Gods of Tin Read online

  gods of tin

  a l s o b y j a m e s s a l t e r

  The Hunters

  A Sport and a Pastime

  Cassada

  Light Years

  Solo Faces

  Dusk and Other Stories

  Burning the Days

  G ODS OF TIN

  n

  The Flying Years

  J A M E S S A L T E R

  m

  e d i t e d a n d s e l e c t e d by

  Jessica Benton and William Benton

  S &

  H

  Shoemaker & Hoard

  Washington, D.C.

  Copyright © 2004 by James Salter

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the Publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Salter, James.

  Gods of tin : the flying years / James Salter ; edited and selected by Jessica Benton and William Benton.

  isbn 1–59376–006-x

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  1. Salter, James—Diaries. 2. Air pilots, Military—United States—Anecdotes.

  3. Korean war, 1950–1953—Aerial operations—Anecdotes. I. Benton, Jessica. II. Benton, William, 1939– III. Title.

  tl540.s183a3

  2004

  813'.54—dc22 2004011664

  Book design by Mark McGarry, Texas Type & Book Works Set in Requiem

  Printed in the United States of America

  S &

  Shoemaker H Hoard

  A Division of Avalon Publishing Group Inc.

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  gods of tin

  the flying years

  F O R E W O R D

  James Salter is one of the important writers of our time. He is the author of six novels, among them Light Years, and A Sport and a Pastime which was selected as a title in The Modern Library in 1995. His collection of short stories, Dusk, won the Pen/

  Faulkner Award in 1998, and in 2000 he was elected to the

  American Academy of Arts and Letters. Yet before he was a

  novelist, he was a fighter pilot in the Air Force, a graduate of West Point who flew over one hundred missions during the

  Korean War. In his memoir Burning the Days (1997), he describes the difficult decision to resign from the military in midcareer and begin another life. “It was in me like a pathogen—the idea of being a writer.” But the pathogen—or passion—of flying is no less ineradicable in the literary man. The courage, risk, and

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  g o d s o f t i n

  self-measure of the one become a standard for the other, transmuted into the writer’s style, and nowhere are the deft and

  minute tunings of Salter’s prose more evident than when he

  writes about his experiences in the air.

  The text of this book has been compiled from The Hunters (1956), Salter’s first novel, set in Korea during the war, where he was stationed from February to August of 1952; from Cassada (2000), a reworking of an earlier novel, The Arm of Flesh (1961), which deals with a squadron in Europe a few years after Korea; and from the “flight years” of Burning the Days. It also includes, published here for the first time, many sections of a journal Salter kept during the Korean War. It is, as a record of the day-to-day, mission-to-mission life of a young fighter pilot, a

  remarkable document by any standards. But it provides as well a view into the crucible of a writer’s beginnings, like pencil studies that precede a painting, in which the essential qualities of the artist’s hand are unmistakable.

  20 April 1952. First morning mission. Weather not good.

  Near Pyongyang shreds of cirrus hung in the air like ici-

  cles on the edge of a roof. Ahead, the mist was flat as a

  table. A band of green haze rimmed the distant horizon.

  The overall structure of the book is made up of passages

  from all four sources strung together chronologically, and

  t h e f ly i n g y e a r s

  xi

  divided into four main sections. The parts bind together to

  create a coherent whole that resembles, perhaps more than

  anything else, a modern, Homeric poem. In Burning the Days, subtitled A Recollection, the personal details of the author’s life were revealed obliquely, through stories. Gods of Tin—the tin is aircraft—stripped of narrative connections and including both fiction and nonfiction, reads like unabashed autobiography. A life is in front of you, with human vulnerability and heroic reach.

  War, like love and death, is without an equivalent experi-

  ence. In one passage, Salter writes:

  You lived and died alone, especially in fighters. Fighters.

  Somehow, despite everything, that word had not become

  sterile. You slipped into the hollow cockpit and strapped

  and plugged yourself into the machine. The canopy ground

  shut and sealed you off. Your oxygen, your very breath, you

  carried with you into the chilled vacuum, in a steel bottle.

  William Benton

  It was said of Lord Byron that he was more proud of his Norman ancestors who had accompanied William the Con-queror in the invasion of England than of having written

  famed works. The name de Burun, not yet Anglicized, was

  inscribed in the Domesday book. Looking back, I feel a

  pride akin to that in having flown and fought along the Yalu.

  From the author’s preface to The Hunters

  I.

  By the summer of 1942, America had been at war with Japan and Germany for more than half a year. James Salter, following in the footsteps of his father who had attended twenty-five years earlier, entered the military academy at West Point. He had just turned seventeen.

