The Sky Behind Me
a Memoir of Flying and Life
by
Byron Edgington



    This excerpt is the first three chapters of The Sky Behind Me, a Memoir of Flying and Life. Recently published by The Educational Publisher, Columbus Ohio, TSBM is more than aviation memoir; it is about life in balance and the need to take off again no matter how hard the previous landing was. TSBM is filled with warm, engaging, heartbreaking and heartwarming human interest stories, all of which are true . From my seat in the sky I was able to look over our world from a perspective few people ever have. I was also able to see people, my passengers, in a wholly different way. That view not only taught me a lot about humanity, it also informs the writing.
         The Sky Behind Me is ultimately about life itself lived as well and as high as possible.

The Sky Behind Me, a Memoir of Flying and Life is available on Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1622490371


                               The Sky Behind Me
                       a Memoir of Flying and Life
                                             1
                     The Island of Kauai: 12/14/2005

     I step out of the cockpit, and the cold, hard ground comes up to meet me. You’ve been there, felt this, the realization in your bones that something is finished, something so important, so fundamental to who you are that you can’t allow yourself to think about it yet, though you know it’s true . You get through the next minute, hang up a phone, watch a train pull away, a face at a window—or close a cockpit door and walk away, and you just know. As much as you ache for it not to be true , it’s done, and you know it. Something in your life is finished forever.

    I land, shut off the engine of the helicopter. The rotor blades spin down, slower, slower still. The trade wind catches them. Each blade dances and bends, like a hand waving goodbye. I yank the rotor brake and they creak to a stop overhead. In the cabin with me six passengers peel off headsets, their helicopter tour of Kauai over. With laughter, and even some tears, they chat about the flight, voting on favorite parts.
    I listen to their bubbly conversation: “NaPali Coast, stunning, the volcano, unbelievable, Hanalei Valley, waterfalls, gorgeous, how’d you like that double rainbow? Love to go again.”
    Typical comments. After flying 2,500 tours of the island I can predict them. I remove my headset, and click open the seatbelt lock. I was forty-five minutes into the tour when the spell washed over me, a sudden dizziness, narrowing vision, creeping loss of consciousness. It scared me to my bones. If I’d passed out...
    I’m listening for something else in their voices now. I’m wondering if, during the spell, whatever the hell it was, a customer noticed me trying to stay conscious? I parse their comments, cringing when a woman says ‘turbulence.’ Was that when I shifted in my seat? When I squeezed my gut, and gulped in air to fight it off? When I did that, did I jerk the stick around and she saw it, felt it?
    No, she hadn’t. “...wonder if it’s always that bumpy on the NaPali Coast?” she says, and I breathe again. The bumps during my syncopal episode happened just as I shook my head and sucked in slugs of air trying to stay awake. Coincidence. Air pockets on the NaPali are a common occurrence. The spell was out of the blue, immediate, frightening in its intensity. I tune in to comments again, but none of them refer to my efforts to avoid passing out in the cockpit. None of my customers know how close I’d been.
    Nor do I. A shiver of shame washes over me; why had I not landed? Another spell may have started, and been worse. I’d continued flying, assuming that whatever the hell it was, it had run its course.
    
    But I knew something was forever changed. I knew my position, my status as a tour pilot on the island of Kauai, the ultimate job in my forty-year career was over. I saw myself asking the boss for time off. Envisioned myself entering the doctor’s office, the same place I went every year for my up slip, the FAA medical clearance without which I couldn’t fly. I heard myself tell the doctor about the spell, describing how close I’d come to passing out with six people in the cabin with me. I hear my urgent questions: why had it happened, what can I do and will it happen again? I see the whole thing, hear the conversation. And I watch myself absorbing his verdict.  

    I step out of the cockpit, and the hard ground comes up to meet me. I latch the door. Despite the anxiety squeezing my chest, I manage a smile, shake hands, accept tips. People thank me for a ‘wonderful tour.’ They sneer, and slap my back, saying ‘what a tough job you have.’ They produce wallets, peel off tens, twentys, the occasional fifty, fold the bills, sneak them into my hand. I thank them for flying with me, watch them walk to the shuttle. The bus pulls away under swaying palms, and the helipad falls silent. Behind me a colleague hovers in, lands, and his engine winds down. At that moment it hits me. I’m done. My flying career is over.  

