They shipped me to gunnery school where I sat in wheelbarrows and shot broom handles, which is how I learned the .30 caliber and the .50. Sergeant Bugg said in all his days he’d never seen one so deadly with a broom as was I.
My buddy was a guy from the east called Socrates. He was smart and told me Sarge was ironic—making fun. Soc and I took turns running the barrow while the other aimed the broom.
When they gave me shooting guns that was better. I could write my name with a caliber .30—if what I aimed at wasn’t dodging, diving, or shooting back. Shooting, diving, and ducking—that was war, seemed to me. Soc laughed, shook his head, and wrote down what I’d said in a book he was making.
They assigned us to the B-17, the Flying Fortress. Soc learned waist gunning. Being small, I became a tail gunner.
Let me tell you about the B-17: The 17’s a hair off 75 feet long. Tail gunner sits less than three feet from the dead end.
Let me tell you about the tail of a B-17: The plane skinnies from the waist on. Heading back, first you stoop, then you duck, then you waddle. You try not to bump your head but, naturally, you do. You watch grabbing anything along the sides because on the skin and between the ribs are breaker boxes, conduits, wire bundles, oxygen bottles, there are hydraulic lines everywhere, control cables that squeak through struts, roll over pulleys, and dip into secret places. All that keeps the plane flying or someone alive. Anyway, you never touch anything metal with your bare hands, not at Angels Sixteen and up, because the cold burns your skin right to it. That’s why you’ve got a flight suit and gloves.
Flying, the plane shifts, creaks, and chatters, she bends, twists, flaps, moans, and shivers. Can’t tell you all the sounds she makes.
At bulkhead seven, there’s a caibo can to the side. It stinks but so much of the plane does in so many interesting ways, I didn’t mind. Past the can, you crawl; you crawl around the hump where the tailwheel snugs into the fuselage. You crawl and eventually there’s an armored seat. Above it is a glass box big enough for your head. After that is the air. Twin .50s poke between your legs in case you want to kill something means you harm. In woolens, flight suit, helmet, gloves, boots, and parachute, you barely squeeze into that iron-bottom seat. Even I had trouble. After a bit I started leaving my chute back by the tail wheel. An easier crawl that way. SOPs said not to, everyone said not, the gunnery sergeant, pilot, everyone, so I figured everyone must do it so I did it too. That wasn’t exactly thinking—which I knew not to do—but without the chute, I could at least move a little, look around, get some idea where the targets were coming from, the notion being you kill the target before the target kills everybody.
That’s the tail of the B-17.
When the Army graduated us to the war, Soc and I shipped as cargo on a flight of 17s being ferried to 8th Air Force, England. Replacements—ships and us. No one had to tell us what we were replacing or why we were required.
At Angels Twenty-five—that’s Air Corps talk for twenty-five thousand feet—it’s three hundred miles an hour and forty below zero outside the plane. It’s not much warmer in.
Soc and I hunkered down forward of the waist guns and talked. Keeping warm, you know? Soc talked, anyway. He talked about the war, the world after the war—”geopolitics” he called it—he talked about the next war, about the big sciences of life and death and, well, he talked about Socrates things. For warmth, you know.
“Next time,” he said, “it’s going to be science. New wars will be numbers and engineering.”
Couldn’t help laughing. I remembered what Daddy said about old wars.
Soc didn’t notice. “Look here,” he said. His voice was rubbery through his O-mask. “Soon it’ll be just our machines fighting theirs. Our brains versus theirs. Men won’t even see the battles they’re in.” He pulled his mask deeper into the fur hole around his hood. “Science won’t make war obsolete—just the warrior.” The voice came out his O-tube.
“Might have a point,” I said.
“Huh?” he said.
I pointed my face at the plane around us. There we were, I told him, sailing the mighty ocean in a single night, freezing our soft asses behind thin metal at Angels Twenty-five. I was trying not to think, see? At least I wasn’t thinking science, but you look at a B-17 on the ground. There is no way it flies. A 17 is sixty-five thousand pounds of Mother Earth, mined, smelted, poured, shaped, fitted and tuned. It could not, no shade of doubt about it, fly. It could not but that everyone agreed it could—pilot, crew, folks at home, the enemy in Berlin, everyone knew a B-17 flew—so fly it just naturally does. Science? I didn’t know; Soc would have called that superstition.
