Once They Were Eagles Read online

  “Up the street I saw a sign: ‘Navy.’ I think it was 181 Broadway in New York City. I told them I had a seaplane license, and they said: ‘My God, just a minute,’ and called a chief over: This gentleman has a seaplane license!’ I thought they’d give me a plane that night!

  “They gave me a physical, and a lieutenant said, ‘You have everything, except you need a tooth filled.’

  “I said, ‘O.K., I’ll get it filled.’

  “He said, ‘How would you like to do it now?’

  “I said, ‘Good,’ and we took an elevator to the next floor. There was a dentist. The Lieutenant said, ‘Doc, I have a great prospect here.’

  “Whambo, the next thing I know, I’m downstairs again, holding my jaw. ‘Raise your hand,’ and that was it!

  “Then they said: ‘We’re going to let you finish your semester at New York University; then you’ll have your two full years of college, and you can go in June. We’re going to send you to preflight training.’ The first preflight battalion was sent to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. We were on Movietone News. But first, we got off the train at Greensboro, and there’re these guys looking like my Uncle Mose, a forest ranger, with those funny hats.

  “One of them was screaming and cussing bloody blue, and they seemed madder than hell about something. A guy from Syracuse and I were good buddies, still are. I asked, ‘Hey, what the hell is he so mad about?’

  “He said, ‘I don’t know who he’s yelling at.’

  “So we looked around behind us on the train. That set off the second stage, and the guy told us in no uncertain terms: we were the objects of his affection; he was a Marine drill instructor. I thought they’d been sent to drive the bus or pick up the luggage or something. He marched us to the buses, and when we got to Chapel Hill, there was a big open field with a desk at one end, guys signing up. It started to rain.

  “They said to put down our gear, formed us into what they called platoons, and gave us close-order drill—and we still had civilian clothes on.

  “Some guy said, ‘We’ve had it. There’s only so many openings. We’re gonna be the grunts, gravel crunchers, or jungle bunnies. We’re gonna get a rifle and be on our way.’

  “That set off the DIs again, but they finally signed us. Preflight was three months of nothing but physical activity, Navy regulations, and hikes, hikes, hikes. We got sent to New Orleans for Elimination Flight Training with two strikes on us because of all the publicity. They called us the ‘supermen.’

  “I got to Espiritu Santo the end of September and saw my first Corsair. I didn’t know how to get in it, since I’m so short; I thought you had to run and jump and climb up the side. Then one of the mechs showed me how you push this thing and the flap drops, put your foot here, your hand here, and that’s it. I asked him, ‘Where’s the pilot’s manual?’ He thought that was funny.

  “The first week, we had two killed out of our 15, mostly ferrying planes back and forth to Guadalcanal. One rainy night somebody came to our hut and said: ‘You guys are now in the Black Sheep.’ We figured this is it; we’d heard all those wild stories. There’s $10,000 going home to mama. If they needed us, then half the squadron must have been wiped out.

  “We reported to the Dallas hut in the rain. Standing there in our ponchos, we saw this big red-headed guy that had this other guy by the belt—it was you handling Pappy. You’d caught him outside in the rain, and his hands were swinging back and forth. We said, ‘Uh-oh, that’s the skipper. We’re dead!’

  “I’d come back from a hop and ask the mech, ‘What’s that switch for?’

  “He’d say, ‘Come on, Lieutenant, you’re kidding me.’

  “I’d say, ‘I’m not gonna touch it. Maybe it jettisons the engine.’

  “We’d touch something, and they’ d say, ‘Forget that, that’s only in cold weather.’ That’s how we learned.

  “I went back to the States and was released from active duty, but stayed in the Reserves. I had a job with Goodyear, traveling in 29 states, and got in my drill wherever I happened to be. But they stopped that and transferred me to the Volunteer Reserves, throwing me out of my home squadron. About four months later, they got called to Korea, so I guess they did me a favor.

  “I joined Colonial Airlines, and they merged with Eastern Airlines; I was with them for 11 years. In 1962, I bought a rundown travel agency. I thought I’d bought a hobby, but after a hairy six months I got it back on its feet, and now it’s doing well.

