Air Force Eagles (21 page)

When she started, Patty had advised her to go to the major drug store and grocery chains to sell her products. On the first three tries, Saundra didn't get past the receptionist, so she changed her tactics. The fourth firm on her list was Phipps Pharmaceuticals. Instead of trying to see a buyer, she called the secretary of the company president. With a little soft talk and some joking, the secretary had set her up to see the head man—Mr. Phipps himself.

She'd never forget that walk through the office, filled with hundreds of identical desks, each with a white clerk bent over it, pulling calculator handles, filling the air with the click of numbers and the whirl of paper. Apparently, they didn't see many Negro women; as she passed through she could feel their eyes following her as if she were a particularly unpleasant-looking bug crawling across each of their desks.

By the time she'd reached Phipps's office, she felt scared; when she saw Phipps himself, she was terrified. Tall and lean, he towered over his enormous mahogany desk like God at the Judgment table. Then he smiled and talked to her courteously before sending her to a buyer with a genuine knowledge of their stores' clientele. The buyer, impressed that she'd come directly from Phipps's office, placed an initial order that completely swamped her capacity. She'd been three weeks late in delivery and was terrified that Phipps—God himself—would cancel. If he had, it would have been all over, for she'd spent three thousand dollars on materials and equipment, and had another two thousand dollars on order.

But Phipps was patient, and the products had been runaway successes. Now she had a clientele of her own, four major drug and grocery chains, and she was still doing all the mixing and packaging, but at the end of the month she planned to hire some help.

John would never have let her do it. As much as he loved her, he would never have let her work so hard, take so many chances, beard so many men—white men at that—in their dens. Instead, she would have been keeping house for him, and—maybe—loving it.

Best of all, the business was lucrative. She'd be able to afford her own television set in a few months. She thought she'd get a Dumont; they were over four hundred dollars, but she liked the round screen, and they seemed to be the best. And if things kept up, she'd buy a house and a car, too.

Today's appointment was with Abe Doerker, a buyer for the Allied Markets chain. He'd been hard to reach, and it had taken a call from Phipps to get through to him.

When she got to Doerker's office it proved to be nice enough, always a sign that she had reached someone with enough authority to make a decision to buy. His secretary, Blanche, had been a little snippy, slamming the door when Doerker asked her to bring them coffee, as if she was not accustomed to waiting on a Negress.

Saundra's sales success had given her a good routine, and she felt well in control of the meeting. Doerker was tall with thinning blond hair and a paunch poised over his belt like a lip of snow over a roof, his mouth weak and jaw slack.

The meeting had started off professionally, with Doerker asking intelligent questions about discounts and delivery times. Then he'd moved around to her side of the desk and leaned over her. "Well, we're certainly going to have to have some of your products in all of our stores," dangling the word
all
as Svengali dangled the watch. "But 1 have other interests, too, like lingerie."

Suddenly he pulled her face to his, mashing his open mouth on hers, thrusting his slimy sausage tongue between her lips, while his right hand slipped between her legs.

Revolted, wondering what on earth he could have had for lunch to make his breath so bad, Saundra raised her hand and poured hot coffee over the back of Doerker's head. He tumbled backward, screaming, tripping over the telephone table to collapse in a heap on the floor.

Blanche burst through the door to find Saundra calmly packing her samples into her case. The secretary broke into laughter as Doerker struggled to his feet, furious, eyes blazing, yelling, "You black bitch, get out of here."

Saundra smiled at Blanche. 'Thanks for the coffee. It came in handy."

Later, she reflected that her average was not bad; she'd made hundreds of calls, and while it wasn't the first time that a buyer had made suggestive remarks, it was the only time she'd been assaulted. Yet it bothered her; she wished John, or someone, were there to protect her.

*

K-2, Taegu, Korea/January 22, 1951

Marshall had flown fourteen missions with the Fireballs and had grown to love the sleek, straight-winged F-84s. Like their World War II predecessor, the Thunderbolt, they were heavy, rugged ground lovers that needed lots of runway. The F-84s were expensive—$300,000 each—but they were reliable and nimble enough below twenty-five thousand feet.

