Even This I Get to Experience

by Norman Lear

  It was in this atmosphere that I was suddenly—how I love this expression!—tickled silly. There was one guy in his fifties—“as black as the ace of spades,” as my father would have described him—large, and with eyes and a smile that a child could have carved into a pumpkin and lit from the inside. I don’t know how many times we passed each other, but each time we did he would turn that face to me, his eyes twinkling, and say: “Gator gonna get you, white boy!”

  “Gator gonna get you, white boy!” I never learned his name, but I know I was sipping the milk of human kindness each time he smiled and said it, and every one of the thousand times he and that line have come back to me since. I have also read volumes of understanding into it at various, usually difficult, moments in my life. Now, in my nineties, I find it the most delightful way of expressing what is approaching all of us, and likely me before most of you.

  • • •

  THE DAY OF ASSIGNMENT finally arrived and I was told to report to the crew of a B-17 led by Captain Albert Brown (Brownie) and copilot Bill Binzen. We all fell in, liked one another quickly, and took to our brand-new B-17 like fraternity brothers to a new frat house. We named our plane Umbriago (“old chum”) after our favorite comedian, Jimmy Durante, who closed his radio show each week with that word. For some days we practiced teamwork in the air, flying day and night training missions, and by the fall of 1944, when we took off to join a bomb group already in battle, we were a proud and sharp Flying Fortress B-17 crew.

  Brownie was handed our orders just before takeoff and instructed not to open them until we had reached our flying altitude. There were two theaters of operations in World War II, the European and the Pacific. Leaving from the East Coast, it seemed most likely that we’d be directed to the European Theater, but we could not have been sure. In the European Theater the 8th Air Force flew out of London, the 15th out of Italy. The crew, with no knowledge as to where we were heading, gathered behind the captain as he opened the brown envelope. With stops in Gander, Newfoundland, and the Azore islands, we were to continue to southern Italy, where we would be joining the 772nd Bomb Squadron of the 463rd Bomb Group, a wing of the 15th Air Force, at an air base outside a town called Foggia. We knew from the press that one of the storied targets of the 15th Air Force was the Ploiesti oil fields in Romania. Ploiesti, which supplied a third of the oil that fueled the Axis forces, was one of the most difficult and best-protected low-altitude targets in Europe, and the 15th Air Force had been suffering major losses there.

  When we took off from Avon Park we were eager to join our brothers in battle overseas. By the time we experienced two nights in Gander—the coldest, most godforsaken spot any of us had ever been to—the freshness of the experience was wearing off, the learning curve somewhat flattened, and with the new reality of the Ploiesti oil fields in our future, the appeal of flying into battle was somewhat more of a stretch.

  I drew guard duty the first night. Why our planes had to be guarded on the tarmac in the dead of night when we were all American servicemen on our own military base on an island one hundred miles from nowhere I’ll never know, but between midnight and three A.M., in the freezing cold, my gloved hand shouldering a shotgun, I walked at attention in front of the plane from wingtip to wingtip for three bullshit hours. Or was I arrogantly overlooking some dark possibility? Had the Germans been training B-17 crews to be dropped on Gander in the dead of night to steal unguarded planes? And those wily Japanese, might they have put something in our food supplies that would cause us not to hear plane engines start up at night, especially when the pilots were Germans? Wait! Was that a “Heil”?

  My agitated imagination carried me for a while, until a measure of fear and loneliness began to overtake it. Into my second hour, the loneliness was met with tears and I was singing at the top of my voice, “We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when . . .” And “I’ll walk alone because to tell you the truth I’ll be lonely, / I don’t mind being lonely when my heart tells me you are lonely too . . .” I knew at least a dozen heartbreaking love songs and, bleary-eyed, sang every one of them into the cold and the wind. My kids are amazed at how many of those songs I recall to this day.

