On Glorious Wings

by Stephen Coonts

  I judge it was about 1400 when thirty new F4U’s took over. I wondered why they sent so many. This gang made even the New Zealanders look cautious. They just shot up everything that moved or looked as if it might once have wanted to move. Then I saw why.

  A huge PBY, painted black, came gracefully up The Slot. I learned later that it was Squadron Leader Grant of the RNZAF detachment at Halavo. He had told headquarters that he’d land the Cat anywhere there was water. By damn, he did, too. He reconnoitered the bay twice, saw he would have to make his run right over Munda airfield, relayed that information to the F4U’s and started down. His course took him over the heart of the Jap installations. He was low and big and a sure target. But he kept coming in. Before him, above him, and behind him a merciless swarm of thirty F4U’s blazed away. Like tiny, cruel insects protecting a lumbering butterfly, the F4U’s scoured the earth.

  Beautifully the PBY landed. The F4U’s probed the shoreline, Grant taxied his huge plane toward my small raft. The F4U’s zoomed overhead at impossibly low altitudes. The PBY came alongside. The F4U’s protected us. I climbed aboard and set the raft loose. Quickly the turret top was closed. The New Zealand gunner swung his agile gun about. There were quiet congratulations.

  The next moment hell broke loose! From the shore one canny Jap let go with the gun he had been saving all day for such a moment. There was a ripping sound, and the port wing of the PBY was gone! The Jap had time to fire three more shells before the F4U’s reduced him and his gun to rubble. The first two Jap shells missed, but the last one blew off the tail assembly. We were sinking.

  Rapidly we threw out the rafts and as much gear as we could. I thought to save six parachutes, and soon nine of us were in Munda harbor, setting our sea anchors and looking mighty damned glum. Squadron leader Grant was particularly doused by the affair. “Second PBY I’ve lost since I’ve been out here,” he said mournfully.

  Now a circle of Navy F6F’s took over. I thought they were more conservative than the New Zealanders and the last Marine gang. That was until a Jap battery threw a couple of close ones. I had never seen an F6F in action before. Five of them hit that battery like Jack Dempsey hitting Willard. The New Zealanders, who had not seen the F6F’s either, were amazed. It looked more like a medium bomber than a fighter. Extreme though our predicament was, I remember that we carefully appraised the new F6F.

  “The Japs won’t be able to stop that one!” an officer said. “It’s got too much.”

  “You mean they can fly that big fighter off a ship?” another inquired.

  “They sure don’t let the yellow bastards get many shots in, do they?”

  We were glad of that. Unless the Jap hit us on first shot, he was done. He didn’t get a second chance. We were therefore dismayed when half of the F6F’s pulled away toward Rendova. We didn’t see them any more. An hour later, however, we saw thirty new F4U’s lolly-gagging through the sky Rendova way. Four sped on ahead to relieve the fine, battle-proven F6F’s who headed down The Slot. We wondered what was up.

  And then we saw! From some secret nest in Rendova, the F4U’s were bringing out two PT Boats! They were going to come right in Munda harbor, and to hell with the Japs! Above them the lazy Marines darted and bobbed, like dolphins in an aerial ocean.

  You know the rest. It was Lt. Comdr. Charlesworth and his PT’s. Used to be on Tulagi. They hang out somewhere in the Russells now. Something big was on, and they had sneaked up to Rendova, specially for an attack somewheres. But Kester shouted, “To hell with the attack. We’ve gone this far. Get that pilot out of there.” He said they’d have to figure out some other move for the big attack they had cooking. Maybe use destroyers instead of PT’s.

  I can’t tell you much more. A couple of savvy Japs were waiting with field pieces, just like the earlier one. But they didn’t get hits. My God, did the Marines in their F4U’s crucify those Japs! That was the last thing I saw before the PT’s pulled me aboard. Twelve F4U’s diving at one hillside.

  Pass me that bottle, Tony. Well, as you know, we figured it all out last night. We lost a P-40 and a PBY. We broke up Admiral Kester’s plan for the PT Boats. We wasted the flying time of P-40’s, F4U’s, and F6F’s like it was dirt. We figured the entire mission cost not less than $600,000. Just to save one guy in the water off Munda. I wonder what the Japs left to rot on Munda thought of that? $600,000 for one pilot.—Bus Adams took a healthy swig of whiskey. He lolled back in the tail-killing chair of the Hotel De Gink.—But it’s sure worth every cent of the money. If you happen to be that pilot.

