The Secret Life of Wings

"The snake? Hell, I guess after a few minutes it got hot. It just slid away, went back into the night."

"And your dad? He just sat there?"

I laughed. "Ever hear how my dad lost his leg?"

She shook her head. "No, I was always afraid to ask."

"He was flying off the old Enterprise, near the end of the war – off the coast of Japan. He saw a submarine surfacing and attacked it, sunk the damn thing, too, before turning to engage two waves of kamikaze. He shot five of 'em down, got hit sometime during that part of the fight. His leg was torn apart, and was damn near bleeding to death but he landed his a/c on the first try. I guess he got to sick bay with help, but there was no way to save his leg..."

"Jesus, I had no idea..."

"No one does, because he never talks about it – hasn't ever, as far as I know. I found the citation in his desk drawer one day after school, when I was in junior high. Stuck in a folder, and I think I figured out he's capable of keeping secrets...for a long time."

"Did he finally tell you about Sumner," she said, "and how that whole thing...?"

She stopped, I suppose, when she saw the expression on my face, but who knows what she read into it. I felt hot inside, for the betrayal I'd been nursing had apparently just been lanced – and erupted into a full-blown infection.

"No," and I think I whispered, "he never did."

The sun was setting and she took my hand and pulled me back to the lanai, and I'm not sure how easy that was. "You want something to drink?" she asked when she finally got me inside.

I recall shrugging my shoulders, looking out into the leafy back yard as I sat in the gloom, and a moment later she came back with some deadly rum concoction popular with the locals. She curled her legs up on the sofa as she sat, then kind of stared at me for a while. I think she was on the edge of a decision, perhaps, wondering if I was worth the expenditure of so much effort, then she laid it out for me.

"I think it was sometime in 1943 or 44, but he came home from the war for a month. He met your mom during that time, according to Sumner, but a friend of his had been wounded, I think at Midway, and your father went down to Uvalde to see him, to meet his family. The guy had been burned badly and wasn't doing well, but he had married a girl from Austin before the war. At least I think he met her at UT Austin. Anyway, the guy knew he was dying and he wanted his wife to have a child – but not just any child. He wanted someone from his squadron to be the father. Sumner told me your father said it was his..."

"Duty," I whispered, because by this point I was trying to hold back tears. "Yes, that would be just like him," I added, looking at Tracy.

"And something else. There was something else Sumner said, about that 'secret life of wings.' Your father took him flying one day, and Sumner heard the laughter. The first time your dad let him take off on his own."

I was nodding my head, crying openly now as I remembered my first time, too.

+++++

He came back from the war sure the most vital part of his life was over. Dead and gone – forever – and going back to med school only drove the point home deeper. He, of course, never talked about flying when I was very young, but every now and then we would drive by Love Field while a Braniff DC-7 or a Trans Texas DC-3 rumbled down the runway, and dad would pull over into a parking lot and watch as the plane climbed up into the sky, and after a minute or so he would wipe an eye and slip back into traffic. I was too little to understand what the hell was going on, but I knew enough to understand my father was very sad.

One night we were watching TV, all of us together in the living room, and I remember dad was reading a book. At one point he put the book down and walked from the room, and my mother went after him. He was crying, and while that didn't happen often it always upset the hell out of me. He came back a few minutes later, as was his way with a fresh scotch and water in hand, and he handed the book to mother and resumed watching TV. I watched as she put the book away, remembering exactly where she put it, and after everyone had gone to bed I snuck down and found the book, slipped into my dad's study and started reading.

The book I started that night,Reach for the Sky,wasn't in a general sense about flying, yet it changed my life forever. It changed my father's life, too, and Sumner Tennyson's as well. It's the story of one Douglas Bader, an RAF pilot who long before WWII was in a crash, an aircraft crash, and he lost both legs as a result. When things were heating up in the late 30s, when it became apparent Hitler was going to violate all the key military provisions of the Versailles treaty, Bader began pestering old flying buddies, still in the RAF by the by, to let him try and return to flight status. Of course they resisted, of course they told him to go home and enjoy his pension – but Bader kept at it.