“Yeah,” I said, “the plane’s the warrior, huh?”
“Yeah, yeah, sure,” he said and went on thinking aloud. “We’ll pave the world, dwell in buildings of the mind, all be part of a vast electric…” His eye poked from his parka. “You know what?” his rubber-voice asked, “we are priests.” Oxygen hissed around his words. “Yeah, you and me, acolytes of the new rites of combat. Yeah, that’s going to be my book, Priesthood of Mars it’s called.” He squinted. “Or In Holy Orders… Well, something like.” He pulled his head back under the fur and said something I don’t doubt was important, but which I couldn’t hear.
On the ground in England another bunch of pilots—they seemed like pretty happy guys, mostly drunk I think—took the planes and flew them off to bases all over what they called Anglia. That was still England.
Soc and me shipped in a beat-up bus to our assignment base, Cranwell Hall, Suffolk, the Air Corps having more important things to fly than us, for Christ sake. I was used to least tit by now.
England’s air breathed different. It tasted. Smelled like Granma’s place, old and smoky. The air and that cold night flight might have put me to sleep because on the way to Cranwell I dreamed. It was full night when Soc nudged me awake. Our headlamps were blacked down to little slits and the bus crawled behind a little squeak of light on the road ahead.
“German night raiders!” Soc whispered and pointed overhead. Gave me a chilly thrill. Here I was in the war, history all around. I got used to it in a few minutes.
Fields rose on steep hills, both sides of the road. All along those up-and-down meadows the harvest ground-stubble was afire. Low flames tumbled in long weaving lines. They rolled uphill, wriggling and whipping like deep blue worms in red and yellow rut. Between the fires and our creeping bus, dark shadows danced; people and animals, I guessed. The shadows herded the flames across the leas and over the crests!
“Farmers?” I asked Soc.
“Don’t know,” he whispered, and kept writing his book.
“Incendiaries?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said slow and plain. “Ask the driver.”
“Bombs?” I asked the old bloke driving. He said nothing. “Sir!” I yelled above the engine. “Was it bombs made them fires?” I guessed he was deaf.
When we cleared the burning hills and rolled into flat land and darker night the driver piped up. “Not bombs, Yank,” he said. “You be in Anglia, now. This be sea-born land ’n’ all here’bouts.” He hunched the wheel, his chin pointed ahead. “All the land here be claimed from the sea in King Charlie’s time.” He gave me a wink. “Them folk,” he cocked his head at the glowing hills behind us, “crazy with country ways, they are. After harvest, they dance wi’ th’ eelymen’als, give ’em their way about, you see? It were their old farthers as stole the warter’s land, they reckon, so pleasing them Undeens makes fer good crops—good wars, too, I reckon.” He coughed a saw-grass laugh my direction. “Eelymen’als like a good to-do!”
“Eely whats?” I shouted to him.
“Eel-e-mentals!” he hollered back, straining on the word. “Old folk! Them of earth and air, the fires and the warters. Them farm folk there be lettin’ the Sallymander play, I reckon. But what’s the point, I arsks? They’ll be fire enough anon, little Yank.” He laughed, then laughed again.
I listened like Daddy to
ld me, but had no idea what the old bloke was saying. When I came back to the seat Soc was asleep. Soon I was too.
Let me tell you about Cranwell Hall and Lakenheath. At this time, all England was under arms. Cranwell Hall was one of hundreds of bases along the North Sea all aimed at the Continent. Every day, our planes from Cranwell and the others rose, rendezvoused over the Channel, and headed for Hanover, Bremen, Frankfurt, Brest, and a thousand places. We were taking war to the enemy.
Three miles from Cranwell was another farm town, Lakenheath: a street of houses, a monument to Daddy’s War, two pubs, a church—all flint and balance—and a chips shop.
Between Lakenheath and Cranwell Hall was a common meadow. On Lakenheath Lea, what the blokes called it, the Air Corps had built a dummy base. The figuring was that from three miles up and lit by marker flares, wood and canvas, painted lines and staked-out squares would look enough like planes, flight lines, and barracks to convince German night raiders to target the Lea and not Cranwell.
That was the idea. It frequently worked.
The Germans showed up at Cranwell about the same time Soc and I did so we spent our first night of war in the brig, a solid place and mostly empty.
Soc was shivering. “Ironic,” he said between waves, “our lives, plans, my future depends on the Germans being perfect. Planes, pilots, bombardiers, bombs all have to be on the money. We expect they’ll miss us because they’ll be on target for the decoy.” His eyes flickered in the winking dark. “What about Kraut fuckups? Our ruse is perfect but some Heinie sad sack misses by a mile and kills the real thing. Us! Ironic. So damn ironic.”
The night went flash and boom distantly and Soc said “ironic” again. I figured war had lots of irony.
That night the ruse and the Nazis worked swell. I slept. Sleeping, I dreamed fireworms crawling the fields. I heard musical voices in the flame. Maybe this was what Daddy’d said to listen for. But this was England. He’d been in France.
Next day, we met the First Sergeant. He said we were mostly useless and sent us to get assigned. We got driven to the crew area in a jeep, which was as much help as we got. Nobody liked us. Like the first shirt said, we were useless and probably already dead, so there wasn’t much point in fussing.
Eventually we got assigned. Soc got sent to one plane. I went to another.
My pilot was Shorty Doas—Captain Doas—from Kentucky and taller than me by just that-much. He looked hardly any older but must have been. I walked in, he took one look and grinned like I was a long-missed baby brother. He wrapped his arm on me and said none of the guys could now rightly call him Shorty. He said it again, louder, ran his hand from the top of my head to the middle of his so everybody got he was an inch taller. They all laughed. Then I was one of them.
Our plane was the Gallopin’ Gremlin. The other crews hated the name. Called us bad luck. Doas loved that. That was him, twist the devil’s tail.
The Gremlin’s crew had just formed up. None of us—the plane either, for that matter—had seen combat. The guy I was replacing was dead before anybody met him. Nobody knew him, not even his name. His gear was still in the first shirt’s office and Sarge was waiting for the guy’s orders to catch up so he could find where to ship it all back stateside. The pain-in-the-ass hadn’t been killed by action. Drunk when he arrived, he walked into a spinning prop on the flightline.
“All of him walked in, half of him walked out,” First Shirt said. That’s how Soc put it down.
“A lesson to us all,” Doas said and passed the bottle.
Soc was riding Gale’s Wrath. He loved her. That was going to be his novel, he said. Gale was his pilot’s girlfriend. Soc wanted to meet her after the war. His pilot said, “Sure you do.”
We flew practice, high level, low level, made phony bomb runs. We did night flights, day raid simulations, threw up together through maneuvers. We got used to each other, the plane, the Bomb Group. Our first mission would be a piece of cake. Headquarters said so.
In the tail, you’re alone. At Angels Sixteen your breath freezes your mask to your face, your head is in your glass box, and sky is everywhere. The world is contrails streaming aft, above below. The war being fought by the rest of your plane and your nine buddies is a rumor on the headset. Except for the engines, everything you hear is on headset. Seventy feet up front, everyone knows everything. They’re yelling, “Watch for it, Shorty! Get him, Ern! Get it, get it... Come on, oh Jesus Christ take him, Brandon, oh fuck, five o’clock low, that’s LOW, Goddamnit, nononono!”
Like that. The 17’s a Sunday drive with nine backseat drivers.
From my seat in the tail, I watched backward. Now and then something flew by or came rocking in from the side, swinging back and forth trying to kill me. Felt that personal. I shot back until they went away. I don’t know if I hit anyone. I tried.
Sixty-five thousand pounds of Gremlin bumped and quivered whenever all thirteen .50s spit short chatters at the MEs and F-Ws that rammed past.
We neared the target. The fighters disappeared. For seconds it was just us and quiet. Then the air opened up.
