The Bridges at Toko-ri (8 page)

“The barge?”
This was a scow stationed near the Korean coast, and helicopter men with that duty lived miserably and engaged in one dangerous land mission after another.

A destroyer moved in and the last the
Savo
saw of Mike Forney was when he climbed into the bo’sun’s chair, green top hat, green scarf and Irishman’s pipe. “I’ll send you the eighty bucks, sir,” he yelled, giving the word
sir
its old infuriating touch.

Brubaker didn’t care if the captain was watching. He grabbed the disgraced man’s hand and said, “Take care of
yourself
, Mike. Pilots need you.”

“I go for rough duty,” Mike yelled, clutching his hat as the lines started to draw him over to the destroyer.
“Because I really hate communists.”

The chair dipped perilously toward the sea but Mike kept his legs clear. Instinctively the pilots cheered but the Irishman yelled derisively, “You apes go into the drink, not me!”

The new helicopter pilot was an officer, a college kid and no doubt competent, but the jet men and propeller crews knew that flying off the
Savo
would be a little tougher now.

The fear that was reborn when Brubaker watched Cag dive into the valley at Toko-ri grew all that day, augmented by the gloom of Mike Forney’s dismissal and the briefing.
After dinner, in the crowded ready room, the intelligence officer had passed around marked copies of the photographs made that morning and said, “Take-off at 0900. By then the sun will have driven ground fog out of the valley. Keep well south of the guns at Majon-ni. Cag, you tell them about the approach.”

Cag, cigar in mouth, said briefly, “On paper it looks like a lot of flak concentrated here.” He jabbed at the map with his right forefinger. “But it’s not accurate. We’ll go in low. We’ll go in three times. And we’ll go in from the east each time. When we’re through, there won’t be any more bridges.”

There were some questions and then Cag handed them the cold dope. He held his cigar in his left hand and said, “Marty, you take your four men in at 1000 feet to suppress flak. I’ll follow with my four at 1200. Brubaker, you mop up.

Tightly Brubaker gripped the arms of his chair and fought back his fear. He couldn’t fly this mission. He couldn’t take his jet inside that blazing rim of hills. His old bitterness at having been called back into service sneaked up into his throat and corroded his courage. Frantically, as if afraid he might break down before his peers, he rose and hurried out.

Stumbling down the narrow passageways of the carrier, he banged against stanchions and bruised his shin upon the damnable hatches. Seeking out his own room he slammed the door shut and climbed up into his bed under the steam pipes. In uncontrolled panic, there in the dark room, he cast about for some way to avoid the strike against the bridges.

“I’ll go see the doc. I’ll just walk in and announce, ‘I’ve lost my nerve.”’ Impulsively he climbed down and started for the door. Then he stopped and laughed nervously at himself.

For the navy had worked out the perfect way to handle situations like this. Suppose you went in and said you were too jittery to fly, the doc simply said, “OK. Don’t fly.” It was so easy that a man thought a hundred thousand times before he used that dodge. He stood alone, sweating, in his dark room and recalled the Cag’s flight into the valley, and almost without knowing it he uttered the tricky words that bind a man to duty, those simple words that send men in jet planes against overwhelmingly protected bridges: “If Cag can fly that flak, so can I.” That was what kept the navy system working. You could weasel out any time, but within the essence of your conscience lived the memory of other men no less afraid than you who were willing to tackle the dirty jobs. So you stuck.

But then a late flight returned and he thought ungraciously, “What mission did they draw? Rail cuts. Up where there are no guns. Why don’t they get the bridges? Why does it have to be me?”

He felt ashamed of himself and turned on the light but was appalled by his own gray and ashen face in the mirror. “Get hold of
yourself
!” he commanded. Methodically, as if attention to some one job would restore his courage, he sat down to write a letter to his wife, but after he had written only a few lines he drew back in disgust. “You stinker!” he whispered at his picture in the mirror. “Scaring Nancy by letting her know you expect to be killed at the bridges.”

He began a new letter and with great composure told Nancy how much he loved the children and of how he longed for the days of peace when they could all go camping again in the Rockies back of Denver. He ended with a paragraph in which he described in detail the suit she had worn that day on the quay at Yokosuka. “It looked very expensive,” he wrote, “and I was amazed when you said you made it yourself.”