In the past, when Marshall had taken stock of himself, he had never been satisfied, even when Saundra forced him to admit that he was doing pretty well for a preacher's son from Cleveland. The two kills in Italy, two more that didn't count in Israel, and flying the rocket plane at McNaughton was pretty good by anybody's standards. Yet his self-esteem still suffered—he'd left the Air Force and been fired at McNaughton and in Salinas. He had begun to build some confidence in the Philippines and at K-2—when he had run into Coleman's constant sneering.

It was much better now, with the REMCO achievement behind him, and serving with the 27th, but he still had the burning hunger to be the first Negro ace. It wasn't any of this "credit to your race" nonsense that you saw in the newspapers. He knew that he was as good or better than any pilot in the squadron, and that if anyone could do it in F-84s, he could. The drive to be an ace was simply undeniable, overcoming even his dismal loneliness, his aching need for Saundra.

At Taegu, the only fly in the ointment was a prissy West Pointer who'd washed out of flying school and refused other flight training, announcing that he'd leave the service as soon as his obligated tour was up. The Air Force didn't care for his attitude so they sent First Lieutenant Kirby Gant to Korea to serve as adjutant in the 27th.

Compared to the way Coleman treated him, Marshall saw Gant as a lightweight, the comic stereotype of an adjutant, a groveling perfectionist for superiors, a tyrannical bully to the exasperated enlisted men who worked for him. He'd alienated everyone with his continual complaints about everything from the noise of the engines running up to the pilots wearing flight clothes to the mess hall.

Always defensive, Gant compensated for being a washed-out pilot by constantly bragging about his four-letter athletic prowess at the Point. Marshall, trying to be agreeable in one of their early conversations, mentioned that he'd lettered in track in high school and college, doing the broad jump. Gant immediately nicknamed him "Little Jesse," and had broadly patronized him ever since, obviously annoyed that a Negro could make it through flight school when he could not.

Gant bothered Riley as much as he did Marshall, and they'd decided to get even, to fix Gant in some memorable way. Tonight was a good night—a whiskey front, as they called the bad weather from Siberia, was moving in and the weather boys had forecast a complete standout the next day.

Riley posted a kickapoo joy juice party sign on the rough board shack that served as their club, and he and Marshall went around collecting the miniature bottles of mission whiskey the pilots received after each sortie. Most of the pilots saved them for just such an occasion, and two contributed whole fifths that they'd brought back from Japan. Riley poured it all into a big mess hall soup cauldron, diluting it with gallon cans of GI fruit juices, mostly the acid orange, but with a few cans of the slightly sweeter pineapple. He dropped a big chunk of dry ice into the mixture to chill it, setting the cauldron boiling like the potion in an amateur production of
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
It didn't taste very good, but after the first two went down, taste no longer mattered.

Inside the hut, Riley had arranged for a few friends to egg Gant on, plying him with Joy Juice and asking him questions about his athletic ability, particularly his broad jumping. Flattered to be the center of attention for once, Gant grew pretty expansive.

While Gant was so pleasantly engaged, Marshall and Riley went to the supply shack, where enough emergency equipment to last two wars was stacked to the ceiling. They pulled two cases of dye marker, the yellow-aluminum powder that a downed airman was supposed to spread from his raft, and carted them out to the evil-smelling stream that sluggishly snaked through the center of the camp. The pilots called it the Nile; it was bone dry in the summer, but the winter rains filled it with the pestilential runoff from the surrounding Korean farms. Then they rigged a rope between two trees so that it ran across the center of the stream, loosening it so that it sagged into the water.

Working quickly, they emptied the die into the pool that had formed near the footbridge across the Nile, let it spread, and went back inside to stand next to Gant and his circle of admirers.

Gant looked up and said, "Well, well, here's Little Jesse himself. Jump any broads lately?" Everyone laughed except Marshall, and Gant drank another glass, very pleased with the good response to his sally; these guys weren't so bad, after all.

