Together We Kill

The Affair with the Dragon Lady

Now that that wise guy photographer from Life found us out there’s hardly any sense making up excuses for what happened. We might sound like a pack of idiots to some, but, damn it all, for two whole years we had a lot of fun with our secret society and crazy clubhouse and in a way it’s a shame to see it all end.

Only watch out who you call crazy, because you’d be surprised at the big names who put on the Dragon Lady costume for one of the meetings and tucked same costume away in a locked trunk in the attic and hoped for another invite back.

Like all good things, though, it had to come to an end. And, like most good things, it took a dame and a calamity to bring it about, so now our secret society is out in the open where all can see it and to save wear and tear on the tarmac I’ll tell you about it.

The story really starts back in October of ’45 and you know how that was. All of us coming out of the service all at once with a pocket full of dough, if you were lucky, and plenty of places to spend it. If you were lucky enough to be married, you settled down right away. If you weren’t, you made all the places, saw all the faces, joined the 52–20 club until you got a job, and from then on wondered what had happened to three or four years and didn’t know whether to be sad or glad about being in civvies.

Well, there we were, the ten husbands of the Dragon Lady. Our mutual wife was a B-17E with bullet-hole acne, a patched-up tail, and joints that creaked and groaned even when she was trying to rest. Still, she was a thing of beauty who took us all there and back 82 times, twice almost giving her own life in a grand gesture that we might live, but survived because our love for her was just as strong.

You can imagine having to leave her. We each took a little piece of her away in our B-4 bags, kissed her mutilated body, and left her there with tears of 100 octane dripping from No. 1 and No. 4 engines. Don’t ever tell us an airplane can’t cry.

We did, too, because, behind us, strangers took her to a far away prison in the desert with others of her kind, put her in solitary confinement behind plastic shrouds and left her there to die in whatever strange way airplanes are supposed to die.

Us? We all came home to the same state, settled down within three counties of each other and began the slow disintegrating process of living. We all wrote, sent greeting cards, got drunk, and went phone happy sometimes, but we stayed in touch. From Ed Parcey, the tail gunner, up to me as first pilot, we all had babies a few times, named them after each other until you could hardly tel) who from whom on the roster.

That is, all of us except Vern Tice, our old co-pilot who out and out refused to enter the marital state because he didn’t want to get like us. Which is to say, weathered out of our own desires by women who made better mothers than wives and wanted the same thing from both children and husbands alike.

Hell, it’s an old story, why repeat it?

Charlie Cross, our engineer, and I wanted to operate a rice-seeding outfit using Stearmans. The wives cried us out of it. Henry Lucerne, the navigator, Vic Cabot, the radioman, and “Tiny” Sinkwich, who handled the right waist gun, were going to patent and manufacture an electronic homing device for private planes.

That meant a few initial hardships, the giving up of minor, but stable, positions and the women sulked them out of that. Needless to say, somebody else invented and sold the same thing and made a fortune, but when you mentioned it to the girls you only got a frosty stare.

Lou Kubitsky, the other waist gunner, didn’t do too badly. Before the war he was a fighter and, had he gone back into it, he would have had his head knocked off. Instead, he became a grocer and, when the community developed, his store was in the center of it and he made out just great. He was happy, all right, but he sure hated groceries. So on the side he managed a couple of fighters, sparred with them and kept his hand in.

George Poe, Arnie Castle, and Fred Halloway were salesmen for the same firm of Coster and Selig, Printers, lived in the same northeast sector of the suburbs, borrowed each other’s tools, and looked to the sky whenever a prop job went over, and studiously ignored the blowjobs as interlopers. Each had a wife who had sweated out all 82 missions and to whom even talk of flying was anathema.

So there we were, all paramours of the Dragon Lady, and, with one exception, no longer bold, but getting old. And when that lone exception showed up it meant a lot of fun for a while as long as you could take a week of cold silences, too-casual meals, and a few other things pouting women can conjure up.

Which brings us back to Vern Tice again.

He was 38 last year, still in good shape with hardly any grey showing and no sign of fat, good-looking as always, with a mint in his back pocket he had picked up on speculative deals most smart money stayed away from. His big deal was banking a Broadway show for 50 percent that gave him a gigantic return with a year and a half run. But women? Oh, he loved ’em all. Marry one? After seeing the trap we were all in?

