On Wings Of The Morning

by Marie Bostwick

  “Dear God,” I began. “Thank you for the lives of our friends, Doris and Dave. Thank you for bringing us together. Just as it is hard to understand why you have allowed this terrible war, it is hard for us to understand why you would allow Doris and Dave to be taken from us. We know that sometimes what is good is salvaged from what is bad. We know that with our heads, but our hearts still ache as we struggle to understand the reason for death.

  “But you see things differently than we do, God. We know that better than most. Help us to rise up from the plain of grief, anger, and fear that we stand on today. Allow our souls to ascend above, to the place where we can see death and life with eyes more like yours. Give us courage to press on, to search out and fulfill our purpose in life.

  “Today we say good-bye to Doris and Dave. Tomorrow, as we graduate and go out to fulfill the duty to which we were called, we will say good-bye again. Life is filled with so many good-byes. Everyone we love, everyone who loves us, eventually leaves us—everyone but you, God. You are with us today, and tomorrow, and forever, just as you are with Doris and Dave. Their souls are at peace. Grant us peace even in sorrow. Help us understand that they and we are never out of your sight.” And as I was about to pronounce the amen, Marjie Kellog, Doris’s roommate and best friend, looked up at me, her brown eyes filled with sorrow but her voice strong as she repeated the words of a psalm I had never heard before.

  Wither shall I go from thy spirit? Or wither shall I flee from thy presence?

  If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there;

  if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.

  If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,

  Even there, thy hand shall lead me and thy right hand shall hold me.

  Only minutes before, Pamela had asked me to lead a prayer to a God I wasn’t even certain I believed in. But somehow, between that moment when I had asked for help from a source whose very existence I doubted and uttering the final “Amen,” belief had come. Not answers, not justifications, but belief, faith. The faith I’d been seeking since Roger died and, I realized, long before.

  Why did it come then? Why not when I had been under the guidance and teaching of the good sisters, or during the countless, more practical expositions Frannie had delivered on saints and sacraments when we were children? Why not when I was standing under a full moon listening to Morgan’s story, or during those Sundays I spent sitting on hard pews in the First Baptist Church of Sweetwater?

  Maybe I wasn’t ready before. Like Morgan said, some things you have to think through for yourself. I don’t know why, after such a long search, God chose that moment to be revealed to me. I probably never will. But in my heart, I think it happened because of that first, uncertain, and wholly honest pledge I laid before God: I don’t know if you are real, but if you will speak, I will listen. And listening, I will speak. It had been a prayer for belief, made while in a state of unbelief. And it had been answered.

  It wasn’t until breakfast the next day, graduation, that I realized what Pamela had meant about Doris still needing our help.

  We’d been looking forward to this day for so many months, but the accident cast a pall over what we’d all thought would be a joyous occasion. In the mess hall, conversations were few and whispered.

  The room became silent when Donna Lee clinked a glass to get everyone’s attention and Pam stood up to speak.

  “Girls, as you know, even though we operate under a militarized system of discipline and training, and will work as uniformed employees of the Army Air Force, the WASP is not a fully militarized unit. That was the agreement you made with the government when you signed up for the program. We aren’t paid as much as militarized, male pilots who do the same job, and we receive no military benefits. Every one of you had to come to Sweetwater under your own steam and at your own expense, and if you had washed out during training you would have had to go home the same way. That same rule still holds, even in the event of death.”

  The room, which was already quiet, became absolutely stony silent as the girls heard this last sentence and realized what Pamela was saying. “Georgia has contacted the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Sweetwater, and the church has kindly agreed to hold a memorial service for Doris and Dave at eight o’clock tomorrow morning so you’ll all be able to attend before you have to leave for your new assignments.

  “Lieutenant Dave Kalinowski’s family has already been notified of his death. After the service, his remains will be sent to his family in Idaho. I hope we will be able to do the same for Doris.

