The Intruders

10

Jake and Flap flew a tanker hop the next afternoon, which was the last scheduled flying day before the ship entered Pearl Harbor. They were in the high orbit, flying the five-mile arc around the ship at 20,000 feet, when Flap said, “I hear you are putting in a letter of resignation.”

Since it wasn’t a question, Jake didn’t reply. He had talked to the first-class yeoman in the air wing office this morning, and apparently the yeoman talked to the Marines.

“That right?” Flap demanded.

“Yeah.”

“You know, you are one amazing dude. Yesterday afternoon you dropped six five-hundred-pounders visually and got four bull’s-eyes, then did six system bore-sights and got three more. Seven bull’s-eyes out of twelve bombs. That performance puts you first in the squadron, by the way.”

This comment stirred Jake Grafton. In the society of warriors to which he belonged it was very bad form to brag, to congratulate yourself or listen placidly while others congratulated you on your superb flying abilities. The fig leaf didn’t have to cover much, but modesty required that he wave it. “Pure luck,” Jake muttered. “The wind was real steady, which is rare, and—”

Flap steamed on, uninterested in fig leaves. “Then you motor back to the ship and go down the slide like you’re riding a rail, snag an okay three-wire, find out a guy crashed, announce it’s all your fault because you knew something he didn’t, and submit a letter of resignation. Now is that weird or what?”

“I didn’t announce anything was my fault.”

“Horse shit. You announced it to yourself.”

“I didn’t—”

“I had a little talk with the Real McCoy last night,” Flap explained. “You were moping down in your room. You sure as hell weren’t crying over Rory Smith — you hardly knew the guy. You were feeling sorry for yourself.”

“What an extraordinary insight, Doctor Freud! I can see now why I’m so twisted — when I was a kid my parents wouldn’t let me screw my kitty cat. Send me a bill for this consultation. In the meantime shut the fuck up!”

Silence followed Jake’s roar. The two men sat staring into the infinity of the sky as the shadow cast by the canopy bow walked across their laps. This shadow was the only relief from the intense tropic sunshine which shone down from the deep, deep blue.

“Hard to believe that over half the earth’s atmosphere is below us,” Flap said softly. “Without supplemental oxygen, at this altitude, most fit men would pass out within thirty minutes. You know, you’ve flown so many times that flying has probably become routine with you. That’s the trap we all fall into. Sometimes we forget that we are really small blobs of protoplasm journeying haphazardly through infinity. All we have to sustain us are our little lifelines. The oxygen will keep flowing, the engines will keep burning, the plane will hold together, the ship will be waiting…Well, listen to the news. The lifelines can break. We are like the man on the tightrope above Niagara Falls: the tiniest misstep, the smallest inattention, the most minuscule miscalculation, and disaster follows.”

Flap paused for a moment, then continued: “A lot of people have it in their heads that God gave them a guarantee when they were born. At least seventy years of vigorous life, hard work will earn solid rewards, your wife will be faithful, your sons courageous, your daughters virtuous, justice will be done, love will be enough — in the event of problems, the manufacturer will set things right. Like hell! The truth is that life, like flying, is fraught with hazards. We are all up on that tightrope trying to keep our balance. Inevitably, people fall off.”

In spite of himself Jake was listening to Flap. That was the problem with the bastard’s monologues — you couldn’t ignore them.

“I think you’re worth saving, Grafton. You’re the best pilot I’ve met in the service. You are very very good. And you want to throw it all away. That’s pretty sad.”

Flap paused. If he was giving Jake a chance to reply, he was disappointed. After a bit he continued:

“I never had much respect for you Navy guys. You think the military is like a corporation — you do your job, collect your green government check, and you can leave any time you get the itch. Maybe the Navy is that way. Thank God, the Corps isn’t.”

Stung, Jake broke his silence. “During our short acquaintance, you haven’t heard one snotty remark out of me about the Holy Corps. But if you want to start trading insults, I can probably think up a few.”

