s u m m e r
owed
He was a gunner on a B-17 in the 305th Bomb Group, Chelveston - "Can Do". His plane flew with the 365th Bombardment Squadron - Heavy. He'd been to some hot spots in the war, but none worse than the Schweinfurt mission.
October 14, 1943 isn't a day he can forget. Not at home under the porch of the family farm after a hard day seeing to the tobacco and cotton, not in his new wife's arms, not even in the time alone spent hunting.
Still he bumps the Packard over the unfinished route 4 to the open fields anyway. In the backseat, his Remington 3006 and a 410 as well. Sue, his dog, rides upfront but she don't seem to take to him like she did before he left. She can tell he's a changed man, same as everyone else, except she just let's him be.
Not like his wife who tries to get him to talk about it so she can understand. Not like his Pa who tried to crack him by telling him some of his own stories from the Great War, but men dying around you doesn't make sense to one man like it might to another. And he never could make sense over what he saw those days in the skies over Germany.
And Sue, well, she picked up on that. That he was still searching for something, trying to wrap his mind around what he's felt and seen, and so she keeps her distance. She doesn't fear him, but gives him space, retrieves his rabbits and quail and sits silent beside him as if she has a greater understanding of him than anything else that he loves.
He'd seen one box in front of his begin to drift ever so slightly. The fighters were keeping the fellas on his ship and all the others busy, but from the waist position in the course of no more than 10 minutes he watched that box get reduced to just two planes. Twelve down to two and a hundred men gone just like that. It didn't really sink in until dinner that night, and from his bomb group alone there were 600 empty seats in the mess hall.
At the time he was so afraid he tried ducking behind the bulkhead of the ship when he could, a foolish thing really because the thin aluminum skin of the plane provided no protection. Mostly he kept the .50 cal pointed in his area of the sky and fired until the floor of the B-17 was slippery with brass shell casings.
Far as he knows he never hit a thing. Never killed a thing. He saw plumes of smoke from the explosions of 500lb bombs 29,000 feet below, but to him it meant nothing except each time he saw the pattern below it meant he was one step closer to getting back home.
Only trouble is after those first 25 missions were over and he'd boarded the Liberty ship bound for New York Harbor and then to Norfolk, and even after he took a seat on the train that would take him back home to North Carolina he was only sure of one thing. He was never going back home again.
Not like it was. Now, though he'd only aged three years it might as well have been twenty. He slumped when he walked, slouched when he sat, and drank so much that his hands shook and he the only time he didn't have a bottle was after he'd fallen off to sleep in the early mornings.
He still did what was expected. He took care of the farm. He saw to the bills. He didn't take it out on his wife. He read the news and kept up with the war even though he wasn't in it anymore.
He tried to be a good son to his parents and a humble man to God, but he always fell short. Short to the point that though he hated hunting he went as often as he could for the company of Sue. He shot rabbits not because enjoyed it, but because it was an interaction he understood.
It was one thing he was absolutely sure of. He was indeed good at pulling a trigger.
goodnight 6.30.04