Yeager: An Autobiography

ON THE RUN

Free-falling. Flat on my back. Spinning from 16,000 feet. Velocity doubling each second. Hold off. Get below clouds where krauts can't see chute. Yank that cord now, you're dead. Germans strafe guys floating down. Clouds whisk past. French countryside filling horizon. Even so, wait, goddamn it. Ground rushing up. Occupied territory.

Two fingers grip chute ring.

A canister of carbon dioxide hooked to my Mae West bangs close to my head. It's tethered to the dinghy we sit on in the cockpit, and the dinghy, which the CO2 inflates if we go down in the Channel flaps in the wind like an enormous doughnut. I unclip the canister and the dinghy; they fall away.

Corner of my eye-ground closing in. Smell forests and fields below.

Now.

I yank the ripcord ring.

The parachute blossoms, braking my fall, and I'm rocking gently in the winter sky. Below me, the hills and fields are crawling with Germans. I see the black smoke from my airplane wreckage and sweat the slow ride down. I'm easy target practice from the ground.

I hear a dogfight raging far above me-the chattering machine guns and roaring engines of dozens of fighter planes spinning across the sky above a dull gray cloud deck. I'm dropping down over southern France on a deceptively peaceful countryside. I work the shroud lines toward a pine forest.

Trees rush up at me. I reach out and grab on to the top of a twenty-foot pine. I bounce a couple of times on that limber sapling, leaning it over to the ground, just as I did as a kid in West Virginia, when we'd ride pines for miles through the woods. In only seconds, I'm six inches from the ground; I step down, gather in my parachute to use later as a shelter, and limp off into the woods. There's blood on my pant leg, blood on my torn leather gloves, and blood dripping down the front of my flying jacket from my head.

The woods are dark and still, but even as I move deeper into them, I hear the distant rumble of army vehicles and the sounds of voices shouting in German. They pick you up fast in occupied territory, before the locals can hide you. The bastards saw me coming down.

It is slightly past noon on Sunday, March 5, 1944, and I'm a wounded, twenty-one-year-old American fighter pilot, shot down and on the run. After only eight combat missions, I'm now "missing in action," World War II shot out from under me by the twenty-millimeter cannons of a Focke-Wulf 190. The world exploded. I ducked to protect my face with my hands, and when I looked a second later, my engine was on fire, and there was a gaping hole in my wingtip. The airplane began to spin. It happened so fast, there was no time to panic. I knew I was going down; I was barely able to unfasten my safety belt and crawl over the seat before my burning P-51 began to snap and roll, heading for the ground. I just fell out of the cockpit when the plane turned upside down-my canopy was shot away.

I treat my wounds in deep brush. There are shrapnel punctures in my feet and hands from the shells that hit around my cockpit, I've got a hole in the lower part of my right calf from a fragment that tore through my fleece-lined boot, and a gash on my forehead from banging against that CO2 canister when I fell out of my dead airplane. I sprinkle sulfa powder on the leg wound and bandage it, then study a silk map of Europe that is sewn into our flight suits. I'm about fifty miles east of Bordeaux, near the town of Angouleme, where our bombers had blasted a German airdrome five minutes before I was shot down.

Man, I can't believe how fast luck changes in war. Just yesterday I landed back in England after scoring my first kill over Berlin. The weather was stinking, but I spotted a Messerschmitt Me109 below me, dove on him, and blew him to pieces. Today some kraut is drinking mission whiskey, celebrating hitting me. Flying as tail-end charlie, I never had much of a chance. Our squadron of eighteen Mustangs took off from our base on the British coast to escort B-24s on their bombing run. Sixteen Mustangs, four flights of four, provided air cover; the two extras joining the mission only if there were aborts. I was an extra and when a Mustang from Captain O'Brien's flight of four turned back over the Channel with engine problems, I pulled in as the fourth plane- the tail-end charlie. Krauts attack from above and behind, and it's the last tail that gets hit first. I saw the three Focke-Wulf fighters diving at me, and radioed a warning to O'Brien, "Cement-Green leader three bogies at five o'clock. Break right." We turned sharply to meet the bastards head-on. As I turned, the first Focke-Wulf hammered me.

I study my escape map, trying to figure my best route across the Pyrenees into Spain. The deep mountain snows should begin melting by late spring; if I can stay clear of the Germans, I might be able to contact the French underground for help. There would be no help if these were German woods. I'd wind up a POW, or, worse, fall into the hands of angry farmers who'd rather use axes and pitchforks than take prisoners. All of us carry forty-five-caliber automatics; mine is gripped in my right hand.