Flap ignored Jake. “We Marines are all in this together,” he said, expanding on his thesis. “When one man slips off the rope, we’ll grab him on the way down. We’ll all hang together and we’ll do what we have to do to get the job done. The Corps is bigger than all of us, and once you are a part of it, you are a part of it forever. Semper Fidelis. If you die, when you die, the Corps goes on. It’s sorta like a church…”

Flap fell silent, thinking. The Corps was very hard to explain to someone who wasn’t a Marine. He had tried it a few times in the past and always gave up. His explanations usually sounded trite, maybe even a little silly. “Male bonding bullshit,” one woman told him after he had delivered himself of a memorable attempt. He almost slapped her.

For you see, the Corps was real. The feelings the Corps aroused in Flap and his fellow Marines were as real, as tangible, as the uniforms they wore and the weapons they carried. They would be loyal, they would be faithful, even unto death. Semper Fi. They belonged to something larger than themselves that gave their lives a meaning, a purpose, that was denied to lesser men, like civilians worried about earning a living. To Marines like Flap civilians concerned with getting and spending, getting and spending, were beneath contempt. They were like flies, to be ignored or brushed away.

“I’m trying to explain,” he told Jake Grafton now, “because I think you could understand. You’re a real good aviator. You’re gifted. You owe it to yourself, to us, to hang tough, hang in there, keep doing what you know so well how to do.”

“I’ve had enough,” Jake told him curtly. He had little patience for this sackcloth and ashes crap. He had fought in one war. He had seen its true face. If Flap wanted to wrap himself in the flag that was his business, but Jake Grafton had decided to get on with his life.

“Rory Smith knew,” Flap told him with conviction. “He was one fine Marine. He knew the risks and did his job anyway. He was all Marine.”

“And he’s dead.”

“So? You and I are gonna die too, you know. Nobody ever gets out of life alive. Smith died for the Corps, but you’re gonna go be a civilian, live the soft life until you check out. Some disease or other is going to kill you someday — cancer, heart disease, maybe just plain old age. Then you’ll be as dead as Rory Smith. Now I ask you, what contribution will you have made?”

“I already made it.”

“Oh no! Oh no! Smith made his contribution — he gave all that he had. You’ve slipped one thin dime into the collection plate, Ace, and now you announce that dime is your fair share. Like hell!”

“I’ve had about two quarts more than enough from you today, Le Beau,” Jake spluttered furiously. “I did two cruises to the Nam. I dropped my bombs and killed my gooks and left my friends over there in the mud to rot. For what? For not a single goddamn thing, that’s for what. You think you’re on some sort of holy mission to protect America? The idiot green knight. Get real — those pot-smoking flower-power hippies don’t want protection. You’d risk your life for them? If they were dying of thirst I wouldn’t piss in their mouths!”

Jake Grafton was snarling now. “I’ve paid my dues in blood, Le Beau, my blood. Don’t give me any more shit about my fair share!”

Silence reigned in the cockpit as the KA-6D tanker continued to orbit the ship 20,000 feet below, at max conserve airspeed, each engine sucking a ton of fuel per hour, under the clean white sun. Since the tanker had no radar, computer or inertial navigation system, there was nothing for Flap to do but sit. So he sat and stared at that distant, hazy horizon. With the plane on autopilot, there was also little for Jake to do except scan the instruments occasionally and alter angle-of-bank as required to stay on the five-mile arc. This required almost no effort. He too spent most of his time staring toward that distant, infinite place where the sky reached down to meet the sea.

The crazy thing was that the horizon looked the same in every direction. In all directions. Pick a direction, any direction, and that uniform gauzy junction of sea and sky obscured everything that lay beyond. Yet intelligence tells us that direction is critical — life itself is a journey toward something, somewhere…

Which way?

Jake Grafton sat silently, looking, wondering.

Hank Davis was still in a private room in sick bay when Jake dropped by to see him. He looked pale, an impression accentuated by his black-as-coal, pencil-thin mustache.

“Hey, Hank, when they gonna let you out of here?”

“I’m under observation. Whenever they get tired of observing. I dunno.”

“So how you doing?” Jake settled into the only chair and looked the bombardier over carefully.

Davis shrugged. “Some days you eat the bear, some days the bear eats you. He got a big bite of my butt yesterday. A big bite.”

