I don’t know what’s wrong with you, Will, I think the Air Force has made you a little dotty. I don’t mind straightening out your romances (like hell I don’t) or handling nutty girls on the telephone right when Parkyakarkus is coming on, but I’m really disappointed that you could write a letter like that to anybody, really, Will! I might as well tell you this now while you’re still in the States, because I guess once you’re overseas I’ll have to be very careful of what I say, otherwise some nasty Nazi will shoot you down in flames and I’ll be sorry the rest of my life. I think it was a lousy miserable and not very comical thing to do, and you should be ashamed of yourself. There.
Besides, aren’t there any girls out there in California?
We had driven down to Los Angeles from Santa Maria, and were sitting with a sodden captain from the Van Nuys Army Air Base in a bar called The Eucalyptus on Wilshire Boulevard. The captain’s name was Smythe, and he had received a Dear John letter from his wife the day before. He was telling us that all women were tramps and that you could not trust them as far as you could throw them.
“To coin a phrase,” Ace said.
“Absolutely,” Smythe said, “to coin a phrase.”
He had a red mustache, and he stroked it now and lifted his empty shot glass, tried to drain it all over again, realized there was no whiskey in it, and said, “Bartender, let me have another drink here, willya? My glass is empty here.”
The jukebox was bubbling with red and blue and yellow lights and oozing “Harlem Nocturne” into the scented dimness of the bar. From the leatherette booths came the muted hovering whisper of men engaged in earnest negotiation with all the town whores, the clink of melting ice in whiskey-sodas gone two a. m. flat, the lamentable sound of someone puking in the men’s room behind the hanging flowered curtain.
Smythe sipped at his fresh drink with remarkable restraint, and then began to describe his wife’s lover in far too meticulous detail, it seemed to me, almost with reluctant admiration, almost as if he longed to poke us with an elbow every now and then, and grin fraternally, and say, “How do you like that son of a bitch?” The son of a bitch was a real estate agent in Smythe’s home town somewhere in Massachusetts. Naturally, he was 4-F, but apparently not too physically handicapped to have escaped Mrs. Smythe’s attention. “Knew the fellow all my life,” Smythe said. “Went to school with him. To school. With him. Her, too. Went to school with both of them.”
“He could have had the decency to stop while you were talking,” Ace said, and laughed, and said to me, “Do you know that one, Will?”
“Yes. I do,” I said.
“You know him?” Smythe asked. “You know the man who womanized my wife?”
“Never heard of him,” Ace said.
“Went to school with him,” Smythe said.
“What school was that?”
“Saint Thomas Aquinas.”
“Are you a Catholic?” I asked.
“No,” Smythe said. “Saint Thomas Aquinas was a Catholic, but I am not a Catholic, no. My wife is a Catholic. Was a Catholic. The man who womanized her is a Catholic. I should never have gone to Saint Thomas Aquinas. That was my first mistake.”
“That was your second mistake,” I said.
“What was my first mistake?”
“What was his first mistake, Ace?”
“Getting,” Ace said.
“Getting what?” Smythe asked.
“Born, married, drafted, screwed.”
“Yes, sir,” Smythe said, “that was my first mistake, all right.”
“This is the best pilot who ever lived,” Ace said.
“Thank you,” Smythe said, “but I am not a pilot. I am in Supply.”
“I was referring to my friend here, Will Tyler.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Will Tyler owes the squadron thirty-seven dollars.”
“Which I’ll pay.”
“Which he will of course pay because he’s a trustworthy and decent human being.”
“Not like that son of a bitch Andy, how do you like that son of a bitch?” Smythe said at last, and grinned and actually gave Ace an elbow.
“I take it that Andy is the guy who put the horns on you,” Ace said.
“That’s who he is, all right. Biggest mistake I ever made in my life,” Smythe said.
“Would you like to know why Will Tyler owes the squadron thirty-seven dollars?”
“No, why?” Smythe said.
“Because he put thirty-seven bullets into the screen, and all thirty-seven of them made holes longer than the legally prescribed length of two inches. That’s why.”
“Thirty-seven holes, my, my,” Smythe said.
“Thirty-seven holes at one dollar a hole equals thirty-seven dollars, if my addition is correct,” Ace said.
“Your addition is flawless,” I said.
“Are you boys fliers?” Smythe asked.
“We are very hot pilots,” I said.
“Are you familiar with air gunnery, sir?” Ace asked.
“Oh no,” Smythe said.
“There’s a B-26 that tows a screen for us to shoot at,” Ace said. “We use a B-26 because it’s the only one of the bombers that can simulate the speed of an enemy fighter. The screen is made of woven wire...”
“Oh, I see,” Smythe said.
“... wrapped in thread, and we fire live bullets at the screen. Fifty-caliber machine-gun bullets.”
“Oh yes.”
“Each pilot has different colored bullets. So at the end of the day we can see how many hits he’s made. Will’s bullets today were red.”
“Old Red Bullets Tyler,” I said.
“Now there’s an angle beyond which we are not supposed to attack because shooting down the bomber is not the objective, sir, definitely not the objective.”
“No, no.”
What he was trying to explain to Captain Smythe whose wife had run off with Andy the real estate man was that you came up on the screen (you usually rose to meet enemy lighters because they tried to attack an escorted bomber formation from above, a position that gave them the advantage in speed and maneuverability) you came up on the screen in a flight of four airplanes, your bullets painted in one of the primary colors, red, blue or yellow, with green thrown in for good measure. Because the screen was constructed of tightly woven wire mesh, the bullets left a streak of paint behind them whenever you scored a hit. Now when you attacked the screen in a perpendicular pass, it was difficult to hit because you were traveling in different directions and had to lead it the way you would a flying duck. But if you fell behind the screen it became easier to hit because you were then traveling in the same direction at almost identical speeds and it was somewhat like firing at a stationary target instead of a moving one. At the same time, though, you were endangering the bomber because it was now ahead of you, say at one or two o’clock level, and there was the possibility of ripping its tail assembly to shreds with your enthusiastic slugs. The further you fell behind the screen in your pass, the more oblique was the firing angle, with the result that the slashes you put into the target got longer and longer. That was what Ace was trying to explain to the drunken captain from Massachusetts.
“... costing the United States Government a considerable amount of money should a bomber get shot down by accident.”
“Naturally.”