Sentimental Journey (55 page)

You think, yeah! Hooyah!

Then you get the details from your father, a Major General, and his crony, another Major General named Eisenhower, and General Marshall, who all explain to you how valuable you can be as a “candidate” in a combined special forces intelligence experiment. You completely forget that “candidate” is just another word for “volunteer,” which is just another word for “guinea pig”—something you never want to be in the military.

Then, weeks later, you’re thousands of miles away from your wife, who needs chasing. You’re lying face down in a ravine full of mud—a seventy-pound field pack on your back—after you’ve fallen twenty feet off a log ladder. There’s a captain from the Black Watch, a real son of a bitch who is the commando instructor, standing over you and hollering for you to get your buggering ass up and run fifteen miles . . . again.

At that moment things are pretty clear. You think back to your choices and you ask yourself . . . do you know how to spell “dumb shit”?

Not that long ago, some people had called J.R. a wild son of a bitch. He had thought he was, too. But during the past eleven weeks at the Commando Training Depot here in
Scotland
, he had been with thirty of the wildest sons of bitches anyone would ever think to see.

There were handfuls of men from the
U.S.
,
Canada
,
Britain
,
France
,
Greece
,
Czechoslovakia
,
Russia
, and
Poland
. And they were here to learn from the experienced British
SAS
crack commando units. The ultimate goal: to create small teams of highly trained men for guerrilla hit-and-run action behind enemy lines.

Together they had slogged through bogs, forded rivers, rappelled cliffs, and jumped out of planes into pitch blackness. They could survive in the wilds for a lifetime if they wanted, and could swim across a lake, then come out running and march for twenty miles. Every single one of them could derail a train or blow up a bridge with the smallest possible charge.

But here today during the last week of training, J.R. was racing over the assault course against his teammate, George Inskip, a Brit who was an RAF ace from the Battle of Britain. At stake was twenty pounds, a fifty-year-old bottle of scotch, and a thick steak taken from a box marked for Lord Mountbatten when the supply truck had stopped at the camp mess kitchen that morning.

J.R. clambered down the roof of a smoking house filled with smudge pots, then hit the ground running with full field pack and weapons. Skip was right beside him when he ran up a twenty-foot ladder of logs, then jumped down into the mud and came up ready to fire. He moved carefully over a slender log bridge. If one of his feet slipped, which had happened twice last week, he would fall into a gully of barbed wire.

He jumped off the end of the bridge with Inskip only a few lengths behind him. They ran for the final exercise. The men dubbed it the Achnacarry Death Ride. Each man doubled his toggle rope over a fifty-foot cable and swung like Johnny Weismuller across a river of icy water.

But Tarzan had it easy. He swung through the movie-made jungles, and there weren’t live demolition charges going off under him.

Inskip had caught up with him. They both flung their toggles over the cable. They both missed. J.R. got it on the second toss, looped the rope, and launched off the cliff.

“Bye, bye, buddy!” he yelled.

Skip was barely a second or two behind him.

J.R. watched the other side of the ravine coming toward him and laughed. Then his hand slipped and he slammed into the ground with a loud grunt.

Skip landed on his feet and trotted past him. “Tally ho!” Then he turned backward as he ran and waved at him.

Groaning, J.R. sat up, then rested his hands on his knees as he watched Skip disappear toward the barracks. He shook his head and spelled, “D-u-m-b-s-h-i-t.”

“EAST OF THE
SUN
”

To everyone’s utter surprise, there came a few days of flawlessly perfect weather, with cloudless blue skies and hardly a breath of wind. The enemy bombing raids were at night and concentrated on London. On days like this it felt like the war was far, far away and the goal of every single pilot was to be up there flying around in that big blue sky.

It was a Tuesday, and most of the ferrying pilots had taken to the air with the crack of dawn, but Charley was left bored and alone in the commons room on a Priority-One Wait, which meant she had to stay put and wait for her plane. Once it arrived, she was to fly it to its destination. Pronto.

At the sound of plane engines she got up and looked out the window. Two taxi planes landed on the grass about three minutes apart. They were bringing back some of the pool’s ferrying pilots. Before long, the women came through the doors as they always did, gear hanging about them, chattering, dropping their chutes and vests, and making straight for a tea cart. It was loaded daily with wonderfully delicious sandwiches—the English made a sandwich better than anyone in the world—and sweet, freshly baked cakes brought to them by the generous local women, who drew lots for the days of the week they would supply the pilots and airfield workers.

Around the base they were known as Miss Judith Wednesday, cheese and cucumber sandwiches and strawberry cake, Mrs. Flora Tuesday, salmon, cream cheese, and pudding, and Mrs. Mary Friday, who had a farm, so she often brought egg salad and nut bread with cinnamon.

“Hey there, Charley.” Dolores poured a cup of tea. “You’re back early.”

“I haven’t left yet. I drew a P-one-W and have been sitting here half the day.”

