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It was cold, Midwest in winter cold
at the greater Cincinnati airport that day in '63. It was the kind of
biting, piercing cold that penetrates your clothes and frosts your breath
and reddens your ears, waters your eyes and makes your teeth hurt. But it
wasn't the chill of the evening that had me shaking that evening in late
November. The knowledge that I was leaving home for good, that my
signature and my oath to God and Country had contracted me to four years
in the Navy sent tremors straight through me raising goose bumps on every
pore in my body. That and the chartered DC-3 idling on the tarmac
patiently waiting for myself and the other Cincinnati and Northern
Kentucky guys to board for a night flight to Chicago and the Great Lakes
Naval training Center beyond.
I was neither first nor last to board. Fortune might have
thought it was doing me a favor by seating me at a window, with a view of
one of the ancient airplane's two engines. But if that was serendipity's
intent before the door closed and the pilot advanced the throttles to move
us out to the runway, then surely it was mistaken. I had never flown in
anything larger than a Piper Cub prior to that and always in the past I
could see, talk to or be the guy at the controls. Being back in the middle
of the plane was scaring me badly.
A novelist could hardly have conjured a darker, more stormy
night. Angry turbulence set in almost immediately after takeoff. The roar
of the motor next to which I sat was not muffled by insulation. Bucking
like an angry bull with an annoying rider astride, the plane seemed at
times as though it would split open and spill me and my hapless fellow
recruits into a bottomless pit of knife edged cold and darkness.
I'd been in love with flying up until that night. A doting
grandfather who knew and approved of my infatuation with the skies had
bought me la few lessons at the private airport near my boyhood home. But
in the here and now of then, I would have cheerfully ridden three days in
a bus through a blizzard to avoid the pumpkin sized knot of panic welling
in my belly as the interior of that DC-3 rotated off level on two axis,
shuddering and bumping as if it were a ball on God's ping pong table.
For what seemed like years we flew. Then my motor
stopped. One instant I was listening to the port and starboard engines of
the geriatric airliner synoptically humming, reassuring me that we were
flying. The next, with a kapow and a pop and a belch of flame that went
off like an orange flashbulb, the engine next to my seat went into the
reciprocating engine version of cardiac arrest and died. That delivered
another and different message, that we were all going to be cornfield
Jell-O, if not now than absolutely any minute thereafter.
The propeller was still turning. At least that's how I
remember it. The next hour was one of the longest of my life, strapped as
I was in that steel tube, destined, it seemed at the time, to die for my
country at the end of the first day of the shortest military ever served
by a member of my family.
They say when you are about to die, your life flashes
in front of your eyes. It's true. 17 years and five months of Scout
campouts, Junior High sock hops and one long trip across state lines in a
beat up Chevrolet to buy fireworks all played before my consciousness like
an Oliver Stone epic edited by Mel Brooks. I was breathing so hard and so
fast that the guy next to me though I was having a fit and called the
flight attendant to come help me.
Time has a way of slowing down and speeding up both at once
when there is a crisis. I had yet to make a single sound, and so did not
suffer needlessly the fate some of my more panic stricken future shipmates
did, who verbally expressed their distress when our pilot suddenly turned
steeply, dropped the nose sharply and dove into the inky black. Nor did I
do much more than convulse once, as a thumping metallic scraping suddenly
changed the pitch of the wind rushing by my wing.
Suddenly, with a bone-jarring THUD, we were on the
ground, bounce rolling, then slowing, then turning, following rows of
lights that outlined the runway on which we'd just landed. I could see out
the window that we were someplace big. That was a good thing, I remember
thinking, just as the engine on the other side of the plane quit with a
pop and bang louder and flashier than the first.
"Welcome to Chicago," The flight attendant said in
a loud voice. "A bus is on the way to get you now. Please be
patient."
It was true. The bus arrived in minutes, or maybe it was
longer and my numbed mind just compressed the time.
I was the last one to disembark. As soon as my feet touched
tarmac, and before they climbed the stairs onto the waiting bus, I said
goodbye to my supper, leaving the regurgitated remains of my family's best
wishes for a happy four years of navy chow as a memento of my passing.
As if to comment on my weakness, God let it start to snow.
(c) 2001 by Bob Liddil.
All Rights Reserved
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