Laugh, laugh.

That’s the way things stood the day old Vern blew in driving a white Jag with the leading lady of Fielder’s Choice next to him. She was a big blonde beaut dripping diamonds and furs with a laugh like ice clinking in a highball and without her as a come-on we never would have made the briefing because it was an axiom among the women that we should never all get together at the same time.

Elaine Hood fixed that. Every one of the girls wanted a look at this fabulous creature who was all over the covers of current magazines and in most of the gossip columns every week. Smart boy, that Vern. He had checked her out well on her procedures, then let her solo in this strange world of suburbanism.

One thing about her. She was ready for combat right off. She didn’t go into it with her head up and locked, not a bit. That girl had all her guns armed and went into tactical maneuvers like a 50-mission vet. The other women never had a chance, really.

So after supper at the country club they were all glad to let the boys go hang around the bar for once while they started pumping Elaine for all the latest tidbits.

Being Monday, we had the bar all to ourselves, toasted the old days a few times, then Charlie Cross said with peculiar feeling, “To the old girl herself. To the Dragon Lady, laddies.”

We lifted our glasses to that one, all right.

When we put them down Vern said, “Miss her, don’t you?”

“Come off it,” George Poe said, “who doesn’t? Man, I’ve put in a thousand missions in dreams since I saw her last.”

“How’d you all like to see her again?” Vern said.

For a good ten seconds it was real quiet. If anybody else had said that there would have been the usual good-natured groans of acknowledgment, but this time it was Vern who said it and suddenly we knew what the pitch was. We knew, but we couldn’t be quite sure.

Tiny Sinkwich turned around real slowly and put up some ack-ack. “She’s long gone in some smelter’s pot, buddy. That or blown up doing drone duty for rocket jockeys in F-l00s.”

Vern’s grin went all the way across his face. “You think?”

I said, “Okay, kid, drop your flaps and take us in. You’ve had something cooking ever since you taxied up. Now start debriefing.”

He was enjoying every second of it. He had us hanging by our shroud lines and wasn’t cutting us loose until he had to. Finally he said, “I bought the Dragon Lady.”

“You what?” Charlie’s voice was almost a squeak.

“That’s right. I bought her. I went through surplus sales and dragged the old girl out of the pile and right now she’s sitting over at the Lakemore Airfield in the big hangar as pretty as you please.”

“You’re crazy,” I said, “Lakemore’s abandoned. It’s all swamp from where the water backed up from the government dam project. You couldn’t put a Piper Cub in there.”

Vern grinned again and nodded sagely. “I know. She went in by truck.”

From down at the end where Ed Parcy guarded the tail out of sheer force of habit, he said skeptically, “There’s no road into there, buddy.”

Between sips of his drink Vern said, “There is now. I bought a road, too. Those steel mats they used to lay up for temporary runways over sand or muck. Worked real well.”

“Lakemore Airfield was owned by...” Vic Cabot started to say.

Then Vern cut him off with, “The Blakenship family. I bought it from them. The deed is free and clear and all ours.”

I think we said it all at once. “Ours?”

He laughed at the expressions on our faces. “Sure. You don’t think I’d keep the old dame all to myself, do you?”

Henry Lucerne said, “But...”

“Look,” Vern told all of us. “I’ve watched you guys losing your lift ever since we left the Lady. You’re all like kids with your toy taken away and those dames in there...” He waved a thumb over his shoulder, “won’t give it back. Well, now they got trouble because we got our dame back and she’s all ours.”

You don’t say much at a moment like that. You try to think of something but it won’t come out so you have a drink to cover your astonishment and when it’s down it all begins to make sense. Everybody tried to talk at once, slap each other’s back and finally came to the same thought.

They left it up to me to put it into words. I said, “There’s only one problem, friend. We can’t fly her around. It would cost an arm and a leg for fuel and parts — and who knows if we can even get her license back?”

“So who needs to fly?” Vern asked me.

I just looked at him. In fact, we all did.

He laughed and said, “Buddies, we got ourselves the craziest clubhouse anybody ever saw on the best patch of ground for fishing and duck shooting in the whole state.”

And when we thought about it, he was right.

Thus began the second saga of the Dragon Lady.