  In mid-July up the steep road from the station we walked as a group. I knew no one. Like the others I carried a small suitcase in which would be put the clothes I would not see again for

  years. We passed large, silent buildings and crossed a road

  beneath some trees. A few minutes later, having signed a consent paper, we stood in the hall in a harried line trying to memorize a sentence to be used in reporting to the cadet first sergeant. It had to be spoken loudly and exactly. Failure meant going out and getting back in line to do it again. There was constant shouting and beyond the door of the barracks an

  ominous noise, alive, that flared when the door was opened

  like the roar of a furnace. It was the din of the Area, upper-classmen, some bellowing, some whispering, some hissing like

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  g o d s o f t i n

  snakes. They were giving the same commands over and over as

  they stalked the nervous ranks that stood stiffly at attention, still in civilian clothes, already forbidden to look anywhere but straight ahead. The air was rabid. The heat poured down . . .

  It is the sounds I remember, the iron orchestra, the feet on the stairways, the clanging bells, the shouting, cries of Yes, No, I do not know, sir!, the clatter of sixty or seventy rifle butts as they came down on the pavement at nearly the same time. Life was anxious minutes, running everywhere, scrambling to formations . . .

  First day at West Point

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  All was tradition, the language, the gray woolen cloth, the

  high black collars of the dress coats, the starched white pants that you got into standing on a chair. Always in summer the

  Corps had lived in tents out on the Plain
, under canvas, with duckboard streets—Summer Camp with its fraternal snapshots

  and first classmen lounging against tent poles; this was among the few things that had disappeared. There was the honor system, about which we heard from the very beginning, which

  belonged to the cadets rather than to the authorities and had as its most severe punishment “silencing.” Someone who was guilty of a violation and refused to resign could be silenced, never spoken to by his classmates except officially for the rest of his life.

  He was made to room by himself, and one of the few acknowl-

  edgements of his existence was at a dance—if he appeared

  everyone walked from the floor, leaving him, the girl, and the orchestra all alone. Even his pleasures were quarantined.

  m

  West Point was a keep of tradition and its name was a hall-

  mark. It drew honest, Protestant, often rural, and largely

  uncomplicated men—although there were figures like Poe,

  Whistler, and even Robert E. Lee, who later said that getting a military education had been the greatest mistake of his life.

  I remember the sweating, the heat and thirst, the banned

  bliss of long gulping from the spigot. At parades, three or four

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  g o d s o f t i n

  a week, above the drone of hazing floated the music of the

  band. It seemed part of another, far-off world. There was the feeling of being on a hopeless journey, an exile that would last for years. In the distance, women in light frocks strolled with officers, and the fine house of the Superintendent gleamed

  toylike and white. In the terrific sun someone in the next rank or beside you begins to sway, take an involuntary step, and like a beaten fighter fall forward. Rifles litter the ground. Afterwards a tactical officer walks among them as among bodies on a battlefield, noting down the serial numbers.

  m

  I was undergoing a conversion, from a self divided and con-

  sciously inferior, as William James described it, to one that was unified and, to use his word, right. I saw myself as the heir of many strangers, the faces of those who had gone before, my new roommate’s brother, for one, John Eckert, who had graduated two years earlier and was now a medium bomber pilot in England. I had a photograph of him and his wife, which I kept in my desk, the pilot with his rakish hat, the young wife, the clarity of their features, the distinction. Perhaps it was in part because of this snapshot that I thought of becoming a pilot. At least it was one more branch thrown onto the pyre. When he

  was killed on a mission not long after, I felt a secret thrill and envy. His life, the scraps I knew of it, seemed worthy, com-

  t h e f ly i n g y e a r s

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  plete. He had left something behind, a woman who could

  never forget him; I had her picture. Death seemed the purest act. Comfortably distant from it I had no fear.

  m

  Salter as a second-year cadet with his mother

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  g o d s o f t i n

  The army, at that time, included what would later become the Air Force, and pilots and aircrews, as well as those supporting them, were members of the army.

  m

  There was a special physical examination in the winter of 1944

  that included the eyes: aligning two pegs in a sort of lighted shoebox by pulling strings—“Am I good enough for the Air

  Corps, sir?”—and identifying colors by picking up various balls of yarn. In April, those who passed, hundreds, that is, including my two roommates and me, went off to flight training in

  the South and Southwest. Hardly believing our good fortune,

  we went as if it were a holiday, by train. Left behind were

  classes, inspections, and many full-dress parades. Ahead was freedom and the joy of months away.

  m

  I was linking everything together, fatalism, sex, war. In my imagination I was already a pilot, handsome, freedom reeking from me, winds coiled round my legs. I had no real idea of what lay ahead, vast southwestern skies with their clouds and shafts of light, towns with railroad tracks running through them and Masonic lodges, dejected country with little lakes and fading cabins amid the pines, Bible country, the air pure with poverty and religious broadcasts. It didn’t matter, I was going.

  t h e f ly i n g y e a r s

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  m

  Pine Bluff, Arkansas, on a loop of a sluggish, curving river, was where we learned to fly. The field was east of town. The flying school there was run by civilians.