    When I was ten years old I snuck out of the house to play baseball with the neighbor kids. I had to sneak out because mom forbade me to play that day. It was Good Friday, and in my Irish Catholic house it was unthinkable that I’d ignore the sacred day of Christ’s crucifixion to engage in something as crass as a ball game.
    Despite the admonition, I grabbed my mitt and the lumber and headed out the back door. Before you could say bless me father I was on the diamond with the lads, in the bright Spring sun, with swish of bat, loft of ball, smack of leather, the thrill of the grass.
    I remember swinging hard, connecting, the satisfying thunk, and the silly sizzle in my chest at the pleasure of a solid hit. I see white ball arc into blue sky over pitcher Bill Peckham’s head. It continues climbing. I’m sure beyond doubt that what’s his name, the new kid on the block, the kid wearing a flannel shirt on such a warm day, the kid no one has seen play yet, that he’ll for sure miss it. And he does. The ball tips flannel shirt’s upraised mitt, skips upward, slows a bit, but heads for the outfield. Sure as I am that, on that very day Christ died for my sins, I’ve got second base made standing up. No way that kid’ll field that ball. No way. I punch first with my right foot, dredge dirt with my left, put my head down and dig for second.
    Second sack is 90 feet away, seventy, fifty, ten... Then a blur, a swatch of flannel, and a terrible whump. I see stars, but this is a day game, isn’t it? My head throbs. Stars twinkle out. Why are guys standing over me in a circle, staring, a blue hole of sky between them? Blood? What are they talking about, blood? I’m sweaty, and my head aches like I’ve been hammered. I can’t focus my left eye because of...the blood.
    I reach the emergency room for stitches ten minutes before the flannel shirt kid. I met him, finally, at second base, when we collided, skull against skull, opening a penitential gash in my forehead, like one of Christ’s wounds. Only mine is well deserved. I’ve had my fun; it’s time for payment. In the car, blood-stained towel at my throbbing head, Mom scolds. “No Good Friday baseball,” she says. “You see what happens?”
    Eight stitches later I’m released to the loving, forgiving fold of my family. Easter comes and goes that year and many others. But I never forget the lesson. The lesson Catholic school taught me above all others. Balance. For every good there’s a bad. For every bad, a good. I never played baseball on Good Friday again.

    Why that long ago incident came to me as I walked away from the helicopter I don’t know. It wasn’t Good Friday; it was December 14th 2005. I’d not been enjoying myself too much, I’d been working. Or had I? This wasn’t some kind of balancing act, was it? My mind raced with possible reasons I was being punished. Divorce and remarriage? That describes half the world these days. Moving so far from family? Leaving Iowa when I told them I’d stay? It was a no brainer for my wife and me. Another winter in Iowa City, or a move to a mid-Pacific Paradise? Was it work? People threw money at me, a lot of it, for flying them around the island while music played and I entertained them with anecdotes, local color and what I knew about Hawaii. Was it just too rewarding, and I loved it too much?
    If so I shared the emotions of my passengers. With laughter, and even some tears, I walked away from the flight line for the last time.

                                                   ✢

                                                   2
                                             Balance

    Maybe I was booted out of Eden, just like in the Baltimore Catechism... Balance. I’d lived in Paradise too long, and it was time to leave. Could that be? If so it made no sense. I’d long ago given up those fairy tales, virgin birth, water to wine, bodily ascension into heaven. Useful narratives for a sixth grader, but not for adults, as Orwell said about the incompatibility of faith with maturity. If there was an Eden, I’d come to believe we hadn’t been kicked out of it; we got bored and left.   
    If it was about balance, what about all those frigid nights flying in wintertime Iowa? The phone rings at midnight, ten below zero, wind chill minus forty. I dress like an Aleut to fly a hundred miles for a drunk who curses me and my nursing crew for forty minutes, then he vomits on us. Was that work? What about the flights in Indiana with those crude businessmen, listening to their sexist jokes about women their daughters’ age in the Playboy magazines they slobber over, as I fly them to job sites? Where’s the balance there? Never thought I’d be relieved to lose a job, but I was. What about scrapping for my first commercial flying job, those postings at the end of the road nobody else wanted just to scribble hours in my logbook? Where was the payback for that?
    What of the dues I’ve paid, the harassment of my first flight instructor in Texas, the Darwinian demands of flight school, an endurance test all the way to graduation? What about the war? That was work just staying alive most days, work a lot of friends failed in. I’d thought living on Kauai was my reward for forty years of paying attention to the flying god, keeping my safety record intact, taking no chances. The After the Fall scenario made no sense. I’d spent forty years as a pilot; my job description was simple: it was to not fall.
    I go to the office, tell the boss I need time off. I call my wife, say I’ll be home early but don’t tell her why. I can’t say it to myself yet. The appointment with the flight doc won’t be easy, but I have to make it, and I have to keep it.  
    I sit in the car a long time scanning the flight line. A colleague climbs into his cockpit, and straps in. The door closes, engine whines, blades turn, faster, faster, disappearing in a blur. A strange feeling comes, achy, tenuous. It makes me feel, what? Invisible. When my colleague takes off I know I’m watching my past.

