Burning Blue
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Alfred_T._Palmer_-_Assembling_the_North_American_B-25_Mitchell_at_Kansas_City%2C_Kansas_%28USA%29.jpg

I was born on an assembly line in Inglewood, 1942.

My first memories are of steel and sweat, khaki against canvas and soft skin against cool metal. I, and a hundred of my brothers and sisters, laid out for inspection like so many butchered birds. The first thing I was aware of was my own crippling nakedness — had I lungs, my breath would’ve caught in them, realizing as I did that I had no paint, no bombs to cover my body. Nothing but sheet metal being welded together by men with grease-stains running down their faces and hands rich with callouses. They would make a bead, then lean back and lift their mask, revealing a sweated face as they inspected their handiwork. Never appearing satisfied, eternally convinced the next seam would be perfect.

I sat there with my bedfellows for weeks, and I watched many of these welders filter in and out as my body slowly, achingly slowly, came together. I enjoyed the first few; one of the first was a young man with a shock of blond hair and a stilted smile. A corner of his front tooth was missing, and it gave his laugh a lilting, flutish quality. He was one of the men fitting my wings to me, and he would talk incessantly with the others while working. I could tell they grew somewhat irritated of him, but they never told him to stop. One day, he simply wasn’t there anymore. He either left, or he moved up — or, I suppose, he went to the front, the place I would eventually go. I never did learn what happened to him, and I had no interest in doing so; people are soft and transitory. I remained.

But eventually the last few bolts and rivets and seams came together and there I was in all my glory. The men cheered when the last beads were made, clapped themselves on the back, and unceremoniously broke for lunch. I didn’t immediately understand why they weren’t celebrating more; my work was complete! I was to fly! I was, surely, their magnum opus, the finest of my hundred-strong litter. Did I not warrant their adoration?

The realization came days later when a different group of men came to me, undoing the rivets and bolts and separating parts that had been painstakingly connected. I was confused, but not scared. I was being disassembled, cranes lifting up my fuselage and wings and placing them into straw-packed crates. Then the lid came over and the sound of nails being pounded in, and all was dark and still. Delivery, I realized; I had to be delivered to the front before I could fulfill my purpose.

Spread out over a dozen dark, soft crates for some time, I had plenty of time to consider my purpose. My first thought was that my purpose was to fly; this seems straightforward enough logic. But that didn’t seem right. Is a human’s purpose to walk just because it is born with legs? Flying is a means of locomotion, one my form is perfectly suited to — but my purpose it is not. But I am not simply a plane, I reminded myself; I am a warplane. Is my purpose war, then? Sailing overhead to drop bombs on enemy unseen?

No, I decided; this was not my purpose either. This was my function, the one assigned to me, but I am given to believe that purpose is prescriptive rather than descriptive. A temporary duty, a job. Sitting in those dark crates, rolled around by the waves on a freighter headed across the Atlantic, I decided my purpose would be made manifest to me once I flew. I had to fly, and then it would be clear.

I arrived at a foreign port eventually, the ship sliding into dock and the cranes beginning to lift off the crates so they could be unsealed. The light as a man cracked the crate open was a welcome sight. The process of removing my parts from their nests took hours; reassembly was hours more, done in one of the many hangars up the hill from the port. Here it was cold, rainy, foggy — only a thin chain-link fence separated the airfield from the forests outside. It was a tableau, heavy mist hanging over dark-green grass and making the treeline haze in and out of view.

All day, I would stare out the open doors of the hangar as the other planes took flight. Fighters, bombers, interceptors, suppliers, planes of all kinds and builds taxiing out of their hangars and onto the runway. This was the first moment wherein I realized that I was different; these machines were not harboring a mind within them, simply empty constructions of steel and paint carrying nothing within other than little men in uniform. No mind, no thought, no ambition and certainly no interrogation of what we were made to do. My attempts to communicate fell short, and in regular consistent fashion, they left their nests, gained speed up the runway, and then they were gone.