By the end of the Battle of Britain he was an ace, and one of the best fighter pilots in the RAF. He continued to wrack up kills until at last he was shot down – over France – and captured. Captured, because his prosthetic limbs were caught up while he tried to bail out. It's a brilliant testimony to the man, and to the deep sense of honor held by the men who captured him, that the one time in all the war that an allied flight was given safe passage to fly to an airfield in France, permission was so granted to fly Bader's spare legs to the hospital where he was recovering from his burns.

Of course the German regretted the decision: Bader made a number of escapes from POW camps and harried his captors as much as they eventually tormented him.

Anyway, I read the book over two nights, then started hitting the library and checking out everything I could read about the Battle of Britain. Then I started reading anything I could lay my hands on about flying in WWII. Finally, I ran across a book detailing the invasion of Japan – that was postponed, then canceled, after atomic weapons were used over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One account I read concerned kamikaze attacks on the carrier Enterprise, and near the end of this account I saw my father's name – and read a description of his actions that day.

Mind you, I'd never heard any story like that ever before, and of course he never spoke of it. Curiously enough, neither had my mother, and I can guarantee you I never asked what happened to his leg – but there it was, in black and white so to speak, complete with a picture of my father before the event, standing there with a dozen other pilots on the flight deck of the Enterprise. And there he was again, in another picture on the next page, with my father standing ramrod straight as an admiral pinned the Navy Cross on his breast.

I was watching a football game on TV one afternoon and I heard dad in his study. He was, as always, smoking a pipe while sitting behind his huge mahogany desk, and he was finishing Bader's story. I didn't put it together then, but he was absent the next several weekends, then one Saturday morning we hopped in his Cadillac and drove north out Preston road until we came to a barren part of the city, then we wound our way along narrow roads between plowed fields until we came to a little airport...Addison was it's name.

There was a hanger there, a big sign proclaiming Cooper Airmotive above the yawning hanger door, and there were all sorts of little single-engined Cessnas sitting on the ramp, just waiting for someone to come along and take them for a little exercise.

He parked the car and we walked out to one and he opened the door on his side, then came around and opened my door. He walked around the airplane checking odds and ends for a few minutes, then got in and showed me how to buckle up.

More switches and knobs turned, the whole thing looking like a ritualized series of ancient incantations to me, then he opened this tiny little window by his left hand and yelled –

"Clear!" as he looked around for anyone or anything near the propellor.

A little mechanical wheeze then the engine caught and rumbled to life. More rituals followed, more buttons pushed and levers flipped, then my father was talking on the radio and I saw him in his flight-suit on the deck of the Enterprise, waiting to take off. A minute later he was turning for the one runway at the little airport, asking for permission to take off and for the very first time in my life – but not the last – I was truly proud of my father. I finally understood what he had been struggling with since the end of his war, and like Bader – he beat the odds.

And moments later an entirely new world came into being – this time just for us.

The Cessna rolled down the concrete runway and lifted gently – into the air – and I heard laughter. Was that me, I wondered? I hadn't realized I was laughing, but there it was – and yet amidst the laughter I had never known such pure ecstasy in my life. We turned and climbed north, flying towards the Red River and Oklahoma, and I was taken not just by all the puffy white clouds we flew above, but the shadows we flew through, too.

+++++

The Enterprise had departed Yankee Station in early January, bound for Puget Sound, and she steamed north northeast – passing west of Taiwan and east of Japan. Now, with almost four thousand sea miles behind us, the weather had turned cold and nasty; blowing snow and ice coated the catwalks around the flight deck, turning them into a slippery no man's land, and knowing it was 0200 hours, it was a given that we were alone out there. Falling overboard was not advised...

Of course we knew Soviet subs and 'trawlers' were following us, or trying to, anyway, but we rarely conducted flight ops at night when they were around – or when it was snowing this hard – unless we really wanted to fuck with Ivan's head. We hadn't in several nights, anyway, and the thinking was Ivan might not be watching just then.