  We lived in barracks and were broken up into flights—four

  students to an instructor—alphabetically, of course, although inexplicably I was together with Marlow, Milnor, and Mahl. Our instructor was an ancient, perhaps in his forties, crop duster from a town in the southwest part of the state, Hope, which he described as the watermelon capital of the world. His name was Basil York.

  m

  Early flights, the instructor in the rear cockpit, the bumpy taxiing on the grass, turning into the wind, tail swinging around, dust blowing, and then the abrupt, wild sound of the engine.

  The ground was speeding by, the wheels skipping, and suddenly we were rising in the din to see the blue tree line beyond the field boundary and, below, the curved roofs of the hangers

  falling away. Now fields appeared, swimming out in all directions. The earth became limitless, the horizon, unseen before, rose to fill the world and we were aloft in unstructured air.

  Looking over the side of the airplane, I could not believe it,

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  g o d s o f t i n

  PT-19, primary trainer, the first airplane flown

  the noise, the clatter of the engine, the battering wind, and the flat country below laid out in large rectangular patterns with dirt roads, the glint of occasional metal roofs, smooth water.

  They talked meaninglessly about “section lines.” In the air

  these quickly became real.

  We passed a thousand feet. I felt as helpless as if sitting in a chair at that height. We climbed higher, to fifteen hundred or two thousand feet, the height of the stalls, the first demon-strated maneuvers. The nose soars up into steep blue air,

  higher, higher still, unforgivingly higher, something sickening is happening, the bottom of the seat feels ready to drop away, and the dry voice of the instructor is explaining it as at the top the plane, almost motionless, suddenly shudders, then starts to

  t h e f ly i n g y e a r s

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  fall. Now I am to do this, his matter-of-fact voice directing it: throttle back, pull the nose up, way up, higher, hold it there, hold it . . .

  There were spins, jamming the rudder in at the top of a

  stall and falling, the plane turning around and around like a maple pod. There was the anguish of trying to make proper

  “S” turns across a road, the wind making one loop bigger than the other unless you steepened your bank.

  An hour has passed. All directions have melted away, the

  earth is too vast and confusing to be able to say where we are.

  Only later it is clear that the roads run on cardinal headings, north-south, east-west. The world and everything in it, the

  river, farmers’ houses, the roads and lone cars, are unaware of us, droning above. The field is nowhere in sight. Like a desert, everything visible is almost the same when he says, “OK. Take us home.” It must be this way, you think, though there is nothing to confirm it. After a few minutes, without a word, he

  brusquely corrects the heading ninety degrees as if in disgust.

  Everything you have done has been unsatisfactory, the

  stalls not steep enough, the “S” turns uneven, the nose of the plane continually wandering off in one direction or the other when you are told to hold it straight and level, anything that could speed up, slide, or drift away has done so.

  In the distance, magically, the fiel
d appears and with precision, sometimes explaining what he is doing, he enters the traffic

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  g o d s o f t i n

  pattern and expertly lands. My flying suit is black with sweat.

  Face glazed, disheartened, I scramble from the plane as soon as we park. One of the others is standing there to take my place.

  m

  All was tin, the corrugated hangars shining in the sun, the

  open-cockpit airplanes, the tin gods. We were expected to solo in a few hours, not less than four or more than eight. If you were not able to take off and land by yourself after eight hours, you were washed out. The days were filled with classes,

  briefings, flights, the sound of planes, the smell of them. We were mixed in with regular air cadets, some of whom were

  older and had flown before. We marched with them, singing

  their songs, the vulgarity of which was disarming, and continued to kick into spins at three thousand feet on every flight and mechanically chant the formula: throttle off, stick forward, pause, opposite rudder . . . Even after three or four

  flights I still did not fully understand what a chandelle was supposed to be and had only a faint conception of a landing.

  Like the first buds appearing, individuals began to solo.

  Word of who had done it spread immediately. Face scorched

  red by the sun, in the back cockpit Basil York repeated over and over the desiderata as we entered traffic, “Twenty-fifty and five hundred, twenty-fifty and five hundred.” He was

  referring to engine rpm and traffic pattern altitude. “When

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  you’re flying B-17s,” he said in his high-pitched voice, “I want you to still be hearing that: twenty-fifty and five hundred.” We had begun to execute the landings together, nose up, throttle all the way off, both of us on the stick. I knew his recitation,

  “Start breaking the glide, ease back on the throttle, start

  rounding out, all right, that’s good, hold it off now, hold it off

  . . .” The trouble was, I did not know what it all meant.

  m

  There was the story I heard later, of the instructor who had a favorite trick with students having difficulty learning to land.

  After exhausting the usual means, above the traffic pattern