Even now, in shock from being shot down, cold and scared, I figure my chances are good for coming out of this alive. I know how to trap and hunt and live off Mother Nature. Back home, if we had a job to do, we did it. And my job now is to evade capture and escape.

I can survive in these woods for as long as it takes to keep the damned Germans from finding me and hauling me off to a POW camp. But whatever happens, for me the war is over. If I make it over the Pyrenees and manage to get back to England, I'll be sent home. No more combat-a rule meant to protect the French underground from pilots they assisted, who might later be shot down again and tortured by the Gestapo into revealing escape networks. So far, none of the guys shot down in my squadron have been able to make it back.

Our commanding officer, Capt. Joe Giltner, was shot down on a strafing run near Antwerp. Joe bailed out, tried to evade the Germans and get to the coast. But his wounded foot hurt so much he was forced to hobble. Finally, he sat down, undid his boot, and discovered the cause of his pain when his shot-off big toe plopped on the ground. The Germans captured him. Because I was a junior officer, but a good pilot with exceptional eyes, I flew my first missions as wingman to the group commander, Col. Henry Spicer, a daring pilot with bristling mustaches, who loved to dogfight and could care less about the personal risks. Spicer smoked a big briar pipe, and on the return home, he always dropped down to below 12,000 feet unhooked his oxygen mask, and had himself a smoke. As his wingman, I dropped down with him right over Paris. German flak guns began pounding at us, but I could see Spicer in his cockpit tamping his tobacco and lighting his Zippo. We were practically over the rooftops when tracers flashed by my canopy. I spoke up into my mike: "Christ Colonel Spicer, we're gonna get shot down." I saw him chuckle through a cloud of pipe smoke. "Relax, laddie," he replied. "Those bastards couldn't hit a billboard." Colonel Spicer was later shot down by a burst of white flak near the French coast, after he had descended to 12,000 feet to light that damned pipe. He bailed out over the Channel, but the Germans picked him up.

I decide to stay put in the heavy brush until dark. Several times I hear low-flying planes-Germans hunting for me. I'm sweating, but stay well-hidden under thick brush. I saw a lot of farmland coming down, and at night I'll pop out of these woods long enough to raid some turnips and potatoes. I figure a French farmer is no match for a hungry hillbilly. Before dark, it begins to rain, and there are no more search planes. I eat a stale chocolate bar from my survival kit. Then, wet and cold, I huddle under my parachute and try to sleep. I doze on and off but at first light, I'm wide awake, gripping my pistol.

I peek out and see a woodcutter shouldering a heavy ax. I decide to rush him from behind and get that ax, killing him if necessary. I jump him and he drops the ax, almost dead with fright. With eyes the size of quarters, he stares at the pistol I'm waving in his face. He speaks no English, so I talk at him like Tarzan: "Me American. Need help. Find underground." He jabbers back in excited French, and if I understand right he tells me he will go get somebody who speaks English. I read his face, which is scared but friendly. He grins and nods when I say I'm an American. Puts a finger to his lips to whisper, "Boche," then hurries off into the forest, after signaling to me to stay hidden and wait for him to get back. I keep his ax and watch him run off; then I move across the path into a stand of big trees, wondering if I should take off or wait for him. Can I trust the guy?

Long before I see them, I hear returning footsteps. Definitely more than one person, but whether they are more than two, I can't tell. It's been more than an hour since that woodcutter took off. I move back into the stand of trees and drop down. My pistol is pointing at the path. I won't get very far if he's brought a squad of German soldiers. I'm burrowed into the wet ground, my heart thudding like a five-hundred-pound bomb as the footsteps stop. My impulse is to turn tail and run, but I check it. Then I hear a voice calling to me in a whisper. "American, a friend is here. Come out." I can't see them and it takes all my courage to slowly pick myself up. I'm on the opposite side of the path from where the woodcutter left me. My .45 is aiming at the back of an old man staring into the brush. The woodcutter is with him. Silently, I move forward.

