Prologue: Yo-Yo

What is missing in the moment he will return to, in memory and in writing, for the

rest of his life is his sense of himself. The moment is simultaneously brief and

prolonged, distorted first by adrenaline, later by the vagaries of memory. And it is

dangerous. In his maturity, he will concede that most of us are never more conscious of

the pulse in our wrists and the thrumming in our minds than in threatening circumstances.

When faced with physical harm or the possibility of sudden extinction, our senses rouse

themselves and life becomes both dream-like (the minutes stretched by an uncanny

feeling of moving in slow motion) and wrenchingly vivid (each small gesture an agony of

air against skin). But now, in the nose of the thin aluminum plane, as metal, glass, and

his teeth rattle to the point of tearing loose, nothing is clear, least of all a fleeting, time-

dependent I.

Here is what seemed certain just before he crawled into the transparent womb at

the front of the B-25. It was August 15, 1944. He was about to fly his second mission of

the day. Earlier, he and the rest of his crew had been ordered to attack enemy gun

positions at Issambres Point, near Avignon, France, but heavy cloud formations had

prevented them from dropping their bombs. According to military reports, flak cover at

the target was “[h]eavy, intense, and accurate.”

Just one week earlier over Avignon, on the morning of August 8, he had

witnessed flak bursts cripple a bomber. “I was in the leading flight,” he recalled, “and

when I looked back to see how the others were doing, I saw one plane pulling up above

and away from the others, a wing on fire beneath a tremendous, soaring plume of orange
flame. I saw a parachute billow open, then another, then one more before the plane

began spiraling downward, and that was all.” Two men died.

Now, on this follow-up mission a week later, the goal was to destroy the Avignon

railroad bridges on the Rhone River. It was his thirty-seventh assignment overall, since

the end of May, when he had first been stationed at the Alesan Air Field on the island of

Corsica, west of Italy.

As he had done thirty-six times before, he took a last pee by the side of the

runway (there were no bathrooms aboard the B-25), and then slid down the narrow tunnel

beneath the cockpit to the bomber’s Plexiglas nose cone. The tunnel was too small for a

man wearing bulky equipment; he was forced to park his parachute in the navigator’s

area behind him. Up front, in the glass bowl (the crew called it the “hot house”), he

always felt vulnerable and exposed. He found his chair. He donned his headset intercom

so he could talk to comrades he could no longer see in other parts of the plane. The

wheels left the ground. Now he was alone, in a blur of blue.

As his squadron began its approach to the Rhone, German anti-aircraft guns let

loose and flak filled the air. A bomber in another squadron got “holed.” A spark, a flash.

The plane lost a wing. It dove. No parachutes.

Hurtling through space, the man in the glass cone watched the shining metal fall.

A minute later, he was steering his plane. His pilot and the co-pilot had taken their hands

off the flight controls. It was time for him to drop his bombs, and so, to assure a steady

approach to the target, he commanded the plane’s movements using the automatic

bombsight, steering left, steering right. For about sixty seconds, no evasive action would

be possible, just a sure zeroing-in.

 Almost. Almost. There. He squeezed the toggle switch that released the bombs.

Immediately, his pilot, Lieutenant John B. Rome, banked up, away from the target.

Rome, twenty, was one of the youngest pilots in the squadron, with little combat

experience. The co-pilot, fearing this green kid was moving too fast and about to stall the

engines, seized the controls and the plane went into a sudden, steep dive, back to an

altitude where it could be holed by curtains of flak.

In the nose cone, the man who had overseen the bombs slammed into the roof of

his compartment. His headset jack pulled loose from its outlet and began whipping about

his head. He heard nothing. He couldn’t move. I “believed with all my heart and

quaking soul that my life was ending and that we were going down, like the plane on fire

I had witnessed plummeting only a few minutes before,” he remembered. “I had no time

for anything but terror.”

Just as quickly as it had begun its descent, the plane shot upwards, away from the

flak, one moment yo-yoing into the next: a vanishing yet interminable instant. Now he

was pinned to the floor, looking for a hand-hold, anything to grasp. The silence was

horrifying. Was he the only crewman left alive? Was he alive? Would this moment

never end, or had everything already ceased?

He noticed the jack to his headset, lying free near his chair. He plugged himself

back in and a roar of voices pierced his ears. “The bombardier doesn’t answer,” he heard

someone shout. “Help him, help the bombardier.” “I’m the bombardier,” he said, “and

I’m all right,” but the very act of asserting what should have been obvious made him

wonder if it was true.

 Twenty-two years later, is it the same self that walks the hills of Corsica, looking

for traces of the young man he was, when, as a second lieutenant, he flew sixty bombing

missions between May and October 1944—looking, so he can write about his wartime

experiences, as he has before and as he will do again?

He is, a taxi driver tells him, the first American from the old Alesan Air Field ever

to return here. To celebrate his reverence for the past, the driver arranges a meal for him

and his family in a local restaurant with something that resembles pan-broiled veal but is

probably goat, with bread and cheese and wine. His wife and children, a ten-year-old boy

and a fourteen-year-old girl, tolerate his nostalgia with gentle, mostly indulgent irritation.

“Be nice to daddy,” the girl tells her brother. “He’s trying to recapture his youth.” Of

course she’s right, he thinks, and he feels stupendously foolish. “I [have] come to the

wrong place,” he tells himself. “My war [is] over and gone.”

The only remaining evidence of his bombing missions, at least that he can find as

he travels, is a hole in a mountain near Poggibonsi. The mountain was not the target.

That day, nervous, his attention drifting—there had been no flak, no danger—he had

released his bombs a second or two too late (he remembers this clearly) and blasted the

side of the mountain instead of the railroad bridge he was supposed to blow apart. The

bridge, hit by other planes that day, has long since been repaired, and looks better than

ever.

Time yo-yos back and forth as he crosses green fields with his wife and kids: on

the one hand, it’s as though certain events never occurred, and then, just as he is

wondering if a bombardier with his name and face ever really came to Corsica, he

encounters a Frenchman on a Swiss train, a train he has decided to take after giving up
touring old battlefields, where the past has been erased like the bounty of annual harvests.

And it is here, where he least expects it, that the ghost of an old self returns, as indistinct

yet insistent as a reflection of his features in the window of the train.

The Frenchman—from somewhere near Avignon, perhaps—speaks no English.

He smokes cigarette after smelly cigarette. He says he is going to visit his boy in a

hospital, where he lies with a terrible head wound from the war in Indochina. He weeps.

In French, he tells the American and his befuddled children, “You will find out, you will

find out.” The future tense seems wrong. Hasn’t he already found out, already sat

among the wounded? But no. He has not witnessed everything. Time still has surprises

to spring. Apparently, old fears, and the reasons for them, never disappear. “Why was

he crying?” the boy asks once the Frenchman has walked away, clear to the other end of

the train car. “What did he say?” the American’s daughter wants to know. Where, now,

is the old bombardier? Who is he? “Nothing,” he says.