But when he crawled back into bed things were worse than before and like a stabbing agony in the darkness he cried, “Why does it have to be me?” He remembered the men he had known in Colorado. Some hated their wives but they stayed home. Others hated their jobs, but they stayed on those jobs. Some of them, he recalled, had always wanted to travel, some had loved airplanes, others were always picking a fight and some good Catholics like Mike Forney hated communism so much they could taste it. Others were poor and needed navy pay. But all of them stayed home.

Through the long night Brubaker wrestled with his fear. Toward morning he was taken with frenzy and leaped from bed, rushing down the passageway to report his loss of nerve, but he never reached the doctor. A shattering sound halted him and in the gloomy darkness he whispered, “They’re launching the dawn planes. It won’t be long now.” Then the catapult fired again and he remembered something Forney had once said and he stumbled down the ladder to the port catapult room, breaking in among the crew and crying, “Where did Mike Forney stand?”

“Here.”

“Is that the piston he told me about?”

“Yep.”

Before Brubaker could ask more questions the engine fired and from its nest forward eleven tons of gleaming metal roared back with appalling force to stop a few inches from his face. Involuntarily he stumbled backward. The enlisted men laughed.

“Forney stood stock still,” they said.

Mike had explained that he came to the catapult room whenever his nerves were getting tight and the explosion of that enormous piston right into his face cured him: “If a guy can take that, he can take anything,” Mike had said, but before Brubaker got set the monstrous machine fired again and that tremendous gleaming force sprang at him. He fell back.

“Takes a real idiot to stay put,” a crewman shouted.

“You ever tried it?” Brubaker asked.

“I ain’t
no
idiot.”

Brubaker rooted himself to a position from which he could not be budged, and like a frightened bullfighter he mumbled to himself, “This time I keep my feet here.” While he watched, the mighty piston leaped at him, then stopped with a powerful uuuuush less than four inches from his face.

The catapult crew applauded and said, “Pretty soon now you’ll be as crazy as Forney.”

“Is that bad?” Brubaker asked. Briskly he returned through the darkened ship and climbed into bed. “Well,” he assured himself, “at least I’m not yellow.” But immediately he was more afraid: “Because you know the catapult’s got to stop. But the guns at Toko-ri never do.”

So when the messenger called at 0700 he found Brubaker awake and sweating, staring at the steam pipes. When he reported to the wardroom bleary-eyed, Cag asked, “What were you doing in the catapult room last night?”

There was no use kidding anybody so he replied, “I was jittery.”

“Does sticking your face in a piston cure that?”

“Yes.”

Cag knew he should have left it at that but this mission was too important so he asked, “You want to ground yourself?
Because today we’ve got to do a first-rate professional job.”

“That’s what I’m here for.”

“Good. I put you in the follow-through spot because I know that if my gang misses the bridges, you’ll get ’em.”

“I’m going to.”

At 0730 the pilots moved into the cold ready room where the worst part of the flight took place. Twelve reasonably trim lithe young athletes began to pile onto themselves such a mass of encumbrances that soon they waddled like pigs, completely muscle bound and sweating from every pore. Sometimes even the bravest pilots felt their nerves shiver when they faced the degrading job of dressing for a winter flight.

Brubaker started in shorts. First he climbed into long-handled woolen underwear,
then
into a skin-tight g-suit, which applied pressure on vital parts of his body so that when he pulled out of steep dives the enormous drag of gravity, the g’s, would not suck all the blood from his head. He covered the g-suit with inch-thick quilted underwear, two pairs of short bulky socks and a third which reached his knees. Then came the rough part, for even though the watertight rubber poopy suit had already saved his life once, getting into it was always murder.

