The Way the Future Blogs

 

My time with the 456th Bomb Group was cut short when somebody at Air Force headquarters in Caserta, Italy, noticed that as a civilian I had been a writer and magazine editor, and immediately jerked me back to headquarters to write publicity for the weather squadron. None of what I did in that capacity, I promise you, did the slightest harm to the German Wehrmacht or the least imaginable good to the Allied — no, wait a minute. By gosh, I did do a little something for the ground-down enlisted men of the 12th Weather Squadron. See, they were getting screwed, and they didn’t even know it.

The 12th Weather Squadron was unusual among small military units in that it was split up into quite tiny groups, four or five officers and half a dozen enlisted men, or just enough to man a weather station for each bomb group. The people in these detachments seldom saw any of the two or three thousand other people in the squadron.

I received a copy of every promotion, so I could write a little news release about it to send to the promoted fellow’s hometown paper (who almost always threw it away). Meanwhile I had started a little, well, all right, it was pretty much a sort of fanzine — only for the B-24 groups rather than sf fans — that was circulated to all the detachments. I encouraged each of the detachments to send me little stories about what they had been doing, even if no more than occasionally playing softball. I decided to make that more interesting, so I started printing news of promotions in every issue, officers in the left-hand facing page, enlisted men in the right. As I had expected, most months there would be a couple dozen officer promotions, few or none for enlisted men.

This caused some concern among the squadron’s higher authorities, who didn’t think it was good for morale, and they dealt with it by promoting me to the post of Squadron Historian, which carried with it a few privileges, including the right to rehouse myself in the squadron’s recreational hotel, the former Albergo Eremo or Hermit Hotel, halfway up the slope of our friendly local volcano, Mt. Vesuvius. So I took the bribe, turning all my news writing and fanzine publishing over to a corporal who, I think, soon stopped bothering with any of it.

As a resident of the Eremo, I had my own room with my own sheeted and pillowed bed, made every morning by my maid, and my meals were cooked to order by Lisa, the hotel’s peacetime cook, who got us all kinds of delicacies by trading powdered eggs and Spam for fresh Italian veggies and other edibles. And I got some of my own writing done, though, unfortunately, little of it was on the squadron history.

 
To be continued.

 
Related posts:

• My War, Part 1
• Hal Clement: Major Harry Stubbs
• How I Lost My Oldest Friend (and Gained a Literary Agency)

 

See, I wanted to get into the action This was World War II, and it was my personal war. I wanted to fight. When I was inducted, they put me, as they did everybody, through a battery of tests, and when they looked at all the results they said, “Boy, you qualified for everything. Now, you have to list what branch of service you want to serve in and, bam, then you’re off to basic training in that service and pretty soon you’re in the war, right where you want to be.”

So I took the list and checked off my three choices.

Number One was Infantry. That was the down-and-bloody place for fighting, and they said, “You put that down anywhere as a choice and that’s where you’ll go, because that’s where they need replacements all the time.” Just to make sure, I put Field Artillery as my second choice and Armored Corps as my third, and next thing you know, I’m on my way to basic training.

In the Air Force.

That’s when I began to perceive that they didn’t really much care what I wanted. Somewhere somebody was making arcane calculations of what the Army wanted. And that’s what they chose.

All right, I was in the Air Force. Then they kept me stooging around the Lower Forty-eight for two years before they at last dumped me into the hopper of the 456th Bomb Group (Heavy) weather station in Italy. It was just in time.

The rumbling and grumbling roar of B-24 motors was coming from every one of those takeoff strips that sprawled over what had once been Italian farm fields and olive groves. We weathermen just arriving from the States had got there in such a hurry that I had already pulled my first shift in the weather station by the time I dumped my baggage in the four-man tent, one of whose cots would be my home for the foreseeable future.

At last! I was in the war! The proof of that was right overhead, where some three hundred or so lubberly B-24s were fighting every attempt of their pilots to gain altitude so they could form up for the long pull across the Mediterranean to where their war would start — No! Had started already!

Once I was outside, I could see in the last glimmer of daylight those chubby B-24s nuzzling into their formations, a few of them all formed up already and already starting to line out across the Mediterranean Sea toward southern France. That’s what it was, the invasion of Southern France, begun at last! And every American and British bomber and fighter in Italy or North Africa was joining in the fight.

The sky was full dark now, stars beginning to appear, along with the little running lights of all those planes — no! It wasn’t dark! Two great blossoms of red and yellow fire swelled overhead, followed at once by the great ker-BANG blast of two B-24s that had cut their turns too fine and exploded in the air as they turned into a collision … and then, suddenly, another immense ker-BANG from a little farther away, as two more B-24s collided … and then a single, smaller blast as a plane flying by itself caught a chunk of wreckage from one of the collisions and itself blew up.

That was five heavy bombers afire at once in the sky over the 456th Bomb Group. Ten men in each crew. Fifty human beings dying before my eyes.

And the next morning at daybreak, every last cook, clerk or MP in the 456th Bomb Group was rousted out of his bed at dawn and set to join one of the wobbly lines of searchers that trudged across the earth under where the explosions had been, looking for a head, a thumb, an ear, a boot with something that once had contained a living human’s foot, to turn over to the graves registration squadrons to try their luck at identification.

