My long delayed remembrance of my dad’s fighter pilot career

June 30, 2022

Somebody won my heart. 79th Fighter Group. My dad was there.

Here’s the thing. I wrote a whole book about my WWI Rainbow Division grandfather. He had a diary, from before to after. Nothing like that for my dad. Everything I learned about him came from a few martinis and a handful of cues from the 79th Fighter Group.

My dad was a different thing.

I did post a response a month ago. Told him my dad was not your likely fighter pilot. Showed him a pic. With extraordinary coincidental resonances that had already been published in the Providence Journal.

Thought I could do what others are doing at the 79th Fighter Group. Dropped lines of remembrances. Discovered I can’t do those.

Now I can tell you.

We belonged to a select set called Hine Quarters. Hiney, the host in charge, had a bottomless hole of booze and fun times. We lived a mile away. We went to their parties. The Hine kids and the Laird kids were best friends, and we watched the parties. The core of the group was something called Airwork. Old Air Force vets who reconditioned aircraft parts in Millville. Hiney wasn’t ever even in the war, but his friends were. Bomber pilots. Three, four of them.

They called my dad Lord Laird. They were all handsome, the pilots. But Dad looked like 007. The women talked to him, flirted, and he did not respond.

What do we know about him? He actually had an audience with Eddy Rickenbacker. After the war. My dad and his friend wanted to start an air freight company, like, you know, Federal Express,…

Rickenbacker said no.

He saw the civilian boy pilots for what they were. Brave, damaged, broken.. He told them to go back home.

Why I’m here.

They did. Where my dad came from. Where Lord Laird came from. I only heard him from three+ martinis onward.

Where all this stuff comes from. The guy from the 79th Fighter Group knew two things I didn’t expect him to know. 91 combat missions as opposed to 88 (91 was the number dad always told me), the Purple Heart he hated. And the incredibly awful wreck of a plane my dad somehow landed. 300+ bullet holes. His tech sergeant said, “What have you done to my plane, Laird?” Dad always said he packed his own parachute and that’s why he never trusted it.

My dad threw his Purple Heart away. The event occurred in the Bay of Naples. He saw a German aircraft carrier and decided to strafe all the planes on the deck. He did. Got away with it too. Then, being a lot like me, he decided to do it again, a second time. When they shot him out of the sky.

He was wounded, his plane sank like a rock, and he was rescued in Naples Harbor by a PT boat. End of story? No. What happened was, he asked the PT boat crew if he could go with them on another mission, because he was so admiring of their bravery. Which is why he told me the punchline. Scarier than anything he’d done as a pilot. Plywood boat, big big motor, crazy navy guys in charge, He didn’t remember who paid fir drinks after.

Scary is a minute or an hour. Fear is not the lightning but the enveloping rolling thunder and wind that goes on all night. In the dark, Most of all the dark.

Dark. 50-caliber machine guns. Face to face with German truck drivers. He saw them die.

What kept him up at night.

He told me. He told me. Why he didn’t really FEEL the thing with Grandpa’s Rainbow Division. Grandpa saw a great many dead men, but not his own. (He never saw his own men die. He was lucky in combat. Got his men through.) True. I asked him. He said no. Dad did see the deaths. His friends and all the ones they killed on missions. But I can’t write his book. He would never have let me.

Mostly, he told me funny stories.

He flew his night solo as a fighter pilot and they shut down the base on him. He flew back and forth and back and forth and nobody knew he was in the air. He finally buzzed the tower so recklessly that they turned the lights back on and let him land his unique Night Solo. It was the title of my first novel (consigned to a drawer somewhere, I confess). I knew how he felt though.

He stole a Brit Spitfire and crashed it. Something about the way the lander stuff at your feet messed you up. Killed the prop.

Stole a Harley Davidson. How he escaped the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Rode all the way down the stairs to safety.

What was it like to come back to base when your friends had died hours before? They drank a large glass to their memory and smashed it in the fireplace. Then they divided up their belongings. One time, a guy came back. Wanted his stuff back. Why my dad told me the story.

There’s more.

There’s a story from Sicily. The 13-holer. Everybody pooping together in the middle of an open field. My dad was so easily embarrassed. Sitting next to a pooping woman in Sicily? Worse even than the flak.

Which was the truly dark heart of his memories. “The flak,” he said. “The flak was so heavy and thick you knew you were dead. When you went into death mode. Do your job. And just wait it out till you die.”

He was there. Flew missions all day. Told me, “They were still shooting out of the rubble as dusk fell.”

There’s also a story about the Bronze Star. He didn’t get one. His commanding officer wrote him up for one, but there was a problem. My dad said, “Please don’t.” He had rescued a wounded pilot from a burning C-47. Except he was on an unsanctioned beer run at the time. Why he and the commander agreed about no Bronze Star.

He came home in ‘44. He was 21 years old. They put him right back to work. There was the New York harbor submarine scare. They had to fly in the fog pursuing Nazi subs that were not there. The fog killed friends of his. And then FDR up and died. And my dad flew in FDR’s funeral. Ordered to fly a thousand feet up, they flew 500 feet above the rotten man’s body. It was a scandal, but they all did it. So nobody wanted to investigate. They were scary because they were united. They ALL hated FDR.

Why, when he came home for good, he painted the crap out of his flight jacket. Of the six pilots he went overseas with, he was the only one who came home.

I have some personal things about him. I moved to Dayton, Ohio, home of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. He came out to visit when the Twelfth Air Force honored the 79th Fighter Group. I was there. All the old fighter jocks. I saw my first P-47 at Wright-Pat. Climbed up to the cockpit. So tiny a place to be and wait to die.

I was living in Dayton. I was working in the Midwest. I was, oh hell, living in a place that held the hellhole called Detroit and I was, you dunno, why I wound up in Evansville, Indiana, Okay. That’s where I saw the factory where all the P-47s came from. They were building air-conditioners. Twisty dark dark corners. To me the whole factory smelled of death.