What better way to get fired up for the coming simulation,
MiG Alley (from Rowan), than to
read one of the great novels of fighter combat depicting
that era? "The Hunters," by James Salter, is just such a
book, the tale of a daring bunch who soared over the Yalu
in F-86 Sabres, thirsty for immortality through acehood,
but often meeting their fate in a terse moment of gunfire.
This book harks back to a time when pilots were still
pilots, surrounded by an aura of romance, when scoring
kills wasn't tainted with shades of moral uncertainty. In
Vietnam, the ethos of the fighter pilot as brazen devil was
traded for a more sobering image of man at the controls of
cold technology. Salter's pilots gamble, drink whiskey,
chase nurses, and boast their exploits with red stars
painted on a fuselage.
About these kills they are at once vocal and benign,
tallying victories on kill boards and nursing huge egos,
but feigning casual disinterest in the presence of their
rivals. And there's something more visceral and heroic
about these guns-only encounters - in this case between the
F-86 and the MiG-15 - and pilots who still wore sunglasses
for a reason.
One would expect nothing less from the author of the famous
text, "A Sport and a Pastime"-a lush book obsessed with
green, bourgeoise France, the aimless rich, and a woman
named Anne-Marie of astonishing beauty. To not entirely
dissimilar territories in "The Hunters," Salter brings his
considerable descriptive powers, evoking the daily life of
a pilot in Korea, loosely based on the author's own
experiences flying in that war. Not only is Salter a
specialist in mapping the emotions of such a man, but he's
capable of more gorgeous descriptions of the wild blue than
you can shake a stick at.
Who needs missiles anyway? In the age of AMRAAM, the idea
of closing to within one nautical mile of a MIG and
swatting it from the sky with a burst of machine gun fire
is particularly exhilarating. To this daunting quest comes
Cleve Connell, a glamour-hungry pilot who has already
proven himself in training but remains untested in the
nasty skies over North Korea. Add to this equation a shy
enemy-MIGs that appear and vanish with the beguiling speed
of minnows-and you have a frustrated hero who wants to
prove his merit to his fellow airmen and, above all, to
himself.
The ace, or the man who has scored five air-to-air kills,
is treated with nothing short of sainthood in this
squadron. It's more than a mark of status in that it is
everything Connell lives for: a kind of black magic alters
those pilots who attain this number. Connell despairs at
the thought of completing his tour without achieving five
victories: his missions are often fruitless and boring, the
enemy MIGs unpredictable, hard to locate. All the more
elusive does his goal seem in the presence of heroes.
Like the hand that bears the orb, the pilots-there were
actually not many of them, about a hundred
altogether-carried alone the ultimate strength of the wing.
In each of the three squadrons there were some thirty, and
in the rest of the structure perhaps fifteen others, who
flew missions. It was a small complement; but even of the
few there were only three who were recognized wherever they
went: Imil, Bengert, and Robey. They stood out like men
moving forward through a forest of stumps.
Their names were gilded. They had shot down at least five
MiGs apiece. Bengert had seven, but five was the number
that separated men from greatness. Cleve had come to see,
as had everyone else, how rigid was that casting. There
were no other values. It was like money: it did not matter
how it had been acquired, but only that it had. That was
the final judgment. MiGs were everything. If you had MiGs
you were a standard of excellence. The sun shone upon you.
The crew chiefs were happy to have you fly their ships. The
touring actresses wanted to meet you. You were the center
of everything-the praise, the excitement, the enviers.
If you did not-although nothing was shameful about it, and
there were reasons, allegedly valid, for any man, no matter
how capable and courageous, to have failed to get
victories-still you were only one of the loose group in the
foreground of which the triumvirate gleamed. If you did not
have MiGs, you were nothing. Every day as he walked among
them, Cleve knew it more truly.
But Connell's problems don't end with the lone kill to his
credit. Shortly after his deployment he develops a fierce
rivalry with another pilot by the name of Ed "Doctor" Pell.
This is the kind of guy who wins inordinate hands of poker,
insults women to their faces, and somehow, inexplicably,
bags a few MiGs before Connell can blink, adding fuel to an
already burning dislike. (These two make Maverick and
Iceman look like kids on Sunday squabbling over the last
orange creamsicle). What emerges from the battle is an
exploration of how fragile, how ephemeral the desire of a
pilot to win fame, since his brush with glory is almost
always an equal shot at early death. In the mouth of one
pilot, "Without the MiGs, the rest doesn't matter . . . .
In this greatest life of yours, you have to win."
Scenes that stand out beautifully in this book include
those when Connell is left behind from a mission and must
abate his desire for combat-missions where his compatriots
invariably end up betwixt "a circus of MiGs". These moments
find Connell pacing in front of the radio, despairing as he
listens to the garbled transmissions of triumph from his
friends. More often than not it's the human heart upon
which Salter trains his gimlet eye, tracking these emotions
of bitterness and desire with the instinct of one long
experienced in such matters.
When I was playing hockey in college-in my official
capacity of riding the pine as a dedicated backup
goaltender-I had something of the same feeling as Connell:
left out, doomed to the bench. (No, Olaf Kolzig never
exactly found me a threat to his job with the Caps). But
most compelling about Connell is his sensitivity. He
watches the skies for the planes returning from their
missions; he inhabits a dream realm of doubt and mystified
silence. He observes his own lonely course in the war with
wonder and fear.
Nor does this tale make empty promises for action. The
appearance of the enemy is chilling, like the arrival of
sharks in still waters.
Somebody called out contrails north of the river. Cleve
looked. He could not see them. Then he heard, "They're
MIGs."
He heard Desmond: "All right, drop them."
He dropped his tanks. They tumbled away. He looked north.
Still he saw nothing. He was leaning forward in his seat,
intently. He stared across the sky with care, inch by inch.
"How many of them are there?" somebody asked.
"They're MiGs!"
"How many?"
"Many, many."
He looked frantically. He knew they must be there. He began
to suffer moments of complete unreality. . . . Then at last
he saw them, more than he could count. He could not make
out the airplanes, but the contrails were nosing south
unevenly, like a great school of fish. They were coming
across the river. They were going to fight.
This isn't a novel about gee-whiz gadgetry: you won't learn
much about the F-86 in these pages that you didn't already
know. What this book will do is transport you to a time in
our recent history when downing three enemy birds on one
mission was still feasible. The closure of this era
represents the extinction of the gunfighters with their
leather jackets and the dawn of the colder, more remote-and
certainly less romantic-warfare soon to follow.
Salter's prose style is spare, exacting-decidedly
Hemingwayesque. The chill and clarity of his sentences are
forged from the barracks of a Korean winter, from the fleet
passage of fighters through empty sky. It's fair to say
that pilots make good writers; Saint-Exupéry, Robert
L. Scott, and others. It's logical that they would be:
their attention to detail, their sharp vision, their
lyricism inspired by vast landscapes, their instinct for
the romantic. Salter is all of these, and judging from the
coarse visage staring from the jacket photo of this book,
one would guess he made a pretty good pilot, as well.
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