“There’s a bee in here,” she almost screamed. “Stop the car.” My feeling was that it would be better for all of us to get bee-stung than to get into a collision. “Roll down the windows,” I said. “Maybe he’ll leave.” “Stop the car,” Peggy kept commanding. She was close to hysteria.
After the windows were down the bee did leave, heading toward New Jersey. In the back seat, the kids tried hard not to laugh. Later, when we stopped for gas, the boys found that they were suffering from a desert-wide thirst. I dug up some change and bought them sodas. Aram, the younger, looked at me with amusement. “That bee business was funny,” he said. “You never panic, do you?” I took it as a profound compliment. Even when he was 8 he didn’t miss much. Aram was right: I try not to panic. It was something I learned during World War II.
Any war is a monstrous atrocity against humanity. But a big, public war fragments into millions of private agonies. When you’re in a great wide war, your only intense concern is your own personal misery, your own deep terror. To survive, you learn to cope. Yon learn little by little or in big chunks–or you learn all at once. But yon do learn. In the immediacy of terror you have to learn.
For a year before the final spring of World War II, I flew B-26 Martin Marauders. The B-26 was not a user-friendly aircraft. Rumor had it that more people were killed in training in the B-26 than in combat.
The Marauder gave me what I sometimes thought was terminal insomnia. Too many nights during that year I lay awake worrying that I might make a mistake while at the controls and kill not only myself but the other five guys in the airplane. My crew in the B-26 – copilot, bombardier/navigator and three gunners-were all younger than I. And I was 21. When people reminisce about that war, they rarely talk or write about the nights you can’t sleep because of fear.
When someone yon knew got killed, there was shock, then instant sadness and sense of loss. You felt emptiness where someone should an been. Then there was a tiny involuntary surge of elation as the thought came, unwanted: “Better him than me.” Right away, then, you had guilt to cope with.
I learned something on my first bomb run over a target in Germany.: Flak, when you fast see it, bursts in harmless dirty puffs, far away. Then, when it’s close enough to look like blinking red eyes, it’s too close. By the time you hear it, rattling off the bombs in the open bomb bays, you can smell it, too. That is SOmehow worse. You can still smell it as the plane lifts after dropping its bomb load and you go into a steep descending turn, still in tight formation, peeling away from the target.
I started to shake on that first mission as pilot and gave the controls to my copilot. After a few vibrating seconds, I was allright and took back the controls. I learned something that has come in handy over the past 50 years: no matter how scared I am I can handle anything while the crisis is right there, immediate, close, breathing on me. Afterward, I may blow sky high. But what the hell, that’s afterward.
In the air, on the ground, at sea, combat had one common denominator. It gave the combatant an all-purpose perspective, a nice feeling for private priorities, a sure sense of what not to choke up about. It gave an intimate working arrangement with the rationale of all agony: if I can live through this minute–or hour, day or week-maybe the next one will be better.
Combat–and we thought of flying the B-26 around Texas as worse than combat–gave you antennae to find the funny aspects in the grim. That’s an essential for survival in any war. It’s that awareness of the ludicrous that gives your boat buoyancy in any of life’s stormy crossings. In Del Rio, Texas, while I was flying B-26s in transition school, an emergency appendectomy gave me some time in the hospital at the field. It was the happiest, most worry-free vacation I can remember. I became friends with the patient in the next room, an instructor pilot named Fletcher Dailey who was there to make peace with his ulcers. Fletcher and I found we both knew how to cook oatmeal and that we both knew the words to “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam.” We volunteered to do some morale work–to cook oatmeal and sing for the men in the wards. The head nurse wouldn’t let us. She said that men suffering from complications of gonorrhea didn’t want to be Sunbeams.
I had a comparatively easy time in World War II. I did not go through any of the private hells of men on ships in the navy, of marines at Guadalcanal, of infantrymen everywhere. But I saw and felt just enough to have empathy with those men, to know what it was all about. I learned the one profound lesson that’s come in so handy over the last 50 years. Don’t panic.
Your car just broke down 27 miles from nowhere? Well, you’re on the ground, not at 12,000 feet. You’re not really in enemy territory, It’s only Wisconsin.
Lost your job? Well, there will be other jobs. And there are others who are worse off, those who’ve been out of work so long they can’t remember what kind of work they’re out of.
Your wife wants a divorce? What the hell, nobody’s shooting at you. There are other shiny pebbles in the brook.
What I got out of World War II-and I’m grateful for it-was a crash course in growing up. Maybe over a lifetime I might have learned what I learned in that war. Maybe. But what I and others got in a short span a haft century ago was an undying appreciation for that everyday miracle, the resilience of the human spirit. I’m sure that combat veterans of every war back to the Crusades got the same kind of profound education.
Anyway, all this enlightenment will help you understand why I’d rather have a bee in the car than wrap a car around a tree.