The old man leads the way through the deepest, darkest part of the woods. German patrols are all around us, hunting for me. Several times we think we hear distant voices and scramble to hide in the brush. But soon we are circling a clearing, staying in the shadows of the pines, and I see a two-story stone farmhouse. The old man nudges me, bends low, and runs across the open field toward the house. I follow him, expecting to hear rifle shots any moment. I forget my wounded leg and move. He leads me to the back of the house and I follow him into a barn, and up a ladder to the hayloft. He opens a door to a small room used to store tools and pitchforks, and pushes me in. Then he shuts the door, locks it, and begins pitching hay against my hiding place. I'm drenched in sweat. The small room is almost airless and pitch dark with barely room for me to sit. I'm trapped in this damned place and begin to wonder whether or not I've been trapped by the old guy: made a prisoner while he runs to get the Germans and maybe pick up a cash reward. I argue with myself about that lousy possibility, but not for long: there are German voices in that barn, and I hear them climbing the ladder to the hayloft.

My automatic is out, my finger on the trigger. The sounds are muffled but definite: they're rummaging in the hay, maybe stabbing into it with bayonets like in a war movie. I don't know how long I sweat it out, but straining to hear, I hear nothing. I never hear them leave-if they have. Maybe they are just sitting out there, having a smoke, and playing a nasty game with me.

They come for me several hours later. I hear the sounds of hay being moved; by then, the .45 feels like it weighs fifty pounds and it takes both of my aching hands to hold it. Before he opens the door, the old man wisely whispers: "It's me. You're okay. They're gone.

When he unlocks the door, I don't know whether to hug him or shoot him. I've no idea what's going on. We move quickly from the barn into the farmhouse, and I'm amazed to see it is already dusk. He leads me up a flight of wooden stairs to the second floor, and we enter a bedroom where a woman is sitting up in bed, wrapped in a shawl and surrounded by medicine bottles. She's about fifty-five, with keen, intelligent eyes, and when she sees me, she begins to chuckle. "Why, you're just a boy," she exclaims. "My God, has America run out of men already?" I tell her most pilots are young and that I'm twenty-one. She speaks perfect English and begins to question me-my name and background. I shake my head when she asks me if I'm married, and her eyes narrow. "What about that?" she asks, pointing to my high-school ring, which I wear on my right hand, where Europeans wear wedding rings. I explain and she seems satisfied. "We must be very careful," she says. "The Nazis are using English-speaking infiltrators to pose as downed American fliers."

She's satisfied that I'm not a German, although my West Virginia accent puzzles her. "Our people will help you," she says, "but you must do exactly what you are told." If the Germans catch us, I would be sent to a prison camp, but they would be pushed against the stone wall of the farmhouse and shot on the spot. I'm taken down to the kitchen where a young girl feeds me soup, bread, and cheese, my first meal in more than twenty-four hours I wolf it down. Later that night the village doctor climbs the ladder to the hayloft and I'm let out of my dark little cell long enough for him to pick the shrapnel from my hands and feet. The shrapnel puncture in my lower calf is not very deep. When he's done, the doc makes a little speech in French, probably saying, "Hey, kid, your wounds are the least of your problems."

I stay in the tiny store room in the hayloft for nearly a week, although each day I spend more time outside than in. The Germans have seemed to lose interest in finding me; there are fewer patrols now. Maybe they're hoping that if they stop looking so hard, I'll become careless and fall into their net. And it nearly happens that way. One sunny morning, I climb down the ladder and venture out of the barn only to dive for cover when a Focke-Wulf comes roaring over the treetops.

It's a pretty farm, and I feel homesick. Late one night the doctor returns, hands me civilian clothes, and tells me to put them on. "We take a little journey," he says. We set out on bikes; I have an ax strapped to my back like any other French woodcutter. We travel for hours in the dark on empty country roads. I have forged identity papers and if stopped by a German patrol, I'm to let the doctor do the talking. We travel together for two days, biking most of the night, resting in various farmhouses during the day, until finally we reach the village of Nerac, a few miles from a more famous town named for its cheese, Roquefort. It's dark when we enter a farmhouse. The farmer's name is Gabriel, a huge guy with a thick, black mustache. The doc says good-bye, and Gabriel takes me out back to a shed that will be my home for the next few weeks. If my kids ever ask how I spent the war, I'll have to tell them the truth: hiding in closets and sheds. Gabriel has a wife and a young son, and from time to time, I'm allowed to sneak into the house and share their family meal.

"We loove Americains," his wife tells me. I think she learned that piece of English just for me.