Elaine Hood was a real pro at her job. She hinted that if the gals “could only” take off a week she’d like to show them around the big town north of us and you never saw nine wives go to work so fast. Oh, we let them sweat a little bit and work their female wiles to the limit, but finally we okayed their flight plans, let them arrange for in-law baby sitters, and saw them all off at the station.

That same day we all started our vacations and went back to our true love, our one wife, the Dragon Lady, and there behind the faded and weather-worn walls of the old hangar primped and petted her until she was a thing of beauty again.

A flip of a switch would bring her to life for us. She would quiver when you touched the controls, talk to you when you pressed the mike button, and through some almost forgotten G.I. genius we could warm her belly in winter and cool it in summer.

Since we were lovers and not fighters anymore, it was appropriate to redesign the Lady, but she didn’t mind. In fact, she seemed to welcome the change. She liked the addition of the bar and the compact gas range and oversize refrigerator. The tables and chairs fitted in just right and the TV set seemed to have always belonged there.

Oh, we kept her in character. No gaudy paint jobs when we had cans of o.d. around. Outside on her skin we tickled her with brushes and brightened up the original markings. A few of the old wounds needed to be sutured up once more and she was all the better for it.

In one week we had her laughing again and a dozen weekends later she was ours, all ours, to love and cherish as we wished. Ah, what a second honeymoon we had! It took a lot of tailoring to get into our wedding clothes again, but we got the uniforms back on, the mold off the leather, and the film off the brass.

I’m glad Life didn’t see us then, coming out of the old tool shed that we made into a dressing room, turned out in old AAF pinks and greens and dress khakis. We saluted each other silly, patted the surplus chutes that hung from hooks under our names and slipped into the hangar under blackout conditions like back in England when we knew Jerry was upstairs looking for a target.

When the door was closed, Tiny said, “Everybody in?”

A murmur went around our heads, sounding strangely hollow in the vault of the hangar.

“Okay,” Tiny said, “Flip ’er.”

Vern pulled the switch, flooded the place with lights placed just so and for all the world we were back there on the stand waiting for take-off.

“Beautiful,” somebody said, “just beautiful.”

And in the same order, just like back in ’44, we climbed aboard the Dragon Lady to celebrate our wedding night all over again, bringing to her gifts to show our love... the same little bits and pieces we had all taken away as mementos years before, gently put them back where they belonged... and the night was consummated in grand style.

Now that was the beginning. You can only keep a beauty like the Lady quiet for so long. A man just has to brag, and having done so, has to back up his talk and before long the Dragon Lady had an entourage the way any royal dame should. Of course, only ex-AAF personnel were invited to a “flight” on that Baker One Seven, and even then they had to conform to spec. Orders of the day said you went on board in the appropriate uniform and those who didn’t have one, either borrowed Class As or dug up something in surplus.

You can bet one thing. Nobody was ever disappointed. Before long that old hangar became a lavish combination Officers’ and N.C.Os’ Club where men could be men in the old style, fight the war as they pleased, and forget the crazy old world outside. It was the place of the Permanent Pass, the Big Open Post, the Fabulous Furlough.

Nobody was old there. When they felt that way they could find their places inside the Dragon Lady and she would console them within herself and give them back their youth.

Of course, Vern Tice knew what he was doing all the time. The place was paying off in grand style and, although the fees were small, all the money stayed in the barracks and finally we had a bomber base to beat all bomber bases. Never was one staffed so adequately with so much rank and so many sergeants.

Never was the location of one base so carefully guarded.

Oh, those women on the home front knew something was going on, that’s for sure. They’d beg and wheedle to find out what it was, but what man in his right mind is going to give his wife the address of his mistress?

Now right here I have to mention that there was one woman who knew the score. That was Elaine Hood, who by now had become big in Hollywood — picked up an Oscar, but didn’t pick up Vern Tice no matter how hard she tried, and believe me she tried.

Vern didn’t know it, but all of us married pigeons knew it. Those already trapped can look back and see the pitfalls.

One thing you have to say about old Elaine. She never squealed. She knew all about our mistress and could have let out the big secret to the town at any time. Good kid, that one, no chicken anymore, but still lovely and with a complete sense of understanding. She became good friends with all the wives of the Lady’s original crew and sort of welded them together to the point where they began liking each other’s company and would even stand for hangar talk over the supper table at the country club.

