Solo (26 page)

We hung upside down from our seat belts.

I had bumped my head somehow. I was stunned. I asked Jim if he was okay. He said he’d cut his head, but not badly. I turned and looked. He was staring at his hand. A bit of blood was on his fingertips. We unbuckled our seat belts, fell into the top of the cockpit, then scrambled out.

I stood and looked at my love,
Annabelle.
Totaled.

T
HAT NIGHT
I
CALLED
several friends to tell them about the crash—Jim Butts, Johnny Hobbs, David McGirt. Was I okay? they asked. How was the airplane? What happened? Still shaken, I told each of them the story.

I called Tim. “Tim, I crashed my airplane today.”

“Damn,” he said. “I wish I’d been with you.”

H
ERE’S THE FINAL
Dusty’s Air Taxi notebook entry:

21 Jan 91. Aircraft disabled on aborted takeoff, later declared a total loss, as a consequence of estimate of repair costs. Insufficient power was available to complete takeoff climb under conditions at the time. Decision was made at about 10–20 feet in the air to abort takeoff and climb-out. Aircraft was landed. Aircraft rolled beyond end of runway (Decker Field) into a field. When main landing gear entered a shallow ditch, the gear remained stationary and the aircraft
continued onto nose and then onto top, leaving pilot and passenger, photographer Jim Henderson, with bumps on heads and suspended in seat belts upside down.

Egress was accomplished, hastily.

FAA inspection determined the mishap to be an incident rather than an accident.

Flight operations temporarily suspended. Office to remain open.

L
OOKING
B
ACK

W
HEN
I
STARTED PILOT
training in 1966, the national antiwar movement was little more that a national whisper. By the time I got my wings in 1967, a more public antiwar movement was getting under way. That year had been a crowded, heady year for me. There’d been little time for anything outside studying flying, thinking flying, breathing flying. I’d been unable to keep up with news about the antiwar movement, but by 1968–69 that movement and the 1960s revolution were beginning to interest me and some of my buddies stationed in Japan, flying F-4s. Every Wednesday night at the officer’s club we danced to the music of Janis Joplin and her band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, as performed by another band from the States. In our quarters, my roommate, Jim, would lie on the floor between his big stereo speakers, listening to the Doors’ “Light My Fire.” On our refrigerator was that peace symbol, and on our walls, the antiwar poster. So by
1969 there was a kind of unspoken peace between antiwar demonstrators and certain pilots, of whom I was one.

Then a year later in Clovis, New Mexico, there were enough of us in this contingent to decide on, plan, and execute a hippie dance. One night we cleared two rooms in the BOQ, set up a stereo system, gathered tapes and records, and had us a dance. Guys brought wives or girlfriends. We were all hippies, and we were not being disrespectful (of hippies), or at least some of us weren’t, I know. I filmed it with my Super-8 camera. The movie shows pilots dressed as hippies, dancing. Hippie spirit was contagious. And fun.

The next morning, as I climbed into my old T-33, smelled aircraft fuel and old metal, pulled on my helmet, attached my G suit, started engines, pulled my oxygen mask to my face, and checked in on the radio, “Silver Two,” hippie spirit vanished.

T
HE
V
IETNAM
W
AR
FOLLOWS
me around like a small, dark, deadly cloud, just over my shoulder. My part in the war floats somewhere in that cloud, accompanied by remnants of fear, pride, shame, exhilaration, and sadness. Without my dream of being a pilot, I might have missed the war.

When I look back, I am surprised at my nonchalance about being ready to drop a nuclear weapon on Russian soil if commanded to do so. Did I ever contemplate the fact that hundreds of young men like me were, without one question, preparing to follow probably self-annihilating commands from their superiors, and might be responsible for bringing about a horrible end to world civilization—civilization, that state in which human beings marry, have children, live safely in homes where they perhaps achieve some kind of meaning and happiness, make plans to go fishing, build tree houses, play ball, and go
outside                to enjoy the green mist of buds in spring trees while eating a sandwich?