Gabriel's farm is right on a main road. As the days drag, I begin to get restless and bored-and a little careless. One day, fed up with my shed, I sit under a sycamore tree in the front yard, and before I can get up or get away, a troop ot German soldiers marches around the bend. They pass not ten feet from where I'm sitting under that tree. Gabriel sees this and nearly dies from fright. He says the French equivalent of 'God almighty, fella, what in hell are you doing?" In English, he says, "Stay in hide. Otherwise, me and you." He scrapes a finger across his throat. I nod and apologize. His young son likes to play ball and sometimes we kick the ball to one another behind the shed. But mostly I just stay in hiding, wonder what's happening to my squadron, write letters to Glennis in my head, and sleep a lot.

One night, well after dark, I leave by foot with Gabriel as my guide. We move deep into the pine forests, and after two days of mostly steep uphill climbing, Gabriel tells me to wait while he goes on alone. I wait for him most of a day and begin to wonder whether I've been deserted. But when he finally returns, he's with a group of heavily-armed men wearing black berets and bandoliers of rifle cartridges strapped across their chests. I don't have to be told who these guys are. These are the Maquis, the French resistance fighters who live and hide in these mountain pine forests by day and blow up trains and bridges by night.

I'm to stay with them, Gabriel tells me, until the snow thaws in the high mountains. Then they will help me cross over into Spain. Until then, they have work that I can do to help them.

Robert is the commander of our Maquis group He speaks fairly good English. He tells me he's a lawyer from the town of Eauze and has been in the resistance for two years, most of them spent hiding from the Germans in these pine forests. I count twenty six guys in his group, including a few really tough old birds with rosy cheeks who can hike longer and carry heavier loads than many of the younger men. Practically none of the group speaks any English, and I can understand only a few words of French, but they are friendly toward me, smiling and nodding each time our eves meet. They know these deep forests the way I know the woods back home: all of them were born and raised in this area and knew each other before they joined the Maquis.

It's a tough, dangerous life. Most of the time, I have no idea where we are. We are constantly on the move, making camp twice a day to eat and sleep, but never staying in any one place longer than a few hours. The Germans are always hunting for us, their Fiesler Storches skimming in low over the forest while we rush for cover under the biggest trees we can find. We're well-armed-British Sten guns, Spanish .38 Llama automatics-and I'd love to fire off a couple of bursts at one of those damned Storches, hit the radiator in its belly, and bring it down. But if the pilot radioed our location, we'd have the German air force bombing hell out of these woods in fifteen minutes. Of course, we never know for sure when we've been spotted by one of these recon planes, and our position reported. So, we stay as alert as deer, knowing that every step can lead to a German ambush. It has happened before in these woods, although it has usually been the Maquis, not the Germans, who have staged the ambushes-getting the drop on a German foot patrol, or wiping out a small motorized convoy.

The Maquis hide by day and hit by night, blowing up bridges, sabotaging rail lines, hitting trains carrying munitions or military equipment. Through the French underground, dozens of Maquis contingents like ours, hidden in the forests and mountains, are wired in to most of the towns and villages in southern France. Their people in the marshaling yards and train depots keep them fully informed on the latest movement of troops or munitions. But it is tricky because every village has its informers or double-agents. And from time to time, assassinations are carried out against these people, supporters of the pro-Nazi, Vichy French government. I wonder whether there are any double-agents in our group. Running around in the French woods in civilian clothes is not exactly safe duty for a downed American flier. If I were caught, I'd probably share the same fate as any of these Maquis-turned over to the Gestapo for torture-questioning, then shot. Traveling around with the Maquis, the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war would not apply to me. But I need these guys if I'm to get out across the Pyrenees.

I'm not included in any of their nighttime operations. They are a close-knit bunch, and I'm definitely an outsider. Most of the time I don't even know what they are up to. I'm left behind with an old man who's the cook and a few others guarding the camp. My first day with them, for example, I led a tethered cow, which a couple of the guys had "borrowed" from a farm, while we hiked to a new camp. Later, I helped in the butchering, which somehow amused the Maquis. I'm the first American pilot they've encountered, and they're curious about what I think of the German air force. I tell them that the FockeWulf 190 is a damned good fighter, probably on a par with our own P-51 Mustang; but the Mustang using 108-gallon wing tanks, can escort bombers and dogfight deep into Germany, and that is a tremendous advantage to the American daylight precision bombing campaign. Although our intelligence has warned us that the Germans have recalled their best fighter pilots from the Russian front to fight against us over Germany, I tell them that the difference between the respective fighters is not nearly so important as the difference between the abilities of the pilots flying them, and that so far, the Americans have proved their superiority with a ten-to-one kill ratio.