“Well, you made it. You pulled the handle while you still had time, so you’re alive.”

“You ejected once, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” Jake Grafton told him. “Over Laos. Got shot up over Hanoi.”

“Ever have second thoughts?”

“Like what?”

“Well, like maybe you were too worried about your own butt and not enough about the other guy’s?”

“I thought the VDI came out on the shot? Went into Smith’s lap?”

“Yeah.”

“Hank! What could you do? The damned thing weighs seventy pounds. Even with your help, Smith couldn’t have got it back into its tray. No way. If you’d crawled across to help, you’d both be dead now. It’s not like you guys had a half hour to dick with this problem.”

Davis didn’t reply. He looked at a wall, swallowed hard.

Jake Grafton racked his brains for a way to reach out. I should have told you guys about checking the VDI’s security. Although he felt that, he didn’t say it.

Hank related the facts of his ejection in matter-of-fact tones. The chute had not completely opened when he hit the water. So he hit the water way too hard and had trouble getting out of his chute. The swimmer from the helicopter had been there in seconds and saved his bacon. Still, he swallowed a lot of seawater and almost drowned.

“I dunno, Jake. Sometimes life’s pretty hard to figure. When you look at it close, the only thing that makes a difference is luck. Who lives or who dies is just luck. ‘The dead guy screwed up,’ everybody says. Of course he screwed up. Lady Luck crapped all over him. And if that’s true, then everything else is a lie — religion, professionalism, everything. We are all just minnows swimming in the sea and luck decides when it’s your turn. Then the shark eats you and that’s the fucking end of that.”

“If it’s all luck, then these guilt trips don’t make much sense, do they?” Jake observed.

“Right now the accident investigators are down in the avionics shop,” Hank Davis told him. “They are looking for the simple bastard who didn’t get the VDI screwed in right. All this shit is gonna get dumped right on that poor dumb son of a bitch! ‘Rory Smith is dead and it’s your fault.’ Makes me want to puke some more.”

Squadron life revolves around the ready room, ashore or afloat. Since the A-6 squadrons always had the most flight crewmen, they always got the biggest ready room, in most ships Ready Five, but in Columbia, Ready Four. The ready room was never big enough. It was filled with comfortable, padded chairs that you could sink into and really relax, even sleep in, but there weren’t enough of them for all the officers.

In some squadrons when all the officers assembled for a meeting — an AOM — chairs were assigned by strict seniority. In other outfits the rule was first come, first served. How it was done depended on the skipper, who always got a chair up front by the duty desk, the best seat in the house. Lieutenant Colonel Haldane believed that rank had its privileges — at least when not airborne — so seniority reigned here. Jake Grafton ended up with a seat four rows back. The nuggets, first lieutenants on their first cruise, stood around the back of the room or sat on metal folding chairs.

AOMs were social and business events. Squadron business was thrashed out in these meetings, administrative matters dealing with the ship and the demands of the amorphous bureaucracies of the Navy and the Marine Corps were considered, lectures delivered on NATOPs and flying procedures, the “word” passed, all manner of things.

At these soirees all the officers in the squadron got to know each other well. Here one got a close look at the department heads — the “heavies”—watched junior officers in action, here the commanding officer exerted his leadership and molded the flight crews into a military unit.

In addition to the legal authority with which he was cloaked, the commanding officer was always the most experienced flyer there and the most senior. How he used these assets was the measure of the man, for truly, his responsibility was very great. In addition to the aircraft entrusted to him, he was responsible for about 350 enlisted men and three dozen officers. He was legally and morally responsible for every facet of their lives, from the adequacy of their living quarters to their health, professional development and performance. And he was responsible for the squadron as a military unit in combat, which meant the lives of his men were in his hands.

The responsibility crushed some men, but most commanding officers flourished under it. This was the professional zenith that they had spent their careers working to attain. By the time they reached it they had served under many commanding officers. The wise ones adopted the best of the leadership styles of their own former skippers and adapted it as necessary to suit their personalities. Leadership could not be learned from a book: it was the most intangible and the most human of the military skills.

