Afterburn Read Free

the Rex Hotel. Everywhere Vietnamese stood selling black-market cigarettes, radios, and chocolate. Everywhere U.S. servicemen were walking, standing, talking with prostitutes in miniskirts. It was ten dollars and yes he thought about it. Little smiling girls you put your cock into. What a monster he was—or might someday be.
    He went to other places, too—Bangkok or Hong Kong to shop. Toys for the children, a watch for Ellie, get a suit made. He wandered the neon streets removed twice from himself—first from America, second from the war. A day later, he was back to the game. There was some paperwork, since he was in a supervisory position, but against the adrenaline moments of flying, it was routine, time passing, tick-tick goes the red trigger on the stick. He felt clean. He knew why he was there. He knew the score. Daily intelligence reports. Troop movements, pontoon bridges being repaired. Rail lines, Chinese-made trucks. Bombing winds, altimeter settings. You lived by a code, you maintained your duties, you knew who you were. And then the plane itself—you had to be clean to fly the machine.
    He missed Ellie, missed her under him, going hard into her, riding her breath, but that was all there waiting for him when he returned. A man lets go of that when he's on the verge of something else, something bigger. A woman, skin, the bed—these were limited sensations, all edges known. Nothing on earth compared to flying combat, for its proximity to death and heaven enlarged him. It was a great and terrifying secret that no one who hadn't experienced it could understand—in all of America, only several thousand men. And of those, only a few hundred were operational now, he one of them.
    He couldn't tell Ellie. Not really. He kept her letters in a neat stack in his drawer. When he didn't care to write, he talked into a tape recorder, just rambled along. Kiss Julia and Ben for me. Go ahead and sign the mortgage, sweetie. What was a mortgage compared to a Soviet-built MiG-21 fighter? He'd made captain early, he could do five hundred sit-ups without stopping, he'd counted cards at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, he could still screw three times in one night, he owned eight hundred shares of IBM and had danced the tango with Ellie at their wedding reception. He'd rolled a Jaguar doing ninety while stationed at Edwards Air Force Base in California and walked off his concussion, he'd dropped an F-86 on a runway in Wiesbaden, West Germany. He was tested and proven and scared. He was in his prime and he knew it. Ninety-seven missions, three confirmed MiG kills, dozens of trucks, trains, and artillery pieces. How many dead Vietcong, how many dead North Vietnamese regulars? He knew the number, more or less. It was just a number. He told no one, and no one asked.
    Of course, he was angry, too. You always were when they were fucking with the technical parameters of your survival. Ellie didn't understand, and if he explained it to her on paper, he'd be flying freighters to Guam. The bureaucracy appalled him, desktop generals promoted in the somnolent 1950s sitting in the puzzle palaces making war policy. The forms and reports, the smudging of statistics. The war protesters putting pressure on him, directly, though they didn't know it. He formulated air strikes and suggested them to his superiors, many of whom had the Pentagon in one ear the whole day. But Washington used the Air Force against North Vietnam only like a cattle prod—trying to get a reaction without causing excessive damage, without doing what it had the power to do: crush North Vietnamese industry and supply lines. At times, the squads weren't even allowed to attack. A North Vietnamese cargo plane carrying war matériel was off-limits . North Vietnamese airfields were off-limits . He'd lost three men to MiG fighters parked on fields he regularly flew over. And all flying targets had to be sight-checked, as if the MiGs did not have air-to-air missiles, as if the American