Robert translates this, and everyone is smiling and nodding at what I've said, except for one moonfaced guy I didn't like the first moment I saw him. This moon-face I don't like or trust. He asks a question in French that causes Robert to frown and argue with the guy for even asking it. Finally, Robert puts moon-face's question to me in English: "If you Americans are as good as you say, then why do we see American planes falling out of the sky like hailstones- and why are you here with us?"

The son of a bitch!

We eat under the trees, our table a long board. They've made a huge kettle of beans and beef, from the cow we slaughtered. I look down the table and see moon-face stuffing himself with stew, his beret pushed down to his eyebrows. I get up, walk over to him, take off his damned hat, and put it down on the table. He's furious. He reaches to his belt, takes out his Llama pistol, cocks it, places it next to him on the table, and puts on his hat. I get up, pick up a Sten gun, unlock the safety, and stick the barrel against moon-face's nose. One flick of the trigger would fire off about thirty rounds. Moon-face turns chalk white. I grab the beret off his head and slam it on the table. The others choke not to laugh, because moon-face is a general pain in the ass, but finally everyone explodes. Moon-face manages a sick smile. His hat is on the table, and it stays there, too.

Robert invites me to take part in a supply drop operation. We walk for hours in the dark, and it s well past midnight when we stand in an open field, looking up at the sky. The guys light flare pots to illuminate the field. It's cold and overcast, and I hear the drone of a four-engine RAF Lancaster. The bomber makes a low pass while one of the Maquis signals with a flashlight. Then the Lancaster circles to the west, gains altitude, and on the next pass overhead, drops a fifteen-hundred-pound canister that floats down to us under two billowing parachutes. It lands with a thud. We rush to it, gathering in the chutes and hoist the canister onto a wagon pulled by two oxen. The drop operation takes less than five minutes.

An hour later, we are crowded inside a barn working by lanterns, as the canister is opened. We separate the contents: Sten guns, 38 Llama pistols boxes of ammunition, packages of counterfeit franc notes, bread and meat ration stamps, bundles of plastic explosives, and all kinds of fuses and timing devices. I tell Robert: "I can help you with this stuff." As a kid, I helped Dad shoot gas wells with plastique explosives. To me, sears and fuses are a piece of cake. There are printed instructions in English attached to the fuse packages, but first the weapons caches have to be hidden in various haystacks and root cellars around the countryside. I'm put in charge of the explosive fuse devices. I take them with me back to camp and show Robert how to set them for different timings-two, four, six, or eight hours. And that will be my assignment for as long as I'm with these guys: Maquis fuse man. When they see I know what I'm doing, I'm put in charge of cutting up cords of plastique and attaching them to fuses-a terrorist bombmaker. The work is fun and interesting.

The Maquis live off the villages not off the woods. The villages are dangerous, crawling with Germans and Vichy police, but guys slip into town to buy food, cigarettes, and medicine, using phony ration stamps and money. I'm amazed that no one is ever caught, or if they are, maybe I'm not told about it. But on a very wet afternoon in late March, Robert takes me aside to tell me that I'm to accompany two of the guys into town. He grins and slaps me on the back. "Don't worry," he says. "Just stay with the men." Then he turns his back and walks away. I'm not happy about it, but the two guys I am to accompany start walking into the woods, and I hurry to catch up.

We don't walk very long. There's a van parked along a dirt road used by loggers; as we approach, the back opens and a young guy motions for me to climb aboard. I reach for his hand, climb in, and we take off.

It's pitch black in the back, and my companion speaks no English, but I don't have to be told that this is it: we're driving south, heading toward the Pyrenees. We drive for several hours before the van lurches to a stop. It is early evening, but dark and drizzly, and we are parked against a wall in what seems to be a backstreet in some village. A Frenchman quickly takes me across the street where another truck is parked, its engine idling. The moment I hop in the back, the truck takes off. There are four or five other guys seated on benches, and nobody says a word, mostly because they are too busy hanging on while the driver barrels down twisting backstreets, doing fifty or better. I hear the guy seated next to me mutter, "Jesus Christ." I'm figuring I'm in with a bunch of bomber guys who will be crossing the Pyrenees together.

