overdrive going when he was in the ship; he used to joke about possible disasters—until that mission to Lorient in mid-May, our seventh, when Braddock’s ship blew up right in front of us. No more jokes after that. Lately he’d been heavily sentimental and methodical, more and more German, it seemed; a beer swamp. Perl whispered in my ear one night that Brindt was a Nazi. Max had been showing up the last few times in my bad dream, my bombing-and-being-bombed dream. Being German-American and the bombardier qualified him for those nightmares. How he loved to drop his bombs! Just about a week before, I’d taken a walk with him out to the bomb dump, and he had sat morosely astride a thousand-pounder under the camouflage nets and waved an arm out across the heaps of hogshead shapes and said, “Look at all that s—.” On our mission to Hamburg during the frightful July blitz—the day Lynch was killed—Max got so excited at the prospect of dropping the bombs that he forgot to fuse them; dropped them safe. Marrow really cut into him about that, said Max only had three things to do on a mission: Arm the bombs. Open the doors. Toggle on the lead bombardier. “Sometimes I think you want us to lose the war,” Buzz said. That remark really got Max where he lived; he’d never really recovered his high spirits, even on bombing runs.

  “Hold on a sec,” I said.

  I found the information and gave it to him, for I was the methodical one, old Scotch-Irish-Presbyterian me. Oh, yes, I was secretively conscientious, and during briefings I usually wrote everything down; being just a lowdown co-pilot I felt I had to cover for every expert, and this call of Max’s wasn’t the first time a specialist had come to me to get straightened out. I was Dependable Charley. Ha!

  My notes of that morning’s briefing were full of holes, and it was by sheerest chance that I did have what Max wanted. I remembered the swerving of my attention that morning during my fury at Marrow; that had been uncharacteristic of me, because I had always kept a tight control on divagations at briefing time, the life- and-death time. Apparently Max’s mind had swiveled that morning, too. Then I had a shock of alarm. What if everyone in the plane—what if everyone in the entire strike had been woolgathering when a certain vital fact of the mission had been thrown out? This was one of the things that made that day dreamlike: Ideas as fantastic as this one, of a momentary universal nod during separate briefings all over the Wing area, came to me with the clarity of revealed truth. With an effort I shook that one out as absurd.

  3/

  Handown was a plane shark. He kept his eye, as directed, on Angel Tread, which he’d spotted firing the red-green flare of a group leader, and we had no trouble attaching our element to Colonel Bins’, so that our squadron of six planes was formed: Angel Tread, Erector Set, Gruesome Twosome, The Body, Finah Than Dinah, Expendable VI. Marrow hung our element underneath, slightly behind, and slightly to the right of the Colonel’s. We were all experienced fliers in the lead squadron, and we made a snug box, no outside dimension of which was more than four hundred feet, and that wasn’t bad, considering that a Fort had a wing span of one hundred and four feet, and there were six of us packed in the box.

  Over splasher two we wheeled, and there we could see the other two squadrons of our Group coming up, and as we slowly swung in the sky they closed with us, to form the larger box of the Group. The low squadron, led by Buzz’s friend, Curly Jonas, in Baggy Maggie, was behind us and down to our right, and the high squadron—Apollo Holdreth commanding in Round Trip Ticket—was behind and above and to the left. For tightness the squadrons were slanted in the opposite direction from the elements—the high wingman to the right, the high squadron to the left.

  Two big circles, climbing all the while, and our Group was formed. We leveled out then to fly along the line of splasher beacons to join up with the other eleven groups of our attack.

  4/

  We were at about nine thousand feet, and it was time for me to take a turn around the ship and make a manual check of everyone’s oxygen-hose connections—a practice which Marrow had instituted after a navigator on the man-killing ship, Chug Bug, had died of anoxia at twenty-four thousand feet. I made the rounds, exchanging shouted greetings with some of the men, working silently at the stations of others.

  I left the nose till last. In the navigator’s compartment, Clint Haverstraw was bent over the right-hand side of his desk watching the radio-compass indicator, but when I leaned over him he swiveled his chair and looked up at me. Clint had the cleanliness madness, and his compartment was fussily housekept, pencils lashed with bowknots, the driftmeter hood weirdly shined with shoe polish. I remembered that early in our tour we’d had ground-school dinghy drill one day, and Marrow got Clint’s goat talking about mud. “If it rains much more we’ll need these dinghies,” Buzz said, “to ride the mud around here.” And, seeing Haverstraw’s loathing of our dirty, disordered life welling up, Buzz took off. The clean war of the Air Force. No marching, no foxholes, no mud. Clint wanted a bath right on the spot, by the time Buzz got through. Marrow was merciless. Most of the time, though, Marrow was gentle and protective with Clint, whose trick mind for numbers dazzled Buzz. Haverstraw was really Marrow’s toy. The favoritism was clinched when Haverstraw came up with a most unexpected talent—for baseball. This was revealed to us on April Fools’ Day, after we had been shown The Body for the first time, when, in the late mildness of that spring afternoon, a bunch of us organized a pickup hardball game. Haverstraw said he’d like to play third. Marrow insisted, of course, on pitching, and the opponents began pasting him, and Haverstraw made some stops that took your breath away, and his pegs to first went like telegrams. Marrow became ecstatic. “See that wing?” he shouted. And after the game he said to Clint, “You got to go out for the Group ball team, son. We got to keep those God-damn sergeants off that ball team.”

