Tail of the Storm

by Alan Cockrell

  As daylight falls on the airfield, the all-clear horn sounds. Rob and I hurry back to the aircraft, arriving before the rest of the crew. The long cord lies outstretched in front of the jet, headset still attached. Various articles of clothing, tools, and personal gear are strewn around, abandoned. The Starlizzard, still powered by the humming external power cart, sits contentedly without human accompaniment. Shortly the rest of the crew arrives in a breathless frenzy of conversation and falls hurriedly to prepping the jet for departure.

  Very quickly we make ready for engine start. I'm sitting in the jump seat, programming the navigation computer while Rob and the pool pilot go through a nervous and hurried cockpit preflight. Glancing out the windscreen toward the maintenance trailers, I'm awestruck to see dozens of gas-masked men scurrying toward the bunkers. The fight is on again. I press the interphone and utter the two words, well recognized by all crewdogs, that signify trouble.

  Once again the maintenance van brakes in front of us, and the driver beckons furiously for us to join him, which I hastily do. It seems reasonable to get to a relatively safe bunker rather than be strapped to a tremendous target full of jet fuel. But I quickly realize that I am the only member of the crew on the van; the aircraft is starting engines. The idea of being left behind has no appeal, so I abandon the van, which speeds away as I jump off. I race to the crew door and vault up, pulling the ladder up behind me. Larry slams the door down, and the jet lurches forward as I climb up to the flight deck. Vicious lies later circulate for weeks that I pounded on the closed crew door, begging to be taken in.

  We depart what is to become known as Scud City with a multitude of sensations. The report of Israel's atomic attack was bogus, but still, Saddam had made it personal with us now. We will never know how close we came to being casualties. We will joke about it for weeks and take dubious pride in having been involved in the first surface-to-surface ballistic missile attack since World War II and in having been witnesses to the first missile-to-missile engagement in history. The name Patriot will take on an entirely new and lasting meaning for us. And we will listen with fascination to the even wilder and more spectacular Scud experiences of other crews in the weeks that follow. I will watch missile engagements from an airborne advantage. Other crews will fly through such battles, watching the rocket plumes flash by their wings in the night, the detonations lighting the skyscapes about them.

  But a few days later, we hear sobering news of a C-5 crew from the New York Air Guard that was dispatched to Dhahran to evacuate the children of American residents. The Scuds came as the children were boarding. The crew quickly herded the children into the bunkers, and as they waited in the darkness, a man appeared in the entrance wearing a full complement of chemical gear. He warned them that a chemical agent was present, and casualties were resulting, then hurried away. The crew quickly pulled on their masks and adjusted the fit but then looked around at the children, who had no protection; their eyes were tearful, and a few were sobbing. Some of the kids clung to the airmen in fright.

  Then the crew did the most gallant thing I have ever heard of. They removed their masks and gathered the children around them. Their self-sacrifice could in no way save the kids. But these brave men decided that it was not only preferable but also strangely appropriate that they die with the children.

  Later, they learned that there was no gas; the Scuds had conventional explosives only. An airman had suffered an epileptic seizure, which resembles the sinister effects of nerve gas, and thus the alert had been issued.

  Although above-average courage is expected of a person in uniform, it remains uncanny to me how America has always been blessed with warriors whose integrity and honor exceed those of the general populace. We joke a lot about that closing statement in Michener's The Bridges at Toko-Ri. Certainly the admiral would be more gender neutral if he cast his rhetorical plea to the sea winds today Still, it's really no joke. Where do we find such men? I don't know. I just thank God we've always had them in abundance.

  Fourteen.

  Dawn Patrol

  Looking like dirty brown cirrus clouds, the normally blue skies overhead are corrupted with ominous, oily mares tails. The sky grows dimmer and greasier to the north, and as we begin our descent into the northern Saudi base at Jubail, we see a long, tarry black line where the horizon ought to be. The Iraqis have set fire to hundreds of oil wells in a despotic act of denial and defiance. Yet I've seen this before. It wasn't on this grand a scale, but it was a desperate struggle under murky skies like these. And it was a different kind of war-one fought right after Viet Nam, for me, and close to home. These smoky skies vividly remind me of one day in that campaign.

