I kept running and moving and ducking and hiding but I didn’t know from who. There were other guys around me but I couldn’t see them very clearly.
Then suddenly I was all alone on this little hill overlooking a big drop-off. It was almost like the drain hole out back but at the time I couldn’t place it. All I knew was that I was all alone. And I’d never felt that all alone and lonely in my life. It was so sad that I couldn’t take it and I woke up. But I must not have been all the way awake. Because I was staring at my reflection in the glass doors, but it wasn’t me. It was this guy in an old dirty tannish kind of uniform. He had some kind of straps wrapped around his shins up to his knees and he had on this pot of a helmet, like nothing I’d ever seen. And he was carrying a gun, an old bolt-action job with a long wooden stock. It looked like it had some kind of flower painted on the stock.
He was standing there staring at me and he had the saddest look I’d ever seen in my life. It just hit me way down deep.
I don’t know how long I stood there looking at him. Gradually I realized that he was gone and it was just my reflection. Then Sherry opened the door and I just about jumped out of my skin. Sherry matched my jump because she didn’t know I was standing there on the other side of the curtains. Adrenaline—what a rush!
I just couldn’t get the dream or whatever out of my mind. 1 kept wondering who he was and what had made him so sad. 1 knew deep down that he wasn’t some figment of my imagination. He was a real guy.
Then a few weeks later we were knocking around the island, taking in the sights. We were at this little park in Agana. I was enjoying the sun and Sherry took the kid into this little building off to the side.
After a few minutes she came out and she was all white like she’d seen a ghost.
“Maybe you better come in here and see this,” she said. “J.T.’s found his army man.”
The building turned out to be this little museum about the war on Guam. I saw J.T. standing in front of this glass case looking at some old Japanese army clothes.
“Is that like your army man wears?” I asked him. And he nodded his head. I agreed with him. It was just like the guy I saw in the glass door.
The display was about this guy who was a Japanese soldier who got left on Guam and stayed hidden for sixteen years. He finally walked out of the jungle in 1960, still not convinced that the war was over. I got a copy of the book he wrote. I read it. Then I knew what was going on.
He wasn’t the only one to survive and be left. There were a bunch of them. He was one of the few to make it out alive, though.
It was some story. How he and his friends, just kids, got drafted into the army and shipped off to Guam just before the Allies came to take it back.
How they watched the enemy airplanes, our airplanes, fly over from the south, night after night, day after day. Concentrating on another island, probably Saipan. How they heard the constant bombardment of Saipan in the distance. How they wondered when their turn would come. There was no doubt that the Americans would come. There was little doubt that they would win. But the Japanese had been instructed to fight on, fight for the emperor. Never yield, never surrender.
I read how the bombardment finally started. It went on for hours and days and it was like living in hell. I read how they waited for the invaders to follow the bombardment and kill them all. They waited until they could wait no more and finally the attack came. And their leaders didn’t know what to do. There was no orderly counterattack. It was every man for himself. Many finally found themselves alone, cut off, and hopeless.
They didn’t know if the war was over. They didn’t know if their army had been defeated or had left. They only knew that they were alone and they could not surrender.
That’s what I think happened to the guy on our lanai. He got left. He got separated. And then he died. But he never surrendered. And I don’t think I would be able to tell him that their army lost. But I wish to God that I could tell him that it’s over.
ABOVE AND BEYOND
WHEN I entered the service it seemed to be full of old farts who spent all their time reminiscing about Korea and World War II. As I neared the end of my service it seemed that all the old farts had been replaced by a bunch of young kids who thought Vietnam was ancient history. Yeah, I know it’s hard to see the old farts when you are one. But it was a good thing that the generations got mixed. War teaches us a lot of very difficult lessons. Lessons too painful to have to keep learning over and over again. So I listened to the war stories. I hope the kids still do.
“Bullet Flight, turn right heading 262.”
“Roger approach, understand you want us to go right to 262. Is that the military right or what?”
The air traffic controller stared at the blips on his radar screen and immediately realized his error.
“Uh… negative Bullet, turn left heading 262.”
“Okay, that’ll be a lot easier, approach.”
“Bullet, roger, say altitude.”
“Altitude.”
“Bullet, say altitude.”
“Altitude.”
“Damn pilots!” the microphone flew across the console. “Stupid, egotistical jerks, the whole bunch of them.”
The controller reached for the mike again, but another hand reached it first. He stared at the hand, then followed it up to the face. It was probably the oldest-looking face he had ever seen in an Air Force uniform.
“Try it this way.” The face smiled as the hand keyed the microphone. “Bullet flight, say altitude.”
“Altitude,” came the monotonous reply accompanied by muffled laughter.
“Roger, Bullet flight, say canceling flight plan.”
“Uh… negative approach… uh… we’re level at one six thousand.”
“See, you just have to know how to handle ’em.” The ancient one smiled and dropped the mike back in the young lieutenant’s hand.
“Thanks, but who are you, sir… uh.… Sarge… uh.” The junior officer stared in bewilderment at the rank on the intruder’s collar. It was like nothing he had ever seen before.