In American naval aviation the best skippers led primarily by example and the force of their personalities — they intentionally kept the mood light as they gave orders, praised, cajoled, hinted, encouraged, scolded, ridiculed, laughed at and commented upon whatever and whomever they wished. The ideal that they seemed to instinctively strive for was a position as first among equals. Consequently AOMs were normally spirited affairs, occasionally raucous, full of good humor and camaraderie, with every speaker working hard to gain his audience’s attention and cope with catcalls and advice — good, bad, indifferent and obscene. In this environment intelligence and good sense could flourish, here experience could be shared and everyone could learn from everyone else, here the bonds necessary to sustain fighting men could be forged.

This evening Rory Smith’s death hung like a gloomy pall in the air.

Colonel Haldane spoke first. He told them what he knew of the accident, what Hank Davis had said. Then he got down to it:

“The war is over and still we have planes crashing and people dying. Hard to figure, isn’t it? This time it wasn’t the bad guys. The gomers didn’t get Rory Smith in three hundred and twenty combat missions, although they tried and they tried damned hard. He had planes shot up so badly on three occasions that he was decorated for getting the planes back. What got him was a VDI that slid out of its tray in the instrument panel and jammed the stick.

“Did he think about ejecting? I don’t know. I wish he had ejected. I wish to God we still had Rory Smith with us. Maybe he was worried about getting his legs cut off if he pulled the handle. Maybe he didn’t have time to punch. Maybe he thought he could save it. Maybe he didn’t realize how quickly the plane was getting into extremis. Lots of maybes. We’ll never know.”

He picked up the blue NATOPs manual lying on the podium and held it up. “This book is the Bible. The engineers that built this plane and the test pilots that wrung it out put their hearts and souls into this book — for you. Telling you everything they knew. And the process didn’t stop there — as new things are learned about the plane the book is continually updated. It’s a living document. You should know every word in it. That is the best insurance you can get on this side of hell.

“But the book doesn’t cover everything. Sooner or later you are going to run into something that isn’t covered in the book. Whether you survive the experience will be determined by your skill, your experience, and your luck.

“There’s been a lot of mumbling around here the last twenty-four hours about luck. Well, there is no such thing. You can’t feel it, taste it, smell it, touch it, wear it, fuck it, or eat it. It doesn’t exist!

“This thing we call luck is merely professionalism and attention to detail, it’s your awareness of everything that is going on around you, it’s how well you know and understand your airplane and your own limitations. We make our own luck. Each of us. None of us is Superman. Luck is the sum total of your abilities as an aviator. If you think your luck is running low, you’d better get busy and make some more. Work harder. Pay more attention. Study your NATOPs more. Do better preflights.

“A wise man once said, ‘Fortune favors the well prepared.’ He was right.

“Rory Smith is not with us here tonight because he didn’t eject when he should have. Hank Davis is alive because he did.

“We’re going to miss Rory. But every man here had better resolve to learn something from his death. If we do, he didn’t die for nothing. Think about it.”

The best way to see Hawaii is the way the ancient Polynesians first saw it, the way it was revealed to whalers and missionaries, the way sailors have always seen it.

The islands first appear on the horizon like clouds, exactly the same as the other clouds. Only as the hours pass and your vessel gets closer does it become apparent that there is something different about these clouds. The first hints of green below the churning clouds imply mass, earth, land, an island, where at first there appeared to be only sea and sky.

Finally you see for sure — tawny green slopes, soon a surf line, definition and a crest for that ridge, that draw, that promontory.

Hawaii.

Jake Grafton stood amid the throng of off-duty sailors on the bow watching the island of Oahu draw closer and closer. She looked emerald green this morning under her cloud-wreath. The hotels and office buildings of Honolulu were quite plain there on the right. Farther right Diamond Head jutted from the sea haze, also wearing a cumulus buildup.

The sailors pointed out the landmarks to one another and talked excitedly. They were jovial, happy. To see Hawaii for the first time is one of life’s great milestones, like your first kiss.

Jake had been here before — twice. On each of his first two cruises the ship had stopped in Pearl on its way to Vietnam. As he watched the carrier close the harbor channel, he thought again of those times, and of the men now dead whom he had shared them with. Little fish. Sharks.

