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When a nation goes to war the lighthearted peacetime rituals by which boys become men twist overnight into bitterly beautiful tests of courage and skill. In this excerpt from the memoir Flights of Passage to be published jointly this spring by Frederic C. Beil and the Naval Institute Press, the author—who flew more than a hundred missions against the Japanese in the Pacific—describes flying one of the ritual searches by which pilots lay their downed comrades to rest. Hynes served as a Marine aviator with VMTB-232, flying the Avenger torpedo bombers (TBMs) the pilots lovingly called “Turkeys.”
J^°t a great game, not even a very interesting one, but played in ready rooms, ritualistically. There was a ^°ke machine in a comer, and a blackboard where flight schedules were posted, and messages written. On 0tle wall an aeronautical map of the area was mounted, with a worn, smudged place where the local field Was. . _
In the ready room pilots waited for their flights. When it rained, they waited for the rain to stop. If they Weren’t flying, they just hung around—partly because there wasn’t anywhere else to go, but partly because J! Was a pilot’s place. You could watch planes take off and land, and you could talk to pilots who had just °Wn, or were on their way to fly. You could read about accidents in the BuAerNews. If you couldn’t be y*ng, the next best things were watching it, talking about it, reading about it.
Failing that, you could get into a card game—the endless poker games, or, if Wally was there, pinochle, ne only game folks played back home, he always explained. He was very good at it and liked to play for ^oney. “I’ve heard of pool hustlers,” Rock would say, “and I’ve heard of poker hustlers. I’ve seen a man shot for hustlin’ at pool. But Wally’s the only pinochle-hustler I ever heard tell of.”
Still, we were a training squadron, and we were expected to train. On wet mornings we were turned out lhe ready room by the Training Officer, whose job it was to get us to do things that could be put in his Records and sent to Washington, as evidence that we were improving our combat readiness. We might drift °Wn the flight line to the Link building and practice instrument flying under the hood, or draw the ready- ^°ni blinds and sleep while an enlisted man ran training movies—What to Know About Air Masses or How 0 Survive in the Jungle—or go out into the fog and mist and play volleyball with a ball that was clumsy and slick with the dampness. On the coldest, bleakest mornings we were sent to the swimming pool; and there, in that chill chemical bath, we passed endurance tests, swimming round and round the pool (it was understood that it was not cheating to stand up and walk when you came to the shallow end), or practicing how to swim through burning oil, or how to take your pants off in deep water and make them into water wings. (“But think of the embarrassment,” Wally said, “our ship is sunk, the rescue ship comes up, and there we all are, floating around in our underpants.”) It was all training for extreme, but possible situations. Pilots did go down at sea, carriers were set afire. But I found them hard to imagine as I swam up and down (being sure to walk round the shallow end) and waited for 1630, when we could get the car started and go home. The hint of danger made our lives exciting, but the danger wasn’t a reality, not yet. I wanted to get into combat, and in my fantasies I did heroic things, but the Test would not happen today or tomorrow. Today and tomorrow we would go on training, and there would be a party at night, or a movie.
When the weather cleared, we trained in the air. We practiced formation-flying and navigation, we bombed and strafed, and we started night-flying; and in the process of learning to do all these things in tbms we had a run of accidents. They were mostly of the usual kinds—a pilot lost control in a landing, and ground-looped, and scraped a wing; an engine failed on takeoff, and the plane slid to a stop, wheels up, off the end of the runway; a pilot hit his brakes too hard while taxiing, and the plane nosed up—the sorts of accidents you have when you’re new and uncertain in a plane. Once, while we were practicing bombing runs on an offshore rock, someone dropped a water-filled bomb—weighing maybe a hundred pounds— through another plane’s wing, and I heard the offended pilot’s rage on the radio. For a moment I felt that shameful excitement that you feel in the presence of a disaster that is close, but isn’t happening to you— there was going to be a crash, reality had entered our bombing game. But the wing held together, and the pilot flew back to the base and made an ordinary landing.
One dark, wet morning in October we drove out to the squadron to meet muster. There had been nightflying the night before, but we didn’t expect to fly that day. An overcast hung down along the mountainsides like a heavy, tom curtain, and the wind blew gusts of sudden, vicious rain across the field. But we had to muster anyway. When we were together in the ready room, Jimmy came in and told us that Wally was missing. He had been night-flying the night before, had taken off, Jimmy said, at 1845. At 2000 all planes were ordered to return to the field—aerology said there was fog coming in. Wally was the only pilot who didn’t acknowledge the order, and didn’t come back. Radar stations along the coast had been alerted, but hadn’t picked up any signals. By now the plane was down somewhere, probably in the sea. Wally might be alive, in a life raft or floating in his Mae West. Or there might be wreckage, or an oil slick. We would have to fly a search for him.
We would be scanning the sea and the beach, under a ceiling that sometimes came down to a few hundred feet above the water, below the minimums allowed for visual flight. Visibility would be poor, and the flying dangerous, and there seemed little chance that we would find anything. A plane that goes down at sea, unless it breaks up on impact, simply goes to the bottom and leaves no trace. But a search like this for a lost friend was not a search so much as it was a ritual for the dead. We dressed silently in the ready room. I noticed that Wally’s flight was still on the schedule board. Beside it he had left a message for somebody: “Don’t forget the pinochle game.”
I took off with T in the rain and turned north along the beach. We were to search from the Air Station to Cape Lobos, a stretch of about 25 miles. The clouds lay low and ragged over the water, and drooped along the hills. We flew just below the cloud base, scanning the surface of the sea and the beach for wreckage. There was only the gray water and the featureless rocks. As we flew the weather got worse, the clouds lowered until we were flying in a thin and narrowing wedge of rainy air just above the waves. We would have to pull up, climb above the clouds, and return to the field; it just wasn’t flying weather, hadn’t been, really* when we took off. Still, we went on for a while, all our attention now on flying—clearing the sudden outcroppings of rock that jutted from the coastline, maintaining a little altitude, a hundred feet or so now, keeping each other in sight. Finally we quit, deciding at once and without words, and began to climb together.
I felt a mounting uneasiness as we climbed through clouds that seemed threatening and endless. T’s plane on my wing was an indistinct shadow, and I was afraid I’d lose sight of it, and then fly into it. The clouds were dark and full of turbulence, and the planes bucked and tossed, and instrument needles swung erratically. Then it became lighter, there was sunlight above us, and I felt an impulse to pull back on the stick, to plunge up to that light; but still we went on in mist, watching the airspeed, the tilting horizon-indicator, the rate-of-climb. When we had burst out at last, into the light, the sky was burning blue above us, and the tops of the clouds were an unbelievable white that was like light itself. It was like flying out of death into life. Wally was dead, but we had performed our ritual of grief. We flew back in a tight two-plane formation, one plane’s wing stuck in the space between the other plane’s wing and tail, two friends being skillful together, being pilots, being alive.