“Warrant officer is the proper designation but Red will do just as well. They’ve been calling me Red since I enlisted over thirty years ago.” He ran one hand through his almost nonexistent hair. “Course back then they had a reason to call me Red.”
“Okay, Red, nice to meet you.” The lieutenant stuck out his hand. “I’m Skip. Like the way you handled that smart-ass pilot. They’re all alike. None of them is worth a bucket of warm spit.”
“Now there’s where I beg to differ with you, Skip. If you can get someone to cover for you, I’ll tell you why. If anyone asks, just tell them I’m inspecting you.”
“Oh, my God, you’re Warrant Officer Garza.” The light of panic glowed suddenly in the lieutenant’s eyes. “I’m sorry sir… ah Warrant… I didn’t recognize you.”
The young officer had heard about Warrant Officer Garza, the toughest inspector on the general’s team. They said he was a thousand years old and tough as nails. He was rumored to have given flying lessons to Curtis Lemay.
“Relax, Skip. It’s still Red. You’re inspection is already over. I’ve been watching you for the last hour. Don’t worry, you passed.”
“Whew.” The relief in Skip’s voice was evident. “Would you like a cup of coffee, or something?”
The officer handed his mike over to another controller and led the way into a small lounge. After the darkness of the control room, the lounge was almost too bright.
“That was pretty nifty the way you put down that jackass in there. This job would be a whole lot easier without pilots.”
“Sometimes they can be a real pain in the posterior,” the old aviator agreed. “But I still think that they’re some of the greatest people around. Owe my life to several of them. One more than most.”
“Oh, I see,” replied Skip. He had just noticed the wings that Garza wore over his right shirt pocket. “1 guess you would owe a lot to your own pilot. You were a gu
nner, right?“
“Yes, I was a gunner. On several different types of aircraft. And I served with some very good pilots. But I wasn’t talking about my own pilot. I was talking about a different kind of pilot altogether. A fighter pilot.
“Since you just passed your inspection with flying colors and you’ve got a lot of time on your hands, I’ll tell you about him. That is if you want to listen to the ramblings of an old war-horse.”
The old gunner didn’t wait for a reply. As he wrapped himself in his tale, Skip watched enthralled. It was as if time was unwinding from the old face. He seemed to get younger as he talked about a younger time for the Air Force.
When the war came along I was already in what some youngster would call my middle years. I had been born on a small farm and lived and worked the same one for most of my thirty-two years. I took over after my daddy died and raised crops and a family.
I guess I could have hung around and bought a couple of war bonds while the younger men fought the war, but it just didn’t seem right to me. It wasn’t some police action like you got going now, with everyone not too sure who’s right or wrong. It was easy to choose up sides. That German fanatic with the toothbrush mustache was a real threat to my way of life. So I went down and volunteered. Told the guys in charge that I was only twenty-four. Now I know I didn’t fool anybody. But they needed as many men as they could get and I was in pretty good shape so they let me in.
I had every intention of being a pilot. Thought if they gave me a good plane, I could get the war over that much faster. But at the time what they needed most of all was gunners. Way they explained it to me, the B-17 only had seats for two pilots but it had room for eight gun aimers. Being a dumb old country boy, I agreed that it seemed the way to go.
Before I discovered the error of my ways, I was in the middle of a very hot war and up to my elbows in shell casings. Being a gunner on a 17 was a whole new way of life. It meant sitting in front of an open hole in a noisy airplane, freezing to death and wishing the bad guys would show up and try to kill you so that you could have something to take your mind off the cold.
It seemed like as soon as we’d leave Jolly Old England everybody would get mad at us. The air just filled up with nasties who wanted to have our hides. But we did have one or two little friends. They always seemed to arrive about the time things got really tense. They were the proud individuals who flew cover for us.
One in particular was this major who led a squad of P-47 Thunderbolts. The Thunderbolt, or Thunder Jug as the pilots called it, was some piece of work. It wasn’t as fast as a lot of the fancier fighters, but boy was it tough.
It was kind of like the cockroach of the air. No matter how many times you stepped on it, it just kept coming back for more.
Everyone on the crew got to know the major. He always showed up when everything got darkest. He was kind of like our own personal silver lining.
He was known by all the bomber crews as “Dad” because on the radio he referred to everyone as “Son.” It was getting to be pretty regular. We’d get jumped by a bunch of Krauts. The pilot would get on the horn and start calling for the cavalry. Then all of a sudden we’d hear that voice of confidence on the radio, “Don’t worry, Son, here come the good guys.”
The major and his boys’d be all over those Nazis. They seemed to be coming from all directions at once, with their fifties blasting, just tearing that German sheet metal to shreds. And Dad would be right in the thick of things, leading by example. He was easy to pick out. He had a great big bull’s-eye painted on the side of his Jug. It was a joke. It was like he was taunting the Germans, saying bet you can’t even hit me when I’m in the center of the target.
Him and his boys were so accurate and deadly that the word got around even among the Germans. More times than not we’d see the Messerschmitts turn tail and run when they recognized Dad and his squad. The worst mission would start to feel like a milk run the minute we found out that Dad would be guarding our six.
