The Second Trip

“He had been out among the dragons, he said, and he assured himself that they were not so hideous as he had imagined them.”

― Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage

Twenty-two degrees with howling winds out of the northwest, and a light dusting of snow that fell overnight.

I'll be out in it a little later this morning, visiting the doctor over in Elmira for a look at this knee that keeps getting more immobile and painful. I sense an expensive arthroscopy in my future, just in time for my three months in Manhattan walking a mile each way to class.

Dio arrives here from Tampa a little later, one of our posse of surrogate sons Peg has assembled over the years. He's ostensibly here to help her plan the decor for the one unfinished room in this new condo, but I figure as much as anything it's just a chance to visit for a couple days. We'll all ride up to the lake after Peg gets off work mid-afternoon, where I'll smoke something on the Traeger for P's big New Year's Eve gathering tomorrow night. She's expecting north of a dozen. These things leave her energized; I tend to grow weary rather quickly in social settings beyond a couple friends, enjoyable as the occasions may be.

The other night I was complimenting Peg about the fairly amazing arc of her professional life, and what she'd accomplished over those decades. I commented that it all took a lot of courage. She responded, "Yes, but I never flew a jet with someone shooting at me."

She mentions that often. This morning in the long winter predawn I found myself musing on the observation, on what constitutes courage and whether that was really it.

I've told folks before that it didn't take any sort of special bravery to climb up the ladder and into the cockpit that first night of the war. There was certainly fear, but it was the generic type we all experience when facing a great unknown. None of us had any idea what combat would look like, or how we would respond. Fear of behaving shamefully under fire felt every bit as strong as the fear of getting vaporized by an antiaircraft artillery shell.

My first night across the fence we escorted a flight of F-111s sent to bomb an airfield halfway up the Euphrates between Basra and Baghdad. The trip up was uneventful. The first sign we were in a shooting war arrived with the flashes of the 2000 pound precision bombs smashing through the doors of individual aircraft shelters, met with wild, blind sprays of orange tracers into the blackness. Our CAP (combat air patrol) was set up a safe distance to the southwest.

On the way home, I learned the hard way that my inertial navigation set, a self-contained precursor to GPS, had precessed and drifted several miles west of my actual position. How did I find that out? My wingman, maybe six miles in trail, fumbled for a Snickers bar he'd left on the left console, and accidentally touched the switch activating his countermeasures dispenser. Flares spilled out behind him. I saw the flash in my rearview mirror and thought he'd been hit by something in the pitch black.

"Prestone Four, status?"

"Damned switch," he replied.

At this point the sky lit up with a sea of tracers rising from directly below me. Instead of passing just west of Talil Air Base, the largest Iraqi fighter base in that part of Iraq, we were directly overhead. Or at least I was.

I've told the story before, and won't relive it in detail here. Lots of AAA exploding mostly below me, but too much for comfort around me. Jinking to avoid dying as a predictable target. Sinking into more AAA. Watching an SA-9 flash from its launcher and start pulling lead on me before petering out. Crawling up out of the chaos in full afterburner at the edge of a stall.

Not a great way to start the war.

But as for courage, I guess my point is that getting to that moment didn't take much. It was that second trip up the ladder, having seen the Elephant. That was a sick feeling, knowing exactly what was coming in a few hours in the skies over Basra.

Eventually one grows strangely accustomed to the dance, to hearing your radar warning receiver ring to life with a warning that a SAM battery is tracking your jet with its radar, to seeing the grey poofs when a 100 millimeter antiaircraft shell explodes near your formation. Flying an F-15 a hundred miles inside enemy territory is a busy exercise, alone in a cockpit dense with sensory inputs yet strangely quiet except for your own breathing. In a way, you're too busy to spend time pondering the danger of the situation.

Over the years since the war- -roughly two weeks shy of thirty-five as I sit here--I've thought about whether any of that could be considered a genuine display of courage. The casus belli of that conflict was so very thin--fighting there was like being a redcoat in harm's way battling the Zulus or the Boxers. The thing that kept you from breaking and running wasn't so much the cause as loyalty to the guys on either side of you. I'm not sure that's bravery, or if shame or the fear of disgrace keeps one facing the enemy. Maybe all of the above?

It has occurred to me that real courage would have meant not going at all, declaring the whole thing too ridiculous to participate. I could never do that--the Air Force paid my way through school, taught me to fly, gave me an identity besides Mike From Hemet, home of the largest trailer park in the United States. One doesn't take a stand against the foolishness of discretionary wars by joining the military and then chickening out. So I went, and did my bit.

But real courage? I think of a high school buddy who remains a friend to this day, standing on the side of Florida Avenue in Hemet in 1981 with a handful of fellow travelers protesting our shameful support of the Contras in Nicaragua . He and his friends received some feedback alright, and not the good kind in that most conservative of California retirement towns. But they stood there with their signs anyway, because it was the right thing to do.

Now that, my friends, took guts.