  “It’s been pleasant, but I wouldn’t trade the Black Sheep experience for anything. It was an extension of what they say in the Marine Corps: ‘I always wanted to be a Marine’ and ‘there’s nothing as good as a Marine or even close to it.’

  “We were a band of brothers. I’ve never seen another service that will get together and stick together, even if we don’t know each other. Once a Marine, always a Marine.”

  Airline Pilot and Real Estate Developer

  Tom Emrich

  W. T. “Long Tom” Emrich is an internationalist. A commercial airline pilot (a Captain with TWA), he had better than a girl in every port: he had property in every port—or at least in Spain, Arizona, and Hawaii. He’s been flitting from one to the other since he retired from TWA in 1981 and is now president of Global Enterprises, a firm that’s developing an area in Colorado.

  Tom talked to me in my apartment in Honolulu. He has lost most of the beautiful head of hair that was his pride and joy, but he is still erect and alert. Tom had wanted to be a pilot from his high school days. He’d spent two years at Wentworth Military Academy in Lexington, Missouri, then joined the Navy V-5 program, graduating as Aviation Cadet.

  After another year of training, he was shipped to the South Pacific in mid-1943.

  “I considered myself lucky to be assigned to a squadron with experienced people in it. I’d never flown a Corsair before, and there, I got only 20 or 30 hours.

  “Late one afternoon Fisher and I were sent on an alert; we’d never flown at night. Pretty soon it’s getting darker and darker. He called me: ‘Do you know where the light switches are?’

  “I said, ‘It beats me, Lieutenant.’ We had to fish around, and you didn’t have much room to maneuver, but we finally found all the lights.

  “When we landed, Fisher said, ‘Well, I guess we checked out the airplane for night flying.’

  “In the beginning, I didn’t know enough to be scared—later on, I could get dry-mouthed. Sometimes, you could tell that the land-based pilots had limited experience. Like the Japanese Zeros doing slow rolls while they were escorting their bombers. It seemed pretty stupid to me, doing slow rolls when somebody was likely to be shooting them down. Maybe it was their way of impressing us with their ability to fly, like two Samurai prancing around waving their swords. But it didn’t impress us.

  “Afterward, I went to Green Island, back to Cherry Point, to Parris Island, and then to Congaree Field in Columbia, South Carolina. By that time, the war was about over. It was there I met a fellow who knew the Chief Pilot of TWA. We took an SNJ [training plane] and flew to Washington, D.C., for an interview, and I had a job.

  Tom Emrich

  Chris Magee

  “On 16 October 1945 when I got out, I called him, and he explained how the seniority system worked. I told him to put me in the first class, and I drove straight through from Columbia to Wichita, spent the night at my mother’s, and arrived in Kansas City in time to report for class that morning. That way, I got a lot of seniority on the guys who took time off before looking for a job. As it was, a lot got in ahead of me because the Army Air Corps released them earlier.

  “I stayed in the Organized Reserves and got called up for Korea. Because of my airline experience, I was sent to Honolulu to fly transport, moving supplies to Korea; then to Japan supporting the First Marine Air Wing over Korea. I was released after 14 months, stayed in the Reserves. I started getting checked out for Captain with TWA and had to move to New York. It was difficult to make the schedul
e commuting to Anacostia [District of Columbia]; one day the squadron CO made an example of me for needing to leave the weekend drill early for a flight. I was transferred to the inactive reserve.”

  By 1955, Emrich was a TWA Captain, then worked his way up to flying the 747. As a respected senior pilot, he took a lot of flak over the TV Black Sheep show.

  “I was disappointed in that show; it made us all out to be dumbbells, somebody nobody wanted, and through the grace of God and Greg Boyington, he took us over and saved us. That wasn’t the case at all. It was just that everything fell together—the command in the right place at the right time. We were very fortunate in winding up where we were for that particular job.”

