Old Songs in a New Cafe: Selected Essays Read online

  To this day, I can feel what it felt like then—-the heat, the sweat, the smoke, the quiet murmuring of the men gathered around, and the old words of my father and Sammy flowing with clarity through my mind (“shoot easy,” “high right English,” “four cushions and get the red ball back up in the left corner,” “if you are going to miss, don’t leave him anything”).

  I began to see that I actually could win. I smelled and tasted the possibility. Teetering there on the brink of manhood, I got down hard and tight and mean. One or two long runs, and I had it. It was over. I couldn’t believe it. Sammy looked tired, but I cared only that I had won.

  I remember sprinting for home, bursting in and yelling, “I beat Sammy, I beat Sammy.” My dad seemed surprised, went downtown to check out the facts, came home and didn’t say much, except to congratulate me in a quiet way.

  I didn’t play much after that. Somehow, it wasn’t the same. Mostly, I just strutted around with “Champ” written in invisible letters on my chest. I talked incessantly at home about the victory, and my father kept agreeing that, yes, it was quite a triumph.

  A few weeks later, I strolled into Braga’s. Dad was lounging against the counter talking with Gerald on a quiet Tuesday night. He grinned at me, “Son, want to play a little billiards?” Now, my dad was not a billiards player, just pool. Oh, he knew the rules and so forth, but he never played much. Cocky, I grinned back, “Sure.”

  Only Braga was there to see it. We chalked up, cleared the wires, and started. It was no contest.

  My dad was a peculiar guy, good at anything requiring hand-eye coordination. He had worked something out with Gerald about practice time and had been bending over that green cloth for scores of hours, unbeknown to me. There was no letting up this time, as he sometimes did when he was beating me at pool in my learning days. He really went after it.

  I was both rusty and rattled. He just kept grinning. Gerald watched, jingling coins in his change apron. I got mad and played worse. Dad played better. He scalded me. I refused his offer of a ride home and came sulking in a few hours later.

  Other things took over my life. Basketball, falling in love, working. I never played much, if any, pool or billiards again. I came home from college once, went into visit Gerald, walked around, and saw my old cue out in the public racks. It was battered from being slammed down on the pool tables when the “slop” players missed easy shots. I looked at it. It looked back dolefully, a mistress cast away for prettier things. Like the lovers that we were in an earlier time, we gazed softly at one another for a moment, sharing the memories rich and warm before I turned and walked away.

  The lessons come slowly. Sammy died twenty years or so after that night of thunder and victory in Braga’s place. Then Gerald went. Then my dad. The four of us were involved in a complicated dance, unchoreo-graphed and intricate, unrehearsed and precise.

  They taught me rhythms I have only recently begun to sense, melodies that escaped me until now—that Zen and precision are not at odds, that small universes exist if you acquire the discipline and skill to enter them, and that grace, passion, and an elegance of spirit are all that really matter, whether you’re shooting billiards, making love, playing the guitar, winning, or losing.

  You see, Gerald Braga didn’t run a pool hall in a small Iowa town. He was the keeper of an academy. Sammy Patterson and my dad were among the faculty, and I, God love them all, had the good fortune to study there in the times when I was small, and tender, and wondering what it was like to be a man.

  The Boy from

  the Burma Hump

  ______________________________________

  In his apartment in Calcutta, there was a grand piano. He wore khaki then, walked the bazaars and tapped away at the piano or played lawn tennis during his leaves from upcountry. After a week or two, he was ready when the call came for the return to Dinjan.

  He carried only a small suitcase for the journey, his “laundry” as he called it, and looked forward to getting back to the jungle and the mountains, away from the sterile and crumbling world of the British raj. His flight left Calcutta, climbing northeast over the Khasi Hills toward Assam, the secluded province that curls off main India and lies snuggled up on the left shoulder of Burma, just short of the Himalayan rise.

