Burning the Days

by James Salter

  Come now, and let us go and risk our lives unnecessarily. For if they have got any value at all it is this that they have got none. We arrived in Korea, as it happened, on a gloomy day. It was February, the dead of winter, planes parked among sandbag revetments and bitter cold lying over the field adding to the pall. The ranking American ace—mythic word, ineffaceable—a squadron commander named Davis, had just been shot down. With the terrible mark of newness on us, we stood in the officers’ club and listened to what was or was not fact. We were too fresh to make distinctions. We had come, it turned out, to join a sort of crude colonial life lived in stucco buildings in plain, square rooms, unadorned, with common showers and a latrine that even the wing commander shared.

  We were there together for six months, cold winter mornings with the weak sunlight on the hills, the silvery airplanes gliding forth like mechanical serpents not quite perfected in their movement and then forming on the runway amid rising sound. In the spring the ice melted in the rivers and the willows became green. The blood from a bloody nose poured down over your mouth and chin inside the rubber oxygen mask. In summer the locust trees were green and all the fields. It comes hauntingly back: silent, unknown lands; distant brown river, the Yalu, the line between two worlds.

  That first night they were talking about the MIGs, how good they were, how superior at altitude. Whatever anyone said we accepted as truth. I stayed close to Wood, as if to suggest we were equals. The group commander, an older, admired figure—Preston was his name—was there. He had been leading the fatal mission on which Davis, with only a wingman, had attacked a large formation of MIGs. He’d gotten the leader and then slowed down to try for one more. He was successful but it killed him. He was hit just behind the cockpit by cannon fire from still another airplane. The last victory was his twelfth.

  Fighters don’t fight, as St.-Exupéry said, they murder. He did not fly one himself—he spoke as their possible victim, which in the end he became. He was flying a reconnaissance plane when it happened, unarmed and relying only on speed, though they are never quite that fast. He was too old for the war and too civilized.

  The fighter aces had names like Adolph and Sailor, Ginger and Don. They had five or more kills and appeared suddenly and unseen, in the first terrifying seconds letting loose a stream of fire. A kind of blood poured from the plane being hit—black smoke really, but it foretold everything. Pieces of metal were flying off, the whole carefully constructed machinery was coming apart miles above the earth, shedding wings, hurtling out of control.

  At Pointe de la Baumette on the southern coast of France there is a lighthouse with a tablet recording the end of St.-Exupéry. He disappeared in July 1944, his aircraft one of the many simply lost without trace in the great sweep of the war. Blue sea of glittering beauty, the sea on which Cervantes fought and where history was born—somewhere within it lie the bones of this secular saint.

  We were replacements, new wingmen—fighters fly always in pairs—and it would not be long before we too were sleek for murder, crammed with gear into the cockpit, like overcoated gangsters in limousines, high above North Korea in the late afternoon, the sun low, the ground lost in reflection and haze. Farther and farther north we go. “Dentist” is the call sign of the ground radar. Nothing is being reported by them yet. Cautious voices in the dusk in a sky that is ominously empty.

  ——

  Just as, they say, in North Africa during the war the thing to have immediately to hide your innocence was desert boots, so the first requirement of a pilot in Korea was a folding plastic-covered map of the long peninsula that projected down from China into the Yellow Sea, the muddy Yalu its northern border, the spattering of numerous islands, and midway, the enemy capital, Pyongyang. Over the area of North Korea we drew a fan of lines, all converging on our base. This gave headings, especially to home. Arcs of distance crossed these vectors to show at a glance how far you had gone or had to go.

  From the front lines, which crossed the country at the waist, it was about two hundred miles, twenty-five minutes or so, to the river and only a few more to the enemy fields in China, where we were forbidden to go. There was no struggle for possession of the air. Like a backroom deal, that had already been decided. The MIGs entered the sky over North Korea at will, fought if they chose to, and went back to their fields. We were trying to exterminate the enemy, but even the boy who mows the lawn knows that you do not kill wasps one by one, you destroy the nest. The nests, however, were not to be touched. Everything in between was contested.