  Clint never meant to do any harm but often managed to do some, and now, at his desk, after we had shouted over the engine roar a few commonplace complaints against this mission we were on, he turned the full glare of his insensitivity in my direction and cried out, “I hear Marrow’s f—ing your girl.”

  I couldn’t believe my ears; the vibration of the motors suddenly seemed to get into my knee joints. “What?” I shouted.

  Clint repeated his happy announcement.

  “Who the hell told you that?”

  “Three guesses.” Clint gave me a grin like the chrome grille on the radiator of a Buick.

  Marrow, then, was already making a story of going to bed with Daphne, and a lying story, at that, and probably purveying it, as he did his many accounts of his swordsmanship, in the officers’ club, buying anyone he could collar a beer or a coke so he could have a bonded audience, and letting the others talk until, at a general pause, he would lean back in his chair and get off a fine lead sentence. “Did you ever clamp it to your co-pilot’s best girl?” Something like that. And all a lie. In the past, when I had listened to Buzz’s stories of his epic successes in bed, I had always thought of his girls as figures in a homemade myth, not as flesh and blood and breathing reputation, but now I saw that the coin he spent so freely was human, and I was in a rage standing there looking at Clint’s delighted face—but my rage was mixed with a sadness for Marrow, too. I saw for the first time, after what Daphne had told me the day before, a pattern in the recitals of these tales of his prowess. All lies? There was some insatiable repetitive driving need in him.

  I turned my back on Haverstraw’s table, and on
him, and made my way in a daze of thinking and anger back up to the cockpit and sat in my seat and looked over at Buzz. He had buckled his helmet and buttoned the collar of his suit, and he was ready for whatever the day would offer, and like the cadaver on the beach at Pamonassett, he seemed to be looking into distant times and spaces—only of course he was simply scanning the sky for signs of our other groups; very much alive, damn his alert green eyes.

  I shuddered. I think I must have wanted to kill Buzz. Yes, I wanted to kill. I, who had such a horror of killing. Who had guilt-fraught nightmares about our work of killing civilians: the faces looking upward, in the dream, and I among them, watching the killing coming down from the sky, and Max Brindt standing beside me in a thick crowd of innocents with upturned Picasso faces, and the horrible feeling of being rooted to the ground and unable to run away, and yet knowing that it was also I up above who had dropped the killing that was falling on also me below.

  To overcome this fearful anger I, too, looked into the distance. There were broken clouds below us, but around us the sky was porcelain. We were flying southeastward over Norfolk. I felt somewhat calmer.

  Suddenly I had a new understanding of one of Marrow’s favorite stories about his own flying—about the dive that had really scared him. While testing at Mildress he had flown as a stunt pilot in several movies: Through the Thunderhead, Wings Over the Desert, Mail Run, and some others. “This one movie, when they were making it,” Marrow once had told us, while we were still in training, and he had repeated the story many times, “they said to me, ‘Go up, stunt as crazy as you can, and then take a long dive.’ So I did what they said, and I didn’t ask any questions; they paid me to fly, not to yap at ’em. When the picture came out, I bought me a ticket and went in to see it, and I found out it was about this pilot, he got p—ed off at his wife, so he went up to spite her with some wild flying that was going to pay her back, he figured. I could see where I took over with the stunting, I mean, the flying got good. I looked around the theater at the faces to see how they were taking it. Boy, was I scaring some of those women! Anyway, I looked back at the screen, and I was going into this dive, and diving was my specialty; it was real clean. Then I noticed, God, I was getting low, and I didn’t remember I went that low, and I still wasn’t pulling out. Then they showed the ground coming up—too fast. It was too late for me to pull out. I shouted right out in the theater, the people must’ve thought I was off my trolley. The lousy plane crashed and the pilot was killed, and I was almost dead myself. They should have told me about what they pasted onto the end of my dive….” And Marrow laughed at the memory, with too much laughter.

  5/

  “All right,” Marrow said, “prepare to go on oxygen.”

  We were at ten thousand feet, and it was twelve minutes past noon. I unhooked my mask and ran a hand across my jaw; I’d shaved too early—nearly ten hours before—and I could see that I was going to have stubble trouble, as Handown had once called it, under the tightness of an oxygen mask.

  Colonel Bins was taking huge easing turns, so that two groups behind us could attach themselves to us.

  Now I was in my mask, cut off from the world. I regulated the flow. In a few minutes Prien called for an oxygen check, ticking off the numbers from nose to tail, and each man answered in his way.

  I said, “O.K.”

  Marrow always said, “I’m here, son.”

  At splasher six, where our task force was to achieve its final assembly, we all made an enormous S of two semi-circles, so that the whole formation could close up, and on the way around to the right I looked out and, seeing group after group tacked closely onto the great loop, I had a sense of our strength, our growing strength. It was always a thrilling sight to see a strike tighten into ranks, and that morning it was breathtaking.

