Stranger to the Ground

In ultra-slow motion I watch the target on the ground; it is serene and quiet, for the bullets have not yet arrived. The bullets are on the way, somewhere in the air between the blackening gunports on the nose of my airplane and the pulverized dust on the range. I once thought of bullets as being such fast things, and now I wait impatiently for them to touch the ground and verify my gunsight. Finger is off the trigger; a one-second burst is a long burst of fire. And there is the dust.

The ground comes apart and begins throwing itself into the air. A few feet short of the target the dust flies, but this means that many bullets will have found their way to the meeting point shown by the white dot in the center of the gunsight. The dust is still flying into the air as my right glove pulls back on the many-buttoned stick and my airplane climbs in the pattern. As my airplane and its shadow flick across the square of canvas, the bullets that are able to tear a concrete highway to impassible crushed rock still whip the air and rain on the ground. “Ricochet Four is off.”

I bank to the right in the pattern and look back over my shoulder at the target. It is quiet now, and the cloud of dust is thinning in the wind and moving to the left, covering Three’s target with a tenuous cloud of brown.

“Ricochet Lead is in.”

I fired low that time, short of the target. There goes my 100 percent score. I must move the pipper up a little next time; place it on top of the disc of black. I smile at the thought. It is not very often that the air is smooth enough to let me think of placing the pipper inches high or inches low on the black spot of the target. I am normally doing very good to keep the pipper somewhere on the square of the strafing panel. But today is a good day for gunnery. Let the tanks beware the days of calm.

“Ricochet Two is in.”

“Lead is off.”

I watch Two, and in the curved plexiglass of the canopy I see myself reflected as I watch; a Martian if I ever saw one. Hard white helmet, smooth-curved glare visor down and looking like a prop for a Man in Space feature, green oxygen mask covering all the face that the visor does not cover, oxygen hose leading down out of sight. No indication that there is a living thinking creature behind the hardware. The reflection watches Ricochet Two.

There it is, the grey wisp from the gunports in the nose. The target is still and waiting as though it will stand a year before seeing a sign of motion. Then, suddenly, the thick fountain of dust. To the left of the panel a twig on the ground jumps into startled life and leaps into the air. End over end, slowly it turns, shifting after its first instant into the familiar slow motion of things caught in the swift rain of machinegun bullets. It twists two full turns above the fountain and sinks gracefully back beneath the thick cloud of it. The concrete highway is torn to rock and the twig survives. That should carry a moral.

“Two is off.” Smoke disappears from gunports. The airplane turns its oval nose to the sky and streaks away from the target.

“Three is in.”

What is the moral of the twig? I think about it and I turn sharply into the base leg of the pattern, rechecking the gunsight, right index finger pointing forward at the altimeter. What is the moral of the twig?

The wisp of smoke trails from the gunports of the smooth aluminum nose of Ricochet Three, and I watch his pass.

There is no moral. If the target was a pile of twigs, the hail of copper and lead would turn it into a scattered blanket of splinters. This was a lucky twig. If you are a lucky twig, you can survive anything.

“Three is off.”

The safety panel is white, the gun switch is at guns, and slam the stick whips to the right under my glove and my airplane rolls like a terrified animal to the right and the sky goes grey with the G of the turn and the G-suit inflates to press me in a hard vise of trapped air.

I have never been so rushed, when I fly my airplane, that I do not think. Even in the gunnery pattern, when the airspeed needle is covering 370 knots and the airplane is a few feet from the ground, the thinking goes on. When events happen in split seconds, it is not the thinking that changes, but the event. Events fall obediently into slow motion when there is a need for more thought.

As I fly tonight, navigating with the TACAN locked firmly onto the Laon transmitter, there is plenty of time for thought, and obligingly, events telescope themselves so that seven minutes will pass in the moment between the haunted land of Abbeville and the TACAN transmitter at Laon, France. I do not pass time as I fly, time passes me.

The hills slip away. There is a solid layer of black cloud from the ground to within a thousand feet of my airplane. The ground is buried, but in my chariot of steel and aluminum and plexiglass I am carried above, and the stars are bright.