No. I did not contemplate any such thing.

How can a young man, raised in the Baptist Church, learning the
teachings of Jesus,
soaking in the pleasures and joys of being alive on Earth, the joys of eating, loving, sharing, laughing—how can he race toward an aircraft carrying a nuclear bomb to be dropped on other human beings, many of whom he would clearly like, even love, if given the chance? Is such willingness to kill in our genes, irrevocable? What gets us whipped into such a frenzy, and how much can we ever do about it?

T
HE WRITING OF THIS
book has been the third chapter in my flying life. The first was military flying; the second was
Annabelle;
and now I am trying to separate the wheat from the chaff, to understand why I chose to go to war, to examine the pride, the shame, and the exhilaration and to see how they have worked for, against, and around one another.

In 1994, before writing this book allowed me to better understand my part in war and my journey to war, I visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. The memorial is not a statue of a great steed, a great soldier, a great eagle, a great sword; there is no giant symbol to give rise to passion and nationalism. The wall speaks differently. It is only what it is: a wall—with the names of those once alive among us who died in the war in Vietnam. It is a record, a narrative of names.

I stood before it the first time, almost numb. When I found the name I was looking for—that of the young man I’d trained, who became my friend, and who never returned from his mission that day back in 1971—a sudden release and collapse of something deep inside me brought a rush of tears and a long moan. I felt possessed by an inside self suddenly grown big, a kind of gangly self, breaking out into the open, taking over, unable to hold back anguish any longer.

I turned away, my face in my hands, and found myself almost violently embraced by a man I’d never seen. He said, “It’s all right, brother. I understand.”

He held me for a long ten or fifteen seconds and then turned me loose. He was crying too.

As I quickly came back to myself, I was embarrassed to have been held by someone I didn’t know. He stepped away, then walked over and embraced someone else. He brought me comfort in that moment, and I wonder if he understood what I felt. He may have been full of pride that he’d fought in Southeast Asia. I don’t know. I wasn’t. And I’m not now.

Pride in my combat flying has dimmed as I have looked back on my nation’s role in Southeast Asia, yet the memories of my youthful excitement about learning to fly military aircraft are somehow still bright. That early seduction into war needs to be told.

Aeons ago when we had no tools of war beyond sticks and stones, the consequence of armed conflict was not usually massive death. The advent of manned flight, especially, has changed all that. And we don’t seem to mind selling our war technology and instruction to other nations. In my pilot
training class was an Iranian student pilot.

A search of history—of ourselves—to find reason for hope in these matters is not comforting. As George Santayana said, “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

The life of an enemy civilian—mother, son, daughter, father—gets lost in the strategy of war and the viewing of war, whether through scopes, bomb sights, or television cameras. Real life, the feel of it, the skin, the blood, the hope to live, is lost in translation.

Will leaders holding the reins to war ever learn to listen well to the enemies’civilians? Put themselves in their places? Know how religion, culture, traditions, have shaped these civilians, their aspirations?

If an American Indian had interviewed me when I was eighteen, would I have been able to explain the fact that so much of my boyhood—playtime, reading time, movie-viewing time—was spent killing pretend Indians or reading about their being killed or seeing them killed because they were all
bad,
and not worth much? And my enjoyment in killing pretend Indians was not because they were a threat—we’d already killed God knows how many of them over a couple of hundred years. Part of my enjoyment came from the fact that I had a young, impressionable human heart in my time (the 1950s and 1960s) and place (an America where non-Caucasians were often considered inferior and were advertised as such).

The need of soldiers to depersonalize the enemy (
gook, gomer
) is as old as war. And why is that? Because humans sometimes find it hard to live with what they do—killing people, other soldiers, even—as they do it.

War machines have killed millions of young men, women, old people, and babies during the last century. Every major industrialized nation has a machine. Certain moving parts of the machine, young men and women, are no braver, no better, no worse, generally, than the youngsters in the camp of the enemy. Leaders with power mistrust one another, manufacture slogans, taunt and mislead, and instigate battles they will not have to fight in—alongside youngsters who die dreaming of home and heroism.

Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine recruitment commercials touch on the need for little boys, and now girls, to be heroes. They do not advertise the killing of other human beings.

F
OR MY PART
in the failed attempt to rescue Jingo 2-Alpha and 2-Bravo, I won a Distinguished Flying Cross. In that way I became a hero. After the mission that day, I was asked by our awards officer if I wanted to be written up for a Silver Star (a few steps below the Medal of Honor). I doubted that I deserved a Silver Star, and I liked the way a Distinguished Flying Cross looked. It was shaped like an airplane propeller. I said, “No, I’ll take a DFC. I think they’re neat.”

“Well,” he said, “write down what happened.”

In 2003, my second child, a son, was born. My wife, Kristina, and I took care of him during his first month while I took a break from teaching and writing, and at one point we were also in charge, for a day, of our two-year-old nephew. For a while I was in charge of both the toddler and the infant. This experience, the details and
demands, made me think of all the women worldwide who, alone, care for children, and it made me consider how we tend to define courage.

A man with an airplane flies into the air, into physical danger. Let’s say his mission is a combat mission. The chances are he will return, and when he does, he will have enjoyed the flight—probably in direct proportion to the danger he faced and evaded during the flight. And even if he didn’t “enjoy” it, he will enjoy discussing it, reliving it, owning the experience forever. And he will have been trained, back in the States with friends, in ways that are generally enjoyable. He will have been thoroughly trained to handle most of the situations he confronts. He will work with men who normally think and act as he does. He may win medals, as I did, that proclaim his courage.

And while there is no doubt about the bravery of many soldiers, sailors, and airmen under far more trying conditions than I’ve ever faced—especially the bravery of those facing death, of POWs—what about the woman with two kids, who doesn’t have the means to take care of them, but who does so, day after day and night after night for
years?
Without training, sometimes without friendship, and without hope of help or of a Distinguished Flying Cross?

We tend to think of courage only as something shown by men in battle over a relatively short time.

It didn’t take a lot of courage for me to do what I did in the war, and given the conveniences in my life, it’ll probably
take far less courage to raise my son than the courage shown by so many mothers and fathers in my country and around the world, in places our nation and other nations will not venture to give aid but
will
venture to make war.

When the combat flying is over for the young pilots—in any nation—who have followed me down my path, many will feel courageous, some with good reason perhaps, but only a few will grow to feel about their experience as I do now, that the pull of the flying machine, the dream of flying, seduced me.

Late in the war, I wrote in my journal a quote from somewhere: “There is no country but the heart.”

A
FRIEND OF MINE
who lived in Vietnam after our war there wants to read this book because, having heard so much about the point of view of Vietnamese on the ground during the war, she wants to know the point of view of the pilots in the air. I’ve not asked her what she knows about the point of view of those on the ground. I know it’s varied and complicated. But I do know that plenty of North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao troops on the ground in Laos were looking up at my airplane and thinking, I’d like to kill him. I never thought the same about them, nor do I think most of my fellow pilots were intent on killing people. Most of us were decent, good individuals who did not want to kill innocent human beings. Is an enemy soldier following his own conscience, his own family, culture, peers, and country, not innocent? Was I innocent? It’s not so simple. In some ways I was, but I fear that
in some ways I wasn’t.

Clearly, civilians are innocent. Killing them should be seen as an unjust act—always—rather than as an “accident.” And unjust acts must be, before anything else can happen, called unjust.

W
HAT
SOLDIER
in the field of battle is going to admit that what he or she is doing isn’t worth it? Very few, for by doing so, the soldier would have to face and admit an extraordinary stupidness in himself or herself, and as human beings we’d rather avoid that more than almost anything. And besides, no sane soldier believes that he or she will be the one to die, else enlistment would stop. It’s the other guy who is going to die.