  At Dinjan, he and the other pilots slept and took their meals in a large bungalow on the fringe of a tea plantation. Well before dawn, he was awakened by the hand of a servant boy. Now he stands drinking thick Indian tea on the veranda, looking out toward the jungle where leopards sometimes go.

  An open four-wheel-drive command car arrives, and he rides through the heavy night toward an airfield five miles away. Time is important now, in this early morning of 1943. Since losing an airplane to Japanese fighters over the Ft. Hertz Valley, the pilots cross there only in darkness or bad weather when the fighters are grounded. He signs the cargo manifest, checks the weather report, and walks out to the plane.

  Like delicate crystal, our liberties sometimes juggle in the hands of young men. Boys, really. Climbing to the top of the arch at the front of their lives, some of them flew into Asian darkness, across primitive spaces of the mind and the land, and came to terms with ancient fears the rest of us keep imperfectly at bay.

  There was Steve Kusak. And poker-playing Roy Farrell from Texas. Saxophonist Al Mah, Einar “Micky” Mickelson, Jimmy Scoff, Casey Boyd, Hockswinder, Thorwaldson, Rosbert, Maupin, and the rest.

  And there is Captain Charlie Uban. Khaki shorts, no shirt, leather boots, tan pilot’s cap over wavy blond hair, gloves for tightening the throttle lock. He waits in the darkness of northeast India for his clearance from air traffic control in nearby Chabua. There are perhaps a dozen planes out there in the night, some of them flying with only 500 feet of vertical separation.

  Captain Charlie Uban, Twenty-two years old, five feet nine inches, 141 pounds. Born in a room over the bank in Thompson, Iowa, when airplanes were still a curiosity and the long Atlantic haul was only a dream to Lindbergh.

  Chabua gives him his slot, and he powers his C-47 down the blacktop through the jungle night, riding like the hood ornament on a diesel truck, with 5,000 pounds of small arms ammunition behind him in the cargo bay. He concentrates on the sound of the twin Pratt & Whitney engines working hard at 2,700 RPMs, ignoring the chatter in his earphones,

  The plane, with its payload plus 800 gallons of gasoline, is two tons over its recommended gross flying weight of 24,000 pounds. Gently then, Charlie Uban eases back on the yoke, pulls the nose up, and climbs, not like an arrow, but rather in the way a great heron beats its way upward from a green backwater.

  It gets dicey about here. If an engine fails, he does not yet have enough air speed for rudder control. And he’s lost his runway, so there is no opportunity to chop the takeoff and get stopped. But he gains altitude, turns southeast from Dinjan, and flies toward that cordillera of the southern Himalayas called the Burma Hump.

  His copilot and radio operator are both Chinese. In the next four hours, they will cross three of the great river valleys of the world: the Irrawaddy, the Salween, and the Mekong. In the place where India, Tibet, Burma, and Yunnan province of China all come together, the mountain ranges lining these rivers constitute the Hump.

  This is the world of the China National Aviation Corporation (CNAC—pronounced “see-knack”). Jointly owned by China and Pan American Airways, CNAC flies as a private carrier under nominal military control of the U.S. Air Transport Command. In the flesh, CNAC is a strange collection of civilian pilots from the U.S., Australia, China, Great Britain, Canada, and Denmark.

  They are soldiers of fortune, some of the best hired guns in the world at pushing early and elemental cargo planes where the planes don’t want to go and where most pilots won’t take them. As one observer put it: “All were motivated by a thirst for either money or adventure or both, and it was impossible to gain much of the first without acquiring a considerable amount of the latter.”

  Some were members of Claire Ch
ennault’s dashing American Volunteer Group—the Flying Tigers—mustered out of various branches of the U.S. military in 1941 to fly P-40 fighter planes with tiger teeth painted on the air coolers in defense of China. When the AVG was disbanded, sixteen of the remaining twenty-one Tigers decided to throw in with CNAC.

  Dinjan is the penultimate stop, the last caravanserai, on the World War II lend-lease column stretching from the United States to Kunming, China. Along sea and air routes to Calcutta, and then by rail to Dinjan, moves virtually everything needed to keep China in the war, including perfume and jewelry for Madame Chiang Kai-shek.