  That night in Gander I learned this about love songs: if there is a relationship and a face to which you connect the lyric, the song can break your heart. Without that, it’s not so much heartbreak as heartache. My heart ached that night for the safety and the comfort of the familiar: my bed, my closet, the things on my wall, certain foods, my shower curtain (“Go know!” as Bubbe would say), and friends and family, which now included Charlotte. I could connect no one person to the “love” in those love songs as I marched wingtip to wingtip in the blackness, alone.

  7

  WE ARRIVED IN FOGGIA in the late afternoon on November 1, 1944, just as a group of B-24s were returning from a mission. The boxy 24s, less sleek than the B-17s, were from a different squadron, landing at a field nearby. That was when we learned that the 772nd Bomb Squadron, to which we were attached, was the only squadron of B-17s in the 15th Air Force. A bit faster and more maneuverable, our plane proved by a slight percentage to be the safer of the two. Slight as that percentage might have been, throughout my life it has made the list every time I have counted my blessings.

  The 463rd Bomb Group air base in Foggia consisted of a couple of hundred tents and a few stone buildings on a desolate open field, a short ride by jeep from the planes and runways. It would be two weeks before we flew our first mission, and we used that time to improve our accommodations. The tents were tents only, no reinforcement on the sides, no lights, no stove, and no floor, just dirt and grass. In 1986, when we were all in our sixties, our tail gunner, Danny Carroll—with the help of other members of the crew—wrote a book, Crew Umbriago, about our tour of duty. Reading it many years later, I learned that I had been key to achieving those improvements.

  “There was no such thing as normal supply channels to get what we had been taught in civilization were necessities,” Danny wrote. “These had to be obtained by begging, scrounging, midnight requisitioning, politicking, or you did without. We were fortunate to have as a member of our crew, Negotiator Par Excellence Norman Lear, who could accomplish the near impossible.” I was pleased to read that our tent had the only brick floor because “our ‘Norm’ had a pile of bricks delivered to our billet by an Italian guy who lived outside the Air Base.” He also described our having just one lightbulb in the center of the tent until “as if by magic six bomb bay lights were obtained, one was installed over each cot and we had the best quarters of any flight crew in the squadron. But our magician, Norm, was still at work,” Danny continued. “He took a ride to a Fighter Group and acquired two P-51 wing tanks which held about seventy-five gallons each. They became our new and improved fuel and water tanks. But the icing on the cake was the headsets over each of our bunks, which were tapped into the Armed Forces Radio Network.”

  While I didn’t remember the specifics of what I got done for my Umbriago crew, I do recall that even as a boy I was never good at taking no for an answer. As I think about it, that probably came from my constant struggle to get through to my parents. Trying one tack after another to gain their attention—occasionally to be listened to and, even more rarely, heard—I developed reasoning and presenting skills, along with a talent for herding ideas and selling them.

  • • •

  JIMMY EDWARDS VIES with Jimmy Gorman as the buddy I felt closest to in the service. Like me, Edwards was a radio operator and gunner, a member of Captain Guy Del Signore’s crew. In formation they flew off our right wing as we trained in Florida, and as we made our way to the European Theater of Operations. We met earlier at Scott Field, where we learned Morse code and became radio operators, talking and sharing a great deal, and playing a lot of bridge. I think of bridge today only in the context of remembering Jimmy Edwards. It comes to me as a kind of sense memory. I’m playing bridge with Jimmy as my part
ner and I feel a quiet calm settle over me.

  Jimmy was himself a quiet calm. Tall, thoughtful, bookish, he came across to me as if he sat on a fountain of secrets that amused the hell out of him. Suffice it to say I found Jimmy Edwards deeply interesting—a very new experience for me at the time. To this day he is a wisp of a presence in my life, like a poem I used to know by heart.

  Ironically, our two crews were posted to fly four times before we actually completed that first mission. Four times we took off and headed to target, only to have the mission scrubbed because of bad weather. With orders not to land with a full fuel tank and a full bomb bay, twice we dropped our bombs in the Adriatic and returned to base early and twice we flew the requisite hours to use up our fuel before landing with the bombs intact.