He went below. Down in the stateroom the Real McCoy was poring over a copy of the Wall Street Journal. “Are you rich enough to retire yet?”

“I’m making an honest dollar, Grafton. Working hard at it and taking big risks. We call the system capitalism.”

“Yeah. So how’s capitalism treating you?”

“Think I’m up another grand as of the date of this paper, four days ago. I’ll get something current as soon as I can get off base.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Arabs turned off the oil tap in the Mideast. That will send my domestic oil stocks soaring and melt the profits off my airline stocks. Some up, some down. You know, the crazy thing about investing — there’s really no such thing as bad news. Whether an event is good or bad depends on where you’ve got your money.”

Jake eyed his roommate without affection. This worm’s eye view of life irritated him. The worms had placed bets on the little fish. Somehow that struck him as inevitable, though it didn’t say much for the worms. Or the little fish.

“You going ashore?” McCoy asked.

“Like a shot out of a gun, the instant the gangway stops moving,” Jake Grafton replied. “I have got to get off this tub for a while.”

“Liberty hounds don’t go very high in this man’s Navy,” McCoy reminded him, in a tone that Jake thought sounded a wee bit prissy.

“I really don’t care if Haldane uses my fitness report for toilet paper,” was Jake Grafton’s edged retort. And he didn’t care. Not one iota.

“Hello.”

“Hello, Mrs. McKenzie? This is Jake Grafton. Is Callie there?”

“No, she isn’t, Jake. Where are you?”

“Hawaii.”

“She’s at school right now. She should be back around six this evening. Is there a number where she can reach you?”

“No. I’ll call her. Please tell her I called.”

“I’ll do that, Jake.”

The pilot hung up the phone and put the rest of the quarters from his roll back into his trouser pocket. When he stepped out of the telephone booth, the next sailor in line took his place.

He trudged away looking neither right nor left, ignoring the sporadic salutes tossed his way. The palm trees and frangipani in bloom didn’t interest him. The tropical breeze caressing his face didn’t distract him. When a jet climbing away from Hickam thundered over, however, the pilot stopped and looked up. He watched the jet until the plane was out of sight and the sound had faded, then walked on.

About a ship’s length from the carrier pier was a small square of grass complete with picnic table adjacent to the water. After brushing away pigeon droppings, Jake Grafton seated himself on the table and eased his fore-and-aft cap farther back onto his head. The view was across the harbor at the USS Arizona memorial, which he knew was constructed above the sunken battleship’s superstructure. Arizona lay on the mud under that calm sheet of water, her hull blasted, holed, burned and twisted by Japanese bombs and torpedoes. Occasionally boats ferrying tourists to and from the memorial made wakes that disturbed the surface of the water. After the boats’ passage, the disturbance would quickly dissipate. Just the faintest hint of a swell spoiled the mirror smoothness of that placid sheet, protected as it was from the sea’s turbulence by the length and narrowness of the channel. The perfect water reflected sky and drifting cumulus clouds and, arranged around the edge of the harbor, the long gray warships that lay at the piers.

Jake Grafton smoked cigarettes while he sat looking. Time passed slowly and his mind wandered. Occasionally he glanced at his watch. When almost two hours had passed, he walked back toward the telephone booths at the head of the carrier pier and got back into line.

“Hey, Callie, it’s me, Jake.”

“Well, hello, sailor! It’s great to hear your voice.”

“Pretty nice hearing yours too, lady. So you’re back in school?”

“Uh-huh. Graduate courses. I’m getting so educated I don’t know what I’ll do.”

“I like smart women.”

“I’ll see if I can find one for you. So you’re in Pearl Harbor?”

“Yep. Hawaii. Got in a while ago. Gonna be here a couple days, then maybe Japan or the Philippines or the IO.” Realizing that she probably wouldn’t recognize the acronym, he added belatedly, “That’s the Indian Ocean. I don’t know. Admirals somewhere figure it out and I go wherever the ship goes. But enough about me. Talk some so I can listen to your voice.”

“I got your letter about the in-flight engagement. That sounded scary. And dangerous.”