We were three hundred miles off the Kamchatka peninsula, essentially the eastern tip of Siberia, and in the dead of winter. There were four EA-6B Prowlers on deck when all the deck lights came on: two waiting for their turn on the catapult, and two with their nose gears already hooked up. My Prowler was the first off, and even with tons of anti-icing fluid on the wings when we cleared the end of the cat I felt sure I'd never be able to get this wallowing pig up into the sky. Still, that wasn't the objective that night.

A few hours earlier, an RC-135 had departed Shemya, near the westernmost end of the Aleutian chain. This 'Cobra Ball' flight was flying well to the west of the usual commercial track used by airliners flying from the US to Japan, and was doing so in order to further mask it's activities. The -135 was also flying cold, flying with all of it's sensors turned off, hoping to disappear in all the commercial clutter.

When the three other Prowlers in my squad joined-up with me, I was in the lead at 300 knots – and flying 150 feet above the sea – when we turned due west...towards the Soviet Union. The snow was surreal, so heavy and wet at this low altitude it began to stick to the windscreen and canopy, and we were pouring as much engine bleed air on the 'glass' as we could, the leading edges of our wings, as well. As we closed the coast the snow let up some, and when we were 20 miles from the beach we sent a single coded message, a micro-burst of encrypted data, telling the -135 we were at the IP and beginning our run.

At that point the Cobra Ball turned all it's sensors on – and waited.

Our Prowlers spread out then – each exactly a mile from the one beside it – and as we left the sea we increased out altitude to – about – 200 feet AGL, and increased speed to 500 knots. At exactly ten miles in we turned on all our jamming equipment, pulled back on the stick and shot up into a ballistic climb – firing off several puffs of radar confounding chaff, and at that point every radar facility in the eastern Soviet Union went off like rabid priests running through a whorehouse.

The RC-135 over the Pacific watched all these radars come on – and search for the source of the jamming – as we rolled and dove back for the hard deck on a reciprocal heading. The intent of the exercise was to see what kind of radar Ivan was playing with these days, because word was he had a new type, a so-called 'frequency agile' array that was – theoretically – impossible to jam.

Of course, our guys at Raytheon had already developed a workaround, and this flight was all about seeing if it worked. If the number of threat warnings my ECMO was shouting about was any indication, something seriously interesting was taking shape out there in the howling snow and ice. He was picking up both ground and airborne radar sets, and my EWO was mumbling something about MIG-25s closing fast, and two SAMs coming off the rails – now heading our way.

Then some guy fresh from a school somewhere back east flipped on his new gear, and bingo – every radar in eastern Siberia lost it's lock-on. Soon, with the beach now twenty miles behind I throttled back and dropped back down to 150 AGL and waited for the three other Prowlers to join up on me. And that's when my EWO chimed in: there were, he said, two MIG-25s overhead now, flying along our heading with their 'look-down shoot-down' radar at full power, burning through our jamming.

"They got us, skipper," he said.

I got on the secure net to my wingmen: "Okay, lets go dark and get the wings dirty, drop our speed to 1-6-7 and spread out in a wide echelon. In five minutes, on my hack, let's go full active ECM, blow some chaff and let's beat feet and zig-zag for Point Alpha. I'll let MoonDog know the situation."

So there we were, two hundred miles from home and going low and slow, spreading out as far apart as we could while still providing a big enough protective lobe for our ECM gear. Why's that, you ask? Well, the MIG-25 was an all-weather interceptor, designed to fly at high altitudes and at very high speed. It's radar was powerful but not really very smart, and with the sea providing lots of clutter on their screens the thinking was that as we slowed the MIGs would overshoot – then have to turn back for us. When they started turning, we'd spread out even more, and thereby provide more dispersed targets easier to loose in the sea-clutter, and I was banking on their radar losing down-angle efficacy in a tight radius turn.

We were spread well apart, almost five miles by the time we went active with our jamming gear, and they lost us, then reacquired signal and lost it again, but by then eight F4-Phantoms filled the screen ahead and Ivan turned and, probably bingo fuel by that time, made a mad dash for home.

I bring this up this whole thing for one reason, and one reason only.

After my trap that night, after I'd landed and folded the wings and taxied for the elevator, as I went through my shut-down checklists while still sitting in my nice cozy little cockpit – on that pitching deck and in that howling snowstorm – I decided right then and there that I wanted to fly airliners, not electronic warfare aircraft ever again, and that Tracy was right.