Soon the gears up front are constantly switching between second and first as we begin to travel up steep grades. It would be nice to be driven across the mountains into Spain. A flashlight is switched on by a guy seated at the end of one of the benches. He hunches down on the floor between the rest of us. He's a Frenchman who speaks good English. "We're just outside Lourdes," he tells us, "heading into the foothills." He distributes hand-drawn maps to each of us, detailing our routes up and over. "You can either go together as a team, or pair off. It will probably take you four to five days to cross, depending on the weather. It's been rather mild, so I don't think you'll encounter any blizzards. But it will be rough-I won't deceive you about that. The most dangerous part will be just before you cross the Spanish frontier. It's heavily patrolled by the Germans, and there are all sorts crossing over-smugglers, refugees, military personnel like yourselves. Your best bet is to cross over at night, as late as possible. We've mapped out a southerly crossing-the farther south, the better, because the Spaniards up north have a nasty habit of turning in American pilots to the Gestapo and collecting a few hundred francs reward. If that should happen, you can expect to be tortured to tell all that you know about us, then taken out and shot. So, please be careful."

I notice a pile of bulging knapsacks stashed against the wall of the cab. When we finally stop, well past midnight, in the middle of nowhere, each of us grabs a knapsack and climbs out. "You're at the starting point," the guy tells us. "There's a woodsman's shed about a hundred yards directly ahead. You can use that. But no fires and no talking. This place is patrolled. Start out at first light. Today is March twenty-third. With luck, you can expect to be in Spain by the twenty-seventh or twenty-eighth." He wishes us well and then takes off in the truck.

We spend what's left of the night shivering in the dark hut. By the first light, we set out in the rain deciding to at least start out together and see how it goes. By noon, two of us have made it to the timberline in gale winds. The other two are lagging far behind, not even in sight. My companion's name is Pat. He's a lieutenant, a navigator on a B-24 shot down over France. The French provide bread, cheese, and chocolate in our knapsacks. Pat and I eat and wait for the others to catch up. We agree that if they can't hack it and reach us in half an hour, we'll go on without them. Pat is big and strong; we wait more than forty minutes, then push on together.

The Pyrenees make the hills back home look like straightaways. We are crossing slightly south of the central ridge that forms the boundary line between occupied France and neutral Spain. The highest peaks are eleven thousand feet, but we figure we won't get higher than six or seven thousand; the trouble is we are up to our knees in wet, heavy snow. We cross ridges so slick with ice that we cross them on the seat of our pants. At first, we rest every hour, then every half-an-hour; but as we climb into the thinning air, we are stopping every ten or fifteen minutes, cold and exhausted. The climb is endless, a bitch of bitches, and I've got to wonder how many of our guys actually make it across these mountains and how many feed the crows that caw overhead.

We sleep and rest when we can, using outcroppings to protect us somewhat from the constant, freezing wind. Our feet are numb, and we both worry about frostbite. The French have given us four pairs of wool socks. We wear two pair at a time, but our boots leak. By the end of the second day, we're not sure how long we've been up here; by the third day, we wonder if we are lost; late into the fourth day, we're almost ready to give up. We should be near the frontier, but low clouds restrict visibility to less than fifty feet. It's four in the afternoon, and we are so exhausted that we catnap between each step we take, staggering like two drunks. I'm thinking that this is the kind of situation that produces fatal accidents, when we reach the top of a ridge and practically bump into a lumberman's cabin. We approach the front door cautiously, my pistol out, but my finger is so numb that I doubt I could squeeze the trigger. The place is empty.

I just crumple on the floor. Pat takes off his shoes and hangs his soaked woolen socks on the branches of a bush. The two of us sleep side by side on the bare wooden floor. And while we sleep, a German patrol passes in front of the cabin. They see Pat's socks hanging on the bush out front. The bastards ask no questions. They just unsling their rifles and begin firing through the front door. The first bullets whine above my head and thud into the wall; I leap through the rear window, Pat right behind me. I hear him scream, and I grab hold of him and yank him with me as I jump on a snow-covered log slide. I'm spinning around ass over teakettle, in a cloud of snow, and it seems like two miles down to the bottom of that flume. We splash straight down into a creek.