  The telephone's ring was murderous. My hand fumbled in the dim morning light, trying to find the blasted receiver. I mumbled something and heard the operations dispatcher's pitched voice.

  "The Loop's blown up!"

  No more talk was necessary. I acknowledged and hung up the phone. It had finally happened. Our territory had been attacked by a vicious and relentless enemy. Attacked at our most vulnerable point. The campaigns of the last few weeks had been skirmishes by comparison.

  I rushed to the airfield and dashed into the hangar, switched on the lights, and shoved open the big door. The dawning light spilled into the cavernous structure, bathing the sleeping planes in morning. I trotted over to the winged mongrel, picked it up by the tail handle and heaved it out backward. It was like pulling an unwilling dog out of his house by the hind legs. I could almost feel the wings stretching around behind me, rubbing sleepy windshield eyes.

  "Naw, go away. lt's too early for this, man," whispered the Cub. I answered it as I strained to drag the main wheels over the hangar door tracks. "Gotta go, Buddy. Today's the big one. The Loop blew last night."

  I ran through a quick preflight of N29FC, the 1952 model Piper Super Cub. She was a simple airplane, built of aluminum tubing covered with fabric, doped, and painted a shade of puke green, a 150horsepower Lycoming under her cowling and an old tube radio with a single frequency mounted in her wing root. "ALA FORESTRY COMM." was painted boldly under her wings.

  The familiar sour, pungent odor of old fabric airplanes filled my senses and roused my spirit as I strapped on the Cub and primed the engine. The craft fit me well. It was good to sit centerline again and to have a stick control instead of the wimpy wheel that I had become accustomed to. I flipped the two magneto switches, which clicked with an irreverent loudness in the early silence of the airfield. Then I cracked the throttle and engaged the starter.

  The starter motor sang. The prop swung. One revolution. Two. The engine coughed, shuddered, died. But still the prop swung to the starter's strained song.

  Then came that explosion of the engine bursting into life, that blessed awakening of this noble creature. My heart soared at the engine's rumble and the sight of the prop blurring, then disappearing. A shudder ran through the airframe from nose to tail, like that of a dog shaking off a douse, as the heavy prop induced its torque.

  I nudged the throttle and leaned to the side, peering ahead as the little tail-dragger rolled out. I taxied fast, checking the magnetos and flight controls as I went; there was no time to waste. The battle was raging, and I had a twenty-minute flight to reach it. I checked the final approach for traffic and took the runway, ramming the throttle home and walking the rudder pedals as the Cub surged ahead. Almost immediately, I applied forward pressure on the stick. The tail lifted and the Cub scurried ahead on its two main wheels. One quick glance inside and I saw that the speed was fifty knots. Enough. I eased off the forward pressure, brought the stick back slightly, and we were airborne. And what a glorious word it is: airborne, born of the air, born once again, renewed, refreshed-sweet release.

  I held the nose low for a few seconds to let the Cub accelerate, then rolled quickly to the right, banking sharply as we climbed over the forest, coming about to a northwest course. The day had dawned gloriously clear, with a fresh southerly breeze; not a cloud was in
sight. But that's what the enemy wanted. It was his kind of day, as yesterday had been and the several days before. And as we climbed above the tall pines, I saw that he had struck with a vengeance.

  I was stunned by the magnitude of it. A great, towering mushroom cloud loomed ahead on the horizon. I switched on the radio, and excited voices began to boom through my headset. Our ground forces were being mobilized and sent into the fray. Desperate calls were going out for reinforcements. I announced that I was airborne and en route, but no one seemed to take notice. I announced again, and the dispatcher admonished me to hurry. But the Cub was giving me her all, blazing through the sky at eighty-five knots, her top speed.

  I pulled out my charts as we drew closer to the imposing smoke column, but I wondered if my presence could make a difference. Normally, my job was to find each of the little pockets of intruders and call one of our ground teams in to repel it. There was little else I could do. The Cub was unarmedfar too small to carry the heavy ordnance needed to attack this determined foe from the air. But our people were already well aware of the enemy's brutal strike at the place known as the Loop. Our advance ground forces were already engaged. So what was I to do?

