Many pilots have written memoirs of their flying careers. Their collected works fill tall bookcases. Usually a pilot turned author, no matter how skilled in the cockpit, is a modest literary craftsmen. He or she can tell a story but cannot make it shine.
James Salter, who died in June at age 90, was an exception. Unlike most pilots, he was not a one-book man who crammed a lifetime between two covers. He quit flying in his prime to write fiction, nonfiction, and movie scripts and continued writing for half a century.
Salter graduated from West Point in 1945 and entered the Army Air Corps as the war ended. He flew transports, served in the command structure, and when the Korean War began, he volunteered to fly combat fighters. He recorded his military experience in the first 200 pages of "Burning The Days," the remainder of which is devoted to his years writing and in film. For Salter, the Korean War was months of intense, brief dogfights his squadron of F-86s fought with Russian MIGs over the Yalu River. This is combat at 30,000 feet, or more, at 350 mph or more. Here, now, over, in a rush of adrenalin. When Salter wrote, he remembered his past with luminosity as this brief sample of his work demonstrates.
Once, at a dinner party, I was asked by a woman what on earth I had ever seen in military life. I couldn't answer her, of course. I couldn't summon it all, the distant places, the comradeship, the idealism, the youth. I couldn't tell about flying over the islands long ago, seeing them rise in the blue distance wreathed in legend, the ring of white surf around them. Or the cities Shanghai and Tokyo, Amsterdam and Venice, gunnery camps in North Africa and forgotten colonies of Rome along the shore.
I couldn't describe that, or what it was like waiting to take off on missions in Korea, armed, nervous, singing songs to yourself, or the electric jolt that went through you when the MIGs came up.
In 1957 Lt. Col. James Salter realized writing was more important to him than flying and drove to the Pentagon to submit his resignation. Finished with his paperwork, done with his career, recognizing everything he had done as a military flier was history, he no longer was a prince of the air, admired by men, eyed by women, celebrated by his country. He returned to his apartment and wept.
Anyone who grew up in Fairbanks or Anchorage in the '50s and '60s, as I did, grew up with the Air Force. Ladd Field (now Fort Wainwright) was within walking distance of my parents' home. Eielson AFB was 26 miles to the east. The military population fluctuated, but there were years when the military and their dependents made up 20 percent of Alaskans.
Until late in my teens, I only went on the military bases as an infielder for youth baseball teams. I paid far more attention to the scoreboard than my surroundings, but some aspects of the base were too obvious for a diamond rat to ignore. The long, seemingly endless, treeless lawns of carefully cut grass. The well-maintained barracks and recently painted officer housing. The absence of trash, garbage, and junk cars in the open. (Well into my childhood Fairbanksans tossed their trash and garbage on the Chena River ice in winter. Junk cars were abandoned everywhere.) The absence of old miners who had participated in founding Fairbanks. The absence of Alaska Natives. The bases, I later concluded, were not Alaska: They were Outside, the states, transported to Alaska. Suburbia -- armed to the teeth with combat aircraft gleaming on the black tarmac. A suburbia whose young, healthy residents rotated away before you knew them.
The bases were a source of mystery. Where did the generals store the hydrogen bomb? I assumed it was somewhere near the flight line behind a tall steel fence -- armed MPs standing at attention near the corners of the fence. Everybody knew the Air Force was in Fairbanks to protect us from Russia, but we also knew if the balloon went up, the Russians would leave Fairbanks a smoldering, irradiated ruin.
The roar of F-86s rolling down the runway into the sky was as integral to the sound of Fairbanks as the country music blaring from the downtown bars where airmen fought over local girls. One winter night that roar became an explosion. A fighter crashed less than a mile from my house. The pilot was killed, the woods where he died remained charred until summer.
I remember the one occasion a fighter pilot -- a man of Salter's breed -- was in our home. And I remember only his first name: Lionel. Somehow, he knew my mother's family in Westchester County, New York. He contacted us and came for dinner. He was in uniform with a broken leg, acquired how, I don't know. He was very much an officer and a gentleman, but he may have visited us to escape the boredom of nursing his leg in the barracks.
I wonder if James Salter ever flew in Alaska. He vividly describes flying in the Far East, Europe, the continental United States, Hawaii -- nothing about Alaska. Too bad. I would like to read his description of taking off into the impenetrable ice fog of December and climbing toward the Midnight sun in the warm, dry air of June.
Michael Carey is an Alaska Dispatch News columnist.
The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)alaskadispatch.com