Since the neck band had to be tight to keep out freezing water and since no zippers were allowed, he had to get into the poopy suit in a special way. A long slash ran from the left shoulder across the chest send down to the right hip and he climbed in through this hole, pushing his feet down into the massive boots and his head up through the impossibly tight neck band. Then he grabbed the two flaps of extra rubber along the slash and rolled them together into a bulky, watertight seal which fattened him like a watermelon. And as soon as he closed this final seal he began to sweat like a pig and every minute he wore the poopy suit he was smelly and wet and uncomfortable. From time to time he pulled the neck band out and blew fresh air inside to get some relief. That’s why the ready room was kept so cold, to keep the pilots from sweating, but all the same they sweated.

After the poopy suit came the survival vest, the pistol, the bulky Mae West, the hip knife, three cumbersome pairs of gloves, golden crash helmet, oxygen connection, harness straps and heavy goggles. Weighed down like some primeval monster, he waddled to the escalator which lifted him to the flight deck—another trick to keep down sweat—where an enlisted man handed him the board for clamping onto his knee with navigation data, codes, plots and all kinds of miscellaneous papers.

Even when he climbed into his jet there was more gear, so complicated that his plane captain had to crouch behind him and adjust safety belt, shoulder harness, ejection gear, microphone cord and oxygen supply. Harry Brubaker, who was about to soar into space with a freedom no previous men in history had known, was loaded down with such intolerable burdens that at times he felt he must suffocate; just as many citizens of his world, faced with a chance at freedoms never before dreamed of, felt so oppressed by modern problems and requirements that they were sure they must collapse.

As Brubaker adjusted himself to the cockpit he was hemmed in on left and right by more than seventy-five switches and controls. Directly facing him were sixteen instruments and thirteen more switches. He thought, “If there were one more thing to do. ...” He never finished the sentence for the mighty catapult fired and he was shot into space, where the suffocating paraphernalia and the maze of switches seemed to fall away and he roared into the upper blue, tied down only by his cancerous fear of the bridges at Toko-ri.

But today he would not see those bridges, for at Wonsan the radio crackled and he heard Cag’s disappointed voice, “Weather scout reports target closed in.
Ground fog.
Stand by for alternate instructions.”

When Brubaker heard this life-saving news he shouted, “A reprieve! I knew I wasn’t meant to tackle the bridges today.” He started to sing the chorus of
Cielito Lindo
but stopped in embarrassment when he saw that in his surging joy he had unconsciously lifted his Banshee 400 feet higher than the formation.

But ground fog did not save him, for in the next minute a miracle of modern war occurred. Cag received a radio message from Admiral Tarrant, and instantly the twelve jets stopped in mid-flight, almost as if they were a flock of pheasant searching for a Colorado grain field. Abruptly they turned south, heading for the mountainous battle front, where in the trenches a new emergency had arisen.

At dawn that morning a battalion of South Korean infantry had been hit by a murderous concentration of communist power and it became apparent that the Koreans would be annihilated unless air support could be provided. So a United States army liaison officer serving at the front phoned a Korean general, who called the United States army command in Seoul, who got hold of an air force general, who said he had no planes but would try to get some from a marine general, who suggested that Admiral Tarrant, far out to sea, might have some to spare. The inquiry arrived in flag plot just as the early-morning weather plane was reporting: “Toko-ri closed in but good. Takusan ground fog. Takusan no see.”

Tarrant, who normally would not see such a message, made a note to chew out a pilot who would use Japanese in a battle report, and replied, “One flight of twelve heavily armed jets available.
Already airborne.”

Seoul immediately ordered, “Proceed Roundelay. Operate as he directs.”

So by means of field telephone, radio, ship-to-shore communication and ship-to-plane, American jets were diverted to rescue South Korean foot soldiers. As the planes swept south Cag called ahead, “Roundelay, twelve jets reporting for orders. We’re loaded.”

From the bright morning sky
came
a whispery voice: “This is Roundelay. I’m flying an SNJ.”

Each jet pilot was astonished that in today’s swift war the out-of-date old SNJ would still
be
used. It had been ancient before they took basic training, but no one had quite the shock that Harry Brubaker experienced. “An SNJ?” he repeated incredulously and he was back in 1935, a gangling boy stretched out upon the floor, quietly and supremely happy, for he had mailed the box tops and the company had kept its promise. Here was the highly colored put-together of America’s latest plane. “It was an SNJ,” he recalled.