  We sought to keep them from attacking our fighter-bombers that were heading north, laden and often low-flying, to cut railroads and bomb bridges. We did not escort but patrolled instead. The noses of the MIGs were sometimes yellow, afterwards red, then purple, then black.

  It turned out that this was because their ideas were the opposite of ours. We had only two wings of air-to-air fighters in Korea and they remained there, replenished constantly with pilots to keep them up to strength. Thus there were always veterans with eighty or ninety missions and brave boys ready to scatter who had none, plus the in-betweens. The Russians—they were mainly Russians—whom we fought moved entire air regiments through, probably to initiate as many of them as possible. They would arrive with very little experience and leave three or four months later, battle-hardened. But it meant they were all bathed in innocence at the same time and learned together, and this proved costly.

  What occurred in the rest of the war meant little to us. There remains with me not the name of a single battle of the time or even general other than Van Fleet, who had an honest face and the history of having risen, like Grant, belatedly, a colonel in Normandy when his classmates were commanding corps—Van Fleet and of course Ridgway.

  In the sky were weather and widely separated operations conducted by the Navy, Marines, and Air Force. We had little to do with one another. It was only in the headquarters, approached on rutted roads and the dusty, tree-shaded avenues of Seoul, in the theatrical evening briefings with the commander sitting silver-haired, stars on his collar, smoking a cigar and in a woman’s voice saying thank you after each presentation, that orchestration took place. Here were all the strikes, targets, losses—everything a general might need to know.

  War is so many things. It is an opportunity to see the upper world, great houses that have become hospitals or barracks, precious objects sold for nothing, families with ancient names at the mercy of quartermaster sergeants. In the familiar footage the guns jump backwards as they fire, the tanks roll past and forgotten men wave. It is all this and also the furnace of the individual in a way that a life of labor is not. Its demands are unending, its pleasures cruel. Goya knew them, and Thucydides, and Isaac Babel. One morning there is the wonderful smell of breakfast, and on the next the sudden arrest and hasty sentencing. The fate that seemed impossible, the justice Lorca knew. He could not cry out, I am a poet! They know he is an intellectual, or worse. They put him in a truck and he rides, with others and without a shred of hope, to an outlying district, where he is handed a shovel and told to dig. It is his grave he is digging, and in silence, the silence he will soon be part of, he begins, who was raised in this country, who became its very voice. Death laid eggs in the wound, he once wrote, at five in the afternoon. From far off the gangrene is coming, at five in the afternoon. His wounds were burning like suns, at five in the afternoon, and the crowd was breaking the windows … In his grip is the smooth wooden handle, and the first shovelful of earth is one of the most precious moments of his life, if only it could last. But in war nothing lasts and the poets are killed together with the farm boys, the flies feast on their faces.

  For us it was simple and always the same: Who was scheduled, what was the weather, what had the earlier missions seen?

  ——

  The first morning light over the top of the wing. The first, easy missions. Out of the dust of memory, with a faint coating of dust himself, childlike, shrewd, comes Amell, the squadron commander.

&
nbsp; A name is a destiny. It is the first of all poems. Even after death it keeps its power; even half-buried in newsprint or dirt, something catches the eye. Paavo Nurmi had such a name. So did Jean Genet; a stunt pilot named Lamont Pry; the Swedish Match King; a small-time fascist, Adrian Arcaud—I am beginning to portray an era—and in the huge graveyard my toe kicks up another: Zane Amell.

  I don’t remember how I first saw him. He remains fixed, in any event, as in a photograph, with a fur hat like a cossack and a navy revolver in a holster under his arm. He had a husky, somewhat thespian voice. As an actor his speeches tended to be slightly long, although he could be succinct on occasion. One morning on leave, arriving back in Tokyo in a staff car, in a wrinkled uniform and reeking of alcohol, he was awakened by the Japanese driver and asked if there was some particular place he would like to be dropped. “Yes,” Amell answered hoarsely.