  The first day we were posted to fly, Jimmy and I had breakfast together, after which we went to the john, sitting side by side on a long line of wooden pot holes. The next time, one of us didn’t have to go to the john but we both went anyway. The following times, whether or not either of us had to go, we went there and at least touched down. A superstition had set in and we eagerly obliged it. The fifth day our crews were posted to fly, either we took too long to eat or the officer who ordered us into a jeep despite our pleas must have had, in Army parlance, a hair across his ass.

  “No way,” he said, pointing to the jeep as, with our entire bodies, we demonstrated our need.

  “Ten seconds,” we pleaded. “We’ll just touch down. It won’t take longer than crossing ourselves, sir. Ten seconds!”

  Nothing helped. We were whisked off to the flight line, Jimmy to his plane, I to mine, and the 772nd Bomb Squadron of the 463rd Bomb Group took off.

  The target, we learned at altitude when Brownie opened our orders, was an aircraft plant in Regensburg, Germany. Our squadron consisted of eighteen planes flying in what was called wing formation. As radio men, Jimmy and I reported back regularly by Morse code to Central Command, informing them as to our condition and location. The radio position and accompanying top gun being closest to the bomb bay, it was also our job to check the bomb bay after we’d heard “Bombs away!” from the cockpit, to be sure all the bombs had been released and the doors could be shut. After some four hours, within thirty minutes of the target, we rendezvoused with the 8th Air Force out of London and started on our first bomb run.

  As we neared the target we were suddenly hit by German fighters soaring in from every angle and spitting three hundred rounds at us in three-second bursts. We radio men were now at our 50-caliber gun posts spitting back. Our vision was limited to what was coming at us from high angles at the side and from above, so I didn’t see it happen—I just heard another crewman say “Del Signore’s been hit.” My heart thumping, I strained to see for myself, but my vision was blurred by heavy flak and angry puffs of black bursting everywhere, a kind of deadly Rorschach in the sky. As we fought our way out of there, Del fell behind. Soon he was out of sight and my heart sank. But about twenty-five minutes after the rest of us had landed, Del—with only two engines firing—managed to get his crippled plane back to base.

  I was racing to greet them when I learned that two crewmen, the ball turret gunner and radio man Jimmy Edwards, were dead. Thick-headed and choking back a scream, I had to say good-bye to Jimmy, but by the time I got to the plane they had already removed the bodies. Sometime later, still in a stupor, the horror of something I’d witnessed at the plane returned to me. It was a member of the ground crew stoically hosing out the ball turret, and I could no longer stifle that scream. Two days afterward I accompanied Jimmy’s body to Bari, Italy, where he was buried in a GI cemetery.

  I’ve thought long and hard, especially after that first mission and Jimmy’s death, about how they could get me, just a few days later, and so many times after that, to board a plane and fly long hours only to be shot at from the ground by hundreds of antiaircraft installations and attacked in the air from every angle by dozens of swastika-emblazoned fighter planes. Yes, I loved my country and offered to risk my life in its defense. Yes, the Jewish part of the American in me made me especially eager to kill those who would eliminate us. But to enter a space at thirty thousand feet, in what could be a metal coffin for nine, carrying up to eighty-five hundred pounds of bombs in its belly, which, if hit by one of the missiles now exploding in the air nearby could lead me to such madness as wondering how many B-17 smithereens it would take to fill my closet at 68 Woodstock—no, no, that’s not me.

  Unless! Unless we humans come equipped with an unconscious or subconscious something that convinces us, no matter what the evidence to the contrary, that we will not die now. We lead numbers of lives—lives end on end and lives within lives. By the time I flew my first mission I had already lived so many—a life in grade school, another in high school, one in the dramatic club, another on the debate team, the one with my family, the many in my imagination, and on and on. So as we approached the bomb run and I manned the radio and top gun, I was scared, of course, but at the core of me, having already lived so many lives, I was by then wired to believe that this was simply another one, and that even as I lived it, the next life was on its way.

