Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Esc - By James Van Pelt Page 0,3

sun glares directly in front of me through the prop’s thin shadow. Subtle currents bump my craft. My wing tips seem to move of their own accord as I balance in the air. I make tiny adjustments with the rudder pedals and the stick. A Nieuport is nothing like the broad-winged Jennies they trained us on. This is an unforgiving machine. A mistake, a moment’s inattention, and the plane is out of control.

I lean the mixture and retard the spark to extend my flying time. The engine begins to miss and I nudge the levers until it runs smoothly again.

The second time was over Cachy Wood near the Somme front. We were returning to Bar-le-Duc airdrome with a squadron of the new British Handley-Page bombers from a mission to destroy a supply dump deep in German territory when I became separated from the others in a cloud. Clouds are always dangerous when planes fly in formations because the visibility drops to zero, so commonly pilots increase the distance between themselves as they enter mist. When the other planes vanished, and I was alone, the solitude, the soft edge of my wingtips and the drops of water streaming off the wires comforted me.

Finally I popped out of the gray darkness and I searched the sky for my squadron. They were gone, but thirty yards to my right and at my altitude flew a blue and silver Fokker D-2 with a red cowling. The black crosses on the fuselage confirmed that I was facing the enemy. We stared at each other across the distance. His goggles reflected pure glisters of sun as we flew side by side like migrating birds. After we had flown together for a moment, he did an odd thing that has burdened me since, a thing I have told no one, not even the other pilots when we drink and laugh and sing each night to forget the days sorties: he waved.

I wasn’t stunned then, only later as I thought about the image of him facing me, hand extended, palm outward, waving. What I did was I dove right, then pulled the stick up hard hoping to get a shot at his underbelly before he moved, but when I got into position, he was gone. Bullets splintered my left wing V-spar. I snapped a hard barrel roll into a vertical loop, but I didn’t shake him, and another shower of lead found my plane, turning the aileron canvas into fragments of flapping cloth.

Turn after turn he hung to my tail, and though I tried every move I knew, he continued to successfully place shots into my ship. Never have I seen flying of this caliber. We fell 10,000 feet during the maneuvering, and then there was no place to dive to. I hugged the ground hoping that the French troops would shoot at him and not at me. His finishing blast should have caught me the instant I quit dodging, but I flew for thirty seconds and no more tracers streaked by my head; I looked behind. He had pulled his plane to the side and out of position to fire, but he was less than twenty yards away. He pointed to his deadly Spandau guns, shrugged his shoulders and turned his ship to the east. He must have run out of ammunition or suffered a jam in the mechanism. I crashed in Cachy Wood and walked away from the wreckage uninjured.

I never had a chance to fire my guns. I am a clumsy flyer, a technician. My commander says, “You must be a flyer in the heart.” I have never shot down an enemy plane.

I am now deep behind the lines and my neck hurts from craning it left and right looking for the blue and silver Fokker D-2. Captain Thenault would not approve this mission, this search for a single ship, and I could not explain it to him had I asked.

I rub frost off my chronometer. I must turn back soon. I have lost altitude to find warmer air. Now, at 8,000 feet, I see the country below has not been touched by the war. The fields are not pockmarked with craters. There are no black trench lines. A thread of smoke comes from a farmhouse chimney.

Why did he wave to me?

Brian came back from the bathroom wired and began a search and destroy circuit of the bar. He approached two women sitting at a table, borrowed a cigarette, talked to them for a few