  Japan controls the China coast and large slices of the interior. Until the spring of 1942, lend-lease supplies were shipped to Rangoon, freighted by rail up to Lashio, and moved from there by truck over the Burma Road to China.

  Then Vinegar Joe Stilwell’s armies, sabotaged by British disinterest in Burma and by the indecisive, fac-tionalized, and corrupt government of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, were driven north. With the Japanese owning Rangoon, the railhead at Lashio, and portions of the Road, China was closed to the outside by both land and water. So it fell to the pilots to ferry materiel from Dinjan to Kunming. To fly the Hump.

  As he reaches higher altitudes, Charlie pulls on a shirt, chino pants, woolen coveralls, and a leather flight jacket. Going through 10,000 feet he switches over to oxygen. At 14,000 feet, he needs more power in the thin air and shifts the superchargers to high. Above the Hump now.

  In summer, the monsoons force him to fly on instruments much of the time. With winter come southern winds reaching velocities of 100-150 miles per hour, and he crabs the plane thirty degrees off course just to counter the drift. Spring and fall bring unpredictable winds, frequent and violent thunderstorms, and severe icing conditions.

  He will fly over long stretches where there is no radio contact with the ground, up there on his own, blowing around in the mountains without radar. “You had good weather information on your point of origin and your destination, and that was about it,’ he remembers. The primary instruments in use will be Charlie Uban’s skills and instincts,

  The winds push unwary or confused pilots steadily north into the higher peaks where planes regularly plow into the mountainsides. And there are other problems. Ground radio signals used to locate runways in rough weather have a tendency to bounce from the mountains. Even skilled and alert pilots mistakenly follow the echoes into cliffs.

  Electrical equipment deteriorates from rapid changes between the cold of high altitudes and the tropical climate of Dinjan. Parts are in short supply, navigational aids faulty or nonexistent. But maintenance wizards do what they can to keep the planes rolling.

  Pilots fly themselves into fatigue, sometimes making two round trips across the Hump in one day. Still they go, their efficiency and competence shaming the regular army pilots in the Air Transport Command. CNAC, with creative, flexible management and more experienced pilots, becomes the measure of performance for the entire ATC.

  General Stilwell wrote in 1943: “The Air Transport Command record to date is pretty sad. CNAC has made them look like a bunch of amateurs.” Edward V. Rickenbacker, chief of Eastern Airlines and America’s ace fighter pilot in World War 1, studies the situation, discounts all of the army’s problems with airports, parts, and maintenance, and simply concludes that CNAC has better pilots.

  Charlie Uban is paid $800 a month for the first sixty hours of flying. He gets about $7 per hour, in Indian rupees, for the next ten hours. For anything over seventy hours, he is on “gold,” $20 per hour in American money.

  A 100-hour month earns him roughly $9,000 in 1987 terms. The rare melding of technical competence, practiced skill, good judgment, and courage always pays top dollar, anywhere. The CNAC pilots chronicle their exploits by making up song verses using the melody to the “Wabash Cannonball”:

  Oh the mountains they are rugged

  So the army boys all say.

  The army gets the medals,

  But see-knack gets the pay…

  Not everyone can do it. They arrive as experienced flyers and are trained for the Hump by riding as copilots, committing the terrain to memory, absorbing the mercurial techniques of high mountain flying, and practicing letdowns in bad weather. There is no time for coddling. Those who can’t move into a captain’s seat in a few months are discharged. Charlie Uban got his command in three weeks.

  One veteran pilot makes a single round trip as copilot, is terrified, and asks to be sent home by boat. Others will hang on, but are so intimidated by the Hump that they develop neuroses about it and become ill. Or, bent by their fears, they make critical mistakes where there is room for none. The Hump, rising out there in the darkness and the rain, is malevolence crowned.