  As we approached the besieged area, the details of the gigantic cloud began to break out. Broom and black smoke thick enough to crash into boiled, rolled, and churned its way upward, carried northward with the winds. Down sun of the inferno the landscape was eclipsed by darkness. Closer still, the orange brilliance of fierce conflagrations began to show beneath it. What an awesome feeling; the Cub was so small and frail against the nefarious thing ahead. I was no more than a mosquito flying toward a roaring campfire.

  Finally we arrived and began to scout the battlefield. It appeared that it happened exactly as one of the old-timers had predicted. "Happens every three or four years," he had said. The Loop is a great bend in the railroad, winding its way around a canyon nearly to the point of meeting itself again, like a horseshoe bent inward. Sparks spew onto the railside from the trains' hot brakes, as they enter the Loop. Sooner or later, the inevitable happens. The sparks catch in the brush and explode into rampaging fires racing up the ravines, devouring the lifeblood of this regionits timberand threatening the dwellings of the nearby town.

  Piper Super Cub

  I circumnavigated the fire, trying to determine its extent and to find possible roads or trails through which the trucks could approach it. The big flatbeds carried bulldozers, but the slow dozers were useless unless they could be deposited at a strategic point downwind and near the fire. I could easily tell the trucks and dozers where best to counterattack, but they had no radios then. I could only communicate with the base station and towers. I watched, frustrated, as the trucks wandered about, the drivers blindly discussing and planning their action.

  I was an outsider here, a temporary pilot, flying only for the season, then I would be gone. But the forest rangers down there had lived around these parts all their lives. They knew the land well. And I was a stranger with whom they were guarded, standoffish, and skeptical. I overheard a lookout tower operator once refer to me, in a transmission to the base station, as "that airplane pilot." They really were good people, but from time to time I was the object of their humor, like the time a tower man asked me to check out a smoke sighting. Not knowing the countryside, I relied on highly detailed maps using the section-township-range gridwork system, maps that the tower men and drivers also possessed. But this man insisted that I fly over near the place where the old farmer had been found dead.

  "Say, what?" I asked incredulously.

  "You know," he responded, "the ole black man, the one they found dead in his pickup truck, oh, five, maybe six, years ago. Out that way"

  Luckily, most of the time, knowing that I was unfamiliar with the area, they used map coordinates. But today I folded my map and stowed it. Determined to get into this fight, I dove low over the trucks opposite their direction of movement along the old logging road they had chosen. I wanted them to turn around and approach the fire from another angle, and I had picked out a route they could use. My low pass seemed to puzzle them, although I knew it was an accepted signal. The lead driver opened his door and looked up, as I made a second pass, the Cub's wheels flashing only a few feet over the truck's cab. Then they responded and the trucks began to turn around. I spent the next fifteen minutes herding the trucks toward the worst part of the fire, and I could imagine them talking as clearly as if I were in the truck with them: "I hope that tomfool pilot knows what the blazes he's doin'."

  Time and again I flew past the advancing face of the inferno, and with the side window slid back I felt the searing heat on my face. And I watched with utter fascination as the fire down below began to "crown" a frightening spectacle, seeing it jump from treetop to treetop, driven before the wind. On one foray around the leeward side, I climbed high and challenged the smoke column, a supremely reckless deed. But I was loving this time of struggle and combat and started to grow cocky.

  I intended only to sideswipe the cloud, to be immersed in it just a few seconds. They were among the most frightening moments of my flying career. At first I felt a bump or two and smelled the burning timber. Then the heat shaft seized the Cub and pitched us violently, as if the raging monster had grabbed us by the throat and was shaking us asunder. I choked from smoke and strained my burning eyes for signs of daylight, hoping that the engine would continue to aspirate. Then, as suddenly as it hit, it spit us out the side of the shaft into clear, calm air.

  My watering eyes fluttered for relief, and I filled my lungs with sweet air. Shaking, I radioed the base station that I was recovering for gas at Monroeville, a few miles to the north. I didn't really need gas. There were almost two hours left in the tanks, but I desperately needed a break.

