“I know,” she said gently.
“You know me,” he told her.
“I’m beginning to.”
“How are your folks?”
“Fine,” she said. They talked for several more minutes, then said good-bye.
The vast bulk of the ship loomed high over the bank of telephone booths. Jake glanced up at the ship, at the tails of the planes sticking over the edge of the flight deck, then lowered his gaze, stuffed his hands into his pockets and walked away.
The problem was that he had never been able to separate the flying from the rest of it — the killing, bombing, dying. Maybe it couldn’t be separated. The My Lai massacre, Lieutenant William Calley, napalm on villages, burning children, American pilots nailed to trees and skinned alive, Viet Cong soldiers tortured for information while Americans watched, North Vietnamese soldiers given airborne interrogations — talk or we’ll throw you from the helicopter without a parachute: all of this was tied up with the flying in a Gordian knot that Solomon couldn’t unravel.
He thought he had cut the knot — well, Commander Campa-relli and the Navy had cut it for him — last winter in Vietnam. He had picked an unauthorized target, the North Vietnamese capitol building in Hanoi, attacked and almost got it, then faced some very unhappy senior officers across a long green table. They knew what their duty was: obey orders from the elected government. What they couldn’t fathom was how he, Lieutenant Jake Jackass from Possum Hollow, had lost sight of it.
We’re all in this together. We must keep the faith. Wasn’t that what you and your friends were always telling one another when the shit got thick and the blood started flowing?
We do what we must and die when we must for each other.
The faith was easier to understand then, easier to keep. Now the war was over. Although some people want to keep fighting it, by God, it’s over.
Now the Navy was peacetime cruises, six- to eight-month voyages to nowhere, excruciating separations from loved ones, marriages going on the rocks under the strain, kids growing up with a father who’s never there; it’s getting scared out of your wits when Lady Luck kisses your ass good-bye; it’s seeing people squashed into shark food; it’s knowing — knowing all the time, every minute of every day — that you may be next. The life can be smashed out of you so quick that you’ll inhale in this world and exhale in hell.
Lieutenant Jake Grafton, farmer’s son and history major, was going to get on with his life. Do something safe, something sane. Something with tangible rewards. Something that allowed him to find a good woman, raise a family, be a father to his children. He would bequeath this flying life to dedicated halfwits like Flap Le Beau.
Yet he would miss the flying.
This afternoon as Jake Grafton walked along the boulevard that led into downtown Honolulu, huge, benign cumulus clouds were etched against the deep blue sky, seemingly fixed. He would like to fly right now — to strap on an airplane and leave behind the problems of the ground.
We are, he well knew, creatures of the earth. Its minerals compose our bodies and provide our nourishment. Our cells contain seawater, legacies of ancestors who lived in the oceans. Yet on the surface man evolved, here where there are other animals to kill and eat, edible plants, trees with nuts and fruits, streams and lakes teeming with life. Our bodies function best at the temperature ranges, atmospheric pressures and oxygen levels that have prevailed on the earth’s surface throughout most of the age of mammals. We need the protection from the sun’s radiation that the atmosphere provides. Our senses of smell and hearing use the atmosphere as the transmitting medium. The earth’s gravity provides a reference point for our sense of balance and the resistance our muscles and circulatory systems need to function properly. The challenges of surviving on the dry surface provided the evolutionary stimulus to develop our brains.
Without the earth, we would not be the creatures we are. And yet we want to leave it, to soar through the atmosphere, to voyage through interplanetary space, to explore other worlds. And to someday leave the solar system and journey to another star. All this while we are still trapped by our physical and psychological limitations here on the surface of the mother planet.
Sometimes the contradictions inherent in our situation hit him hard. Last fall, while he was hunting targets in North Vietnam as he dodged the flak and SAMs, Americans again walked on the moon. Less than seventy years after the Wright brothers left the surface in powered flight, man stood on the moon and looked back at the home planet glistening amid the infinite black nothingness. They looked while war, hunger, pestilence and man’s inhumanity to man continued unabated, continued as it had since the dawn of human history.
It was a curious thing, hard to comprehend, yet worth pondering on a balmy evening in the tropics with the air laden with fragrant aromas and the surf flopping rhythmically on the beach a few yards away.
Jake Grafton walked along the beach, stared at the hotels and the people and the relentless surf and thought of all these things.
An hour later, as he walked back toward the army base with traffic whizzing by, the tops of the lazy large clouds were shot with fire by the setting sun.
The problem, he decided, was keeping everything in proper perspective. That was hard to do. Impossible, really. To see man and his problems, the earth and the universe, as they really are one would have to be God.
The officers’ club was full of people, music, light, laughter. Jake stood in the entrance for several seconds letting the sensations sink in. He tucked his hat under his belt, then strolled for the bar.
He heard them before he got to the door.
“How ugly was she?” three or four voices asked in a shaky unison.
“She was ugly as a tiger’s hairball.” Flap’s soaring baritone carried clearly. People here in the lounge waiting to be called for dinner looked at each other, startled.
“How ugly?”
“Ugly as a mud wrestler’s navel.” Eyebrows soared.
“How ugly?” Eight or ten voices now.
“Ugly as a pickled pervert’s promise.” Women giggled and whispered to each other. Several of the gentlemen frowned and turned to stare at the door to the bar. Jake saw one of the men, in his fifties, with short, iron gray hair, wink at his companion.
“That’s not ugly!”
“She was so damn ugly that the earth tried to quake and couldn’t — it just shivered. So ugly that five drunken sailors pretended they didn’t see her. The city painted her red and put a number on her — two dogs relieved themselves on her shoes before I got to the rescue, that’s how ugly she was. She was so desperately ugly that my zipper welded itself shut. And that, my gentle friends, is the gospel truth.”
Jake Grafton grinned, squared his shoulders, and walked into the bar.
11
The air was opaque, the sun hidden by the moisture in the air. Two or three miles from the ship in all directions the gray sea and gray sky merged. Columbia was in the midst of an inverted bowl, three days northwest of Pearl laboring through fifteen-foot swells. The wind was brisk from the west.
From his vantage point in the cockpit of a KA-6D tanker spotted behind the jet blast deflector — the JBD — for Cat Three, Jake Grafton could see a frigate a mile or so off the port beam. Just ahead, barely visible on the edge of the known universe, he could make out the wake and superstructure of another.
Jake and Flap were standing the five-minute alert tanker duty, which meant that for two hours they had to sit in the cockpit of this bird strapped in, ready to fire up the engines and taxi onto the catapult as soon as the F-4 Phantom that was parked there — also on five-minute alert — launched. There was another fighter on five-minute status sitting just short of the hook-up area on Cat Four, and an airborne early warning aircraft, an E-2 Hawkeye, parked with its tail against the island. Sitting on the waist catapult tracks was a manned helicopter, the angel, which would have to launch before the catapults could be fired. A power unit with its engine running was plugged into each aircraft, instantly ready to deliver air to turn the engines. All five of the alert birds had been serviced and started, checked to make sure all their systems worked, then shut down.