    I see myself board a tiny, two-seat helicopter in Texas almost forty years ago. Wayne, my first instructor, starts the engine, engages the blades and we lift into the searing Texas sky. How easy for him it seems. How hard it is for me in the next few weeks to learn to fly. How frustrating failing over and over. How satisfying, finally, when I do what Wayne says, “...just think about moving the controls, Edgington, and it’ll do what you want.”
    I see my first solo flight, feel the rush of success knowing I’ve flown, by myself, that I’ve done it. Then advanced training at Hunter Field in Savannah, instrument flight, tactics, navigation, first flight in a Huey. Flight school graduation, then on to Vietnam in February 1970. The company, and missions, and fear, and fire and friends. Some die. Twelve months pass, and I come home.
    My colleague takes off low overhead, and the car wobbles. In his rotor wake palm leaves frolic, then settle down. The aroma of burned jet fuel washes over me like incense, and my eyes fill with tears. The helicopter heads for the interior of Kauai. Part of me is on board. And always will be.

    The places I’ve flown: Southeast Asia, Alaska, South America... The missions I’ve done: spotting tuna, herding bears, dousing fires, rescuing emergency patients. Winter night, 100 miles to Iowa City, 3 in the morning. The dim cast of the instruments, altimeter, rpm, torque, compass glow red like backlit rubies. My hand grips the cyclic, steady, the touch of experience. The ship surges through the frigid night, blades whipping overhead while Iowa sleeps a thousand feet below.
    Another night, newly dark, ominous. I see gauges sag, needles droop, warnings flash like fireworks as my engine fails and the Huey plummets. I take charge, adjusting, maneuvering. Ground rushing up, I flare the Huey and slide it on smooth and safe, like a thousand practice runs before.
    I see my whole career in that one takeoff. And in one landing.

    I grab my seat belt and snap it shut. The other tour ship becomes a speck, then disappears. The island shimmers through a mist: all the tours I’ve flown; satisfied customers; the camaraderie of peers, fitting in with an elite group of pilots. I see Wendy, a woman completing her bucket list with her pungent leis and brave smile. I remember the letter about her weeks later. I see the envelope from my Chinese passenger with a five and two ones inside, smallest tip ever, and the best. I hear the questions: “how long you been doing this?” “Ever crash?” “What’s the worst that ever happened..?”
    I know that answer. The worst incident ever was stepping from the cockpit minutes ago.

    I start the car, and put it in gear. On the phone, my wife wonders what’s wrong? I never leave early; I always stay late on the flight line. She’s used to it. Today something’s different. I know it. I’m looking for the balance, and not finding it. But I will find it.
    I leave the airport, and head down the hill.

                                                  ✢

                                                  3
                                  August 1970: Vietnam

    Headwinds, the storm, rain in buckets and the restriction to visibility on an August afternoon in Vietnam in 1970 made me a pilot, and showed me the balance I’d be seeking my entire career, though I wasn’t aware of it then.
    I was assigned that day to fly for a detachment called U.S. Army Vietnam, USARV, (You-Sar-Vee) a liaison between the U.S. and South Vietnamese military. I made several routine air transfers that day, of equipment, mail, documents, beans and bullets. The flying was easy, until it wasn’t. I logged five flight hours in my Huey, refueling twice. During a previous leg, Sergeant McKay in company operations had radioed with orders from the 101st Airborne’s commanding General. McKay told me to be on the ground by five p.m. A major storm was forming in the South China Sea, moving in from the east, and the General didn’t want his aviation assets damaged. I called Sarge McKay back. “Roger...on the ground by seventeen-hundred. No problem.”
          I carried more materiel, ammo, hot chow, the stuff an army needs to do its job. The day slipped by with more of the same, an easy mission. But, as I’d often joked with colleagues, an easy mission can turn nasty in a heartbeat. At four o’clock I finished my last sortie, I thought. At four-fifteen USARV released me, and I headed to home base at Camp Eagle. Looking forward to a shower, dinner, and a cold beer at the club, I aimed the helicopter that direction with plenty of time to gas up and lash things down by five o’clock.
    Sometimes insights are so brief, so obscure, that we’re unable to understand even their outline much less their meaning in our lives. Like the shards of lightning that zippered the Asian sky that August day, illuminating my cockpit like flashbulbs in a dark room, the insights were so brief that I was unaware of their defining purpose in my life. Short and subtle as they were, they showed me who I was, and the balance I was yet to see. They also showed me the pilot I would become. Sometimes it takes years to tease out the truth of those insights. That doesn’t make them any less true , or real, or valuable. Indeed, their brevity can make them sacred. As Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote in North To The Orient, “...at the time of the incident, one was not conscious of such a feeling, and only became so in the retelling.”
    That August day I was a 21-year-old Army helicopter pilot. The war was going badly for me. I’d been under fire numerous times. I’d lost good friends. I was tired, hassled by military bullshit, fearful of the unknown, the random violence that came in an instant. I felt weary beyond my age, wary from being off balance. My ambivalence about the war, and the reason I found myself there, had turned me cynical and angry.

