31 October 2006

October Country

Ray Bradbury knew about the end of the last good month of the year. He called it the October Country, which is a state of mind as much as it is a time. All the harvests are in, the first frost has visited, and the ghosts walk in the chill night air.

The ghosts are supposed to walk tonight, though many of us will be so colorfully attired and drunk that we would not notice them. Dick would have snorted at the idea that ghosts walk. He knew better. You carry them, as he had carried his across the boundary of October Country and into a our new century.

I came back from a deployment to the Med years ago, proud of the complexity of what we had been ready to do, the targets we could have destroyed, if ordered to do so.

He cocked an eye at me, and asked how many airplanes we had.

“Ninety,” I said, “Between the fighters and the attack aircraft, and the Airborne Early Warning guys and the jammers.”

He snorted. “Let me tell you about complexity,” he said. “Start out with eight hundred bombers, and four hundred fighters, and six hundred bandits when you got to the target. That is an air operation. And do it with a blind take-off into the soup.”

I was instantly humbled, and bit my tongue, since I was about to boast that our airplanes started out with sling-shots at night on a runway the length of a football field, a hundred feet above the glittering sea.

“Taking off in a fully-loaded bomber in a pea-soup fog, another airplane twenty seconds ahead of you and one twenty seconds behind is an act of faith. You cobb the throttles, get to 120 miles an hour and start to pull back on the stick and pray that everything holds together.”

“But getting airborne is just the beginning, the price of admission. We had to get organized once we were aloft, in the dark and the clouds.”

“We had to do the procedural turns to get clear of the runway, and wound up a couple minutes later at three thousand feet, right over the active runway, hoping that everyone did their turns on time because we were blind. Thirty-six bombers on the upward racetrack, in radio silence.”

“Climbing up toward seven thousand feet you might get a break in the clouds, but you had to stay focused in the cockpit, watching the instruments. The engines were straining with the weight, the cylinder head temperatures just below the red lines. We had extra weight, too, since as a lead crew we had extra people on board to manage the target designators.”

“I usually let my co-pilot keep the look-out for the other planes, hoping you would see them before there was a collision. It was like being wrapped in cotton wool, and vertigo was always waiting to smack you on the back of the head.”

“One lapse in judgment, one failure to believe what the instruments were telling you, and you could smash into another bomber.”

“it was always a kick to break out of the clouds and see the stars. Thirty minutes to ten thousand feet. That is normally when I told the crew they could smoke, though I think that is nuts, with all that gas onboard. They called them Flying Forts, but they were just flying gas tanks.”

“We would be on oxygen in a while, and that was the only chance they had to settle their nerves with a little nicotine before we headed east. There is only so much you can do to people who know they might be dead in a few hours.”

Dick was silent for a moment, thinking of his ghosts in October Country, climbing out over England. Then he began again, speaking from another place.

“At eleven thousand feet we would start to circle, and break out the flares, red and green, so that the guys coming up out of the undercast could tell who to join on. We would mill around for another ten minutes to get the group together.”

“Then the sun would be coming up. It rose late in the high latitudes, and it would be getting dark again by the time we got back. If we got back, that is. A lot of the guys wouldn't.”

The clouds were sure pretty, highlighted in the English dawn. We would proceed to the designated rendezvous point, and our group of thirty-six planes joined three other groups to form a Wing, and then the Wing joined the other wings and there were more than eight hundred of us in a Task Force a mile or two wide and streaming miles behind.

"It was pretty impressive to see it out the windshield, and I had done it twenty-nine times before. The big silver beast crosses the Channel, sun glinting, and we hit land just south of the Zuider Zee. We were coming up through twenty-two thousand feet, boring holes in the air, and later the contrails started to form and it began to get cold. It was just like it always was, always had been, world without end in the Bomber Stream."

But this last one seemed like a jinx. All the way to the middle of Germany, with all the fighters and flack in the world waiting for us, and we are going to drive right over the most heavily defended target in Germany. If the guys hadn't been tucked right up in formation, I think I might just have turned around and gone home.

“The last one was the hardest. Why wasn't it a milk run against a target in France? I mean, if you are going to die, why don't you just get it out of the way?”

He couldn't answer that question, not then, and I think we talked about Michigan Football and fast cars, leaving the dead where they were.

I think he knows now, from the part of October Country he is flying over. The colors of the leaves blaze far below, and all the aircraft are once again in formation.

Copyight 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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