Stranger to the Ground

The sun isn’t up yet. We wait in our cockpits. I drift idly in the great dark river of soft-flowing time. Nothing happens. The secondhand on my watch moves around. I begin to notice things; as something to do. I hear a quiet tik . . . tik . . . tik . . . very regular, slow, metronomic. Tik . . . tik . . . tik . . . And the answer comes. My navigation lights. Without the engine running and with the canopy closed to keep out the rustle of the wind, I can hear the opening and the closing of the relays that control the flashing of the lights on wingtip and tail. Interesting. Never would have thought that I could hear the lights going on and off.

Outside is the efficient high-speed pokpokpok of the APU. What a truly efficient thing that power unit is. It will stand there all night and through all tomorrow if it has to, pumping a constant stream of electricity to power the radio and keep the cockpit bathed in scarlet light.

My airplane rocks slightly. I think someone has climbed to the wing and wants to talk to me, but there is no one there. The wind, that gentle cold wind, rocks this massive hard airplane. Every once in a while, and faintly, the wind moves the airplane on its landing gear struts. Thirty feet to my right the airplane of Hawk Able Leader waits, lights on, tikking silently to itself. The bloodlight of the cockpit reflects from the foamwhite enameled helmet of the pilot just as it would reflect if we were cruising now at 30,000 feet. Canopy is closed and locked, the air inside the cockpit is still and cold, and I wish that someone would invent a way to pipe warm air into the cockpit of an airplane that waits in the cold of a very early day. I can feel my warmth being absorbed in the cold metal of the instrument panel and the ejection seat and canopy rails and rudder-pedal tunnels. If I could only be warm and move around a bit and have someone to talk to, sitting cockpit alert would not be too bad a thing.

I have made a discovery. This is what Lonely is. When you are walled up where no one can come inside and talk to you or play a game of cards or chess with you or share a joke about the time over Stuttgart when Number Three mistook the Moselle River for the Rhine and . . . Insulated from the outside. A track that I know is a noisy line truck that clatters and squeaks and needs a new muffler glides noiselessly by on the road in front of my revetment. The locked canopy seals away the sound of its passing. It seals me in with my thoughts. Nothing to read, no moving things to watch, just a quiet cockpit and the tik of the nav lights and the pok of the APU and my very own thoughts.

I sit in an airplane that is mine. The commanders of Wing and Squadron have given it to me without question, trusting utterly in my ability to control it and guide it as they want it guided. They are depending on me to hit the target. I remember a line from the base newspaper that I read during a gigantic war game of a few weeks ago: “Yesterday the Wing saw action while it flew in support of the Army. . . .” The Wing did not see any such action. It was me that saw that action, arcing low and fast with simulated ordnance across the troops on the tanks, trying to streak low enough to make the troops jump into the mud but not low enough to take the whip antenna off the tanks.

Not the Wing making them jump.

Me.

Egoistical? Yes. But then the Wing did not take the chance of misjudging and driving its 12 tons of airplane into the side of a 50-ton armored tank. So this is me sitting Alert, in my airplane, and if it were a real Alert, it would be me who came back or did not come back from the flak and the missiles over the target. They trust me. That seems odd, that anyone should trust anyone else with so much. They give me an airplane without question and without thinking twice about it. The number of the airplane comes up by my name on the scheduling board and I go out and fly it or sit in its cockpit and be ready to fly it. It is just a number on the board. But when I sit in it I have a chance to see what a remarkably involved, what an intricately fashioned thing it is, and what power the commanders have given me by putting that number next to my name.

The crew chief, heavy-jacketed, steel-helmeted, appears abruptly on the aluminum ladder and knocks politely on the plexiglass. I open the canopy, grudging the loss of my pocket of still air, however slightly heated, to the cold wind, and pull one side of my helmet away from my ear so I can hear him. Red light paints his face.

“D’ymind if we climb in the truck and wait . . . be out of the wind a little bit if it’s OK with you. Flash your taxi light if you need . . .”

“OK.” And I resolve to discipline my thought and go over again the headings and the times and the distances and the altitudes to my target. And the great dark river of time moves slowly on.