| 20 August 2006 Leathers The jacket turned out to be a problem. Fall is coming, and I want to be ready for driving with the top down. I thought I had the answer when I got a lead on a nice brand-new A-2 leather jacket, just like the one that Uncle Dick wore when he was in the 487th Bomb Group (Heavy), the “Gentlemen from Hell.” The unofficial squadron patch featured the Devil wearing a tuxedo, standing in a field of flames. It was not on his leather jacket, which was an A-2 model, the cool one with the leather collar that flipped up or could be secured with metal fasteners to the obdy of the coat, like a button-down shirt. Americans have changed a lot in a single generation. It was the size that I could wear when I was in my late teens, and I wore it with the bravado that only a kid can, who has done nothing whatsoever to deserve it. Sort of like Marlon Brando in The Wild One. If I knew then what I know now, I might have had more respect. But that is the way of things, isn't it? The only decoration on Dick's jacket was the Eighth Air Force logo, the wings upswept around the central roundel, painted on the left shoulder. It was a prime piece of leather, and it went somewhere in a trade for Dad's Navy G-1 leather jacket. I remember it as rich and supple chocolate horsehide. I got in trouble with Dad once time for taking it out of the closet and wearing it, I did not then know what they meant, except that they were pretty cool. I still have it, and actually wore it on active duty for a while, but it is now in the closet, stiff, and with the collar mostly eaten away by some sort of nasty bug. It is there with my leather G-1, which the Government issued me in 1977. They were tailored for an earlier generation of Americans, and mine fit once, long ago, and I doubt if it ever will fit again. The leather jackets were something special, totems of the trade. The Navy ones with the fur collar never left the active inventory, though they had some hard times. They were so cool that they raised resentment in the rest of the Service, and were banished to the outer reaches of respectability as “working, utility” and not authorized for wear from home to the flight line. In between, only the dorky khaki jackets that the ship drivers were permitted. That is a pain in the ass, having to switch jackets, and eliminated one of the perks of being the World's Shit-Hottest Aviating Men. There was a legendary control freak named Admiral Fellows. He had command of the Naval Air Forces Pacific when I was young and my hair was brown. He had a penchant for detail, and cleanliness. The Navy term for a thorough cleaning of the ship and spaces was called a “field day,” and that is how he got his name. Field Day Fellows. He had squadron Commanding Officers who had offended his sense of military order stand duty at the gates to Naval Air Station Miramar, looking for young Top Gun aviators who dared to wear their leathers in their cars from home to work. The whole thing was ugly and quite unbelievable, unless you understand what you have to go through to get the leather jacket and the contempt they had for some idiot who claimed they could not wear it with pride. You could understand why some in the military would hate them. We adorned them with patches that made them wildly individual, celebrating squadrons and airwings and ships and number of successful carrier landings. I served under a celebrated Airwing Commander, who had stripped all the patches from his G-2, but all of which lived in the intricate tracery of the holes that had once held them on. The Air Force, who had the arguably cooler jacket, did away with it. Banished it not to the flight lines, but expunged it from the inventory. Gone. No appropriate use could be determined by the missileers for the archaic flight garb in the future's action aero-space team. Those of us in the Navy laughed at them. But when the Air Force leadership of the Bomber and Missile Mafia was overthrown by the fighter jocks just before the first Gulf War, the leather jacket came back. Way back in 1930, the Army Air Force had specified a Seal Brown horsehide jacket to be designated part number “DWC 30-1415” and A-2s became standard issue through 1942, when production ceased in favor of cloth flight jackets. Uncle Dick was in the first muster of volunteers, and he was issued one of the horsehide ones. They were a coveted item, as was the right to wear one. I think the Air Force was smarting from the success of Tom Cruise swaggering around in his leather G-1 as a Navy fighter pilot in the movie Top Gun, but beyond the smirk, I did not think about it much. The new jackets are made of goatskin, and they don't look right. Surveys of the movie-going public at the time indicate that they were a little hazy on the difference between the Navy and the Air Force anyway. Which is a long way around the rosebush to say that I stumbled onto a deal on a brand new and completely authentic leather A-2 jacket, correct in every detail. I jumped on it, since my real one doesn't fit any more, and I figured I could leave it unadorned, leaving my own real past where it belongs, and not claiming anyone else's. I was excited when it came in the mail. The box was a thick rectangle of cardboard and when I peeled off the plastic covering marveled at the almost silver highlights to the rich chocolate leather. It was supple and moist with juice, like Dad's used to be. It was made to WWII Air Corps standards; no pussy “hand-warmer” pockets, as if someone wrestling a B-17G Flying Fortress or a B-24 Liberator could spare the time to tuck his hands in the convenient slide-ins behind the pockets and watch the flak blossom around him at 20,000 feet over Germany with the ambient air temperature in the cockpit at twenty or thirty below zero. Of all the people that were killed in our part of the war against Hitler and Tojo, fully ten percent were Air Corps guys like Uncle Dick. The only other military discipline that paid such a high price were the submarine force, and everyone agrees that their jackets were nothing to write home about. There was a problem, though, and a major one. Across the otherwise unblemished breast was embroidered a silver eagle, with a martial gaze, and the numerals “50” in the middle and the years “1947-1997” below the Air Force logo. “Shit,” I said, to no one in particular. “It is a fiftieth anniversary jacket of the Air Force, marked by the emblem of the Anti-Christ.” No wonder the thing had been such a great deal. It was flawed, and fatally. I could not wear that jacket. Not marked like that. I went to my box of patches, the ones acquired down through the years. I looked through them, the ones too crude to be worn on the nylon jackets we actually wore, and the official ones that I had earned. The only one that was big enough to actually cover the whole Air Force Eagle was ironic. It was a patch from the Air Force Element at the Yongsan Garrison in Seoul where I spent fifteen months of a one-year tour. The embroidering featured a jet upended in a martini glass, with the words “Crash and Burn Club” on the scroll below. I thought about it hard, but then I thought about Uncle Dick, who had been in the Air Corps, not the Air Force. I thought I could at least wear his patch in tribute, though I was probably kidding myself. I looked on the Net for copies of the unofficial patch of the Gentlemen from Hell. I thought it might be appropriate to decorate the jacket as a tribute to Dick, since no one would mistake me for a real hero, but it was to no avail. Pictures there were, but no replications. Maybe it was because the Army would not let them be worn at Army Air Corps Station 137, Lavenham, Sussex, England. Based on painful personal experience, I think to this day that the Army is filled with the career kin of Field Day Fellows. And I do not imagine there is much demand for them these days, anyway. Doodling through the internet disconsolately, I looked for alternatives that might be acceptable from an esthetic and moral perspective. I wound up on a site that sold both Navy G-1 jackets and Air Corps A-2s. I was intrigued. Apparently the original Flying Tigers of the American Volunteer Group wore Navy G-1 jackets, since that is what was provided. They were gypsies who swore temporary allegiance to the Chinese Nationalist Government of Generalissimo Chaing Kai-Shek. The Tigers fought the Japanese in the skies over China before the US came into the war. They were a rag-tag and valiant band, and when the war was finally declared, they were absorbed into the Army Air Corps, and they were issued the remaining stocks of the A-2 jacket. I have been to most of the Chinas in my time, and found that the patch of the First Pursuit Squadron was available in leather, at a nominal price. I measured carefully, and it looked as if the logo of the nude woman pursuing the khaki-clad aviator across a green apple, wrapped in serpent, would completely cover the Air Force eagle. Not that I have anything against it. I just can't wear it. And the other thing about these jackets is that they live longer than their owners. Heck, this one could wind up in China someday. Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra |