On Glorious Wings

by Stephen Coonts

  Urged by the need for the mask for Clint and by Junior’s cries I skinned back, as fast as I could, through the empty bomb bay and the radio compartment, where Lamb was at his gun, to the lower turret compartment, and I found that Negrocus Handown had been way ahead of me; he had already cranked the turret into line, and he opened the hatch, and Junior almost squirted out, and the two men embraced like brothers in a myth who had been separated as children and were seeing each other again as men.

  I ran forward with the spare mask and two walk-around bottles and handed them down to Clint, who was already looking blue around the lips.

  _________

  When I was plugged in again, I asked Marrow if he was getting on all right. He didn’t answer. I thought perhaps the interphone was knocked out, so I called Prien and he did respond, though his voice sounded farther away than the tail of The Body. Then I ran a check all around, and I got a sassy answer from Farr; an echo of it from Bragnani; an absent-minded response from Lamb, who sounded as if he weren’t on this trip but were sashaying down to Florida by Eastern Air Lines; no word from Junior Sailen, who had been removed to the radio room; the usual stout and reassuring boom from Handown, who was back up in his turret; no answer, again, from Marrow; and of course I didn’t even try Clint and Max.

  For a second I wondered whether Marrow had lost the power of speech. I couldn’t get anything out of him. He just flew along, and his control was still subtle and smooth, but otherwise he was a huge, leather-clad robot. I supposed that his jackbox might have been ruptured.

  Some of our guns were firing.

  A brief glance outside the plane showed me that we had fallen back underneath part of the lead group, but we still had an umbrella. The air battle was continuing. I saw two new German Staffeln coming up, and (no credit to myself; just the astonishing persistence of the human mind in its habitual patterns of association and rambling, even during a cataclysm) I began ruminating about the efficiency of the Germans, and the obvious co-ordination of their attacks. One could suppose that they must have assembled, to meet both the Regensburg strike and ours, fighter squadrons all the way down from Jever and Oldenburg—we knew those units from our battles with them over Wilhelmshaven, Hamburg, and Kiel—and up from airports we knew in France, such as Laon, Florennes, and Eyreux, and since the planes had limited range they must have set them down for refueling along the way to us, somewhere near our expected line of flight but far ahead of us, and then got them up not only in time to meet us but also just in time to replace other squadrons who were having to retire. Such ingenuity put to the service of killing!

  These thoughts, in their dreamlike detachment from our real situation, and in their vividness that was also dreamlike, took only an instant or two.

  Then it occurred to me that we would do well to climb, to hug as closely as we could the remainder of our group, so that The Body could take maximum advantage of the formation’s firepower and not be singled out, yet, as a potential straggler, and I suggested this to Marrow on interphone. I shouted, thinking his headset might not be giving him but a shred of sound.

  No answer.

  Then I tapped his shoulder, to convey by gestures what his ears apparently could not hear, and he turned his face, and my heart froze at what I saw. Behind his goggles, which intensified the horror of the sight, I saw eyes that seemed to aim at me but that were unimaginably far away. It was like being looked at through the wrong end of binoculars, or no—because that’s a game all children have played—it was like being viewed through two infinitely distant telescopes. I hovered off Saturn; I was somewhere out in the black eternity of the universe.

  I went through with the gestures I had planned. The telescopes simply swiveled away.

  I saw then that one of the instruments on the panel in front of us that had not been shot away was the rate-of-climb indicator. It showed that we were descending, almost imperceptibly, at the rate of fifty feet per minute. With my right hand lightly on the wheel, I could feel that Marrow was trying, with all his deep-driven skill, to hold altitude. Our loss of it was not serious yet, but climbing to attain shelter from the formation was out of the question.

