Stranger to the Ground

FAC, for instance. Pronounced fack. Forward Air Controller. The blast of low-level and gunsight on the truck columns of the Aggressor. FAC. “Checkmate, Bipod Delta here. I’ve got a bunch of troops and two tanks coming toward my position. They’re on the high ground just south of the castle on the dirt road. You got ’em in sight?”

The greening hills of Germany below me, the chessboard in another war game. What a job for a fighter pilot, to be a FAC. Stuck out with the Army in the mud with a jeep and a radio transmitter, watching your friends come in on the strikes. “Roj, Delta. Got the castle and the road in sight, not the target.” A sprinkling of dots in the grass by the road. “As you were, got ’em in sight. Take your spacing, Two.”

“What’s your armament, Checkmate?”

“Simulated napalm and guns. First pass will be the napalm.”

“Hurry up, will you? The tanks are pouring on the coal; must have seen you.”

“Roj.”

I melt into stick and throttle, my airplane leaps ahead and hurls itself in a sweeping burst of speed at the road. There are the tanks, feathers of dust and grass spraying long behind their tracks. But it is as if they were caught in cooling wax, I move fifteen times faster than they. Take it down to the deck, attacking from behind the tank. In its wax, it begins to turn, grass spewing from beneath its right track. I bank my wings, ever so slightly, and feel confident, omnipotent, as an eagle plunging from height to mouse. Men are riding on the tank, clutching handholds. They do not hear me, but they see me, looking back over their camouflaged shoulders. And I see them. What a way to make a living, clinging with all your strength to the back of a 50-ton block of steel hurtling across a meadow. In the time it takes me to count three, the tank, frozen in its turn, frames itself for a moment in my windscreen, and the lowest diamond of my gunsight flicks through it and my thumb has released tanks of jellied gasoline from beneath the wings. Wouldn’t be a tank driver in wartime for all the money in the world. Pull up. Hard turn right. Look back. The tank is rolling to a stop, obedient to the rules of our game. Two is snapping his black swept shadow over the hatch of the second tank. Tanks make such easy targets. I guess they just hope that they won’t get caught in an air strike. “Nice job, Checkmate. Work over the troops, will you?” A friendly request, from a man who is seeing from the ground the sight that so often has been caught in his forward windscreen. In the war we would worry now about small-arms fire and shoulder-mounted antiaircraft missiles, but we would already have decided that when our time comes, it will come, and the worry would be a transient one. Down on the troops. Most unwarlike troops, these. Knowing the game, and not often having the chance for their own private and special airshow, they stand and watch us come in. One raises his arms in a defiant V. I bank again, very slightly, to hurtle directly toward him. He and I have a little personal clash of wills. Low. I climb up the slope of the long meadow toward my antagonist. If there are telephone wires across the meadow, I will have plenty of clearance going beneath them. In war, my antagonist would be caught in the hail of Armor Piercing Incendiary from six Browning 50-caliber machine guns. But though this is not real war, it is a real challenge he throws to me. I dare you to make me duck. We are all such little boys at heart. I make one last tiny adjustment so that my drop tanks will pass on either side of his outflung hands if he does not duck. I see the arms begin to falter as he flicks from sight beneath the nose. If he hasn’t ducked, he is due for a flattening burst of jetblast. But he does have determination, this man. Usually we scatter the troops like flocks of chicks around the hilltops. I turn on another pass from another direction, looking, from sudden height of my pullup, for my friend. One dot looks like another.

Another pass, carried perhaps a little too low, for my friend dives for the ground even before I pass over him. That is really very profound. One dot looks like another. You can’t tell good from evil when you move 500 feet per second above the grass. You can only tell that the dots are men.