“It was exciting all right, but we lost a plane yesterday on a day cat shot. An A-6. Went in off the cat. The pilot was killed.”

“I’m sorry, Jake.”

“I’m getting real tired of this, Callie. I’ve been here too long. I’m a civilian at heart and I think it’s time I pulled the plug. I’ve submitted a letter of resignation.”

“Oh,” she said. After a pause, she added, “When are you getting out?”

“Won’t be until the cruise is over.”

“Are you sure about this?”

“Yeah.”

He twisted the telephone cord and wondered what to say. She wasn’t saying anything on her end, so he plunged ahead. “The plane that went in off the cat was the one I had the inflight engagement in, ol’ Five One One. The in-flight smacked the avionics around pretty good, and when they reinstalled the boxes one of the technicians didn’t get the VDI properly secured. So the VDI box came out on the cat shot, jammed the stick. The BN punched and told us what happened, but the pilot didn’t get out.”

“You’re not blaming yourself, are you?”

“No.” He said that too quickly. “Well, to tell the truth, I am a little bit responsible. With better technique I might have avoided the in-flight. That’s spilled milk. Maybe it was unavoidable. But I was briefing these Marines on carrier ops— everything you need to know to be a carrier pilot in four two-hour sessions, and I forgot to mention that you have to check the security of the VDI.”

“I see.”

“Do you?”

“Not really. But aren’t these risks a part of carrier aviation?”

“Not a part. This is the main course, the heart of it, the very essence. In spite of the very best of intentions, mistakes will be made, things will break. War or no war, people get killed doing this stuff. I’m getting sick of watching people bet their lives and losing, that’s all.”

“Are you worried about your own safety?”

“No more than usual. You have to fret it some or you won’t be long on this side of hell.”

“It seems to me that the dangers would become hard to live with—”

“I can handle it. I think. No one’s shooting at me. But see, that’s the crazy part. The war is over, yet as long as men keep flying off these ships there are going to be casualties.”

“So what will you do when you get out?”

“I don’t know, Callie.”

Seconds passed before she spoke. “Life isn’t easy, Jake.”

“That isn’t exactly news. I’ve done a year or two of hard living my own self.”

“I thought you liked the challenge.”

“Are you trying to tell me you want me to stay in?”

“No.” Her voice solidified. “I am not suggesting that you do anything. I’m not even hinting. Stay in, get out, whatever, that’s your choice and yours alone. You must live your own life.”

“Damn, woman! I’m trying.”

“I know,” she said gently.

“You know me,” he told her.

“I’m beginning to.”

“How are your folks?”

“Fine,” she said. They talked for several more minutes, then said good-bye.

The vast bulk of the ship loomed high over the bank of telephone booths. Jake glanced up at the ship, at the tails of the planes sticking over the edge of the flight deck, then lowered his gaze, stuffed his hands into his pockets and walked away.

The problem was that he had never been able to separate the flying from the rest of it — the killing, bombing, dying. Maybe it couldn’t be separated. The My Lai massacre, Lieutenant William Calley, napalm on villages, burning children, American pilots nailed to trees and skinned alive, Viet Cong soldiers tortured for information while Americans watched, North Vietnamese soldiers given airborne interrogations — talk or we’ll throw you from the helicopter without a parachute: all of this was tied up with the flying in a Gordian knot that Solomon couldn’t unravel.

He thought he had cut the knot — well, Commander Campa-relli and the Navy had cut it for him — last winter in Vietnam. He had picked an unauthorized target, the North Vietnamese capitol building in Hanoi, attacked and almost got it, then faced some very unhappy senior officers across a long green table. They knew what their duty was: obey orders from the elected government. What they couldn’t fathom was how he, Lieutenant Jake Jackass from Possum Hollow, had lost sight of it.

We’re all in this together. We must keep the faith. Wasn’t that what you and your friends were always telling one another when the shit got thick and the blood started flowing?

We do what we must and die when we must for each other.

The faith was easier to understand then, easier to keep. Now the war was over. Although some people want to keep fighting it, by God, it’s over.