  I heard a faint call on the interphone, and it was for me. “Bo! Listen to me, Bo!” It was Junior Sailen’s voice. It did not even occur to me at that moment that for a sergeant gunner, and of all sergeant gunners, formal Junior Sailen, to address his co-pilot by his nickname and not by his rank and surname was an act of unusual effrontery; I believe I may have felt faint relief and gratitude that Sailen had torn away a barrier between us. It was immediately evident why he had done so. Even though the interphone was fading, I could hear the pleading tone of his voice. “Can I get out? I want to jump. I have no gun, Bo. I’m no good any more.”

  I guess he was going batty sitting on a passenger seat in the radio room, doing nothing. Another guess about Junior: He had felt safe at his familiar post, locked into the ball turret, and he found rattling around in the radio room frightening.

  A thought entered my mind which caused a leap of selfish joy in my chest: Junior Sailen had called me, not Marrow; he had asked my permission to bolt.

  I looked at Marrow. He sat leaning forward, communing with the flight column.

  Just at that moment, as it happened, Prien called in, with a hoarse shout, announcing an attack from the tail, and Marrow, though he had not responded to direct calls on the interphone in recent moments, automatically began to corkscrew The Body with the superb sinuous motions he had devised for selfdefense at the height of his skill in the middle of our tour. He must have heard Prien.

  I said on interphone, “Sailen! The answer is no. Repeat: No!” Because what if the others, Bragnani, for instance, heard an able-bodied man get permission to jump?

  Junior could not (he did not want to) hear me. Far, far away I heard Junior shouting, “What? What, Lieutenant? What?” Yet perhaps he had understood me, after all, because now he called me Lieutenant, and, in any case, he stayed aboard, for whatever reason.

  I called Butcher Lamb and tried to tell him the interphone was fading.

  Butch heard me, I realized (some time later) when the interphone came in loud and clear; he must have left his gun and gone down into the radio room and—I can visualize him—begun checking out possible causes of trouble in the systematic, step-by-step way of the born radio ham, concentrating on his work so as to shut out all the rest of the world.

  Right after calling Lamb—I suppose not more than four or five minutes, at most, had passed since our nose had been opened—I began to worry about Max Brindt. I leaned over and saw through the trapdoor that Haverstraw was not doing anything about Max. Clint was sitting by the big opening of the main hatchway, looking downward in a brooding way, and Max was still conscious, and for a moment the stump was exposed to sight there in that wind, the blood still spurting and coagulating and freezing on him and all over the deck, and I could see that I was going to have to do the most distasteful piece of work I had ever done in my life. I got up and unclipped the first-aid kit from the wiring-diagram box on the back of my seat and started down.

  Going down through that small trapdoor was easier thought than done. We were making about a hundred and thirty miles an hour through the air, with the front end splayed out and wide open, funneling the air as if through a Venturi tube so that the blast in the trapdoor was tremendously powerful and concentrated, besides being thirty-four degrees below zero. It took all the strength I had, on top of all the courage I had, to force myself down through it. I had to ease myself past the revolting form of Max. The escape hatch on the left was open and looked very void and vacant, and a lot of the wind was being driven out through it, so the hatch opening was like the mouth of a vacuum-cleaner tube; once in a while something would pull loose and fly out through it, and you felt you might, too. The front end of the ship was pretty much as I had imagined it, with all the plexiglass gone and some of the metal bent outward, and Max’s seat and Clint’s desk and chair in a tangle, and wires
flapping, and equipment all mashed and confused. And suddenly, like a blow in the chest, the thought hit me that I had no parachute.

  Worst of all, there was Max, his eyes open, begging me to do something.