  “Doris was from Little Rock, Arkansas. She was unmarried. Her father was a high school math teacher who died several years ago. Her only family is her mother and two younger sisters. The family isn’t especially well off, and it will cost at least three hundred dollars to send Doris’s remains home to Arkansas.”

  Pamela turned and nodded a signal. When she did, Fanny, Donna Lee, and I got up and started passing around three bread baskets we’d borrowed from the kitchen, like a trio of church ushers gathering the collection. Pamela continued.

  “I know I won’t have to urge you to dig deep, but I do want to ask you to give as much as you can. Beyond the cost of the train, I’d like to send Doris’s mother enough to help with funeral expenses and as much as we can to help the family. Doris sent almost every cent of her paycheck home to her mother. Those will stop coming now, so if we could help out her mother and little sisters, I’m sure they would appreciate it.”

  She was right. She didn’t have to ask for generosity. Every girl present emptied her pockets. The baskets were so full they had to be emptied three times. After all, it could have been any one of us, and, though it wasn’t something we wouldn’t discuss, we knew Doris’s funeral might be the first, but it wouldn’t be the last.

  20

  Morgan

  Baxter Field, Arizona—May 1943

  At home or abroad, mail call is the highlight of the day on any military base. It wasn’t any different at Baxter, where I was undergoing my training. And I got more mail than just about anyone on base.

  Growing up in a small town like Dillon, Oklahoma, where everybody treats you like family—with all the good and the bad that the word implies—I received letters almost every day, if not from Mama, Grandma, Aunt Ruby, or Virginia, then from somebody in Dillon. Everyone from Mr. Dwyer, the head of the deacons’ board, to the entire second-grade class of Dillon Elementary, whose teacher made me a homework assignment, wrote to me. I appreciated every letter they sent, but there was never one that gave me more joy than the one I received from Paul telling me that he and Mama were hoping to marry—that is, Paul said, if I would give them my blessing.

  I didn’t have to think long about saying yes, that’s for sure. I knew that Mama and Paul would be very happy together. I’d thought so for a long, long time. That they really did love each other, I had no doubt, but more than that, I think they genuinely liked each other. I didn’t know much about love, but I was sure that was a pretty good base to build a marriage on.

  I dashed off a note and sent it to them right away, saying,

  Dear Mama and Paul,

  You have my blessing, my approval, and my sincere congratulations. I’ve always believed you were meant for each other. Why did it take you two so long to figure out what I’ve known for years?

  Really, this is great news. I am so happy for you. My only regret is that I can’t be there for the ceremony; I think I’d have been a great best man. Well, you know I’ll be there in spirit. I’m going to go over to the PX and buy you a wedding present as soon as I mail this.

  I’m expecting my new orders any time now and I imagine I’ll have to ship out as soon as they come. Make sure you take some pictures. I’ll let you know where you can send them. I’ll write more later, but have to close now so I can get this sent today. Congratulations!!

  Your loving son,

  Morgan

  After my initial excitemen
t over the news about Mama and Paul, I felt a little blue. Of all the things that are hard about soldiering, being far from your family during holidays and big celebrations is the hardest. Especially when you’re about to ship into a combat zone you’re not sure you’ll return from alive.

  I was nearing the end of my P-38 training, and I should have had my orders already, but they’d been delayed by bureaucratic bungling. I’d gotten used to that. It seemed to be part of the military culture. There was a joke about “military intelligence” being an oxymoron, and as far as I was concerned, that was no joke, just a statement of fact. My training was a perfect example.

  I only lacked one flight check before I could graduate and ship out to my new unit. But just before my graduation, some moron sent half of our instructors off to a brand-new base in New Mexico, which didn’t have nearly as many guys as Baxter did, even though our base was packed to the gills. There weren’t enough instructors to handle the backlog of pilots waiting for flight checks. Until I could get my final flight check and finish my training, there wasn’t much I could do besides wait.