  CHIEF WHITE

  HALFOAT

  FROM CATCH-22

  by JOSEPH HELLER

  The decision to include an excerpt from Catch-22 in this anthology can be questioned—some will argue that regardless of whatever else Catch-22 might be, it is not a flying story: very little of the action takes place in the air, the few flying scenes do little to advance the plot—such as it is—and the characters are anti-warriors, the beat generation’s version of heroes.

  Joseph Heller’s first novel, published in 1961 with a certified war hero living in the White House, was an anti-establishment romp from first page to last. The main character is Yossarian, a B-25 bombardier whose mission in life is to survive the war. Yossarian’s existence is desperate not because of the Germans, who go about their task of killing Allied fliers in a logical, predictable, sane manner, but because of the insane ministrations of his own military machine, as embodied in the person of his nemesis, Colonel Cathcart, who keeps raising the number of missions that the air crewmen must fly before they can be rotated home.

  Like all good humor, Heller’s over-the-top tale is an exaggeration of the truth. At some level, war is an insane activity (at the most basic level, so is life). The survival of his troops is not the number one priority of any military leader—if it were, his troops would never fight. The system is indeed designed to force the unwilling into combat, and does so with ruthless efficiency. Yossarian and his friends tell us these truths and many others; our humanity begs us to listen.

  Doc Daneeka lived in a splotched gray tent with Chief White Halfoat, whom he feared and despised.

  “I can just picture his liver,” Doc Daneeka grumbled.

  “Picture my liver,” Yossarian advised him.

  “There’s nothing wrong with your liver.”

  “That shows how much you don’t know,” Yossarian bluffed, and told Doc Daneeka about the troublesome pain in his liver that had troubled Nurse Duckett and Nurse Cramer and all the doctors in the hospital because it wouldn’t become jaundice and wouldn’t go away.

  Doc Daneeka wasn’t interested. “You think you’ve got troubles?” he wanted to know. “What about me? You should’ve been in my office the day those newlyweds walked in.”

  “What newlyweds?”

  “Those newlyweds that walked into my office one day. Didn’t I ever tell you about them? She was lovely.”

  So was Doc Daneeka’s office. He had decorated his waiting room with goldfish and one of the finest suites of cheap furniture. Whatever he could he bought on credit, even the goldfish. For the rest, he obtained money from greedy relatives in exchange for shares of the profits. His office was in Staten Island in a two-family firetrap just four blocks away from the ferry stop and only one block south of a supermarket, three beauty parlors, and two corrupt druggists. It was a corner location, but nothing helped. Population turnover was small, and people clung through habit to the same physicians they had been doing business with for years. Bills piled up rapidly, and he was soon faced with the loss of his most precious medical instruments: his adding machine was repossessed, and then his typewriter. The goldfish died. Fortunately, just when things were blackest, the war broke out.

  “It was a godsend,” Doc Daneeka confessed solemnly. “Most of the other doctors were soon in the service, and things picked up overnight. The corner location really started paying off, and I soon found myself handling more patients than I could handle competently. I upped m
y kickback fee with those two drugstores. The beauty parlors were good for two, three abortions a week. Things couldn’t have been better, and then look what happened. They had to send a guy from the draft board around to look me over. I was Four-F. I had examined myself pretty thoroughly and discovered that I was unfit for military service. You’d think my word would be enough, wouldn’t you, since I was a doctor in good standing with my county medical society and with my local Better Business Bureau. But no, it wasn’t, and they sent this guy around just to make sure I really did have one leg amputated at the hip and was helplessly bedridden with incurable rheumatoid arthritis. Yossarian, we live in an age of distrust and deteriorating spiritual values. It’s a terrible thing,” Doc Daneeka protested in a voice quavering with strong emotion. “It’s a terrible thing when even the word of a licensed physician is suspected by the country he loves.”

  Doc Daneeka had been drafted and shipped to Pianosa as a flight surgeon, even though he was terrified of flying.

