Saving Graces (5 page)

Directly behind our house was a stone seawall that formed the border of the base and the retaining wall for a river that ran to the inland sea. From my brother’s windows or from the cliffs right outside the gate, we would watch as the Japanese celebrated Obon, a summer festival honoring the dead, its last day marked by a moving and beautiful ceremony. The Buddhists believe that at death the spirits cross the river to the other side, but that once a year they return silently and, for the several days of Obon, visit the living. To guide the dead back across the water, Japanese families would use tiny straw boats, and in the bow they would place a candle to light the way. To entice the dead into their boats, the living leave messages and elaborate treats. That last night of Obon the little boats would be set out on the river, and the landscape would gleam with the tiny flames and then gleam again with reflection of those flames in the water and on the white paper sails of some of the boats. The beauty and the glory of this image never left me, not just of the image but of the sense that all these souls, thousands of them, were being led by the delicacies their families had prepared and by the lights in their bows glistening above the black water, and that all of the souls were traveling together to be on the other side of the river, together. Even if in life they may not have known each other, these souls crossing back across the river formed a great and glorious, even a joyous, community. It was like the title of Mark Yakich’s book of poetry,
Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting To Cross
. Although I am Christian, this Buddhist tradition made it easier for me when we sat in the base chapel for the memorials when Lieutenant Commander Decker and three others died in May 1959, and when in November another VQ-1 plane crashed and again four men died, and again we all sat in the chapel, with our friends and their mothers, some beaten, some stoic, all filled with grief, alone in the front pew. I would stare at the still backs of the necks of my now fatherless schoolmates and imagine them bent over their boats and pushing them out to sea, sending the souls of their fathers home—until the next year. For children who were used to their fathers being gone, it was almost enough.

I nearly had to test the redemptive power of that image with my own father.

One night in June 1959, only a few weeks after April had left our house, my father didn’t come home. We didn’t worry. It was not unusual. The pilots and crew of VQ-1 could never tell their families when they were leaving for a reconnaissance flight or how long they would be gone. If Dad didn’t come home for dinner, we knew he was in the air somewhere. We could sometimes tell where he had been, or at least where he had refueled, by what he brought back to us. If he brought home bananas, he had been to Taiwan; a piece of jewelry for my mother, we decided, was Thailand. If he had landed at Midway, it was the best treat of all—pictures and stories about the gooney birds, heavy waddling albatrosses. Dad would delight us mimicking a gooney bird’s outstretched neck and graceless dance. We made a game of guessing.

But on this mission, something went wrong. My father and Commander Donald Mayer, Daryl’s father, were piloting a P4 Mercator along the coast of North Korea. A large, heavy four-propeller bomber, built for nine men, with a gun turret in the back, it was holding fourteen men, and most of the guns had been replaced with cameras and surveillance equipment. My father was piloting the plane. As the Mercator made her maneuvers trying to set off—and thereby expose the location of—communist radar stations, two MiG jet fighters with red stars emblazoned on them made a pass. Dad and Commander Mayer weren’t surprised to see them. Chinese or Korean jets often flew close to watch the maneuvers near their coastlines, perhaps to intimidate.

But this time they weren’t just watching. This time they were shooting.

As the MiGs passed the converted Navy bomber, the sharp report of gunfire tore through my father’s plane. The crew scrambled, while the MiGs circled back to make another pass. The Navy gunner, Donald Corder, rushed to his only gun, but he never even got a shot off. In their second pass the MiGs blew out the gun turret, wounding him. They continued to make passes, six in all, riddling the helpless plane, which had nowhere to hide, no way to shoot back. It seemed they had no way to save the plane or themselves.

Through fifteen hits on the plane, through fire and deafening noise, the fourteen men on the Mercator instinctively acted as one. Covered in blood, his flight suit on fire, Corder managed to crawl out of the mangled turret. Lieutenant Owen Farley knocked out the flames, and an ordnance man named Richard Nelson bandaged Corder. Bullets continued to shower the plane, and Nelson draped his larger frame over Corder’s body to protect his injured friend.