  “Where?”

  “Anywhere,” he muttered and fell back asleep.

  His first words to me that I recall were at a briefing. I was flying as his wingman on my second combat mission. The task of a wingman can be easily described: it is to stay with the leader and to look, especially behind—almost all danger comes from there. I knew I was being tried out. I was ready for advice or words of warning. As the aircraft numbers were written next to our names, he commented genially, “Great. You have old No Go, and I’ve got the Guzzler.” They were two of the oldest and slowest airplanes, but he didn’t have them changed.

  I was fearful as we climbed in the cold air, the planes bobbing slightly. Perhaps it was the day I saw my first MIG, silver, passing above us, complete in every strange detail, silent as a shark. There were many in the air that day. They were coming from the north in flight after flight, above us. I remember how helpless and alone I felt. My throat was burning as I breathed.

  His eyes were bad. They used to say that if anyone had the chances Amell had, they would have shot down ten airplanes—he ended up with three victories and a wingman drenched in flame who went down one day near Sinuiju. As I think now of his eyes, they seem to me small but like those of traders or old policemen, wise. In the air you heard his grating voice and assurance, like a man stepping blithely into traffic looking the wrong way. He liked to drink and was given to extravagant gestures.

  Perhaps there is a price for insouciance, but I did not see him pay it. A few years later, in Michigan, he swerved off the runway while landing to avoid planes coming the other way. The ground was soft, however, and he flipped over and was killed.

  ——

  Speed was everything. If you had speed you could climb or overtake them and, more important, not be easily surprised. You could rid yourself of speed quickly in a number of ways, but to obtain it, especially in the instant it was needed, was impossible.

  By subsequent standards these were uncomplicated airplanes, but they could fly above forty-five thousand feet and, going straight down, flirt with the speed of sound. There was a second red needle on the airspeed indicator that moved to mark the limit beyond which you were not supposed to fly though we often did, the needles crossed by thirty or forty knots, usually at low altitude or in a dive, the ship bucking and trying to roll. “On the Mach”—the absolute limit and a favorite phrase.

  The difference between our planes and theirs was in most ways insignificant, but in one, crucial. They had cannon—the maw of a MIG seemed swollen and menacing. We had machine guns, which were almost feminine in comparison; the skin of the ship had faint gouges, like the imprint of a spoon, near the nose where the guns poked through. There were six of them. The cannon shells were as big around as a drinking glass and the damage they could do was severe. Machine-gun bullets, on the other hand, were the size of a finger or wine cork. It was the sledgehammer versus the hose. The hose was more flexible and could be adjusted quickly. The slower-firing cannon could not; you could almost say, Oh, God, between the heavy, glowing shots. Once machine guns had their teeth in something, they chewed rapidly.

  We test-fired on the way north, a brief squeeze with the switches on. The trigger was on the stick and the safety pin for it, with a red streamer attached, in one of your pockets. Now it was all real; it had only been a picture before, the familiar one of a formation hung in vacant sky. There were only eleven seconds’ worth of ammunition altogether. A burst in a fight might last two or three. The secret was simple: get in close, as close as possible, within fifty feet if you could, so close you could not miss.

  ——

  Often at dawn, drifting across to us was a great, swelling sound, the running up of engines. It reached a climax and stayed there, this roar that devoured our lives. Then slowly it would diminish, down unseen runway, fading as the flight became airborne. After a moment it began again: first-light reccey, off to the Yalu.

  The names that appeared on the mission board three or four times a day were not a list of the most able. They included laggards and incompetents as well as men whose only failing was prudence. The war had swept up and reclaimed former pilots who had returned to ordinary life and become stockbrokers or schoolteachers, and there was one veteran captain—I’ll call him Miles—who had been badly burned in a crash and never recovered his nerve. He was a man for whom things went wrong. Dishonor was always staring him in the face, or worse, another crash. On a mission his engine was always running rough, it seemed, and he would call that he was turning back. I flew with him several times, once in early March, in my first real fight.

