He claimed it was just a case of misery wanting company but I knew that he was talking through his hat even if he didn’t admit it. And that was the way things stood the night of our anniversary party. The whole squadron had assembled to cheer up Vern, damn the interlopers at Ellison Field, and drink to our ever-loving mistress, the Dragon Lady who was the fairest of them all, bar none, no none at all.
Ah, yes, this was to be a night! Waldo Casey and the Stephano brothers had brought along six converts between them and, like all first timers, they had bad gaposis in their old uniforms. You never did see guys have so much fun, though.
Yeah, we were really rolling along about 8, hangar flying as usual, winning the war personally, turning all the little things into big things.
Upstairs a jet cracked the sound barrier with one hell of a bash and for a few seconds everyone stopped talking.
Maybe it was a half-hour later that the phone rang and after Tiny answered it he edged up to Vern who was talking to me and said, “It’s for you, Vern.”
Now nobody but nobody outside our own group has that number and this night everybody was here. That left Elaine. I watched Vern get grim around his mouth and he shook his head just once. “Tell her nix, Tiny.”
Then Tiny shook his head. “Not me, buddy. She said you speak to her because this one’s important. She made it stick, too.”
Vern frowned a little bit. “How?”
“Brother,” Tiny said, “can she use G.I. language. You better talk to her.”
Vern frowned at that, shrugged, and picked up the phone, took a breath and said. “All right, chick, what’s up?”
It came out real funny because the phone was hooked up to a speaker system like we used to have overseas and it let the world in on the know.
Elaine came back so sharp and quick it was like she was trying to bite him. “One of the kids from Ellison just went down.”
“So let the Air Force take care of their own. They’re autonomous now.”
Without being asked to, all the talk came to a standstill. It was as if they were waiting for the bomb to drop, not knowing whether to stay there or run for it.
“Listen, you knothead,” she said, “look at the wings you’re wearing.”
Everybody there looked down at his own chest.
“Those wings he’s got on are the same as yours even if they are a whole generation younger. He’s one of your own. Do you understand that?”
“Well, what can we...”
“He ejected over that damn swamp you playboys call home. He’s down right in the middle of it some place and he could possibly be hurt.”
“Okay, okay, sugar, but what am I supposed to do?”
“Do? Do something! You’ve been fighting that war so long the only thing you have out there are heroes and you ought to be able to think of something. You’re officers, aren’t you? You’re enlisted specialists, aren’t you? Maybe you can take that damn crate of yours and...”
“All right, baby, hold it there. You’re coming over loud and clear only don’t run the old girl down. Where are you?”
“At Ellison with the boy’s wife. They live next door to me.”
“Where at Ellison?”
“On the flight line,” the speaker said. Her voice was flatter now.
“Okay, baby, now calm down. Is there any way there you can contact base ops?”
“I’ll find a way.”
“Good, then you call from there and by then we’ll have something ready.”
She hung the phone up almost before he finished and when we looked around it was like looking at the bunch about to hit Ploesti. For a moment the heroes were gone and they were butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers again, slightly paunchy, a lot balder, a little bewildered from being civilians so long. And then Vern spoke.
“Gentlemen,” he said. That was all. They all edged in close and the heroes were back once more. They wore the damnedest grins yon ever did see and every hat went over at a jauntier angle and they were ready. And I mean ready.
“We’re in a peculiar position here. I dare say we are the only ones alive who know that swamp area. It’s relatively new, so there are no old timers on it.”
I heard Jonesy laugh and say, “Hell, I made a lot of dawn patrols after bass, man.”
“I know,” Vern told him, “but there’s no moon tonight.”
Henry Lucerne, our old navigator, said, “We’ll go, bucky. Just hand us the poop from group.”
Right then the phone rang. Elaine got her message across fast because she had literally busted into ops and the C.O. was on her back. We could hear him squawking over the speaker and then Pappy Thompson, who managed the big A & P store and who had been a general during the war — with the kind of a voice a general should have reached for the phone and told Vern, “I’ll take it.”
When he told Elaine to put the C.O. on the guy came on strong until old Pappy said, “This is General Thompson from the Four Hundred and Thirteenth.”
Now the 413th went out with the war, but that C.O. didn’t know that and he wasn’t about to argue with a general.
Pappy said, “What equipment have you there? Any choppers?”
“Er, yes, Sir. Just one, but she’s redlined.”
“Well dammit, you un-redline it and gel it ready. I’ll give you thirty minutes to have it on the ramp. You got that?”
“Yessir, yessir,” the C.O. stammered uncertainly. “But Sir, where are you?”
“With my men, in the swamp where that boy went down, that’s where. Now you get every available man ready. Stand by on an open line and that girl there can pass the messages to you. I want you to relay them directly. Do you hear? Directly. I want no misunderstanding. No garbled orders. Is that clear?”
Well the message went across, all right. You could hear that C.O. sounding off on the other end of that line and now it was up to us. Nobody bothered to change clothes. The flat-boats the sportsmen used were all drawn up at the edge of the water and in five minutes were loaded with gear.
They went out three and four to a boat, some paddling and some with trolling motors. Up front would be one man with a light and another standing by with a boathook to fend off anything from low hanging branches to cottonmouths.
Vern gave a list of things to Pappy and he called them out to Elaine. Ambulance, medics, ropes, power saws, and a dozen other things. She’d relay them across the room and the C.O. would repeat the list.
On the other side of the room the radio that had been drowned out in the chatter was heard again, and this time it was a special bulletin. Nobody could figure it out, but with usual Air Force efficiency an entire rescue team led personally by a general himself was down in the swamps already searching for the lost flier.
We grinned at that, but a sad grin, because we all knew that in a way it was the end of us.
But how that Elaine and Vern did act as a team! You’d think they had been practicing for this all their lives. We sent Curly Mason and Harry Stamph out to direct the crash crews coming in, because without a guide they’d never have made it. Even then we had to use a dozen more to line the road ahead of them so they could pick out the mat under their headlights. Long ago grass had grown through the perforations in the steel and you could hardly tell roadbed from swamp.
You know, it must have been funny to those Air Force boys. Like having a dream. There we’d be, officers and enlisted personnel side by side working hand in glove, decked out in uniforms that disappeared years back. Something like suddenly finding yourself in a lost world.
The fly boys who came in on the crash trucks let their mouths hang open when they dug our 50-mission crushes and the medals that backed our wings up under the lapels almost. But it didn’t last long. The mud and sweat made everybody look alike pretty soon.