Now the Navy was peacetime cruises, six- to eight-month voyages to nowhere, excruciating separations from loved ones, marriages going on the rocks under the strain, kids growing up with a father who’s never there; it’s getting scared out of your wits when Lady Luck kisses your ass good-bye; it’s seeing people squashed into shark food; it’s knowing — knowing all the time, every minute of every day — that you may be next. The life can be smashed out of you so quick that you’ll inhale in this world and exhale in hell.

Lieutenant Jake Grafton, farmer’s son and history major, was going to get on with his life. Do something safe, something sane. Something with tangible rewards. Something that allowed him to find a good woman, raise a family, be a father to his children. He would bequeath this flying life to dedicated halfwits like Flap Le Beau.

Yet he would miss the flying.

This afternoon as Jake Grafton walked along the boulevard that led into downtown Honolulu, huge, benign cumulus clouds were etched against the deep blue sky, seemingly fixed. He would like to fly right now — to strap on an airplane and leave behind the problems of the ground.

We are, he well knew, creatures of the earth. Its minerals compose our bodies and provide our nourishment. Our cells contain seawater, legacies of ancestors who lived in the oceans. Yet on the surface man evolved, here where there are other animals to kill and eat, edible plants, trees with nuts and fruits, streams and lakes teeming with life. Our bodies function best at the temperature ranges, atmospheric pressures and oxygen levels that have prevailed on the earth’s surface throughout most of the age of mammals. We need the protection from the sun’s radiation that the atmosphere provides. Our senses of smell and hearing use the atmosphere as the transmitting medium. The earth’s gravity provides a reference point for our sense of balance and the resistance our muscles and circulatory systems need to function properly. The challenges of surviving on the dry surface provided the evolutionary stimulus to develop our brains.

Without the earth, we would not be the creatures we are. And yet we want to leave it, to soar through the atmosphere, to voyage through interplanetary space, to explore other worlds. And to someday leave the solar system and journey to another star. All this while we are still trapped by our physical and psychological limitations here on the surface of the mother planet.

Sometimes the contradictions inherent in our situation hit him hard. Last fall, while he was hunting targets in North Vietnam as he dodged the flak and SAMs, Americans again walked on the moon. Less than seventy years after the Wright brothers left the surface in powered flight, man stood on the moon and looked back at the home planet glistening amid the infinite black nothingness. They looked while war, hunger, pestilence and man’s inhumanity to man continued unabated, continued as it had since the dawn of human history.

It was a curious thing, hard to comprehend, yet worth pondering on a balmy evening in the tropics with the air laden with fragrant aromas and the surf flopping rhythmically on the beach a few yards away.

Jake Grafton walked along the beach, stared at the hotels and the people and the relentless surf and thought of all these things.

An hour later, as he walked back toward the army base with traffic whizzing by, the tops of the lazy large clouds were shot with fire by the setting sun.

The problem, he decided, was keeping everything in proper perspective. That was hard to do. Impossible, really. To see man and his problems, the earth and the universe, as they really are one would have to be God.

The officers’ club was full of people, music, light, laughter. Jake stood in the entrance for several seconds letting the sensations sink in. He tucked his hat under his belt, then strolled for the bar.

He heard them before he got to the door.

“How ugly was she?” three or four voices asked in a shaky unison.

“She was ugly as a tiger’s hairball.” Flap’s soaring baritone carried clearly. People here in the lounge waiting to be called for dinner looked at each other, startled.

“How ugly?”

“Ugly as a mud wrestler’s navel.” Eyebrows soared.

“How ugly?” Eight or ten voices now.

“Ugly as a pickled pervert’s promise.” Women giggled and whispered to each other. Several of the gentlemen frowned and turned to stare at the door to the bar. Jake saw one of the men, in his fifties, with short, iron gray hair, wink at his companion.

“That’s not ugly!”

“She was so damn ugly that the earth tried to quake and couldn’t — it just shivered. So ugly that five drunken sailors pretended they didn’t see her. The city painted her red and put a number on her — two dogs relieved themselves on her shoes before I got to the rescue, that’s how ugly she was. She was so desperately ugly that my zipper welded itself shut. And that, my gentle friends, is the gospel truth.”

Jake Grafton grinned, squared his shoulders, and walked into the bar.