My father was piloting a plane that was now rudderless, with both engines on the starboard side knocked out or on fire. The hydraulic system was out, and the holes in the plane created even more instability. A plane in this condition is almost impossible to fly, but keeping it aloft was not all he had to do. He had to fly it with enough precision to avoid the continued passes by the MiGs and dodge the incoming tracers. If he couldn’t do that, they wouldn’t survive. To limit the maneuvering room of the MiG jets, he decided to force the plane down from seven thousand feet above the water to fifty feet. The plane shook as it dived, four thousand, two thousand, five hundred feet. Then came the real test: Dad had to use his considerable strength to bring the plane level again—the water just five stories below them—and hold it there. One of the men on board said my father’s unflinching arms looked like they had been chiseled in marble, for nearly two hours flexed and unchanging.

The dive worked, and the MiGs disappeared into the clouds, but the plane still had a lot of water to cross before it was out of harm’s way. When the crew was sure that the MiGs were gone, Dad brought them back up to a safer sixteen hundred feet. Then one of the two port engines started to go, and it was hard to keep aloft the now one-engine rudderless plane. It dropped back to three hundred feet. Even my father’s strength might not be enough to save the plane. Commander Mayer radioed that they were thirty miles out from a small landing field at Miho, Japan, and that they had begun to jettison the plane’s nonessential equipment to lighten the load. It worked. The plane maintained three hundred feet until landing. President Eisenhower was notified what happened immediately. We found out half a day later.

It seemed everyone on base knew before we did. But all our next-door neighbor Bob Greenwood told Mother was that Dad’s plane had had a flat tire and that he had landed at Miho, a couple of hundred miles from Iwakuni. Commander Greenwood got Dad on the phone, and Dad simply told Mother he was fine and he would join her at a dinner party that night. At the dinner, Commodore Staley came in late and told Mother that Dad was delayed talking to investigators. Investigators, she asked, for a flat tire? Mother knew something more was wrong, and she turned to Commodore Staley and asked, “Don’t I deserve to know what’s going on?” “Yes,” he said and took her to the next room and told her what had happened, that Corder had survived and that Dad was all right and was a hero in fact. Finally, hours later than expected, Dad walked in, still dressed in his flight suit. He took one look at the assembled guests, and the first thing he said was, “Holy smokes, Liz, you told me this was a party. It looks more like a wake to me. Let’s play charades!”

One night at home was followed by a long debriefing at the Seventh Fleet command in Yokosuka. The first news stories said that the Mercator hadn’t shot back because the guns jammed. Dad and the crew went to Washington to testify first about nonexistent jammed guns and then about actual surveillance activities. All the while, we read about it in our only news source, the
Stars and Stripes
, but we later heard from friends in the States that the crew was on every news program, on television and radio, in every newspaper, in
Life
and
Time
, on front pages, on covers, and in conversations across the country.

Finally he was back from Yokosuka and Washington and was again with us in Iwakuni. Commander Mayer and my father were each awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, the highest medal a pilot can earn outside of wartime. Then life was quiet again, or at least quiet in our way, for things had returned to our version of normal. Dad was coming home for dinner, and then sometimes not coming home.

I never had any doubt that my father had saved himself and the thirteen others aboard that plane, and apparently I was not alone. When my father was seventy-five years old—about five years after he had a massive stroke that doctors said might have killed another man and crippled him—he got a letter from one of the Mercator crew, writing from California, where he and his family and grandchildren lived. He wrote that he had a full life, and he just wanted to thank Dad for it. What the man said in his letter was a great gift to my father.