We belonged together.

+++++

It turned out she hated practicing law in Maryland. With a passion she'd never known she had. Same thing in Texas. I think that's because she'd hated law school, and it became apparent after a few months working in Henry Wade's office that she hated, I mean truly hated lawyers. Scum sucking bottom dwellers...that's what she called 'em, and 'I don't want to be one of them thar thangs, neither.'

Father was, of course, a little perplexed by that line of thinking. In his world, you spend three years in professional school, you take your boards and then get to work. In other words, you start making money, maybe start paying your parents back for twenty five years of their blood, sweat and tears. You buy a house, have kids, two if you want to make your parents real happy, and maybe you even buy a dog.

The thing is, Tracy wasn't having any of that. She wasn't planning on living her life by anyone else's rules or on anyone else's terms, and she certainly wasn't going to use my dad's worn out playbook.

A year after I left the Navy, four months after we got married, we went to my grandmother's house for Christmas. My grandmother, the woman who pulled quarters out of her savings passbook to pay for my dad's flying lessons, was still alive and kicking and, for the record, she was cooking fried chicken, some sort of stuffing (and don't ask, really; the woman used oysters in her stuffing) and a cranberry relish that had enough whiskey in it to kill large farm animals and small children. Dad was showing Tracy his old room, her parents were in the kitchen trying to come to terms with oysters in stuffing and toxic vapors coming from a huge pyrex bowl full of cranberry relish. Sumner's mother was in the living room with my mother (I know...don't ask) when Tracy screamed and ran into the living room.

And where was I, you might ask? In the right seat of an American 727, on it's way from Dallas to San Francisco. After we landed someone from our dispatch office met me at the gate and told me my father had had a heart attack; they handed me a voucher and sent me back to Big D, and Tracy picked me up at the airport and drove me back into town. He was at Parkland (of course) and he was stable, but they were going to operate on him at five the next morning. He of course wanted to see me before all that, so she took me straight to his room.

I walked in and, because I'm real good at picking out little things like this, said something sweet, like "Gee, Dad, you look like hell warmed over..."

My father being my father, he shot me the bird, then he looked at me with anxious eyes. "Get me out of this madhouse," he said, "and let's go get laid."

"Oh, you have anyone in mind, or do you just want to pick up someone to eat out on Harry Hines?"

"Fuck, no. Let's run down to Piedras Negras and pick up some really nasty shit. You know, some real honest god incurable clap."

"No thanks, Dad, I'm trying to quit. Really, I am."

"Well then, you'd better take a seat, let me go over a few things..."

A few things...like where his papers were. Estate stuff, "Just in case," or so he said, then he wanted to talk. About Sumner, as it turned out.

"You know, after I started to fly again," he began, "I flew down to Uvalde all the time. Lot of times when I didn't have anything scheduled in the afternoon, I'd take off and fly down there. That's why I finally bought that Baron, by the way. So I could get down there in time for supper, spend a few hours with the boy then turn around and fly back."

"Oh? Where'd you land?"

"Oh, out there on the highway, then I'd taxi right up to the house. I started teaching him to fly that year. He'd just turned fifteen, and you were still too young to start lessons. I paid for his ground school, then I'd fly down there in one of Ted Cooper's old 172s on the weekends and put him through the ringer..."

"I remember," I said. As luck would have it, dad was the world's toughest flight instructor.

"Yeah, I'll bet you do. Funny thing, too. You were always the better pilot, you know. Came to it naturally. I had to really work with that boy, ride him hard on scanning his instruments, and the first few times we worked through engine-out stalls I thought the boy was going to shit his britches. Not you. You always seemed to get it."

"Get it? What do you mean?"

"You never panicked, not like he did, anyway. It's like that old rattlesnake. You remember, that big mother by the campfire?"

I shook at the memory.

"I was looking at you when that thing slid up to the fire, and at Sumner too. That boy was wide-eyed, thought he was going to take off right then and there and fly to Texarkana, but not you. You were as cool as a cucumber..."