  I tried to remember all those lectures on first aid, in large, warm auditoriums, often with a quite satisfactory and unhurt WAC modeling the slings or handing the bandage rolls to the fat, bald major who was demonstrating, on a stage, what one should do for every sort of imaginary injury. I had a moment’s flash of anger at the image of one steak eater of a medical major, because I remembered his saying that the best thing you could do for a wounded man in a plane was to leave him alone. “Cold conditions, flying clothing, harness, and limited fuselage space render the giving of effective first aid to such a man during flight a matter of extreme difficulty, and the less he is disturbed, generally, until the skilled assistance of a trained physician is available, the better.” What did that fat slob know about kneeling in a murderous gale of cutting, boreal wind on a sheet of ice made of your crewmate’s blood and seeing his eyes, looking out at you from a bundle of bloody trouser material, saying, “We’ve been through very much together, Bo, we took a walk together just the other day, so please, for the love of the God I didn’t know till a minute ago I believed in, please, please, Bo, please, please, please.” Suddenly there was a marked degree of love in the eyes, and though I had always, until this moment, considered that I despised Max and assumed that he despised me, here I was, struck to the very seat of my soul with horror and receiving messages of brotherly love from him. I believe this tender begging look increased my sense of terror by many fold, because I hated Max, I really did hate his deep aggressive drives, the love of dropping bombs that made him jump on his seat, after bombs-away, like a baby on a kiddy-car. I think he was one of them, one of the men with the taint Marrow had, a war lover—not so poisoned, maybe, as Marrow, but one of them. And his eyes were saying, “My dear Bo, my dear fellow man, my brother, sharer with me of life, do you understand what I am trying to say with my eyes?”

  I began to attempt to order my thoughts. First aid. I took off one glove and crammed the glove between my knees and lifted the lid of the kit; my skin stuck to the metal, it was so cold. A small blue bandage box flew from the kit and out through the escape-hatch opening without even touching the floor. I turned with my back more to the wind and hunched way over and opened the lid again. I saw a morphine ampule. Morphine, pain, Max. Brother in life. I took the ampule out and crammed the first-aid box into a safe vee between an oxygen bottle and the wall of the plane, and I banged Haverstraw on the arm, to bring him out of a trance he seemed to be in, and he, without taking his gloves off, bared some of the leg above the stump, and I held the ampule in front of Max’s eyes, and then he looked into mine with more love than ever, and I stuck him, and Max winced at that pin prick—goodness knows how Max felt it through the torment of his leg—and I believe the pricking sensation itself gave Max relief, because he closed his eyes (which gave me immeasurable relief) and looked contented; in spite of the fact that I had not succeeded in getting much, if any, of the morphine into him, because it had seemed thickened by the cold, or, at any rate, had oozed out on his skin and had not gone in him. I put my mitt back on.

  Tourniquet. My thoughts, like the pain-relieving fluid, were thickened and sluggish, on account of the very, very cold atmosphere of man’s madness with which that cavern in the war plane was invested, but at last two thoughts—bleeding, tourniquet—came slowly together, and I reached for the box, and took out materials marked for a tourniquet and saw that a loop had to be formed of the cord that was provided.

  Kid Lynch came into my mind, and I guess that, at that, I had had enough of war, really enough, because I simply had to leave.

  I carefully stowed the first-aid kit by the oxygen bottle and handed the tourniquet cord to Clint and made a circle with my hands to show how big it should be, and I started to go up to the flight deck. Unfortunately as I was going across above Max he dreamily opened his eyes and a look of such gentle surprise came into them, mixed still with that other look, of trusting family love, that I did something I had least expected to do. I straightened up my head, shoulders, and arms through the trapdoor, turned my head to glimpse at Marrow, who was driving woodenly along as if mushing down Broadway with nothing but a few taxis to worry about, and then I reached for my parachute, which was under my seat and on top of my flak suit, and was not stuck, and I backed down again, pulling my chute pack after me.

  Max’s affectionate eyes took one look at the parachute and rolled to the left and saw Clint’s chute on his chest, and the love fled from them, as he must have concluded that the whole crew was about to bail out. He began to flutter and roll from side to side. I’ve never seen a human being who affected me more with abject fright than Max reacting to the idea that we were going to leave him, in his condition, alone in a ship gliding down the sky on automatic pilot.

  I pulled my mask loose and leaned over and yanked the bloody pants material aside and shouted in Max’s ear, “Don’t worry, chum, we’re not going to leave you.”

  That worked better even than the prick of the ampule needle. It seemed to me that tears of joy came into Max’s eyes.

  Chum? Since when was Max Brindt my “chum”? The word was one of many commonplaces used around the base, expressive of a rough, sometimes sarcastic affection: chum, pal, friend, son, doc, bud, buddy, old man, brother. But not as between Boman and Brindt! I despised him with his “Banzai!” at the dropping of bombs. I really did not like him.

  Clint had the loop made and handed it to me, and now came the job of getting it over the leg, and it was then, and only then—I’d been so shocked and braked by the whole deal, especially by the brotherly love in that man’s eyes, that I hadn’t realized it until then: that there was a shoe, with a foot in it, beating, or kicking, Max in the face, and it was his own right foot, and it was still attached to him.

  I had a flash memory of Mrs. Krille, in something like seventh grade, telling us about Achilles, brave and generous warrior, slayer of Hector, who died when Paris struck with an arrow the Peleid’s one vulnerable spot, the tendon above the heel, vulnerable because his mother, dipping him in the Styx as a baby to make him wound-proof, had held him by the heel, and Mrs. Krille (I could remember of her face only the sweet mouth, the warm eyes behind shell-rimmed glass, the astonishingly long black hairs in her nostrils) saying that this tendon had an extraordinary strength. “In animals,” she said, “it is called the hamstring.”

  The bone was gone, flesh and pants were mostly gone, the flying boot had been blown off the shod foot, yet a ragged, tenacious length of tendon and muscle and back-of-the-knee sinews and more muscle, a living rope, in places an inch thick, had held firm, and in the terrible wind the foot had blown back and now was banging against Max.

  I hadn’t noticed it, and indeed I hoped it had just started blowing that way, and my idea was to try to keep him from realizing that his leg was cut mostly off and that his foot was striking him, so I grabbed the shoe and pulled it forward, and I forgot the knife in my boot with which I might have severed the tendon, and finally, being very heavy-handed, very slow, my fingers stiff, my heart and mind sick, I laboriously worked the tourniquet cord over the foot, and threaded it up the tendon.

  While I was doing that, I noticed that Marrow was executing some exceedingly rough and even crude maneuvers. They seemed not like his.

  I concentrated as best I could on getting the loop of the tourniquet in position, but we seemed to be bouncing as if in a front.

  I felt a rage at Marrow. All this, Max’s anguish, the insane work I was doing, all this was somehow Marrow’s fault. He was the one whose natural climate was war.

  Clint—having something to do was nourishing him wonderfully, and he was growing more and more alert—handed me the turning stick, and I inserted it and turned it, and the flow of blood stopped. I tucked the stick into the loop.

  Then (I think because
I saw a bundle of spare interphone wire stowed next to the oxygen bottles, back underneath the upper deck, beyond Max’s head, and also because we were bouncing around in such a peculiar way) I got the brainy idea of trying to make Max more secure, so Clint and I dragged him back farther and we made the intercom wire fast to the back of Max’s harness and lashed that to the foot of one of the top-turret stanchions. We had to stop and put our gloves on and whiff our oxygen every few seconds. We finally finished that absurd work. We gave Max another shot of morphine, and he seemed to be resting all right, and I was about to go back to my seat when he spoke again with his eyes—a piercing, questioning stare into mine.

  I loosened my mask again and leaned down and shouted into the rags around his head, “Don’t you worry, Maxie boy, we’re going to get you back to England. England’s in sight right now.” How I wished that were true!

  And the eyes, in the watery, bluish light of that recessed place, were flooded then with love, more and more of it, love of his friends, I guess, and of England, of home, of an uncertain, abstract, marvelous everything. Above the mask the eyes were so full of love that the emotion seemed intolerable, overwhelming, and then all that feeling drained out very quickly and the pupils rolled upward.