  “I don’t have to go looking for trouble in an airplane,” he noted, blinking his beady, brown, offended eyes myopically. “It comes looking for me. Like that virgin I’m telling you about that couldn’t have a baby.”

  “What virgin?” Yossarian asked. “I thought you were telling me about some newlyweds.”

  “That’s the virgin I’m telling you about. They were just a couple of young kids, and they’d been married, oh, a little over a year when they came walking into my office without an appointment. You should have seen her. She was so sweet and young and pretty. She even blushed when I asked about her periods. I don’t think I’ll ever stop loving that girl. She was built like a dream and wore a chain around her neck with a medal of Saint Anthony hanging down inside the most beautiful bosom I never saw. ‘It must be a terrible temptation for Saint Anthony,’ I joked—just to put her at ease, you know. ‘Saint Anthony?’ her husband said. ‘Who’s Saint Anthony?’ ‘Ask your wife,’ I told him. ‘She can tell you who Saint Anthony is.’ ‘Who is Saint Anthony?’ he asked her. ‘Who?’ she wanted to know. ‘Saint Anthony,’ he told her. ‘Saint Anthony?’ she said. ‘Who’s Saint Anthony?’ When I got a good look at her inside my examination room I found she was still a virgin. I spoke to her husband alone while she was pulling her girdle back on and hooking it onto her stockings. ‘Every night,’ he boasted. A real wise guy, you know. ‘I never miss a night,’ he boasted. He meant it, too. ‘I even been puttin’ it to her mornings before the breakfasts she makes me before we go to work,’ he boasted. There was only one explanation. When I had them both together again I gave them a demonstration of intercourse with the rubber models I’ve got in my office. I’ve got these rubber models in my office with all the reproductive organs of both sexes that I keep locked up in separate cabinets to avoid a scandal. I mean I used to have them. I don’t have anything any more, not even a practice. The only thing I have now is this low temperature that I’m really starting to worry about. Those two kids I’ve got working for me in the medical tent aren’t worth a damn as diagnosticians. All they know how to do is complain. They think they’ve got troubles? What about me? They should have been in my office that day with those two newlyweds looking at me as though I were telling them something nobody’d ever heard of before. You never saw anybody so interested. ‘You mean like this?’ he asked me, and worked the models for himself awhile. You know, I can see where a certain type of person might get a big kick out of doing just that. ‘That’s it,’ I told him. ‘Now, you go home and try it my way for a few months and see what happens. Okay?’ ‘Okay,’ they said, and paid me in cash without any argument. ‘Have a good time,’ I told them, and they thanked me and walked out together. He had his arm around her waist as though he couldn’t wait to get her home and put it to her again. A few days later he came back all by himself and told my nurse he had to see me right away. As soon as we were alone, he punched me in the nose.”

  “He did what?”

  “He called me a wise guy and punched me in the nose. ‘What are you, a wise guy?’ he said, and knocked me flat on my ass. Pow! Just like that. I’m not kidding.”

  “I know you’re not kidding,” Yossarian said. “But why did he do it?”

  “How should I know why he did it?” Doc Daneeka retorted with annoyance.

  “Maybe it had something to do with Saint Anthony?”

  Doc Daneeka looked at Yossarian blankly. “Saint Anthony?” he asked with astonishment. “Who’s Saint Anthony?”

  “How should I know?” answered Chief White Halfoat, staggering inside the tent just then with a bottle of whiskey cradled in his arm and sitting himself down pugnaciously between the two of them.

  Doc Daneeka rose without a word and moved his chair outside the tent, his back bowed by the compact kit of injustices that was his perpetual burden. He could not bear the company of his roommate.

  Chief White Halfoat thought he was crazy. “I don’t know what’s the matter with that guy,” he observed reproachfully. “He’s got no brains, that’s what’s the matter with him. If he had any brains he’d grab a shovel and start digging. Right here in the tent, he’d start digging, right under my cot. He’d strike oil in no time. Don’t he know how that enlisted man struck oil with a shovel back in the States? Didn’t he ever hear what happened to that kid—what was the name of that rotten rat bastard pimp of a snotnose back in Colorado?”