  “Four aborts,” Farr said. He meant from our Group. “Lucky bastards.”

  After the huge turns, which took nearly ten minutes, we unwound on a southwesterly course, sailing over the Suffolk downs for Orfordness, where we would break with the friendly coast. We were all put together.

  Our great strike was made up of two task forces of about a hundred ships each, which were flying in train twelve minutes apart; each task force consisted of two combat wings, one behind the other, five minutes apart; each combat wing comprised three groups of eighteen ships each. The groups had now joined up into these combat wings, slanting wedges exactly like the basic vee in which our three planes, The Body, Finah Than Dinah, and Expendable VI, were stacked in our element, and like that in which the three squadrons of six ships each in our Group, Bins’, Jonas’, and Holdreth’s, were formed up in their turn. The combat wing had a lead group of eighteen, a high group of eighteen stacked up behind to the left, and a low group of eighteen astern, below, and to the right. We in The Body, in the second element of the lead squadron of the lead group of the second combat wing of the second task force, were about three quarters of the way back from the head of the procession. Actually we felt more exposed than that sounds, for thanks to the gaps between combat wings, we were right out on the nose of the last big fighting box of the strike. All that shielded us from the very nose was Colonel Bins’ element, Angel Tread, Erector Set, and Gruesome Twosome.

  On the way to Orfordness something happened which was very curious, which struck me at the time as being strange, but whose meaning I did not then even try to fathom, for I was busy thinking of other things.

  Junior Sailen came up on interphone. “Ball turret to engineer,” he said, though we usually had none of that radioman’s-manual kind of formality on our ship, Roger, over, and out, but simply spoke to each other by name and shut up when done. “Roger,” which was supposed to mean, “I understand you,” was occasionally used by our sergeants with a heavy accent on the second syllable to express mock alacrity, and for a while, during Marrow’s phase of enthusiasm for English slang, we had bandied around “Rodney,” which Buzz had said was the R.A.F. equivalent for “Roger.” On the whole we were sloppy because Marrow thought it was manly to be raunchy. “Cut that kid stuff,” Marrow had said on an early mission when our first radioman, Kowalski, had gone formal on us.

  Anyway, Sailen said, “Ball turret to engineer.”

  “What’s up, Junior?” Handown said.

  “Come down here a minute,” Sailen said.

  Junior Sailen was a tiny guy; one look at him made me feel burly. He was five feet and one inch tall, weighed a hundred fifteen—and a good thing that he was so tiny, too, because his station in combat was just a small plastic bubble full of machinery down there under the ship, where even he had to sit with his knees drawn up like an embryo. He was strong for his size, and well co-ordinated, and needed to be, because it took a natural athlete, if a small one, to gyrate those Sperry K-2 power turrets around, traversing through range and deflection at the same time, by means of feather-delicate touches on the hand grips of the guns, to get a bead on a German fighter coming from underneath at a skidding angle. And though he had this litheness and quickness and was twenty-one years old, we all treated him as a baby, and he loved it. He was our mascot. He told me once that his father had died early and that as a kid he’d been brought up by a brother ten years older than he, and that from the time his brother had left home he’d always been restless; he would take a job, and there’d be no one to look out for him, and he’d quit in a few days and mope around the house, and then take another job, and the same thing would happen. In our crew he was in clover—nine older brothers, who fought each other to take care of him. Even Farr: “Did you remember your gloves, Junior?” Junior couldn’t take a p— without getting permission from one of us.

  Marrow hated not being in the know, and when Sailen asked Handown to come down to his turret, Buzz cut in right away, saying, “What’s itching you down there, Junior?”

  “Nothing,” Junior said.

  “What do you mean, ‘nothing’? Wha’d you call the engine
er down for if it was nothing?”

  Usually at this point Junior Sailen would have been eating out of Marrow’s hand, but this time he seemed inspired with gall and he said, “It’s just between Handown and me.”

  I was amazed at this: it made me think there must be something seriously wrong in the turret about which Sailen was too scared to tell Marrow, for fear it might mean turning back. Handown had an amazing knack for getting things straight in the plane. In the heaviest of action he could retain the cool, systematic logic of a case-hardened mechanic on a trouble-shooting quest, eliminating one by one the possible causes of malfunction in the order of their probability. He had saved us all more than once. I think that what made me sure something was wrong in the turret was Sailen’s having started the whole thing off in that formal way, using the word “engineer” in calling Handown. Power of suggestion.

  Rebuffed by the tiny man, Marrow went wild. He loosed a fantastic torrent of obscenities against sergeants, which reminded me, in its excesses and its vileness, of his tirade the night he had gone for a dancing lesson at the Red Cross Aeroclub.

  And what came out now was distorted in sound, because a throat mike couldn’t take more than a certain amount of volume.

  When it was over, Sailen said with astounding quiet courage, “You must have the wrong number, sir. No one here by that name.”

  “Listen, you God-damn yellow-bellied mouse…”

  Handown was apparently back at his post in the upper turret, because he now spoke one word that cut Marrow short. “Sir.”