Portrait of a Lady

By Colin W. Sargent

     I was flying in a Boeing 727, with Kenya hours behind me. We’d refueled in Morocco, the local lads running beside me when I deplaned and crossed the tarmac during the two-hour layover, shouting “Fly man! Fly man!”
Behind them were their sisters, in damask and blue and purple mozambique. The jet screamed shrilly in the background, something stepped on. Flight crews from diverse nations filled the terminal. You know you’re not in the U.S. when everyone speaks perfect English. I snacked on some maakouda, returned to the cabin, took my seat, and closed my eyes. One more leg and I’d be home.
We lifted off. I don’t enjoy commercial air, as a rule. Say you have a chip light and you’re an airline pilot: You’re going to launch anyway. You going to have to land in zero‑zero conditions worse than skiing through a glass of milk. On top of that, you’re going to have to shake everybody’s hands at the end of the flight. I prefer the relative safety of being an F-4 Phantom II pilot.
    I was nervous about leaving the squadron because this was obviously my last flying tour. Jim Abbott, the Pentagon detailer whom I knew when I was at MCAS El Toro circa seventy-four, was working feverishly to win me a spot on the staff at Monterey, though the idea of teaching naval officers about international relations hardly tickled me.
I reached into a slit in the lining of my cotton duck uniform jacket to retrieve the cablegram that really put me on this plane. My sister Adrienne was probably the last person stateside who preferred them to telex. The blue and red hashmarks shouted importance, as did the lightning bolts of electricity that leapt through the ionosphere on the front of the envelope.
“Colonel?”
“Yes, ma’am.” I stood to let the lady return to her seat beside me. We’d talked a bit since takeoff. She had a grandson in the Marines.
“Do you know about The Basic School?”
“Yes, ma’am. I used to be an instructor there.”
“Oh, so you’re a teacher and don’t do any fighting?”
And so on. I listened to her itinerary, though at the end I was sagging in the straps of being a considerate person. Like a boy scout, I was helping her across the Atlantic Ocean.
“What’s that?”
“Is that an airstrip?”
“We don’t think so, ma’am. See that green mountain down there, the one dodging a punch from the one with the power lines on it?” I feinted a little punch in the air over my transoceanic martini, a little aerial shuck and jive.
“No, Colonel,” she said.
She did too see it. What was her point in not seeing it? I sighed. “You’ve gotta dump too much power to hit the numbers after you miss those mountains. It ruins the final approach. Pilots hate it the world over. You’re guaranteed a long rollout.”   She deserved more than pleasantries. I’d exhausted mine. Like it or not, she was out to hit a nerve.
“Colonel?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Are you married?”
“No, ma’am.” Flying on carriers isn’t a great way to keep a marriage up. “Are you?”
“My husband died twelve years ago. We’re not landing on that runway, are we?”
I looked back over the wing at the Azores, thirty miles away. Lajes, with its airstrip, mountains, and unstable nightmare air through orographic lifting, was 35 miles behind us. “No, ma’am. But those are some pretty islands. They’re covered with birds. Canaries, of course. But also other songbirds.”
“Have you ever hit any?”
“Birds. Yes!”
“Tell me the truth.”
“Seagulls.”
“What happened to them?”
“They died.”
“From the trauma?”
“We ingested them into our intakes.”
“Thank you for telling me that. People only tell me little petits fours pleasantries because I’m old. Wouldn’t they think that I’d want better information now that I’m old? I’ve done it all. I’ve tried drugs. Have you ever tried drugs, Colonel?”
“No, ma’am. Birds get fooled by the size of the planes. They’re experts at judging closure rates; they have a sort of built-in Data 89.”
“Eighty‑nine, Colonel?”
“Time and distance, Mrs. Havens.”
“Uh huh.”
“So the birds see an apparently slow object–like an airliner–moving so slowly that it looks as if it’s stalling in midair, and they’re shocked when it hits them at 200 knots.”
She leaned closer. “I’ve seen the planes climbing out of an airport, just stalling in the clouds.”
“They stay there forever. You can slice ’em up and grill them like steaks. Put garnish around them. Seven varieties of ketchup. The birds never know what hits them.”
“Because they’re not intelligent?”
“With all due respect, ma’am, I could hit you with the Washington Monument if I threw it at you at 200 knots.”
“Is that what that marconigram did to you, Colonel?”
“It’s my father.”
“I’m sorry.” She looked out the window. “How can something this big fly?”
“Bernoullis. See them? They grab hold of the wings out there and flap their wings as fast as they can.”
“Tell me something terrible, Colonel.”
“I will if you’ll tell me what you used to do,” I said.
“I am the first old lady you’ll ever meet who will not tell you she was a dancer when she was younger.”
“I was sure.”
“They’re all lying. No one was a dancer back then. No one had time to dance. We all worked. I was a telephone switchboard operator during the war.”
“Where?”
“Long Island.”
“Doesn’t anybody live on the mainland anymore?”
“No,” she said. “I wore a brown uniform, like yours.”
“You met your husband then?”
“No,” she said. “Now tell me.”
“All of my stories are terrible. My friends don’t like me when I don’t tell them.”
“You tell me.”
I hesitated. Then I backed in.
“I like ketchup. Did you know there are seven varieties of ketchup?”
“There shouldn’t be seven varieties of a thing like that.”
“It’s just a hobby.”
“What wasn’t a hobby?”
“I mentioned I used to fly Huey helicopters in Vietnam.”
“Yes!” She rubbed her hands together quickly, like a cricket.
I looked down. “It’s hard to tell the story without you being right there in the cockpit, reverberating everywhere with one‑per‑rev vibrations while they’re down there, shooting at you, guys in coolie hats and black pajamas,” I said. “Even then they had long hair, like the Beatles. Their soldiers were younger than we were. We were in 157563–I can still remember the bureau number–flying Hueys as part of some black ops far into the north over the jungle to rescue three downed F‑8 Crusader pilots being held in a village, awaiting transfer to a POW camp. Dam Neck was the original Naval Intelligence tasking agency, controlling this thing all the way from Virginia. Two of these Crusader guys had been hit–one by SA‑2 surface‑to‑air missiles, one by gunfire from another U.S. jet beside him. Needless to say, none of these guys should have been there at the time. From the air, the trees that far up the coast look black but don’t seem to have any shadows. We only found one of these POWS, the friendly fire guy.”
“Was he mad?”
“Well, he was unconscious. I guess he was mad later. Anyway, the mission was over and we were heading back for some beers.”
She eyed me, I’m sure.
“We’d drink ourselves...on the other side of the 17th Parallel back then.”
I toasted her with my ice water.
“And then?”
Vietnam didn’t have an ‘and then.’ That was the bad stuff of flying. “The Huey beside me got hit by the guys in black pajamas. We saw the guy who shot it. My friend Chuck Rillo was flying in the burning helo, and he talked to me on the radio.”
“Yes?”
“First he was screaming because there was fire, then friendly stuff. His voice calmed, and then there was an explosion, and they fell like a fried egg. The mishap report says they hit at 13 g’s, which was non‑survivable.
“We bumped up to max cruise airspeed for base, transmitting maydays to an air controller called Rocker Panel. He was calling jets in. We flew about a mile. Then I turned around. This one black‑pajamaed guy had danced, celebrated. He waved his arms.
“You’re never supposed to do this, but we went back after one guy. We came in low then flared through the trees. Branches hit our tail rotor, which was a fatally dumb maneuver on our part. We were getting hit. I bottomed the collective and gave the aircraft to my copilot. I pulled out my standard Navy issue and started shooting, saw him running across a dirt field toward the water.
“He made it. But we followed him right over the water. I shot him and blew out the front of his chest. A bullet from a 45 goes in small, like this, but if it’s soft lead, it tumbles. Sometimes it will go in your back and out your ankle. You never know which direction it’s going to take. In this case, it came out of his chest with a hole the size of a garbage can. The top opening. He was swimming. Now he had no chest, no heart, no lungs. But he kept swimming. He was swimming toward Sumatra or New Guinea. He was swimming like hell toward a vanishing point.”
“Did he get away?” She was taking everything in.
“What would he have gotten away with? I’m not proud of this. I was crazy. A leopard was eating my brain. Those arms. We pulled to a hover over him while he kept swimming toward the horizon. I blew off his head. And the arms kept swimming. He had no back and no head, but his arms were digging into the ocean like nothing I’ve ever seen. Alaskan King nightmares. They weren’t connected to anything. We flew away before we saw them go under.”
“But do you think the arms went under?”
“The water was that green color, which I don’t like. We popped up to 3,000 feet, above bombing altitude.”
“You never saw them go under?”
“This was a rare situation, but a fait accompli. Where would the arms go if there were no body to go with them?”
“You said to New Guinea or Sumatra,” Mrs. Havens said.
“Then I guess they made it,” I said. “I mean we climbed. I put on my oxygen mask.  We climbed to 14,000 feet. We could see it all, the jets searing in below us, even the battleship New Jersey on station out on the horizon. We went to 18,000 feet, higher than you’re ever supposed to go in a Huey.”
“How high are we now?”
“Well, we’re at 33,000 feet or so, ma’am, but this isn’t a Huey.”

****

Colin W. Sargent's novel Red Hands has been released in the U.K. and is forthcoming in the U.S. in 2021. He flew Navy CH-46D helicopters in the Navy and was editor of Approach, the Navy's Flying Magazine. He and his wife are both former Navy LCDRs. He's the publisher of Portland Magazine and teaches writing at William & Mary.