  “Wintergreen.”

  “Wintergreen.”

  “He’s afraid,” Yossarian explained.

  “Oh, no. Not Wintergreen.” Chief White Halfoat shook his head with undisguised admiration. “That stinking little punk wise-guy son of a bitch ain’t afraid of nobody.”

  “Doc Daneeka’s afraid. That’s what’s the matter with him.”

  “What’s he afraid of?”

  “He’s afraid of you,” Yossarian said. “He’s afraid you’re going to die of pneumonia.”

  “He’d better be afraid,” Chief White Halfoat said. A deep, low laugh rumbled through his massive chest. “I will, too, the first chance I get. You just wait and see.”

  Chief White Halfoat was a handsome, swarthy Indian from Oklahoma with a heavy, hard-boned face and tousled black hair, a half-blooded Creek from Enid who, for occult reasons of his own, had made up his mind to die of pneumonia. He was a glowering, vengeful, disillusioned Indian who hated foreigners with names like Cathcart, Korn, Black and Havermeyer and wished they’d all go back to where their lousy ancestors had come from.

  “You wouldn’t believe it, Yossarian,” he ruminated, raising his voice deliberately to bait Doc Daneeka, “but this used to be a pretty good country to live in before they loused it up with their goddam piety.”

  Chief White Halfoat was out to revenge himself upon the white man. He could barely read or write and had been assigned to Captain Black as assistant intelligence officer.

  “How could I learn to read or write?” Chief White Halfoat demanded with simulated belligerence, raising his voice again so that Doc Daneeka would hear. “Every place we pitched our tent, they sank an oil well. Every time they sank a well, they hit oil. And every time they hit oil, they made us pack up our tent and go someplace else. We were human divining rods. Our whole family had a natural affinity for petroleum deposits, and soon every oil company in the world had technicians chasing us around. We were always on the move. It was one hell of a way to bring a child up, I can tell you. I don’t think I ever spent more than a week in one place.”

  His earliest memory was of a geologist.

  “Every time another White Halfoat was born,” he continued, “the stock market turned bullish. Soon whole drilling crews were following us around with all their equipment just to get the jump on each other. Companies began to merge just so they could cut down on the number of people they had to assign to us. But the crowd in back of us kept growing. We never got a good night’s sleep. When we stopped, they stopped. When we moved, they moved, chuckwagons, bulldozers, derricks, generators. We were a walking business boom, a
nd we began to receive invitations from some of the best hotels just for the amount of business we would drag into town with us. Some of those invitations were mighty generous, but we couldn’t accept any because we were Indians and all the best hotels that were inviting us wouldn’t accept Indians as guests. Racial prejudice is a terrible thing, Yossarian. It really is. It’s a terrible thing to treat a decent, loyal Indian like a nigger, kike, wop or spic.” Chief White Halfoat nodded slowly with conviction.

  “Then, Yossarian, it finally happened—the beginning of the end. They began to follow us around from in front. They would try to guess where we were going to stop next and would begin drilling before we even got there, so we couldn’t even stop. As soon as we’d begin to unroll our blankets, they would kick us off. They had confidence in us. They wouldn’t even wait to strike oil before they kicked us off. We were so tired we almost didn’t care the day our time ran out. One morning we found ourselves completely surrounded by oilmen waiting for us to come their way so they could kick us off. Everywhere you looked there was an oilman on a ridge, waiting there like Indians getting ready to attack. It was the end. We couldn’t stay where we were because we had just been kicked off. And there was no place left for us to go. Only the Army saved me. Luckily, the war broke out just in the nick of time, and a draft board picked me right up out of the middle and put me down safely in Lowery Field, Colorado. I was the only survivor.”

  Yossarian knew he was lying, but did not interrupt as Chief White Halfoat went on to claim that he had never heard from his parents again. That didn’t bother him too much, though, for he had only their word for it that they were his parents, and since they had lied to him about so many other things, they could just as well have been lying to him about that too. He was much better acquainted with the fate of a tribe of first cousins who had wandered away north in a diversionary movement and pushed inadvertently into Canada. When they tried to return, they were stopped at the border by American immigration authorities who would not let them back into the country. They could not come back in because they were red.