  Free Spirit

  Chris Magee

  Chris “Wildman” Magee was perhaps the ultimate combat fighter pilot. Utterly fearless and totally aggressive, he had the knack of knowing where the action was, plus complete mastery of the airplane; he could make it do things no other pilot could. His record of nine Zeros was exceeded in our squadron only by Boyington’s total.

  Maggie turned out to be one of the most difficult Black Sheep to locate. When I finally found him, I understood why. He’d had a most colorful career.

  After the war, he’d joined the Israeli Air Force during their war of independence. Following that service and his return to the States, he had run into some difficulty with the law; as a result, it took the assistance of my friend, the Chief of Police of Los Angeles, and the FBI to locate him. Finally, I received a letter from Maggie.

  Greetings, Frank,

  Strange how a few words can do more to reveal something of the nature of time than all the equations a team of Einsteins could formulate in a lifetime of blackboard gymnastics. It isn’t so much that words throw a bridge across a considerable gulf between “now” and “then” events as it is that they collapse all intervening activities below consciousness, and unite the “now” with the “then” as if by some alchemical implosion, some magic infusion.

  Such, somehow dramatized, was the effect of your letters, which I picked up recently when I dropped by my former pad in Chicago Southside to check the possibility that mail may have strayed that way.

  I’ve been to Florida a couple of times this year, roving the Gulf Coast, into the Everglades, and down through the Keys. And Westward Ho! too. Colorado, etc.

  A change of pace after six years as editor/writer/reporter for a Chicago community newspaper of approximately 30,000 circulation.

  Aside from two days and nights of intense involvement every week, I was free to set my own pace, so there was some compensation in terms of freedom, which I needed.

  There was further compensation in the form of a discipline imposed by the ever-present demand of the next deadline. But once a week for six years is a bit too much of that kind of compensation for me.

  The paper was sold and the new owner brought in his own editor, so I’m free of the printer’s ink mold, and have spent a number of months recuperating from a bad case of brainlock, induced by overexposure to journalese.

  Before that job, I edited another community newspaper for a couple of years.

  Previous to these forays into the legitimate, I was a house guest of J. Edgar Hoover at his resorts in Atlanta and Leavenworth, where due to SNAFU bureaucratic behavior in the manner of record keeping, teamed with a paranoiac penchant for secrecy, my durance vile went considerably beyond what had evidently been intended.

  During my sojourn, I taught a wide variety of high school classes, picked up some 80 college credits via extension courses, and became editor of Leaven-worth’s quarterly magazine, “New Era,” a slick, 50-plus-page organ with pretensions to literary excellence. In fact, it was included in a survey and index of literary “Little Magazines.” We also had close and friendly ties with Engel’s famed Writers’ Workshop at the State University of Iowa.

  Some of my work was reprinted in other publications around the world that are oriented to more esoteric fare. For instance, the Sai Aurobino Ashram in Pondicherry, India. I was deep into the psycho-spiritual thing long before the recent boom began. And I don’t mean the Tim Leary, Baba Ram Das, Allen Ginsberg, Holy Man circuit bit, or any of this swooning over Eastern mysticism. The West has its own tradition, only touched upon by C.G. Jung.

  Anyway, retreating further yet, timewise, I was active in the Caribbean area in the mid-1950s, and before that was working with construction crews in Greenland, above the Arctic Circle, setting up the air warning network. Earlier, in 1949, I was in Aspen, Colorado, tape recording highlights of the Goethe Bicentennial Celebration, the event that kicked off Aspen’s ascent to an off-the-beaten-path cultural center. Albert Schweitzer (‘Reverence for Life’) was guest of honor; his first absence from Africa in 25 years.

  In 1948, I was flying ME-109-Gs for the Hagannah in Israel (while Herr Hitler did snap rolls in his Nazi hell. Must have been a blowtorch on the bollocks to hear about Jews in Messerschmitts!). But that wasn’t until I went through a cloak-and-dagger underground smuggling operation in New York and Europe.

  So, that’s a fair abbreviation of my post-Black Sheep days. Although there are those who would say, cynically, of course, that for me they never ended, that they in fact became more than an upside down euphemism, more than a play-name adopted by a bunch of great guys whom it would be almost miraculous to reminisce with over a vat of milk punch.