  The sky that day was clear and deep. Heading north at forty thousand feet, there were smooth, straight contrails streaming out for miles behind us which could be seen from far off. The spares, unneeded, had already turned back and were somewhere near Pyongyang. They were talking calmly. “There are bogies at twelve o’clock,” the wingman observed routinely.

  “Roger.”

  After a few moments the wingman added, “They look like MIGs.”

  “They are,” the other said. He began calling us. “Lots of them. They’re turning north,” he advised.

  There were twelve of us. We began a slow turn to the south while the conversation went on; we were trying to find out more, how many of them there were. The sky was empty but my hands were tingling. Then we saw contrails, faint and distant. “Drop tanks, everybody,” I heard.

  We carried external fuel tanks, large as bathtubs but more gracefully shaped, beneath the wings. At a touch of a button they could be jettisoned. The plane jumped slightly, became lighter, as the tanks fell away. The hostile contrails turned slowly towards us.

  For an interminable time nothing changed, we drew no closer. Then there were specks that were making the contrails. Suddenly we were almost in range. “Everybody pick one of them,” I heard.

  It was almost impossible to hold the gunsight on something so small but we fired as they shot past. It was at a slight angle and we were on the side closest to their course when, instead of turning after them, Miles rolled over and started down. Fifteen thousand feet lower, in some haze, he pulled out. His aileron boost had gone out, he called. Was I still there, he asked brusquely? “Do you have me in sight, Four?”

  I was at three o’clock, I told him. There was a pause, “My boost seems OK now,” he announced. Then, for the benefit of anyone who might be listening, “Let’s climb up and get back into the fight.”

  Far above, like the surface after a deep dive, were scrawled and broken contrails. We could hear the calls: the squadron leader that day had gotten one, the pilot of the MIG had just bailed out at thirty-two thousand feet.

  At debriefing I heard Miles explain that he thought he might have hit jet-wash and been thrown out of control. He had a tight, embarrassed expression on his face. The skin of his neck was unnaturally smooth from the ancient scars. His back and arms were burned too, I knew. I couldn’t bring myself to look at him.

  At the same time, however, there were acts of aplomb. Most were things of the moment and lost in the huge tapestry of war. In a day or so they were forgotten, but a few
were passed down. “Lead, they’re shooting at us!” “That’s OK, they’re allowed to do that.”

  ——

  Colman’s arrival in the wing—in fact, there were two arrivals, the first having gone unnoticed—made him famous. He often told the story himself, in an awkward sort of way, laughing and revealing cigar-stained teeth.

  He had been in a National Guard wing at a base in northern Japan—Misawa, I think. I have never been there but I know the drabness, the cold of the mornings. They were flying dangerous, repeated raids on enemy supply lines. One day he caught a ride to Korea, to our base, and made his way to wing headquarters, which was not far from the flight line. There he asked to see the wing commander. For what reason, they said, and who was he? It was about a transfer. He was Captain Philip Colman.

  The wing commander looked like a fading jockey and had the uncommon name of Thyng. He had piercing blue eyes and wore eagles that because of his smallness seemed doubly large. I can hear his voice as his plane suddenly whips over on its back. “MIGs below us, fellows,” he cries. Down we go.

  Colman stood before him with a respectfulness untinged by the least subservience. He was, after all, only tossing the dice. He was that dauntless figure, a free man. Soldier, yes, but only occasional soldier; it was all somehow implicit in the crispness of his salute, his effort to be unsmiling, his stained flying suit. He was an experienced fighter pilot and had been an ace in China only seven years earlier. At the moment, he explained, he was in fighter-bombers, which was a waste of his talent; he would like to come to the Fourth.

  Thyng was always on the lookout for able men. Did he have any time in the F-86? he asked Colman. Yes, sir, Colman said, about two hundred hours. He actually had none and had merely picked a figure that seemed probable. Thyng, interested, told him to leave his name and other details with the adjutant and he would see what could be done.