Normally Marshall just smiled and took Gant's ribbing. Tonight he said, "Well, I'll bet I can outjump you, Gant. Why don't we have a little contest, a broad jump over the Nile?"

Gant smirked. "You're on—but you go first." He grinned owlishly around the hut, reinforced by the amused approval and support from his new circle of friends.

The hut emptied at the prospect of a contest. Marhsall marked off a spot on the ground as the takeoff board, took a twenty-yard run, jumped, and cleared the Nile by four feet.

Gant was not impressed. "No sweat. I'll move the board back four feet and still beat you."

As Gant turned around to mark off his run, Riley stood by the rope he'd slung.

The pilots cheered as Gant assumed the sprinter's position, pounded down his track, and hit the takeoff board. Just as he jumped, Riley pulled up on the rope, catching Gant in midair and dropping him into the Nile like a sack of flour. Looking like a wet Crayola, Gant struggled out of the Nile to the raucous laughter of the group, going to the showers without saying a word. The next day, skin still bright yellow, he demanded a full series of shots from the flight surgeon and a transfer from the C.O.

Two days later, long before dawn, the two co-conspirators were double-timing down the PSP ramp that led from the mess hall to the operations shack. Mildly content after a wretched eggs and spam breakfast, they were still laughing about Gant's spectacular plunge. Both were a little older than the new troops coming through—this was their third war—and they knew their sophomoric high jinks had helped the younger pilots let off steam.

"What's the mission?"

Bear was puffing a little from their run. "You'll love it! They want a maximum effort, a thirty-three-airplane strike at Sinuiju Airfield. The B-29s are going to be hitting Pyongyang."

"What kind of opposition they calling for?"

"The usual heavy flak—and they've got seventy-five MiGs sitting at Antung, across the Yalu. Intelligence says that our ground support is tearing the Commies up. We might get a reaction from the MiGs. Maybe we'll get lucky and they'll mix it up. You know they shot down a P-80 last week."

A hot flush of anticipation went through Marshall. Maybe he'd get a chance for a kill at Sinuiju.

Bear read his mind. "Look—I know what being an ace means to you. Don't press—don't get yourself killed. You've shot down four airplanes, that's more than most of the guys who call themselves aces have."

It was true. Lots of pilots who had one or two victories claimed to be aces. Some of them did it so often that they began to believe it themselves.

"Only two counted. But I won't press—and I won't let anybody slip by me, either."

There was no more conversation. They went into the briefing tent, then helped the ground crews pull the canvas covers off the canopies and controls, making sure the wings weren't frosted over. They wouldn't have had to do it, but they were pros, and they knew that the sense of solidarity was important to the airmen on the line.

The slightly distorted Saint Andrew's cross of Sinuiju Airfield lay 350 miles to the northwest, its runways a blot on the sheet of snow that ran from Siberia to Pusan. To the west, the Yellow Sea bulged swelling and hostile like a sullen gray balloon inflated with some evil gas. From its corner, a dank twisting tendril extended inland to separate Red China and North Korea. It was the Yalu, the magic shield of the North Korean Air Force. United Nations forces were not allowed to cross the Yalu, and the Chinese used its sanctuary to field their growing legions of MiG 15s that were piloted, according to rumor, by Russians, Chinese, and even some Germans.

The river was spanned by a string of Japanese bridges that stitched the two countries together like a zipper. The B-29s had been hammering the steel and concrete bridges since November, but from the Chinese People's Republic a steady stream of men, munitions, and materiel poured down to the armies that had driven the United Nations forces all the way back down the peninsula. The Reds had retaken Pyongyang in December and Seoul had fallen for the second time on January 4th.

Today, the B-29s were going after Pyongyang again, trying to stop the flow of road and rail traffic. The 27th was sending out eight flights of Thunderjets, all loaded with maximum ammunition, but no ordnance. Two flights—eight aircraft—would strafe the field at Sinuiju, while the others would orbit at altitude to fly top cover.