Flap paused. If he was giving Jake a chance to reply, he was disappointed. After a bit he continued:
“I never had much respect for you Navy guys. You think the military is like a corporation — you do your job, collect your green government check, and you can leave any time you get the itch. Maybe the Navy is that way. Thank God, the Corps isn’t.”
Stung, Jake broke his silence. “During our short acquaintance, you haven’t heard one snotty remark out of me about the Holy Corps. But if you want to start trading insults, I can probably think up a few.”
Flap ignored Jake. “We Marines are all in this together,” he said, expanding on his thesis. “When one man slips off the rope, we’ll grab him on the way down. We’ll all hang together and we’ll do what we have to do to get the job done. The Corps is bigger than all of us, and once you are a part of it, you are a part of it forever. Semper Fidelis. If you die, when you die, the Corps goes on. It’s sorta like a church…”
Flap fell silent, thinking. The Corps was very hard to explain to someone who wasn’t a Marine. He had tried it a few times in the past and always gave up. His explanations usually sounded trite, maybe even a little silly. “Male bonding bullshit,” one woman told him after he had delivered himself of a memorable attempt. He almost slapped her.
For you see, the Corps was real. The feelings the Corps aroused in Flap and his fellow Marines were as real, as tangible, as the uniforms they wore and the weapons they carried. They would be loyal, they would be faithful, even unto death. Semper Fi. They belonged to something larger than themselves that gave their lives a meaning, a purpose, that was denied to lesser men, like civilians worried about earning a living. To Marines like Flap civilians concerned with getting and spending, getting and spending, were beneath contempt. They were like flies, to be ignored or brushed away.
“I’m trying to explain,” he told Jake Grafton now, “because I think you could understand. You’re a real good aviator. You’re gifted. You owe it to yourself, to us, to hang tough, hang in there, keep doing what you know so well how to do.”
“I’ve had enough,” Jake told him curtly. He had little patience for this sackcloth and ashes crap. He had fought in one war. He had seen its true face. If Flap wanted to wrap himself in the flag that was his business, but Jake Grafton had decided to get on with his life.
“Rory Smith knew,” Flap told him with conviction. “He was one fine Marine. He knew the risks and did his job anyway. He was all Marine.”
“And he’s dead.”
“So? You and I are gonna die too, you know. Nobody ever gets out of life alive. Smith died for the Corps, but you’re gonna go be a civilian, live the soft life until you check out. Some disease or other is going to kill you someday — cancer, heart disease, maybe just plain old age. Then you’ll be as dead as Rory Smith. Now I ask you, what contribution will you have made?”
“I already made it.”
“Oh no! Oh no! Smith made his contribution — he gave all that he had. You’ve slipped one thin dime into the collection plate, Ace, and now you announce that dime is your fair share. Like hell!”
“I’ve had about two quarts more than enough from you today, Le Beau,” Jake spluttered furiously. “I did two cruises to the Nam. I dropped my bombs and killed my gooks and left my friends over there in the mud to rot. For what? For not a single goddamn thing, that’s for what. You think you’re on some sort of holy mission to protect America? The idiot green knight. Get real — those pot-smoking flower-power hippies don’t want protection. You’d risk your life for them? If they were dying of thirst I wouldn’t piss in their mouths!”
Jake Grafton was snarling now. “I’ve paid my dues in blood, Le Beau, my blood. Don’t give me any more shit about my fair share!”
Silence reigned in the cockpit as the KA-6D tanker continued to orbit the ship 20,000 feet below, at max conserve airspeed, each engine sucking a ton of fuel per hour, under the clean white sun. Since the tanker had no radar, computer or inertial navigation system, there was nothing for Flap to do but sit. So he sat and stared at that distant, hazy horizon. With the plane on autopilot, there was also little for Jake to do except scan the instruments occasionally and alter angle-of-bank as required to stay on the five-mile arc. This required almost no effort. He too spent most of his time staring toward that distant, infinite place where the sky reached down to meet the sea.
The crazy thing was that the horizon looked the same in every direction. In all directions. Pick a direction, any direction, and that uniform gauzy junction of sea and sky obscured everything that lay beyond. Yet intelligence tells us that direction is critical — life itself is a journey toward something, somewhere…
Which way?
Jake Grafton sat silently, looking, wondering.
Hank Davis was still in a private room in sick bay when Jake dropped by to see him. He looked pale, an impression accentuated by his black-as-coal, pencil-thin mustache.
“Hey, Hank, when they gonna let you out of here?”
“I’m under observation. Whenever they get tired of observing. I dunno.”
“So how you doing?” Jake settled into the only chair and looked the bombardier over carefully.
Davis shrugged. “Some days you eat the bear, some days the bear eats you. He got a big bite of my butt yesterday. A big bite.”
“Well, you made it. You pulled the handle while you still had time, so you’re alive.”
“You ejected once, didn’t you?”
“Yeah,” Jake Grafton told him. “Over Laos. Got shot up over Hanoi.”
“Ever have second thoughts?”
“Like what?”
“Well, like maybe you were too worried about your own butt and not enough about the other guy’s?”
“I thought the VDI came out on the shot? Went into Smith’s lap?”
“Yeah.”
“Hank! What could you do? The damned thing weighs seventy pounds. Even with your help, Smith couldn’t have got it back into its tray. No way. If you’d crawled across to help, you’d both be dead now. It’s not like you guys had a half hour to dick with this problem.”
Davis didn’t reply. He looked at a wall, swallowed hard.
Jake Grafton racked his brains for a way to reach out. I should have told you guys about checking the VDI’s security. Although he felt that, he didn’t say it.
Hank related the facts of his ejection in matter-of-fact tones. The chute had not completely opened when he hit the water. So he hit the water way too hard and had trouble getting out of his chute. The swimmer from the helicopter had been there in seconds and saved his bacon. Still, he swallowed a lot of seawater and almost drowned.
“I dunno, Jake. Sometimes life’s pretty hard to figure. When you look at it close, the only thing that makes a difference is luck. Who lives or who dies is just luck. ‘The dead guy screwed up,’ everybody says. Of course he screwed up. Lady Luck crapped all over him. And if that’s true, then everything else is a lie — religion, professionalism, everything. We are all just minnows swimming in the sea and luck decides when it’s your turn. Then the shark eats you and that’s the fucking end of that.”
“If it’s all luck, then these guilt trips don’t make much sense, do they?” Jake observed.
“Right now the accident investigators are down in the avionics shop,” Hank Davis told him. “They are looking for the simple bastard who didn’t get the VDI screwed in right. All this shit is gonna get dumped right on that poor dumb son of a bitch! ‘Rory Smith is dead and it’s your fault.’ Makes me want to puke some more.”