    Growing up I was a happy, carefree kid, hopeful for my future, confident that the world was a good place, that what I did mattered. Second pup in an Irish Catholic litter I was, by tradition and temperament, the one tagged to become the family priest. That selection was reinforced, my resolve strengthened, when I was in seventh grade at St. Andrew school.
A priest from a missionary order came calling. He showed a movie to boys who entertained thoughts of the priesthood.
    
    The forty-minute film was titled “The Heart of a Man.” It featured the life of a mission priest in Burma, a real cleric named Father Colombo.
     The priest arrived in a jungle clearing in a small plane. He said Mass, heard confessions, gave communion. He ministered to the simple people of his village, cared for them, kept them safe from local thieves. One scene showed Colombo trudging through the dim village late at night with a hypodermic to comfort someone in pain. The film ended with the narrator’s simple yet magnetic message: “The heart of a man can want no more than this.” I was hypnotized. Watching that priest gather his flock around him, smiling, eyes lifted to heaven, a look of pure joy in his face, I wanted to be him. The narrator was right; I could want no more than that.
    That insight, too, was brief. Like a flash in the night it gave little by way of explanation. Even so, that day, as the film’s ragged end slipped through the projector and whap-whapped against the takeup reel, the light may have blinded me but I saw what I wanted. I would become a priest. In September 1962, at age thirteen, I entered the seminary.     
    My dream was not to be. When I was fourteen, a priest took advantage of me for his own sexual gratification. His perverted actions, and the dismissal of them by church authorities were the biggest crisis of my young life. Making it worse, instead of punishing him, church authorities subsequently dismissed me from the seminary. My dream of the priesthood died. Lost, confused, feeling out of all balance I questioned heaven for some explanation but found none.
    The echoes of that supreme betrayal followed me for a long time. It broke my heart because I loved the Catholic faith, its comforting rituals, the solemnity of its liturgy. Church music exalted me, filled me with joy. As a choirboy I led the procession every Sunday during High Mass. I warbled liturgical melodies while candle smoke tickled my nose, my whole being lifted, almost a weightless, glorious feeling that only near rapture can provide. Participation in the liturgy gave me a feeling of clarity, exhilaration. I knew I was valued by the Church, that I was among the select. The Church entrusted me with a secret, powerful message: my beliefs were the truth. Everyone else labored in a dark jungle of ignorance awaiting the light I would offer them. The knowledge was intoxicating. I immersed myself in the rites: Baptism, Confirmation, Holy Communion. I dreamed of Holy Orders, the priesthood. I yearned to administer those sacraments, perform those rites, to be that jungle priest. It was my childhood dream to soar, my first aspiration toward flight. And it was my first experience with the heartbreak of a crash as well.