That’s what I saw that first night with the 456th. There were ten men, from pilot to tailgunner, in each of those five blown-up bombers, but there were no parachutes and no survivors.

Oh, I was in the war all right. I just wasn’t allowed to do any fighting.

 
To be continued.

 
Related posts:

• Hal Clement: Major Harry Stubbs
• How I Lost My Oldest Friend (and Gained a Literary Agency)

 

Remember that great old black-and-white movie, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington? That was the one where Jimmy Stewart, the Boy Scout leader who becomes a senator by accident, discovers what a gang of crooks many politicians are and filibusters until their misdeeds are exposed. It’s a great moment in the movie — unfortunately not quite as great when the filibuster is used in real life to paralyze action.

For instance, there’s what is going on in the Senate right now. A few Republicans in the Senate don’t like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that Congress voted into law over their objections. Now they’ve got a second shot at crippling it.

By Constitutional law it is the President’s duty to appoint someone to head it, and the Senate’s to vote, aye or nay, to confirm. When the President did what the Constitution requires and passed the name of his nominee to the Senate he learned that one senator was blocking it by filibuster. So the headless Bureau can’t function as well as it should, and “financial protection” for many Americans is still just a promise.

A handful of senators have pulled the same trick on scores of other nominees, particularly judges. There are nearly a hundred federal courthouses sitting vacant today because a senator has filibustered a veto on voting for them. This has caused some real hardships, not just for judge-appointees who sometimes can’t take other jobs before their confirmation hearings (are they supposed to apply for unemployment insurance?) but for many persons up for federal trial. The Constitution promises them a speedy hearing, since “justice delayed is justice denied.” But any single senator can delay a trial indefinitely.

Most Senators, both Democrats and Republicans, will admit that the filibuster rule needs to be fixed, since it is just as immoral when the roles of the two parties are reversed, as it was in the Bush years. But that doesn’t stop almost all Republicans from chiding the President for not getting enough done, even when it’s their own party that does its best to tie his hands.

When I say I grew up in Brooklyn, those who are aware that Brooklyn is nothing grander than just one of the five boroughs of the megalopolis called New York are likely to have a mental picture of a six-year-old dodging trolleys for his life and never seeing a tree leaf out in the springtime.

It wasn’t like that. Oh, sure the traffic and the trolleys were only steps away on Flatbush Avenue. I rarely tried to cross Flatbush Avenue, though. Didn’t care for all that traffic, and in the side streets where people lived it wasn’t so bad. And gigantic, wonderful Prospect Park was only a ten-minute walk away, and if I wanted real National Park-type open space there were huge chunks of that a lot closer than you might imagine.

My grandparents came from the same little town in Germany but didn’t meet until they had independently immigrated to the States. There they lived in Broad Channel, in a house my grandfather, a carpenter by trade in Germany, had built himself for his bride and their expected flock of German-American kids, of whom my father was the seventh and last. That little house at 1404 Cross Bay Boulevard had an unusual distinction Its front door was in Queens, another of NYC’s flock of boroughs.

The back door, though, opened onto Jamaica Bay, an integral part of the one and only one of the America’s National Parks (20,000 acres broad and offering populations of more than 300 species of birds and similar populations of marine animals and vegetation) that you can get to on the subway.

If you want more technology than that, the Bay is bracketed at one end by Floyd Bennett Field, New York’s first city-owned airport, and at the other by no less than JFK itself, with the big jets screaming every few minutes as they depart for destinations in America, Europe, Africa, Australia — for the world.

 

If you’re driving a People’s Gas truck and the fuel tank is running low, head for the North Side of Chicago. There the first of three filling stations has been operating for a year, turning waste cow dung into truck fuel with the help of an Obama Administration grant. An anerobic converter changes half a million gallons of cow manure into clean fuel a day, enough to drive a truck 20,000 miles, with the help of live bacteria.

 

I tried to figure out why I had been so open with Professor Betty and so closed-mouthed with most of the rest of the world.

I finally figured it out. I hadn’t want to discuss it with anybody, I just wanted to spill it out and get rid of it, so it had to be a stranger. And when I woke up the next morning, I did feel that a weight had been lifted off my chest.

I had obligations to MidAmeriCon that day, but I couldn’t see anything past that afternoon that I couldn’t just skip. So I sat in on the Saturday morning breakfast, with Robert Heinlein (the guest of honor, remember?) at the head of the table and being sure to chatter with each of the special guests, and I gave my “Thank You For Being You, Robert” speech at one-thirty, as promised. It went well, especially with my one big joke — “And, Mr. Chairman. I see you’ve got a Robert A. Heinlein luncheon promised for tomorrow, but this is a big con and he hasn’t gained any weight. Are you sure there’s enough of him to go around?”

And then I pocketed the cash refund for the unused day of my stay and got in a cab and a little over an hour later we were taking off from my favorite airport and I was on my way home.

More, when I write it.

 
Related posts:

• Arrival: The Happiest Airport
• Arrival, Part 2: Heinlein Stories
• Arrival, Part 3: KC in the GOP’s Wake
• Arrival, Part 4: The Party Plan
• Arrival, Part 5: ‘I guess I am’
• Arrival, Part 6: The Deal