Many returned, and many didn’t; I had no way of knowing whether they were destroyed or simply off to a different pasture, and I found that I didn’t care much either way. They were machines, not like I, and what happened to them was the affair of the men piloting them. What happened to the men piloting them was even less of my affair; as I said, humans are transitory and shallow. They run around in uniform, joking with their cohort, visiting the officer’s club at night, yelling and shouting when the sirens begin to scream and the bombs begin to fall.

It happened many times during my stay at the airfield, but the ordnance almost always fell in a different part of the base, or missed it entirely. I only heard the sounds of those sirens, shouting and yelling for cover, the terrific whistling that preludes an explosion, and then, boom, loud enough to fill your soul. Then, some seconds later, a repetitive THMP-THMP-THMP banging on for minutes and minutes as the explosions silenced and things returned to the normal din.

I was unaware, at the time, what that latter noise was, or what it would come to mean for me, but I knew from the instant I heard it that I was captivated. It intrigued me in a way the explosions did not; it was steady, thoughtful. Every thump seemed to have a meaning in it, a second or two of space in between each one. I could not crane a neck I did not have to see it, and I suspect it was too far from the hangar to have mattered anyway, but it captured my imagination nonetheless. I came up with many internal explanations for what it might be while they fitted my parts back together until I was whole again.

The bombings also gave me an opportunity to observe those who would be piloting me, contained within my fuselage. Not my crew specifically, but people are largely interchangeable. Inevitably, there would be casualties after a bombing, some dead, some dying, some merely wounded. It was odd to see them so easily fractured and destroyed, lying under piles of rubble, dragged out by their comrades. Men bleeding from the chest, limp on the stretcher as they were rushed to the infirmary. Once they went within the doors, I did not see them again, save for if they survived and I witnessed them in passing bandaged across the chest and arms.

I did notice that the dead and the on-their-way seemed to have a particular grace about them that the injured lacked. The latter would weep and sob openly, crying for their mothers; the former seemed more clear-headed, strangely. Little weeping and no sobbing, gritted teeth and empty eyes. Expressionless, calm faces that finally seemed as though they were at peace with their surroundings, bereft of the chaos that filled every waking moment of their lives otherwise. Maybe the purpose of a human is to die.

I had little time to ponder on this revelation, of course. It was some days after one of these bombing raids that my crew funneled into me for the first time, exploring my nooks and crannies with gloved hands and through visors. It was uncomfortable, undesirable. There were five of them, and they took their time getting to know their commission, seeing which levers activated what, the pilot and copilot settling into their chairs, the bombardier inspecting where he wold be most comfortable within the bay and the navigator doing the same.

The overwhelming sensation was one of itchiness, of a persistent irritation within myself that I could neither amend nor grow used to. I envied the ‘dumb’ planes around me, because they would never know they were suffering an indignity; I simply had to bear it. They settled themselves in after a bit, and I could return to my joyous solitude in the hangar, looking out at the train of planes coming in and out.

But, of course, all good things must come to an end.

The sirens sounded one brisk morning, and I prepared for another charge of bombers. But they were different today, more of a rousing alert than a scream of danger. The soldiers jogging around the airbase looked more focused than scared, though it would be untrue to suggest there was not an undercurrent of anxiety. I realized what was happening when my crew rushed into me and began flipping their switches. My body rumbled with my two engines spinning into gear, and I taxiied out onto the runway. We slowed, then stopped, then started again, picking up speed, faster and faster, the world turning into a blur around me, until the pilot roughly pulled upward on the throttle and I finally took flight.

We shot up into the bright blue, gaining altitude rapidly as my engines yelled along. It was an indescribable pleasure, letting loose the chains of gravity and rising unfettered into the sky. The buildings of the airfield became miniatures, then blobs, then dots as we rose up. I became aware of a number of other bombers like myself behind me. I was, it seemed, the head of this particular maneuver.