  Well, Frank, it was a high, hearing from you. I’d enjoy being on the receiving end of any other information you seine from the stream of years.

  Chris enclosed one of his own published poems, entitled “Postscript from One Who, Like His Age, Died Young” and prefaced by the following note: “Several years after World War II, the wreck of a U.S. Marine Corps fighter plane was discovered in the interior jungle of New Ireland, in the Solomons, by a former Royal Australian Navy Coast Watcher. A jungle kit was recovered from the cockpit of the Corsair; among its items of survival gear was a wax-sealed, fungus-resistant plastic folder containing a box of ammunition for a .45 automatic and a sheet of paper with these lines.”

  I have skimmed the ragged edge of lightning death

  And torn from bloody flesh of sky a thunder song.

  Across the nakedness of virgin space

  I’ve blistered my frozen hand in feathered ice

  And dared angelic wrath to smash

  The snarling will of my demon steed.

  Far above sun-glint on winded spume,

  High executor of laws no man has made,

  I’ve welded Samurai knights into fiery tombs

  And hurled them down like the plumed Minoan

  Far down the searing heights to punch

  Their livid crates in the sea.

  ‘Enemies,’ you say. They were not mine.

  More than blood brothers, I swear,

  With tawny skin and warrior eye.

  Bushido-bred for hell-strife joy.

  Much closer my kin, my race than those

  Who cud-chew their lives can ever be.

  ‘War-lover,’ you say, ‘sadist, psychotic’—

  That sick cycle of canned clichés masking

  Your lust for eternity fettered to time.

  Go, epigonic pygmies, make peace with hell,

  Drag the myths of our ancient might

  Through the miserable muck of a cringer’s dream.

  What could you know

  Who have never heard

  The soaring song of the Valkyries,

  Felt thunder-gods jousting with livid peaks:

  You who have never dared to walk the razor

  Across the zenith of your peevish soul?”

  Subsequent letters to Chris’s address have come back marked “Return to Sender—Unable to Forward.” Possibilities as to where he is and what he’s doing are endless. He may be in Central America; he may be involved in another secret mission somewhere in the world; in view of the Middle East situation, he could very well be back with the Israeli Air Force; he may be in Africa. Like K
ipling’s Cat Who Walked by Himself, “He went through the wet, wild woods, waving his wild tail, and walking his wild lone. But he never told anybody.”

  He may have passed on to Fighter Pilot’s Heaven. I certainly hope not. The world has desperate need for free spirits, even those who suffer occasional aberrations.

  Electrical Contractor

  Rollie Rinabarger

  To reach Rollie Rinabarger’s home in Tulelake, California, I drove north from San Francisco almost to the Oregon border, then turned east through a national wildlife refuge, home of some two million waterfowl. I passed thousands of ducks, geese, swans, and other water species, as well as quail, pheasant and deer.

  Tulelake, population 900, is situated in the center of a major rice-growing area, where the clean air is cooled by the 4,000-foot altitude. Hunting and fishing are excellent, local residents usually have a side of venison in their freezers. Nearby is the hundreds-of-years-old Lava Beds National Monument containing ancient petroglyphs and Indian pictographs. Rollie’s directions led me to his home in the middle of this relatively unspoiled mountain utopia.

  I talked to him in the garage/office from which he runs his active electrical contracting business. During the season, he also flies a crop-dusting plane over the ricefields. The walls displayed memorabilia of Black Sheep days, which for him had ended in a hospital. On 26 September 1943 he had been attacked by a swarm of Zeros over Kahili and his plane severely shot up. A fire in the cockpit and a shell that hit him in the back, shattered on a knife at his hip, and lodged fragments in his back and left leg did not prevent his getting back to us—but only temporarily—for our Sydney trip.

  “I was sent to the States on a hospital ship, and in Schumacher Hospital they were still picking pieces of metal out of me months later. Afterward, I was sent to El Toro, then Santa Barbara. I was there when the war ended; I was released from active duty then but stayed in the reserves.