Stranger to the Ground

On one FAC mission near the hem of the iron curtain we were asked to fly east for two minutes in order to find our Controller. Two minutes east would have put us over the border and into Soviet airspace. Enemy airspace. The Controller had meant to say “west.” The hills did not look any different on the Other Side. As we circled and turned west I had looked across into the forbidden land. I saw no fences, no iron curtains, no strange coloring of the earth. Only the green rolling of the constant hills, a scattering of little grey villages. Without my compass and map, with the East-West border heavily penciled in red, I would have thought that the villages of men that I saw in the east were just as the villages of the west. Fortunately, I had the map.

“How about a high-speed run for the troops, Checkmate?”

“Sure thing,” I say, smiling. For the troops. If I were a fighter pilot marooned on the ground with the olive-drab Army, nothing would ease my solitude quite so much as the 500-knot rapport with my friends and their airplanes. So, a pass for the troops. “Open her up, Checkmate.” And throttle full open, engine drinking fuel at 7,000 pounds per hour. Across the meadow, faster than an arrow from a hundred-pound bow, heading this time for the cluster of dots by the radio-jeep of the FAC. 510 knots and I am joy. They love my airplane. See her beauty. See her speed. And I, too, love my airplane. A whiplash and the FAC and his jeep are gone. Pull up, far up, nose high in the milkblue sky. And we roll. Earth and sky joyously twined in a blur of dwindling emerald and turquoise. Stop the roll swiftly, upside down, bring the nose again through the horizon, roll back to straight and level. The sky is a place for living and for whistling and for singing and for dying. It is a place that is built to give people a place from which to look down on all the others. It is always fresh and awake and clear and cold, for when the cloud covers the sky or fills the place where the sky should be, the sky is gone. The sky is a place where the air is ice and you breathe it and you live it and you wish that you could float and dream and race and play all the days of your life. The sky is there for everyone, yet only a few seek it out. It is all color, all heat and cold, all oxygen and forest leaves and sweet air and salt air and fresh crystal air that has never been breathed before. The sky whirs around you, keening and hissing over your head and face and it gets in your eyes and numbs your ears in a coldness that is bright and sharp. You can drink it and chew it and swallow it. You can rip your fingers through the rush of sky and the hard wind. It is your very life inside you and over your head and beneath your feet. You shout a song and the sky sweeps it away, twisting it and tumbling it through the hard liquid air. You can climb to the top of it, fall with it twisting and rushing around you, leap clear, arms wide, catching the air with your teeth. It holds the stars at night as strongly as it holds the brazen sun in the day. You shout a laugh of joy, and the rush of wind is there to carry the laugh a thousand miles.

In my climbing roll away from the FAC, I love everyone. Which, however, will not prevent me from killing them. If that day comes.

“Very nice show, Checkmate.”

“Why, feel free to call on us at any time, Bravo.” So this is joy. Joy fills the whole body, doesn’t it? Even my toes are joyful. For this the Air Force finds it necessary to pay me. No. They do not pay me for the hours that I fly. They pay me for the hours that I do not fly; those hours chained to the ground are the ones in which pilots earn their pay.

I and the few thousand other single-engine pilots live in a system that has been called a close fraternity. I have heard more than once the phrase “arrogant fighter pilots.” Oddly enough as generalizations go, they are both well chosen phrases.

A multiengine bomber pilot or a transport pilot or a navigator or a nonflying Air Force officer is still, basically, a human being. But it is a realization that I must strive to achieve, and in practice, unless it is necessary, I do not talk to them. There have been a few multiengine pilots stationed at bases where I have been in the past. They are happy to fly big lumbering airplanes and live in a world of low altitudes and long flights and coffee and sandwiches on the flight deck. It is just this contentment with the droning adventureless existence that sets them apart from single-engine pilots.