Let me tell you about flak: It’s high explosive wrapped in scrap-metal. Big anti-aircraft guns throw it up to where we are, then it explodes. Thing about it: It’s beautiful. In the big emptiness all around, white, black and pink puffballs blossom, blots of color bump the air. You see it wrinkle, the air. When it’s heavy you can smell it. The smell is like a fired off 12-gauge: hot powder and burnt metal. Flak chews your control surfaces, peppers your hydraulics, it can whip your belly open like-that, unravel your guts around the plane, spin your head clean off—all while you watch in wonder and breathe that back-home smell of duck season on the Red!
I sat in my glass house and waited to explode.
Doas ignored everyone, did his job, drove us to the target, released Gremlin to the bombardier, whose Norden bombsight inched us over whatever we were trying to kill that day—I disremember—and loosed our load. We bounced up, light and happy, and Gremlin and Gale returned to Cornhole without a scratch.
Soc and I got drunk because everyone said we’d stand down till headquarters evaluated the fuck-up, why intelligence promised a milkrun and the Germans fed us a buzzsaw. Sorry, Soc, I’m mixing what you call your metaphors.
And we didn’t stand down. Next day we were up again. Again, Gremlin and Gale came home untouched and Soc and me decided drunk was lucky. Maybe Soc was starting to believe in superstition.
As a reward, we got sent back the very next day. Hungover, boozy, focused by pain, we clobbered the target that third time. Whatever it was.
Three missions and the Gremlins and the Gales were untouched. Not one piece of flak, not one bullet, not one drop of blood. It shit-scared us.
On Gremlin’s fifth mission, a pair of Focke-Wulfs stitched us across the middle and took out one of the waist gunners. Burdette. A big guy. Quiet. Always a little smile like something funny had… Well, that was that.
On seven, we took a burst in the gut and the ball-turret was gone, the ball-turret gunner just a smear along the underside almost to my ass in the tail. What the hell was his name, the ball turret gunner?
Okay. What I didn’t tell the debriefing crew was that during the mission—okay, all the missions—I’d heard things. First, I thought I was picking up Kraut radio on the headset. That happens. Don’t know why. Listening, I knew I heard no radio and what I heard was not on headset. The voices were in the air, in the flames and noise, cripes, in the smell of the plane, the caibo shit, oil burning itself at pressure, flak and cordite fumes whipping back from the waist. I know a little Kraut and the singing words were not Deutsche, they were... Okay, they were older. Older like Daddy’d said older. On the headset, I hear Doas’s Kentucky drawl, the other guys’ shouts, what’s-his-name, the ball-turret gunner’s final chirrup before he became a streak of grease down the belly, all that was there. And I hear it. I hear engines, guns, I hear the flak. But wrapped around all that is a tom-tom chorus and a bull-roar hum. I hear t
he air itself and the air’s flames. They’re all a choir at some old, old church. The voices are explosions and the flak that peppers us, the engines, our guns, theirs, the fighter’s buzz and the rushing air, all seem to be… No, it all is… it all was liquid music. Music and laughter.
I said nothing. Not to Intelligence, not to Doas, not to Soc. As I said, tail gunner’s pretty far back there.
Anyway, we were blooded and felt better. Not happy Burdette and what’s-his-name, the ball-turret gunner, were dead. No. But we didn’t have to worry about what was going to happen first, because the first thing had already happened.
So it got to be routine: missions, stand-downs, scrubs and rainouts, losses, escapes. We were combat vets.
Mundt! That was the ball-turret gunner.
Soc and I were working our pre-mission hoodoo at the Ploughman in Lakenheath. Soc had fallen to the wiles of a country girl still with all her teeth from somewhere by the River Ouze. He’d told her about the book he was writing. “By River Ouze, I call it,” he said. She was impressed and when they closed the boozer, he and she were off talking books. They left me without even a bike to pedal myself back to base on, so I walked. I liked walking fields. Day or night, I liked talking to the critters, to the noises in the earth. This is best done alone. The time I did so in Soc’s hearing, he wrote me down and said I was colorful.
At Lakenheath Lea, I considered risk: cross the decoy field or hoof the long way around? A lone cow sat in the mist under the wing of a decoy plane. I asked what she was doing, out.
Left behind in someone’s haste, she said.
I laughed. A rabbit, then another, leaped the painted lines and went dodging among wood and canvas shapes in the fog.
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