  • • •

  AROUND EIGHT P.M. a few days after Jimmy’s death, we learned our crew was posted to fly the next morning. A light breeze of fear began wafting through my chest, a mixture of apprehension and excitement. Since childhood, the culture had instructed us to believe that being male and facing danger came with good cheer and a touch of bravura. Add a little peer pressure and there we were, having rushed to the board to learn with cheers and yelps that we were posted to fly. It wasn’t until I was under my bedcovers, alone in my thoughts, that apprehension began to gain ground on excitement.

  By morning and our wake-up call—no bugle, just a shout-out at about four-thirty—the apprehension had turned into fear. It seemed palpable in everyone. There was little chatter as we dressed, which, given the fact that we were preparing for temperatures that could reach thirty to forty below, was an ordeal in itself. Over our own underwear we wore a set of heated long johns, heavy outer pants and jacket, a “Mae West” life preserver, a parachute harness to which a parachute would clip if needed, and, over all that, a flak jacket and helmet. On our way to the flight line some guys dipped into Bibles they were carrying; some touched crosses to their lips; I looked heavenward, touched my right buttock and then my heart, my way of praying for God—whatever God there was—to save my ass.

  From Foggia the average airtime to target was four to six hours at a minimum. (Our crew had the distinction of flying the longest single mission in the European Theater, some thirteen hours, to Berlin.) I would cheat at my radio desk and steal time listening to Armed Forces Radio play the music of the moment: “Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me,” “When Johnny comes marching home,” and “There’ll be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover . . . When the world is free.” On one otherwise unmemorable mission, the one song I can recall my mother going mad over popped up.

  One Sunday night in the 1930s, on The Jack Benny Program, she heard the tenor Frank Parker sing “Isle of Capri,” and instantly it was as if that were the only song ever written. She never sang a note of it herself, never even hummed it, but as long as she lived, when music came up in conversation, or someone referred to a new song, my mother would brighten as if she had just awakened and ask if anyone knew “Isle of Capri,” and if so, would they please sing it? Occasionally someone would start to grant her request, only to be interrupted before they got eight bars into it. “Oh,” she’d say, “you should have heard Frank Parker sing it.”

  That day on the mission when I heard Frank Parker sing her song, I started to weep. At an altitude more than ten thousand feet I was sobbing into my oxygen mask, an activity not encouraged by Air Force medics, who favored the ability to breathe. After the war my mother showed me a letter I had written her describing the incident. It wa
s a love letter.

  • • •

  AS I FLEW OUT OF FOGGIA, bombing German factories, airfields, and troop installations while listening to Armed Forces Radio, I was making notes for a variety show I planned to produce and stage between missions, titled Holiday Hangovers. The holiday referred to was Thanksgiving 1944. Our copilot, Bill Binzen, once showed me a letter he’d written to his folks, dated November 26, 1944, describing the show I’d put together and performed in: “Last night the boys put on a show at the EM (Enlisted Men) Club. The place was sufficiently intimate and smoky, the gags kidding the commanders raw enough for anyone, and everyone had a good time. Norman Lear, our radio man, was emcee and really carried the show. He’s got a wit that can cope with most any situation. The thing started off with an awkward silence when Lear feigned drunk as a member of the audience, and was very obnoxious. The CO got mad, Lear continued his remarks, and everybody was getting very tensed up. I’d been tipped off, but still couldn’t help feeling a little uneasy until the gag was exposed as such.”

  What made Binzen uneasy was my ability to fake outrage and fury, which I’d learned and honed in my relationship with my pal Nick Stantley at Emerson College. Nick was a master at extreme behavior with a straight face. If he told you in advance that he was going to fake going nuts, he would proceed to a point where you believed him to be great at it; and to a point beyond that, where you could not believe how great he was at it; and past that to a point where you started to wonder, then worry, that maybe he had been sucked into the quicksand of his own madness; and then to a place where you had bought that possibility and were scared shitless.