“It’s your punishment for capturing the attention of the most eligible bachelor in all of Great Britain.” Paulette, one of the British pilots, sat down across from her with a full plate.

Charley groaned.
Not this again.

“You are so lucky. What a dreamboat!”

“I go all gooey for a man with dark hair and blue eyes.”

All of them, the three British pilots and the American women, were looking at her expectantly. “I’ve told you this before. We only danced together for a few dances. That was all.”

“Oh, right.” Lois laughed. “He called here twice for you.”

“But you weren’t here.” Joan said. “I told him I was available, Charley, but he’d already hung up.”

“That was weeks and weeks ago. The last I saw of Pilot Commander Inskip was the wave of his hand and the back of his dark head when he walked out the door of the dance, with his cousin . . . if she even was his cousin.”

“Oh, she’s his cousin all right. We checked for you, sweetie.” Dolores patted her shoulder as she walked past. “Apparently he hasn’t dated anyone since his wife was killed. You’re it.”

“There’s nothing going on between us. There’s not going to
be
anything going on. He danced with me. Period.”

“I don’t know, Charley. You two looked like a smooth couple on that dance floor.”

“We were a couple. There were two of us.”

“You know what I meant.”

“Where’s he from, anyway?”

“Didn’t Connie say something about the family estate in the Uplands?”

“Whoa.” Dolores raised her hand. “Stop right there. Don’t listen to Connie. She’s not too good with geography. Back at training school in Texas, when Rosalie came in and told us the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, Connie looked up with all seriousness—I swear this is true—and asked, ‘Who’s Pearl Harbor?’ “

Paulette, Joan, and Lois, the British pilots, who hadn’t heard the story before, began to laugh pretty hard.

“Did I hear the words ‘Pearl Harbor’?” Connie came in and closed the door behind her. “Are you telling that horrid little story again? Such silly old news.”

“Maybe, but you’re never going to live it down.” Dolores said, laughing.

“No. I’m not. Thanks to most of you. You’ll probably still be telling it when my grandchildren are alive.”

“Well, you have to admit it was pretty funny. We
were
in navigation classes.”

“I’m from Vermont. I’ve never been to the Hawaiian Islands. One of you needs to do something really stupid and save me from Dolores’s big mouth.”

Before anyone could respond, the door burst open and Rosalie came storming inside. She tossed her brown leather helmet on an empty chair. “You are not going to believe this!”

Dolores handed her a cup of black tea. “What?”

“Thanks.” Rosalie took a sip. “I had a Hurricane to deliver to East Anglia, and someone from chain watch thought I was a bogie, so they ordered up three more aircraft to investigate me.”

“That happened to me last month.”

“Well, it gets better. Those planes, too, were designated as bogies, so the next thing you know, half the fighter command is in the air, flying around to investigate themselves and me.”

Everyone was laughing.

“It could have been worse.” Dolores poured her own tea. “They might have classified you as a bandit instead of merely unidentified aircraft.”

“That’s right,” Connie said. “Someone might have shot you down.”

“Oh, wait.” Rosalie held up her hand. “I’m not done. We’re going over the Thames at about five thousand feet, and Ops tells us to circle until they can figure out what to do with all of us. So, get this. Every time we pass over the ack-ack batteries, they open fire on us.”

Dolores was laughing so hard she was snorting and holding herself up with one hand on the tea cart.

“We didn’t dare break orders, so we tried to edge off course a little each time we passed the guns.”

“Good God . . . ” someone muttered.

“Ops finally makes a decision—there is a God—and sends us to Hornchurch. Well, get this . . . when we land, the CO gets on the phone and tracks down the battery commander, who tells him he is ‘frightfully sorry, but his chaps have been on alert for a long time and were getting rather rusty, so when we all came along, it gave them the chance for some real target practice.’ “

“Lord, but I do so love the British way of dealing with mistakes,” Dolores said.

“He then pointed out, with this twisted bit of logic, that the very fact that they hadn’t hit any of us just proved how badly they needed the practice.” She set her tea down and grabbed a sandwich, then flopped down in a Morris chair, disgusted. She pulled her hair ribbon out of her curly dark hair and tied it around her wrist. “I swear, I am never flying over Sheppey again.”

Paddy the dispatcher stuck his head in the door. “Morrison. Your plane’s here. It’s that Lysander II the crew’s fueling up.”

Charley grabbed her gear. “See you later!” She walked outside, spotted the plane, and began to run across the grass toward it.

Paddy caught up with her. “Here’s the paperwork.” He shoved it in her hand. “Good luck!” He turned around and made off for the base office.

She climbed into the pilot’s seat with the help of one of the crew, who were just removing the fuel hose. She did her checks quickly, then fired her up. Soon she was in the air.

A half an hour into her flight Charley stared down below her wing at the coast drifting by. From above, the land below looked human: a spine of a railroad track; the green hills, patches of farmland, and small villages formed the vital organs and the muscles that made it strong; the rivers, truly the veins of the land.