They have been described as the kid who used to fill your gasoline tank, the boy who went through college with your son, the lad who used to take your daughter to symphonies under the stars at Hollywood Bowl…
These young fighter pilots have been described that way to point up that they are part of you back home, that they are as American as hamburgers and malted milks. But none of those descriptions is adequate.
Like hamburgers and malteds, like pie à la mode, the billing is subject to change.
The young men have changed. In the many long months of transition into smoothly co-ordinated, well-trained men of war, they found that it takes a great deal of sweat and worry and fear and conquering of fear, just as it takes a broadening sense of values and humor and an awakening to responsibility and the shouldering of a king-sized burden, to make a grocery clerk into a fighter pilot.
These transitions have changed his face, altered his viewpoints and affected his manner.
So they aren't exactly the same kids who used to talk about the Notre Dame football team. Now they talk of “the Abbeville boys,” the tough yellow-nosed fighter planes of Goering's elite squadron, and that is more important.
They used to miss the friend who had gone on vacation. Now they miss the friend who has gone.
In many moments they will be full of rough, fraternity house horseplay, abruptly erupting into a melee of wrestling, flailing arms and legs, for no discernable reason. Then again they will sprawl in the pilots' room, up here on the flight line, bored, tired beyond all understanding, when a session of bad weather has clipped their wings.
Sometimes you would think we all are crazy, if you should walk into the room and see Jeeter, who is Tom Neal from Chatham, Va., jitterbugging by himself, and Charley, who is Charles Sweat from West Point, N.Y., imitating the various instruments heard on the swing recording, and Baby, who is Henry W. Brown of Washington, beating his hands together and stomping on the floor.
It was a slow morning, the kind of a dreary, dragging morning where there seems to be a cork in the hour glass. The fog closed off visibility until every man walked in his own private, wall-less world.
They banged into the pilots' room. The room is long and looks like a giant metal can split lengthwise and laid on its side, with the opening face down on the earth. Covering the far end is a big map of England and the continent, and across it are traced the routes they follow on their missions.
There are tables covered with magazines — old issues; lots of comfortable chairs, a radio and a big iron stove in the center. Bulletin boards carry notices and orders and cartoons and diagrams. There are ash trays that never contain any ashes; and there is a linoleum-covered floor, which always has ashes on it.
One morning the American forces network, which we call “the GI station,” was broadcasting recordings. The GI announcer offered a Frank Sinatra record taken from a transcribed broadcast. Interest awakened.
Bud Fortier, from Nashua, N.H., who brought a clarinet overseas, walked over and fiddled with the volume control. The music swelled and Frankie-boy was singing — but every now and then he would pause and we would hear a very strange sound in the background, the sound of women screaming in ecstatic delight.
Jeeter Neal promptly shrieked and “swooned” and there was bedlam. Jeers, shots, yelps of laughter. Jeeter's crashing body, moans of despair, derisive whistles echoed through the room.
“Wait! Wait!” Bud cried, his eyes bright with amused disbelief. “Let's hear the rest of it!”
So we listened to the rest of it. Captain Al Starr, a flight leader from Pittsburgh, sat with his eyes on the floor, shaking his head in amazement. “Oh,” he kept saying, “oh, my aching nerves.”
They do not look upon death as a fighting man chained to the ground looks upon it. It is not a foul breath, close on their necks. It is, rather, a chill wind that blows along some stratospheric course that each one, individually, never expects to take.
On the ground a man heard the rush of sound of a shell, or the whine and slap of a bullet, or the giant door-slam of a bomb. He sees the man next to him fall, and he hears him cry out and sees the torn body and the spreading red. Death is very close.
In the air the speed is so great, the action so fast, the distances multiply so quickly, that one hardly ever sees a man receive his mortal wounds. As Starr said: “Everything happens behind you.”
In the air you do not actually see a man die unless the circumstances are extraordinary, as they were recently when a pilot crossed above a German plane he had just fought and conquered and could see the German pilot, his body still, his head lolling like a buoy washed by lazy waves.
Even as the movies and books of the last war [World War I] portrayed, these young men do develop a type of fatalism. But it does not become a murky cloud that overshadows sane reasoning. They have good tools for their job, they have good minds and clear hands, they have purposeful intent and the benefit of excellent training.
In addition to these things they need the element of luck that every man, in every kind of a fight, has needed back down the centuries. They know that, and accept it, and each one goes out to fight with the belief that although some of them may not return, he will not be among that stricken number.
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