In fact (and we say it was because they were afraid to compete with the Dragon Lady), they even helped when Tiny, Vic, and Henry pooled all their savings and started making electronic equipment. Lou Kubitsky sold his store, opened a sports arena, and made a bundle. Irene, his wife, sold tickets and loved it. Come to think of it, things like that were happening to everybody.

And back at the Happy Hangar way out there in the swamps, the fishing grew better, the duck shooting greater, and all the state would have wanted in on it had they known it was there. But it was our secret and none would give it away. Vern made his like he always did, but he wasn’t so happy about it anymore. You could tell. When the flight was over and the crew left for their bunks, Vern would take off in his Jag and go prowling around. Sometimes he’d go see Elaine, but when he came back you could see he was having a struggle with himself and it took a hard month to tell some of the women to lay off the matchmaking attempts and let him and Elaine be. If the guy didn’t want to get married, so let him live in a BOQ.

It was about then, at the end of summer, that two things happened simultaneously. Elaine finished her run on Broadway and the Air Force decided to reactivate Ellison Field, about 10 miles out of town. So Elaine moved into an apartment on Avery Road around the corner from us and the 332nd moved 50 F-l00’s into Ellison.

Those great big air-borne hogs overhead made all the kids happy and brought smiles to the faces of merchants, but to us old prop men they were just noise makers that needed too damn much runway to get off and ten times that to get back down.

But they raised hell with our hangar hours because whenever one of those blowjobs would go by overhead it made our Dragon Lady seem suddenly old and that was one thing we just couldn’t tolerate. It got so that when we saw one of those pink-cheeked pilots on the street we’d freeze him down, him in his blues that made him look like he never got out of the kaydets.

Maybe if it hadn’t been for the Vern Tice Elaine Hood sideline show we all would have had pilot fatigue, but those two were flying the craziest kind of sidewalk formations you ever saw. Everybody but Vern knew it was love, but, even if he did know, she was the enemy to be avoided. He enjoyed the combat angle, the boy-girl stuff, but when it came to the Big Tangle, he put his nose down and hit for the barn.

My wife was the one who put her finger on it. Vern had the old gang back together again and he was afraid that marriage to Elaine would be like bailing out on the return leg of a milk run. She’d have him off in Hollywood or back on Broadway and not even a goodbye kiss for his true lady fair in the hangar, and that he couldn’t stand.

It was right in the middle of the fall that everything came to a head. Vern and Elaine finally had it out and, from what I heard by way of eavesdropping on a phone conversation, she was going back to Hollywood to do a picture and Vern was going to stay put. I passed the word around because by now we were all on her side and hated to see Vern a permanent party in the BOQ when he could just as easily get married.

He claimed it was just a case of misery wanting company but I knew that he was talking through his hat even if he didn’t admit it. And that was the way things stood the night of our anniversary party. The whole squadron had assembled to cheer up Vern, damn the interlopers at Ellison Field, and drink to our ever-loving mistress, the Dragon Lady who was the fairest of them all, bar none, no none at all.

Ah, yes, this was to be a night! Waldo Casey and the Stephano brothers had brought along six converts between them and, like all first timers, they had bad gaposis in their old uniforms. You never did see guys have so much fun, though.

Yeah, we were really rolling along about 8, hangar flying as usual, winning the war personally, turning all the little things into big things.

Upstairs a jet cracked the sound barrier with one hell of a bash and for a few seconds everyone stopped talking.

Maybe it was a half-hour later that the phone rang and after Tiny answered it he edged up to Vern who was talking to me and said, “It’s for you, Vern.”

Now nobody but nobody outside our own group has that number and this night everybody was here. That left Elaine. I watched Vern get grim around his mouth and he shook his head just once. “Tell her nix, Tiny.”

Then Tiny shook his head. “Not me, buddy. She said you speak to her because this one’s important. She made it stick, too.”

Vern frowned a little bit. “How?”

“Brother,” Tiny said, “can she use G.I. language. You better talk to her.”

Vern frowned at that, shrugged, and picked up the phone, took a breath and said. “All right, chick, what’s up?”

It came out real funny because the phone was hooked up to a speaker system like we used to have overseas and it let the world in on the know.

Elaine came back so sharp and quick it was like she was trying to bite him. “One of the kids from Ellison just went down.”