  I taxied up to the fuel pumps and shut the engine down, looking back toward the still visible smoke column as I stepped onto the porch. The local gang greeted me and asked about the fire, then allowed as to how they knew the Loop was going to blow up any day now. I grabbed a Coke and strolled to the back room, where my friend Dick Dammon was strumming his guitar as usual, dog sleeping at his side.

  Maybe the Chuck Yeager types never need solace, but sometimes the ordinary flier needs to find a confidant upon whom to unload his own nagging inadequacies and shortcomings. I, for one, long for a kindred soul to say (to lie, if need be) that he has been there as well, to say with a soothing chuckle, "Yeah, I know what you mean. I've done that too."

  I had come to know Dick quite well in the last several weeks. I enjoyed visiting with him on these stopovers. He worked at night, flying canceled checks in a Cessna Skymaster. He stayed there at the field during the day. They'd given him a cot in the back room. He and I had much in common: we were about the same age, both recently out of the Air Force, and both somewhat outsiders in this rural worldhe especially, being a Yankee and all.

  But Dick was an enigma. I couldn't quite figure him. Outwardly he seemed to be the model of a person at total peace with himself and the world. All his happiness seemed to require was his guitar, his dog, and his modest flying job. Yet there was a hint of turmoil in his eyes. He didn't talk much about himself, and I knew little of his past, except that he flew C-7 Caribou transports in Viet Nam.

  On my normal fire patrol I'd spend more time there, but I had to leave Dick and return to the hunt. Already the base station had telephoned to alert me that more fires were breaking out elsewhere in the district. I fired up the Super Cub and waved to the airport bums.

  They wanted to know how quickly I could get airborne. I swung the plane around into the wind, clearing for other air traffic as I turned. I held hard on the brakes, firewalled the throttle, and held the stick as far back as it would go, like a carrier pilot about to catapult. The asphalt runway was about a hundred yards away, but I didn't use it. I released the brakes and bounded across the small parking apron, laboring into the air over the grassy edge not much more than a good stone's throw away. I knew I couldn't have d
one that if a stiff headwind hadn't slipped me an extra ace, but it was a crowd pleaser. Patting the Cub for its performance and feeling refreshed, I turned eastward. But after a short cruise I saw that something strange was happening.

  I was heading for a fire in the distance. It was not very big, but another fire had just started a short distance north of it. As I reached the first smoke, the second one had billowed higher, and now a third baby fire had been born still farther north. I could see that all three fires had broken out along a dirt road barely visible beneath the heavy pine timber. I dropped down as low as I dared, the tires barely clearing the treetops, banking carefully left then right, catching fleeting glimpses of the dirt road. Suddenly I saw what I had suspected.

  A yellow Volkswagen bug chugged along slowly, barely moving, the driver obviously concerned about my presence overhead. I passed over and rolled into a steep 360-degree turn, cobbing the power to maintain airspeed above the stall, which at this height, would be fatal. I rolled out and crossed the road about where I had sighted him, but he was gone. Again coming about, I slowed the Cub back and followed the snaking road but to no avail. I then doubled back and caught a glimpse of the bug parked on a side road in a thicket. Again I cobbed the power and swung back around. He knew he'd been discovered, and he fled northward. I chuckled over the reflection that I was in a cat-and-mouse game, but then thought no, this was a cub-and-bug game. I felt immensely alive and totally at one with the Cub.

  Certain that I had found an arsonist, I climbed for a higher altitude and radioed the discovery to the base station. I passed along the coordinates of the fires, and the route and description of the escaping bug. The answer came that the Highway Patrol was being notified as well as the large paper corporation that owned the pine tree plantation. I reflected on what one of the rangers had told me of forest arsonists: they are often discontented or terminated employees of the paper companies. I desperately wanted this guy to be caught, but I knew that the charge would never stand up in court, as I had not seen him in the act of torching the woods. But maybe they could match tire prints or something. I finally lost the bug under the heavy timber as it fled northward, and I had to abandon the chase.