And I want the man I love to love me. To have a man who would return the love I have to give is my great ambition.
I have dated boys, known boys of all ages, and I do not want to marry one.
I want to marry a man. I want a man who believes in what he is doing, who goes out the door every day to make a contribution — in business, in academia, in government, somewhere. I want a man who will love not just me, but life itself. I want a man who will stand up to the gales of life, who won’t bend with every squall, who will remain true to himself and those who believe in him, a man who can be counted on day after day, year after year.
An hour later, after he had reread Callie’s letter three times and lingered over the one from his parents, he opened the official letter. In it he found a copy of his last fitness report, bearing Donovan’s signature. In the text Donovan wrote:
Lieutenant Grafton is one of the most gifted aviators I have ever met in my years in the naval service. In every facet of flying, he is the consummate professional. As a naval officer, Lieutenant Grafton shows extraordinary promise, yet he has not made the commitment to give of himself as he must if he is to fulfill that promise.
There was more, a lot more, most of it the usual bullshit required by custom and instruction, such as a comment upon his support of the Navy’s equal opportunity goals and programs. Jake merely skimmed this treacle, then returned to the meat: “… has not yet made the commitment to give of himself as he must if he is to fulfill that promise.”
A pat on the back immediately followed by a kick in the pants. His first reaction was anger, which quickly turned to cold fury. He stalked from the ready room and went to his stateroom, where he opened his desk and seized pen and paper. He began a letter to Commander Donovan. He would write a bullet that would skewer the son of a bitch right through the heart.
What kind of half-assed crack was that? Not committed to being a good naval officer? Who the hell did that jerk Donovan think he was talking about anyway?
Even before he completed his first sentence, the anger began leaking from him. Donovan had said nothing about the Sea-Tac adventure, didn’t even mention that the promising Lieutenant Grafton had punched out a windy blowhard and thrown him ass over tea kettle through a plate glass window, then spent a weekend in jail. Perhaps his comments dealt strictly with the performance of Jake’s duties at the squadron. No, he must have meant that comment to cover the Sea-Tac debacle in addition to everything else. Worse, Donovan was right — a more committed, thinking officer would not have done it. A wiser man…well, he wouldn’t have either.
Jake threw down the pen and rubbed his face in frustration.
Were Callie and Dick Donovan talking about the same thing?
“Man, you should have seen ol’ Jake last night,” Flap Le Beau told his fellow Marines. “Both the you’re-gonna-die lights pop on bright as Christmas goin’ down the cat, and this guy handled it like he was in a simulator. Cool as ice. Just sat there doin’ his thing. Me — I was shakin’ like a dog shittin’ razor blades. I ain’t been so scared since the teacher caught me with my hand up Susie Bulow’s skirt back in the sixth grade.”
There were eight of them, four crews, and they had just finished a briefing for another flight to the Kahoolawe target. This time they were carrying real ordnance, twelve five-hundred-pound bombs on each plane. After they had reviewed how the fuses and arming wires should look on the bomb racks, the crews stood and stretched. That was when Flap took it on himself to praise his pilot to the heavens.
Jake was embarrassed. He had been frightened last night, truly scared, and Flap’s ready room bull puckey struck a sour note. Still, Jake kept his mouth shut. This was neither the time nor place to brace Flap about his mouth.
He got out of his chair and went over in the corner to check his mailbox. Nothing. He gazed at the posters on the wall as if interested, trying to shut out Flap, who was expanding upon his theme: Jake Grafton was one cool dude.
One of the pilots, Rory Smith, came over and dug a sheet of official trash out of his mailbox, something he was supposed to read and initial. “Flap gets on your nerves, does he?” he asked, his voice so soft it was barely audible. He scribbled his initials in the proper place and shoved the paper into someone else’s box.
“Yeah.”
“Don’t sweat it. To hear him tell it, every guy he flies with is the best who ever stroked a throttle. He was saying that in the ready room about his last stick five minutes before he was down in the skipper’s stateroom complaining that the guy was dangerous. You just have to take him with a grain of salt.”
Jake grinned at Rory.
“Everybody else does,” the Marine said, then wandered off toward the desk where the maintenance logs on each aircraft were kept. Jake followed him.
Smith helped himself to the book for 511, the plane Jake had flown into an in-flight engagement.
“Gonna fly it today, huh?” Jake said.
“Yeah,” Smith said. “The gunny says it’s fixed. We’ll see.”
“It’ll probably go down on deck,” Jake pointed out. “Down” in this context meant a maintenance problem that precluded flight. “Since I bent it,” he continued, “I’ll fly it if you want to trade planes.”
“Well, I’m one of the maintenance check pilots and they gave it to me.”
“Sure.”
Meanwhile Flap had progressed to his favorite subject, women. Jake looked up from the maintenance book on his plane when Flap roared, “Oh, my God, she was ugly!”
“How ugly?” three or four of his listeners wailed in unison.
“She was so ugly that paint peeled off the walls when she walked into a room.”
“How ugly?”
“So ugly that strong men fainted, children screamed, and horses ran away.”
“How ugly?” This refrain had become a chorus. Even Rory Smith joined in from the back of the room.
“Women tore their hair, the sky got black, and the earth trembled.”
“That’s not ugly.”
“I’m telling you guys, she was so dingdong ugly that mirrors cracked, dogs went berserk, fire mains ruptured and one man who had smiled at her at night dropped stone cold dead when he saw her in the daylight. That, my friends, is the gospel truth.”
It was a typical afternoon in the tropics — scattered puffy clouds drifting on the balmy trade winds, sun shining through the gaps. Hawaii was going to be wonderful. Two more days, then Pearl Harbor! Oh boy.
Jake inspected the Mark 82 five-hundred-pounders carefully. He hadn’t seen deadly green sausages like this since the night he was shot down, seven months ago. Talk about a bad trip!
Well, the war was over, this was a peacetime cruise…He could probably spend another twenty years in the Navy and would never again have to drop one of these things for real. World War III? Get serious.
Up into the cockpit, into the comfortable seat, the familiar instruments arranged around him just so. The truth was he knew this cockpit better than he knew anything else on earth. Just the thought of never getting back into one bothered him. How do you turn your back on six years of your life?
Flap settled into the seat beside him as the plane captain climbed the ladder on Jake’s side and reached in to help with the Koch fittings.
He had lived all this before — it was like living a memory.
And somehow that was good.
Rory Smith preflighted his aircraft, 511, very carefully indeed. That four- or five-foot fall couldn’t have done this thing any good. The main concern was the landing gear. If anything cracked…Well, the airframes guys hadn’t found a single crack. They had scraped the paint from the parts, fluoroscoped them and pronounced them perfect. What can a pilot do? Just fly it.