  Of course, you’d have thought that, under the circumstances, they might have let me take leave, go home and see my family. That would have been the logical thing, but again, that would have fallen under the heading of “military intelligence,” so there I sat, polishing my shoes, playing pickup basketball, reading and rereading letters from home, answering letters, and daydreaming about Georgia Welles.

  Just the day before, I’d started writing her a letter—just a friendly note, I told myself, but I tore it up after I finished the first paragraph. There was a lot more than friendship in my intentions toward Georgia. But I already had a girlfriend, Virginia. The girl who had been waiting for me all these months, writing me two and three times a week, the girl who had pressed herself close and asked if I loved her, the girl I had almost ... No, there was no point in starting something with Georgia. I already had a girlfriend. Virginia knew everything about me, just like everyone else in Dillon. She knew about my mother and my father, or lack of one, and she cared for me anyway. I didn’t have to explain things to Virginia.

  Taking out a clean sheet of paper, I began writing an answer to Virginia’s most recent letter, assuring her for the umpteenth time that I wasn’t seeing anybody else, but I ended up throwing that out, too. Frustrated, homesick, and stuck, I stood up and kicked my footlocker so hard that the handle flew off. My roommate, Jake Patterson, was just walking in the door. The flying handle hit him square in the face.

  “Hey! Watch it!” Patterson rubbed the spot above his right eye where he’d been hit. “Sheesh, Morgan! Save it for the Japs, will ya?”

  “Sorry, Jake. It was an accident. I just kicked it and it went flying.”

  “What’s the matter?” he asked, motioning toward the pile of mail on my bunk. “Bad news from home? Did your girl dump you?”

  “Naw. I’m just bored. Sick of hanging around here with nothing to do,” I complained.

  “Yeah, I hear you. That’s why I came in here looking for you. We’re getting a basketball game together, and we still need somebody on defense. Wanna play?”

  I shook my head. “No, thanks. I already played two games before lunch. I don’t want to have to take another shower before dinner.”

  “Suit yourself.” Patterson shrugged. “But until your orders come in, it’s the best offer you’re gonna get.”

  He was probably right, but I begged off anyway. As anxious as I was to receive my orders, another part of me was dreading the moment of their arrival. I didn’t know where I’d be stationed, but wherever it was, I knew I’d be back in the thick of combat. That’s what the P-38 was designed for, and that’s what my training had been all about—getting back into the fight.

  When General Martin told me I was being sent stateside for training, I’d resented it. I felt like I was being sidelined. But as time went on, I started to think that my training would pay off after all. Up until the P-38 came on the scene, America didn’t have a fighter that could match the enemy’s. But the P-38 changed all that. She was fast, powerful, and agile. If Holman, Campezzio, and Walker had been flying P-38s, I was convinced they would still be alive. I was anxious to get back into the fight and even up the score. And waiting around base with nothing to do was making me more anxious, but in a different way.

  Recently I’d started having dreams. It was almost always the same thing. I was back in the Pacific, flying an escort mission with Fountain. We were the only two planes covering a whole fleet of bombers. The weather was perfect, the skies a clear, bright blue. Suddenly, on my left, I saw an enormous bank of clouds, moving faster than any cloud formation I’d ever seen. Fountain was flying about a thousand feet below me. I called him on the radio saying, “Hey! Look at this cloud! Did you ever see anything like it?”

  Before he could answer, the cloud split in half like a curtain, a deceitful Trojan horse of a cloud, and out of the gash spilled an angry swarm of Zeros, hundreds of them. Emerging from the vapors they broke into separate attack groups, eight or ten planes flying together to concentrate on a single bomber, vicious wolf packs destroying their prey with terrible and bloody efficiency. The biggest pack went after Fountain, riddling his tail with bullets, injuring his plane, but not badly enough to down him, not yet. It was as though they wanted to prolong the kill, to toy with him before finishing the job—to torture him. I was the only target they chose to ignore, inflicting me with a different kind of torture, taunting me with my own helplessness.