    One of my most vivid childhood memories is watching a helicopter land, almost in my back yard. It must have been about 1958 when I was ten, and likely after my stitches had healed. Home was on the near northwest side of Columbus Ohio, near the Olentangy River Road. The house was literally across the fence from the local NBC affiliate, Channel 4 TV. One summer afternoon I heard the percussive wopping of rotor blades, and ran to the back yard. The old Bell model 47, with its bubble canopy like the helicopter on M*A*S*H, kicked up a swirl of grass and dirt as it clattered to the ground. The pilot idled the engine, slowed the blades. Then his passenger unbuckled and stepped out. As she and I watched, my mother informed me that the passenger was Van Johnson, a popular actor at the time. But the star of that scene, for me, was the helicopter and its exotic landing and takeoff.
    I first flew in a seaplane with my dad and brother when I was seven. The plane’s engine roared, and lake spray spattered the windscreen as we took off. Vibrations in the fuselage made my gut giddy as the pontoons lifted, dripping water. The sparkling lake fell away as the plane’s nose grappled skyward. People really were like ants. Cabins and trees and cars looked like the ones on my train board. The engine thrummed, sunlight flickered through the prop, the salt-sour stench of av-gas and burnt oil tingled in my nose. The only bad part of aviation, near as I could tell, was landing. The experience was over much too quickly.
       Considering my romantic, carefree nature, flying was the best career match in the world for me, the perfect fit. It was much better than the priesthood as it turned out. According to my mother, and several nuns I managed to annoy in Catholic school, I spent most of my childhood with my head in the clouds. I was the kid who, as the Peter, Paul & Mary song has it “...always looked out the window, failing tests in geography.”
    Aviation was a natural extension of my predilection for dreaming, for overlooking the real and mundane in favor of the insubstantial and ethereal. I’m a loner, mostly, perfectly happy by myself curled up with a book, or solving a crossword, while a soothing symphony sounds in my headset. As a priest, I knew I’d have a life of quiet contemplation surrounded by books, solving people’s crises, reveling in music and ritual. But I was turned away from that dream, and fell into aviation as a replacement.
    The replacement was a perfect fit. As a pilot, I was almost always alone, ensconced in the cockpit, poring over charts, solving aviation challenges while the lyrics of flying lingo hummed in my headset. I was at home in the sky, never lost, never afraid of what the air, or clouds, or wind or weather might bring. The sky was my element; returning to the ground was the alien part. Like that seaplane ride when I was seven, it was always over too quickly.
    I grew up in Ohio, so flying was in my background courtesy of the Wright brothers, Neil Armstrong, John Glenn, Jim Lovell, Jerry Mock and numerous other aviation pioneers. My mother’s brother worked for North American Aviation. Three or four times a year ‘rich uncle’ Dick took my brother and me to a local hobby shop where we could pick any plastic model we wanted. My bedroom ceiling was littered with models: A P-40, MIG, P-51, a Japanese Zero, an F-4U Corsair, and several century-series jets, F-100, 101, 102, 104. The ceiling tiles disappeared behind plastic Revell or Monogram model planes dogfighting with each other on strings. Orange and black painted cotton streaming from a fuselage meant an enemy aircraft.
    
    As the Pauline letters read, “...as a child, I spoke as a child.” Once I’d been dismissed from my childhood fantasy and put childish things aside, the adult world provided a richer, more satisfying way for me to pursue my dream. It was aviation, not religion that gave me the chance to help others. Especially in my hospital flying, I used skills that made a difference at a critical time in people’s lives. In my corporate and other flying I put people’s fears to rest, allowing them to relax and do their job. While flying in Hawaii I gave more than 15,000 tourists a vision of paradise they’d remember forever, including many newlyweds who received a memento of their honeymoon they’d cherish. The heart of a man can want no more than that.

    Aviation gave me a unique perspective on human behavior, especially that part of my career in Air Medical. Flying for a hospital for twenty years matched my skill with the needs of people in crisis. It was a gratifying convergence. The ability to use our skills at a critical time in another’s life, and to possibly save that life, is a privilege few people ever have. I held that privilege in my hands for twenty years. It was like balancing two kinds of gravity at once, the physical principles of aviation, and the grave crises of medical emergency, or traumatic injury. And I was damned good at it.
    Tour flying on Kauai seemed like a reward for my twenty years of jump through your ass, oh-dark-thirty take off in ten-below zero snow-shrouded Iowa flying. Maybe it was. If so, that balance makes me smile. Aircraft must be in balance, or they simply won’t fly. Flight surfaces, airfoils, control rigging, all must be tuned, balanced, or the machine will not leave the ground.
    That necessity goes for us, too. Our attitude and outlook must be balanced, or we’ll miss a critical part of the flight. I learned pretty early that the ripples we create go in all directions, and they spread in a balanced, equal way.