“So let the Air Force take care of their own. They’re autonomous now.”

Without being asked to, all the talk came to a standstill. It was as if they were waiting for the bomb to drop, not knowing whether to stay there or run for it.

“Listen, you knothead,” she said, “look at the wings you’re wearing.”

Everybody there looked down at his own chest.

“Those wings he’s got on are the same as yours even if they are a whole generation younger. He’s one of your own. Do you understand that?”

“Well, what can we...”

“He ejected over that damn swamp you playboys call home. He’s down right in the middle of it some place and he could possibly be hurt.”

“Okay, okay, sugar, but what am I supposed to do?”

“Do? Do something! You’ve been fighting that war so long the only thing you have out there are heroes and you ought to be able to think of something. You’re officers, aren’t you? You’re enlisted specialists, aren’t you? Maybe you can take that damn crate of yours and...”

“All right, baby, hold it there. You’re coming over loud and clear only don’t run the old girl down. Where are you?”

“At Ellison with the boy’s wife. They live next door to me.”

“Where at Ellison?”

“On the flight line,” the speaker said. Her voice was flatter now.

“Okay, baby, now calm down. Is there any way there you can contact base ops?”

“I’ll find a way.”

“Good, then you call from there and by then we’ll have something ready.”

She hung the phone up almost before he finished and when we looked around it was like looking at the bunch about to hit Ploesti. For a moment the heroes were gone and they were butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers again, slightly paunchy, a lot balder, a little bewildered from being civilians so long. And then Vern spoke.

“Gentlemen,” he said. That was all. They all edged in close and the heroes were back once more. They wore the damnedest grins yon ever did see and every hat went over at a jauntier angle and they were ready. And I mean ready.

“We’re in a peculiar position here. I dare say we are the only ones alive who know that swamp area. It’s relatively new, so there are no old timers on it.”

I heard Jonesy laugh and say, “Hell, I made a lot of dawn patrols after bass, man.”

“I know,” Vern told him, “but there’s no moon tonight.”

Henry Lucerne, our old navigator, said, “We’ll go, bucky. Just hand us the poop from group.”

Right then the phone rang. Elaine got her message across fast because she had literally busted into ops and the C.O. was on her back. We could hear him squawking over the speaker and then Pappy Thompson, who managed the big A & P store and who had been a general during the war — with the kind of a voice a general should have reached for the phone and told Vern, “I’ll take it.”

When he told Elaine to put the C.O. on the guy came on strong until old Pappy said, “This is General Thompson from the Four Hundred and Thirteenth.”

Now the 413th went out with the war, but that C.O. didn’t know that and he wasn’t about to argue with a general.

Pappy said, “What equipment have you there? Any choppers?”

“Er, yes, Sir. Just one, but she’s redlined.”

“Well dammit, you un-redline it and gel it ready. I’ll give you thirty minutes to have it on the ramp. You got that?”

“Yessir, yessir,” the C.O. stammered uncertainly. “But Sir, where are you?”

“With my men, in the swamp where that boy went down, that’s where. Now you get every available man ready. Stand by on an open line and that girl there can pass the messages to you. I want you to relay them directly. Do you hear? Directly. I want no misunderstanding. No garbled orders. Is that clear?”

Well the message went across, all right. You could hear that C.O. sounding off on the other end of that line and now it was up to us. Nobody bothered to change clothes. The flat-boats the sportsmen used were all drawn up at the edge of the water and in five minutes were loaded with gear.

They went out three and four to a boat, some paddling and some with trolling motors. Up front would be one man with a light and another standing by with a boathook to fend off anything from low hanging branches to cottonmouths.

Vern gave a list of things to Pappy and he called them out to Elaine. Ambulance, medics, ropes, power saws, and a dozen other things. She’d relay them across the room and the C.O. would repeat the list.

On the other side of the room the radio that had been drowned out in the chatter was heard again, and this time it was a special bulletin. Nobody could figure it out, but with usual Air Force efficiency an entire rescue team led personally by a general himself was down in the swamps already searching for the lost flier.

We grinned at that, but a sad grin, because we all knew that in a way it was the end of us.