As we banked and turned to a particular heading, my previous thoughts came to me: that my purpose would become evident the moment I took flight. It was wonderful, for certain, but it didn’t feel like my purpose, like I had been struck by the grand epiphany I was awaiting. I soldiered on, swooping and turning, obediently following the lead of the pilot who nudged me to and fro, the group of other bombers following behind me.

We flew for quite some time. It all faded away at one point, but I became suddenly shocked back into consciousness when I saw dots on the land far below and in front of me. Buildings, of some kind. I moved to drift away, but the throttle pulled me back. We were lowering altitude, focusing in our direction. Ah. This was to be a bombing run.

I had no real issues with this, and the group came closer, and the buildings became more and more defined. Hangars, barracks, but also shops, houses. I could feel the bombardier rushing around in the bay, preparing himself. And once we were over them, I felt the flaps to my bomb bay open, and a weight lift. They sailed down, and it was several seconds until I heard the telltale explosions, the same kind I had been hearing for so long now but from below and distantly. I continued to steadily drop bombs as I drifted overhead, and I knew that the rest of the group was doing the same. The city below lit up with reds and oranges, deafening noises rendering the brick to rubble and the hangars to twisted metal. They spread across the city, blooming like flowers before suddenly fizzling out. Perhaps I had been wrong, and this was my purpose.

I was so lost in the sight that I didn’t notice the noise until I was over it. A very familiar THMP-THMP-THMP, and this time, I could focus my vision until I saw where it was coming from. A turret, an anti-aircraft cannon, two barrels rising until they met my trajectory, and then continuing their bleating. The shots whizzed by me, barely feet to spare, and as the pilot jerked, I followed, and the gun followed me, shots missing forward, back, until one clipped my tail.

It didn’t hurt, as I expected it to — but I was fascinated. Here was a machine with a mind, clearly; a vendetta, even. Taking active action against an enemy, chasing me until I was in its sights. The other bombers were now drifting in front of it, easy shots, but it didn’t pull away from me even though the pilot yanked the throttle.

I rebelled. When he wanted me banking right, I banked left. When I was told to gain altitude, I lost it. I was zigzagging uncontrollably, both pilot and copilot alternately swearing and praying for their lives. The cannon continued to chase me.

We continued this dance, me jerking back and looping just when it thought it had a bead on me. I had seen the pleased, satisfied faces of the men on the stretchers. I had seen the empty, thoughtless actions of the mindless machines. I wanted to enjoy this, this fateful encounter with something more akin to myself than anything else I had seen in my life. I imagined the frustrations and ecstasies the cannon felt, as it fired upon this evasive bird. Perhaps it respected me for the same agency I could sense from it; perhaps it felt frustration at my dalliances, but what mattered to me was that it felt at all.

So we ballet in the sky, pirouetting past flak. At some point, the crewmen began firing my forward guns whenever the cannon drifted into my vision; they did not hit it, but the exchange of fire between us only further excited me. This, this was perfect! A kiss across distances, white-hot lead passing from you to me and from me to you. We could never touch, of course, but this was almost as good, giving each other sensation.

The crewmen were increasingly troubled and terrified at their plane possessed, and I was increasingly manic, pulling in for one final pass across the base. The rest of the group was nearly gone now, and the cannon’s full attention was on me — I wouldn’t have had it any other way, of course. We banked left, and — pain.

A spray of fire struck me, piercing holes across my wings, my fuselage. One of my crewmen fell, struck. The left engine sputtered and died, threatening to burst into flame. My dance was interrupted — my courting, hobbled. The cannon took advantage, pumping in more fire, and as the other engine gave out and I began to fall uncontrollably, spiraling out to screams from inside, I realized my purpose, the same as anyone else’s: total destruction.

I locked my vision onto the cannon, now gone silent as it watched my fall. Aching, I tilted my rudder, swinging wildly left, directly into its path. In my last moments, I careened towards my love for a final kiss.

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