The tail gunner comes from so close to the
border of Kentucky he talks like a Kentuckian. “I read a very nice piece in a
magazine about us,” he says. “This piece says we’ve got nerves of steel. We
never get scared. All we want in the world is just to fly all the time and get
a crack at Jerry. I never heard anything so brave as us. I read it three or
four times to try and convince myself that I ain’t scared.”
“There was almost solid red flack over Bremen
last Thursday,” the radio man says. “Get much more and we can walk home over
solid flak. I hate that red flak. We sure took a pasting Thursday.”
“Well, we didn’t get any,” says Henry Maurice
Grain, one of the gunners. “We got the nose knocked out of our ship, but that
was an accident. One of the gunners in a ship high on ahead tossed out some
shell casings and they came right through the nose. They’ve got her nearly
fixed up now.”
“But anyway,” the first man says doggedly, “I
wish they’d tell them at home that the war isn’t over and I wish they wouldn’t
think we’re so brave. I don’t want to be so brave. Shall we have another beer?”
“What for?” says the tail gunner. “This stuff
hasn’t got even enough character for you to dislike it, I’m going back to wipe
my guns. Then I won’t have to do it in the morning.”
They stand up and file slowly out of the pub.
It is still daylight. The pigeons are flying about the tower of an old Gothic
church, a kind of architecture especially suited to nesting pigeons.
The hotel taken over by the Red Cross is
crowded with men in from the flying fields which dot the countryside. Our bus
drives up in front and we pile in. The crew looks automatically at the sky. It
is clear, with little puffs of white cloud suspended in the light of a sun that
has already gone down.
“Looks like it might be a clear day,” the radio
man says. “That’s good for us and it’s good for them to get at us.”
The bus rattles back toward the field. The tail
gunner muses. “I hope old Red Beard has got a bad cold,” he says. “I didn’t
like the look in his eye last time.”
(Red Beard is an enemy fighter pilot who comes
so close that you can almost see his face.)
SUPERSTITION
BOMBER STATION IN ENGLAND, June 30, 1943—It
is a bad night in the barracks, such a night as does not happen very often. It
is impossible to know how it starts. Nerves are a little thin and no one is
sleepy. The tail gunner of the other outfit in the room gets down from his
upper bunk and begins rooting about on the floor.