    If dismissal from the seminary was my first crisis, getting drafted out of college was the second. Losing a dream isn’t easy, and finding a replacement for it isn’t either. Aimless, and uncertain how to proceed, at the height of the Vietnam conflict my grades went south and I lost my 2-S deferment to stay in school. Days later I received a letter from Selective Service changing my draft status to 1-A. It was the only ‘A’ I’d received in a long time, and it made me eligible for immediate induction.
    In a remarkable display of government efficiency, within two weeks my draft notice arrived in the mailbox, and my future was chosen for me. I was removed from campus, given a uniform, a military skill, and shipped to Vietnam to participate in a cause that seemed marginal at best, hopeless at worst. The irony was too rich. In choosing the missionary priesthood I’d dreamed of anointment to an elite group, then traveling to an exotic land, finding people in need, showing them the light of my religious truth, while helping them at critical times in their lives. Instead, I was anointed a Warrant Officer in the U.S. Army, shipped to an exotic land to locate people in need of conversion to our beliefs, and to assist in killing them.
    The similarities with the seventh-grade movie were eerily similar: I arrived in jungle clearings in a small aircraft; the Vietnamese looked like the people in the film; we called our flying assignments ‘missions’; the American ‘mission’ was an effort to ‘win hearts and minds.’ I tried not to become cynical. I’m afraid I failed.
    The happy, carefree kid was gone. My psychic terrain was littered with shoals, ruts, dark valleys. The war changed me, defeating the last vestige of my boyhood optimism. It made me someone I didn’t recognize: I joked about human suffering; I shared negative outcomes with fellow pilots; I developed a morbid sense of humor that even then I knew I’d need to change if I survived. All that had happened made me doubt the human capacity to love, the compassion that, as a choirboy at midnight Mass I’d assumed was present in everyone, and especially in me.
    I no longer recognized the man I saw when I was shaving, and I didn’t like the fellow very much. There was no balance between what I saw, and what I knew in my heart to be true . I was “East of the sun, West of the moon” in my inner exploration, cast into that foreign land where no one goes willingly. I might have been flying in Vietnam, but in reality I was crossing the landscape of my own soul.

    Then, on that August day in 1970, based on decisions I made, and my actions following them, I was given an insight, a glimpse of the terrain ahead, the rise and fall of it. It would take years to cross. But after that day I knew I was headed the right direction, back to myself. The curious thing is, that unlike my day to day flying where I studied the sky in front of me for its clues, its traps, its benevolent breezes that ushered me along, unlike that necessary vigilance for what lay ahead I could only know the truth about myself by studying the sky behind me. And that clue, the first generous spark of wisdom was given the August afternoon when fate showed me the pilot I would become.

          The unit released me from my mission, so I turned the Huey toward Camp Eagle. Then the aircraft radio sputtered. It was the USARV fellow calling. He had another mission, a Medevac flight down the coast to a village called Vinh MŶ. A young Vietnamese woman was in labor, he explained. The baby was breech. “If she doesn’t get to a hospital soon...”
           I checked the time: four-twenty. The fuel gauge showed enough for about forty minutes of flying. I did the math. A flight down the coast, back to the hospital in Huế,’ off-load time, back to base, then time to gas up... I’d never make the General’s five o’clock curfew. Fuel was iffy as well. I scanned the blackness, like a shroud across the ocean, and a chill crawled up my back: the storm was close, and marching closer. I had to decline the mission. My finger hovered near the transmit button to send my regrets. Then something stopped me. “...the heart of a man...”
     I simmered in irritation. Why didn’t those people in Vinh MŶ call sooner? They’d known the girl’s condition all day. Am I responsible for their poor planning? Shit, she’s been pregnant for nine months! The cynical me pressed forward, unattractive and unbidden. I touched the transmit button again, almost squeezed, released it, waited. “...no more than this.”
    The USARV fellow called again. In that moment, after listening to his calm, even voice on the radio all day, and then hearing a different tone, I sensed the urgency in his request. That urgency raised the tension between the new cynical me and my old compassionate self. Imagining the girl in trouble I saw my earlier dream, a foreign land, people in crisis, a small plane landing. I saw Father Colombo moving through the dark to provide comfort.   
    With my finger on the button, I tried to strike a balance. I have orders to be on the ground, orders from the General himself. The girl needs help. I’ve done the damn mission all day, and done it well. Her baby is breech, and may die. I’m tired; my crew needs food and rest; fuel is low; the war is wrong. The storm’s closing in. But a young woman and her unborn child need my help...
    I looked at my crew for support. My crewchief nodded. The gunner’s thumb went up. My right seater looked outside at the glowering sky and he hesitated. Slowly, he nodded yes.
    I mashed the transmit button. “Comanchero 2-3, off to Vinh MŶ.”
 
                                                    ✢