But how that Elaine and Vern did act as a team! You’d think they had been practicing for this all their lives. We sent Curly Mason and Harry Stamph out to direct the crash crews coming in, because without a guide they’d never have made it. Even then we had to use a dozen more to line the road ahead of them so they could pick out the mat under their headlights. Long ago grass had grown through the perforations in the steel and you could hardly tell roadbed from swamp.

You know, it must have been funny to those Air Force boys. Like having a dream. There we’d be, officers and enlisted personnel side by side working hand in glove, decked out in uniforms that disappeared years back. Something like suddenly finding yourself in a lost world.

The fly boys who came in on the crash trucks let their mouths hang open when they dug our 50-mission crushes and the medals that backed our wings up under the lapels almost. But it didn’t last long. The mud and sweat made everybody look alike pretty soon.

A little after eleven, Jonesy found the boy near his favorite bass hole. He was hanging from a tree snarled in his shroud lines. Jonesy couldn’t tell if he were dead or alive. Everyone was quiet then, until Charlie and Ed got there with another light and Charlie saw the boy move. There was one hell of a shout for pure joy after that.

Then Charlie gave us the bad news. You couldn’t make the rescue with a few flashlights and the crash teams had nothing to be used right then. It would take a couple hours to rig something up.

It had to happen. You just know it had to happen.

In fact, I think she was there just waiting for it to happen all along.

We told Charlie to hold it a minute and got the Air Force kids to open hangar doors we never thought would ever be opened again. Then, after Vern told Elaine, “Hold it a minute, baby, because you’re going to hear the sweetest love song ever sung,” the two of us got aboard the Dragon Lady and went through the checklist, and when I said, “Start One,” Vern hit the switch.

Yessir, she sure did croon. On all four big ones she sang to us, then we opened her eyes wide when we turned on the landing lights and she brightened up the whole swamp.

Oh, how their faces did look when they saw our lady roll out. I guess it was like seeing a live dinosaur to them, because most didn’t want to believe it at all. Right then the Lady was a living, fire-breathing doll working at what she knew best, taking care of her men, and she was going to make this her last and her biggest.

There were a few of that gang who weren’t that young and from up in the cockpit I saw them take a hasty swipe at eyes that turned misty all of a sudden and I knew that she was their lady too as much as she was ours.

Vern went back to the phone and Pappy got the tail jacked up and somehow they were able to swivel our girl around so that midnight was turned into noon, and all the while those four big engines turned generators by whose light a life was being saved.

They got out there with the power saws, cut their way through to the kid in the tree, roped the debris back with winches filled up along the shore, but it wasn’t quite enough.

It took the chopper to get him out. Vern directed him in, then Charlie Cross and Ed got the kid in a sling along with a medic who got out there and like it all started... suddenly... it was all over. Almost, anyway. We put the Lady back to sleep, but she wasn’t quite the same. She was mired to her belly in the muck of the swamp but we all kissed her tenderly, even those pink-faced Air Force kids, and the two older guys who did it rather forcefully and seemed reluctant to leave her, then we all went to the hangar to smash the glasses in the fireplace. The war was over.

Well, that’s when that Life photographer found us. Don’t ask me how he got there, but he had popped pictures all over the place and there we were, two generations apart, drinking to the old girl outside. Yeah, it made quite a story, our secret society of B-17 lovers who had some harmless good limes like it was still a long time ago.

And, of course, now we had to let the girls in, but you can believe it’s no sewing circle setup because this is a man’s club where all you have to do to get rid of the women is schedule a sex lecture. They don’t act up, though. They’re all the better for it. Let them get raunchy and you just wave a finger at the beautiful doll under colored lights in the background. You don’t buck the Dragon Lady in her own house.

Oh, didn’t I tell you? That new Air Force over at Ellison threw us a thank-you party and got our lady back out of the muck and into a hangar whose interior really is decorated with some of the most beautiful “salvage” you ever saw.

Vern? Shucks, he and Elaine got married and here’s the kicker. They did the bit right in the hangar and I was the best man and when she came down the aisle beside the Dragon Lady he almost keeled over with surprise because instead of a wedding gown she was wearing the same thing she wore in ’41, the pinks and greens of an Army nurse and she was a rank over old Vern.

First thing he did after the ceremony was make old Pappy promote him so he could give her orders. Then he turned and winked at the Dragon Lady.

And I’ll be hanged if she didn’t wink back!