Time, Immemorial

There’s a wonderful exuberance in those words, a childlike exuberance I think many of us felt when we climbed into the cockpit of a military jet for the first time. Every time felt like the first time, then.

I have long lost that childlike exuberance; long lost that child.

Willie too was a child of my generation. He was a fresh faced Mormon kid with an easy smile who believed in America but couldn’t believe what America was doing.

He was a boy sent to fight a man’s war. He never wanted to go to war. Like me, he was drafted into the Army and tried to ride out the Vietnam War by enlisting in the Air Force instead. Like me, he never wanted to kill anyone. Like me, he thought he could avoid that in the Strategic Air Command.

We were both four years old when the first B-52 lumbered into the sky; nine, when one of them released the first hydrogen bomb dropped from the air, in a test over the Bikini Atoll. The B-52 was almost solely used by SAC since to ferry nuclear bombs over the Pacific back and forth to near Soviet airspace. Back and forth, back and forth, all day and all night. They called it deterrence.

When we met at March Air Force base in California a decade or so later, Willie and I found we both had the same idea about deterrence: SAC would deter us from the war. We would learn to fly the Big Ugly Fat Fuckers, and if any idiot President sent the order to drop our nuclear bombs, we would drop them, at sea, and look for a place to land our crew somewhere safe, say, Australia. I think we’d both seen Kramer’s “On the Beach.”

As I think I mentioned, we were kids. Our plan contained a fairly sizable flaw: B-52s by that time had been refitted to lay carpet for Vietnam and, for a fair time in secret, Cambodia. Young pilots weren’t going into SAC. They were dropping sixty thousand pounds at a time of conventional bombs on people they never saw.

Plan B was study, train, fly big jets and small, punch volleyballs and sometimes other airmen, and try to figure out a way to get through it, figure out a way just to get back home.

I was lucky, and got out early.

Willie never did figure that out, never figured a way to get back home.

I remember him, every Memorial Day.

I remember him, most every day.