All these years later, I still feel connected to the military, especially when incidents like the one involving my father occur. In 2001, after a collision with a pursuing Chinese fighter, a reconnaissance plane from that same squadron, VQ-1, was forced down in Hainan, China. The Chinese accused the plane of flying in their airspace and refused to give up the crew or the plane, which, like my father’s planes, had an electronic surveillance system aboard it. The crew came back in April 2001, and the plane came back a few months later. During the ordeal, I felt as if the men and women on board were my military family. I had to remind myself how young they were, that they were not my father’s age, that they were not even my age. Yet I felt the connection. When Shane Osborne, the pilot of that EP-3 plane, was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, I felt a satisfaction and pride that a family member might feel. I was fifty-one with no present connection to the Navy; it made no sense except that the bonds built in the military community are strong enough to last a lifetime.

Now, some who have grown up in military families will tell you a story of scars left by a largely absent father and an oppressive warrior mentality. For some that is undoubtedly true. There were fathers I won’t name who drank too much; there were mothers who were lonely and depressed, even suicidal in this nomadic life. I know that it did happen. It just didn’t happen to me.

The common image of a military pilot is the father in Pat Conroy’s brilliant and heartbreaking
The Great Santini,
but my own father was as far from Bull Meecham as any military man could be. Oh, sometimes he would wake us up with a bugle—because he thought it was funny. Sometimes he would “inspect” our rooms—but I never remember anything awful happening, and believe me, the condition of my side of the room I always shared with my very neat sister would have justified memorable punishment. Dad clearly expected more from his son than from his daughters, just as his Italian father had from him. My brother was never allowed to have his hands in his pockets. Of course, he put his hands in his pockets anyway—there are dozens of family photos that attest to that—but when my father spotted it, the bellowing would begin. I thought about it later and realized that John Kennedy’s natural easy pose with his hands in his pockets was never, absolutely never, repeated by anyone in uniform.

At the same time that he was hard on Jay, Dad would give him every spare minute. That my brother loved baseball is an understatement, for as far as Jay was concerned, the hidden meaning of life was found on a baseball diamond. So the year before my brother was eligible, my father signed up as the head of the Iwakuni Little League, and he decided that, to round out the teams, the age limit would be dropped a year—just this once. The whole family joined in—my sister and I, and other sisters on Jay’s team, dressed up in plaid—what were we thinking, plaid?—cheerleading uniforms, chanting cheers like “
Iki masho,
let’s go!” which translates to “Let’s go, let’s go.” Dad’s decision to allow cheerleaders may have generated some complaints, but his decision to lower the age limit never did. Jay was a spectacular baseball player, pitching and hitting well that first year and leading the league with a staggering .750 average the next year. My grandfather, who died that year, would have been proud: the next generation of athletes and sports fans was born.

My mother arranged activities for Nancy and me. She found Toshiko, a lovely woman in her mid-thirties, to teach us Japanese dance and music. Toshiko had trained intensively to be a geisha, and before going to Tokyo to begin her esteemed career, she returned home for a last visit with her family—in Hiroshima. While she was home the atomic bomb fell on her town. Seventy thousand were killed that day, her chest was blown off, and her life was blown apart.

No longer a vision of perfection, she could not be a geisha. Instead here she was, in our living room, imparting her life’s learning to two awkward American girls, the daughters of a Navy pilot, the symbolic daughters of the men who had taken away her chance to practice it herself. She dressed in a
yukata,
a plain cotton kimono, and a woven obi, and at the V of her neckline we could see the scars on her chest. Each week she would show me where to put my hands, how to angle my legs for the most grace, how, with a single touch, to close a fan. She sat with me, a samisen in my lap and the oversize ivory pick in my hand, and taught me the notes to the songs that, because they had no written music, could only be handed down from a mistress to an initiate. She would wrap her small scarred arms around me as I knelt with the instrument across my lap, showing me just where my fingers should be for each note and where they should be when I rested.

Although there was never a moment of unguarded laughter or joy during the lessons, there also was never a moment of resentment in the two years that she came every week. She was not resigned in any way that was marked by bitterness or defeat. She had realigned her expectations, a sad moment undoubtedly, and from that time on, she moved with all the grace and serenity that her new station would allow. There was a part of that serenity that could break your heart, but in it, too, was the indomitable: some things cannot be taken away.