Fortunately, the water is deep. I surface and so does Pat. I grab him and paddle across to the other side. Christ, he's gray. He's been shot in the knee, and he's bleeding to death. I tear away his pant leg and I can't believe it. It looks to me like they hit him with a nine-millimeter soft nose bullet, a dumdum because it blew away everything. His lower leg is attached to his upper leg only by a tendon. Using a penknife, I cut off that tendon. In my knapsack is a silk shirt that Gabriel's wife had made for me out of my parachute, before I left their farm to join the Maquis. I tear off a piece and tie it tightly around the stump. Then I take the shirt and wrap it two or three times around the stump and tie that. Pat is unconscious, but still breathing, and we're pretty well hidden from the Germans up above. I decide to wait till dark and then somehow drag both of us back up that mountain and get us into Spain.

Night falls early in the mountains that time of year, and thick clouds bury the stars. I can barely see the reflected ice and snow of the steep mountainside. The going is rough and treacherous, dragging both of us up that steep slope. At one point, not even halfway up, I lose both my footing and my grip on the collar of Pat's jacket, and we slide backwards more than fifty feet, slamming against a boulder. If the slope had been extreme, that would have been it for both of us, but it was gradual and we weren't sliding fast. It's very cold, but the low cloud deck prevents the temperature from really dropping and glazing the wet snow into a sheet of ice. And at least there is no wind. I stop dozens of times to hear if Patterson is still breathing. The truth is, I would be glad to let go of my one-hundred-seventy-pound bundle, but his breathing is regular, although weak. A few times I hear him moan softly.

I think, "He's the lucky one. He's unconscious." Every muscle in my body is hammering at me. I just want to let go of that goddamn bomber guy and drop in my tracks-either to sleep or to die. I don't know why I keep hold of him and struggle to climb. It's the challenge, I guess, and a stubborn pride knowing that most guys would've let go of Pat before now, and before he stopped breathing. I keep going on anger, cursing the mountain that's trying to break my hump. The mountain isn't exactly trembling, but getting mad at it at least keeps my blood warmer. It's too dark to do anything but inch up, mostly crawling and hauling. I have no idea how far I am from the top, which is just as well, because if I did know I would probably quit right then and there. I decide not to stop and rest; I can't trust myself not to fall asleep and let go of Pat.

The strange thing is, I think I did go to sleep. One moment it is night, and the next, I panic, thinking I'm bleeding on the snow. But I check again and see that it is the rosy glow of sunrise firing the world. I haven't let go of Pat. It happens that fast: dark one minute, light the next. What happened in between, I'll never know, or care. Because we make it to the top. I can let go of him and stand up. We're on top of a glazed snowcap at sunrise.

I walk to the far edge and look down at a long sloping draw. Off in the distance, through the mist, I see the thin line of a road that must be in Spain. I'm standing near a rocky ledge and a cluster of dwarf pines. I break off a bough, then go back and fetch Pat. I haul him to the edge, check once more to make sure he's still breathing, then shove him over the side and watch him slide down the draw until he's barely a small dot in the snow. Then I hunch down, holding the bough between my bent knees, just as I did when I roller-skated down the steep hill behind my house, using a broomstick as a brake. I'd sit against that stick, and it kept me from breaking my neck. And that's what I do now. I hunch down as low as I can get, put my weight against that bough, and push off down the draw.

When I stop, I'm only about thirty feet from Pat. I crunch through the glazed snowfield, check him out, then give him another shove. He spins down another twenty feet. The draw slopes all the way to the road, so I keep shoving him down until the last fifty yards, when I haul him to the side of the road. By now, he is so gray that I figure he is dead. But there s nothing more that I can do for him. So, I leave him where the first passing motorist would see him. Then I take off, walking south. (I found out later that he was picked up by the Guardia Civil only an hour or so after I left him and was taken to a hospital where they amputated most of the stump. Within six weeks Pat went home.)

I walk south for another twenty miles until near dusk I reach a small village and turn myself in to the local police. I don't expect a hero's welcome, but I don't expect to be locked into a small, filthy jail cell either. I want a hot bath, a hot meal, and a warm bed to sleep in for forty-eight hours; and as tired as I am, I'm just not going to spend this night locked in jail. They don't bother to search me, and I'm carrying my survival kit. It contains a small saw for just this kind of situation. The window bars are made of brass, and that good American steel blade zaps through the brass like butter. I find a small pensione a few blocks from the police station. The police know where I am, but ignore me. I eat two portions of steaming chicken and beans, soak for an hour in a hot tub, sleeping with my head propped on the enamel rim. Then I stagger to the bed and dive into it, asleep before I hit the mattress.

I was still sleeping two days later when the American consul knocked on my door. It was early afternoon on March 30, 1944.