  A thousand cries of terror howled into the radio, begging me for cover, for help, for salvation I couldn’t supply. There were too many voices. Fountain’s was the loudest of all. He called to me, pleaded with me, and finally cursed me. I tried to come. I wanted to rescue him. I wanted to rescue them all. But when I tried to push the engines, the throttle wouldn’t answer, and when I grabbed it, the stick broke off, crumbling in my hands. Frantically, I peered out the windows and realized that I was in the wrong aircraft. I should have been in a fighter, but this was a glider. There were no engines on the wings, and when I looked back at the control panel, all the instruments were gone. The panel was a black void and the only piece of equipment I had left was the radio that kept emitting a stream of piteous, anguished cries for help. Listening to them was agony, and I tried to rip the headphones from off my ears, shutting out the keening cries of dying men, but they were stuck tight to my head.

  The glider kept to her path, flying a constant thousand feet above the carnage, a tolerant witness to the butchery below. And there was nothing I could do to stop it. No matter what I tried, the plane refused to answer. Helplessness made me frantic. Though I knew it would down the craft, I tried kicking out the windshield—better to share a comrade’s death than to watch it happen and do nothing—but no matter how hard I kicked, the glass remained unmarked. I was trapped behind it, powerless to do anything but ride escort, watching the bombers and their crews disappear into the sea as they were picked off, listening as one by one the desperate cries for help decreased, then stopped altogether, and finally only Fountain’s voice was left, and he cursed me, shouting, “Morgan! Do something! Help me! They are killing me! For God’s sake, why don’t you do something? Help me, you impotent bastard!”

  Until finally, bored with the game, the Zeros turned on him with savage precision, strafing his plane with a percussive hail of gunfire. I heard the sound of it through the earphones, the rattle of Fountain’s last breath, and the explosive roar of metal and glass as his plane slammed into the waiting sepulchre of the sea and vanished.

  The job done, the Zeros departed, dismissing me for the innocuous threat I was, disappearing into the cover of the cloud, hidden, until the next time.

  Night after night, I dreamed that dream. I came to dread sleep because I knew the minute I closed my eyes, the nightmare would return.

  The same thing happened that night, but before I got to the end I was mercifully interrupted. Jake Patterson shook me awake. �
��Morgan! Hey, Morgan! Wake up, buddy.”

  I opened my eyes and saw Patterson, dressed in an undershirt and skivvies, peering down and assuring me that everything was fine. It had just been a bad dream. My heart was beating like a drum, and my breath came in short, gasping bursts, like I’d been running from something. It took a while to remember where I was.

  “Sorry if I woke you, Jake. It’s just a dream I have sometimes.” Patterson was a good guy, but he’d come straight from flight training. He hadn’t seen combat yet, and I didn’t feel the need to bother him with details.

  Patterson sat down on the edge of the bunk, pulled a pack of cigarettes out from under the mattress, and lit one up. “Sometimes ?” He made a wry face and shook the match to extinguish the flame. “You’ve been mumbling and groaning in your sleep every night for a week.”

  “I have? Sorry.”

  He exhaled and shrugged dismissively. “That’s okay. Doesn’t bother me. Never have any trouble getting back to sleep. I was just kind of worried about you. Something’s bothering you, that’s for sure. Maybe you should talk to somebody. The chaplain or something.”

  “No. I’m all right.”

  Patterson looked at me doubtfully. “You sure about that? Three nights running you’ve been thrashing around, punching the air, and telling whoever you’re mad at to come back and give you a fair fight.”

  “Oh, that. It’s nothing. Just a dream I have sometimes. I played football in high school and we lost the biggest game of the year because their ref was a hometown boy. Sometimes, if I’m keyed up I kind of replay the game in my sleep. It’s nothing. Just all this sitting around and waiting has me on edge, you know?”