Just when it felt like some of us might even survive to terrorize the girls back home, somebody decided to tweak it up a notch to damn serious.
We started to notice a whole lot more senior officers sitting in on our target briefings. They were just falling all over themselves to give us dire speeches about the seriousness of our missions. And there wasn’t a smile in the bunch of them. The targets got to be the you-gotta-be-kidding-me variety. What made it even worse was that they started sending us up against the same target area two or three times in a row. If you think the bad guys were mad when we went after their ball bearing plants the first time, you should have been there for the second go-round. They were seriously pissed off.
If it hadn’t been for guys like Dad to count on, we would have been highly depressed about the whole thing.
Then came that briefing that topped them all. We knew we were in trouble when we pulled up to the briefing hut. There must have been ten cars with little flags on them. The tail gunner took one look and started to cross himself at about ninety miles an hour. One of the waist gunners, who always professed to be a devout holy terror, started to beg the tail to teach him how to do that.
When we saw our target we all got real quiet. The only sound was the snap of jaws hitting the floor. One pilot, who suddenly looked about ten years old, raised his hand and asked if we wouldn’t be outflying our escorts just a bit. He was relieved when the answer was in the negative. His relief only lasted a couple of seconds. The briefer went on to explain that there would be no cover for this mission. It seems that another bomb group was to act as a decoy for us, to draw the attention of the German defenses. All the available cover would ride with this group to make it seem like the real thing. Then he said something that really scared us. “Don’t worry, guys, it’ll be a piece of cake.”
Since military units were first put together, the words “piece of cake” have been used as shorthand for a genuine, gold-plated, no-bull suicide mission. Nobody whistled on the way to work that day.
We took off and quickly formed into the defensive units that made the B-17 so formidable. If it held together, the combat wing left little space for the bad guys to maneuver between the airplanes. Then our massed firepower would hold them at bay. But the Nazis were always thinking up new ways to break up the formations. Even if the formation held together, we got stuck in the worst possible position. We were in the outside tail end charlie position in the high group. Seventeens who flew in this position were known as fighter bait.
As we flew out of the right country into the wrong one, everyone was concentrating too hard to talk. We were straining to pick out those little dots that meant we had company.We all wanted to believe that the fake by the other bomb group would work, but we didn’t dare count on it. That was like believing a weather forecast.
It seemed like the brass had finally called one right. We were already entering Germany without being jumped by a single fighter. Maybe this would be a piece of cake after all. In fact things were going so good that the number four engine decided to take the day off. Without a warning, the big twelve-hundred-horsepower Wright on the outside of the right wing just quit cold. The pilot scrambled to compensate and he and the copilot spent the next ten minutes trying to restart it.
“Well, guys, I knew things were going too smooth,” the pilot said. “I think we can make it to the target in formation, but it’s going to be difficult to keep up going home.”
That was not good news. Stragglers were fair game to any predators around. Our only hope was that the fighters stayed engaged with the decoy bunch.
When the blue sky started to get dirty with the black puffs from antiaircraft fire, we all calmed down a bit. It was a well-known fact that the German fighters stayed out of their own flak fields. It was too easy to get hit by your own gunners. Today it was a well-known fact that somebody forgot to tell the Nazis. They jumped us from all directions at once. They had just been playing possum, trying to lure us into a trap. And it worked. Suddenly the w
ell-kept formation ceased to exist. It was every man for himself.
Our pilot threw the ship in the evasive maneuver known as “go every way at once.” It must have been intended to throw the Germans off by making them think we were crazy. And it was working, too. Then the bombardier had to ruin it with those terrible words. “Level out, pilot, target coming up.”
The chorus of “are you out of your mind” was interrupted by the pilot.
“Shut up, everybody. Bombs is right. We didn’t come all this way just to be a target.” He paused for effect. “Besides, Herman the German would never expect us to do something that dumb. Just might confuse him.”
We leveled out and the bombardier took control of the ship. Every gun blazed at the multiple targets. It looked like a flying circus. For once it looked like the target might actually be as important as intel said it was.
Just as we hit zero in the countdown and the bombs started to fall away, I saw a bad guy start his run. He was definitely lining up on us. He was coming in low from the left, which was a shame, because that was the way we were supposed to turn. I opened up with my gun and yelled for the pilot to break to the right. The SOB just kept coming. I don’t think he even paid any attention to my machine gun blazing away. I watched him squeeze his triggers and at almost the same instant I felt a jolt as the number one engine exploded.
The pilot whipped the big bomber into a tight right spiral away from him but the damage had already been done. The only good thing that happened was that the sudden descent put out the flames. But it didn’t save the engine. We had just become a two-engine bomber. A lonely, two-engine bomber. When we broke right and descended, what was left of our defensive formation broke left and climbed.
We were now way out on a limb. We were damaged, slow, and all alone. You could almost hear the sound of the coffin slamming shut.
The pilot eased her around and headed for home. We decided to run low and as fast as we could to avoid as much trouble as possible. But with only two out of four left we couldn’t get much speed out of the old bucket.
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