  Was Charlie Uban afraid? He thinks about the question for a moment, a long moment, and grins, “I’d say respectful rather than fearful.”

  Fear and magic sometimes danced together in northern Burma. A Chinese pilot was flying a new plane from Dinjan to Kunming. Over the middle of the Hump, the temperature gauge for one of the engines began climbing. The instructions were clear: “Feather the engine at 265 centigrade.” Panic arrived at 250 degrees.

  With a full load, a C-47 will fly at only 6,500 feet on one engine. So the choices were three. Feather the engine and descend to an altitude that is not high enough to get through the mountains, let the temperature escalate and burn up the engine, or bail out in the high mountains. Three alternatives, each with the same outcome.

  But the manual had been written by Western minds. Therefore, and not surprisingly, the range of options was unnecessarily constrained. As the gauge hit 265, the pilot broke the glass covering the gauge and simply twisted the dial backward to a reasonable level Unable to get at the sender, he chose to throttle the messenger. There is some ancient rule at work here—if you can’t repair the problem, at least you can improve your state of mind.

  At Kunming, the gauge was diagnosed as faulty. The engine was just fine. Remember Kipling’s famous epitaph? “Here lies a fool who tried to hustle the East.” The C-47, like a lot of others, tried and failed.

  If a crew goes down in the Hump region, no search party is sent. The territory is wild and rugged, settled sparsely by aboriginal tribes or occupied by the Japanese. The snow accumulates in places to a depth of several hundred feet, and a crashed plane just disappears, absorbed by the snow.

  The pilots suffer through it and gather strength from one another, talking quietly when a plane is overdue and cataloging the optimistic possibilities. After a few weeks, the missing pilot’s clothing is parceled out among the others and his personal effects are sent home.

  Charles L. Sharp, Jr., operations manager for CNAC, is a realist. Roosevelt demands that China be supplied. There is not enough time for proper training. The weather is wretched, equipment humbled by the task, and the planes, which are cargo versions of the venerable DC-3s, always fly above the standard gross weight.

  So lives are going to be taken. Sharp accepts that. Still, he grieves for the pilots who vanish out there in the snow or thunder into foggy mountains during letdowns in China or blow up on the approach to Dinjan, and he worries about those who keep on flying.

  Small samples from his logs in CNAC’s war years intone a litany to risk and a chant of regret.

  Aircraft

  No. Captain Date Location Crew

  53 Fox 3/11/43 Hump Lost

  49 Welch 3/13/43 Hump Lost

  48 Anglin 8/11/43 Hump Lost

  72 Schroeder 10/13/43 Shot Down Lost

  59 Privensal 11/19/43 Kunming:let-down Lost

  63 Charville 11/19/43 Kunming;let-down Lost

  Between April 1942, when Hump operations started, and September 1945 at the end of the war, CNAC pilots will fly the Hump more than 20,000 times. They carry 50,000 tons of cargo into China and bring 25,000 tons back out. Twenty-five crews are lost. The consensus remains among those who understand flying that, given the conditions under which CNAC operated
, the pilots were one of the most skilled groups ever assembled, the losses remarkably small.

  Today Charlie Uban is freighting ammunition. Sometimes he carries fifty-five-gallon barrels of high-octane gasoline, a cargo he prefers not to haul Or he might be loaded with aircraft parts or medical supplies or brass fittings. Occasionally he moves Chinese bank notes printed in San Francisco and being forwarded to deal with China’s sprinting inflation.

  On his way back from Kunming, he will be dragging tin or wood or hog bristles, or mercury or silk or refined tungsten ore. Now and then he has a cargo of Chinese soldiers going to India for training. They are cold and airsick for most of the trip.

  As Stilwell begins his 1944 push back down into the jungles of Burma, Charlie will haul bagged rice that is booted out of the cargo doors at low altitudes to construction crews following the armies. The crews are building a new land route, the Ledo Road, from India across northern Burma to China.

  Conditions are seldom good enough for daydreaming. Most of the time he concentrates on his gauges and listens to the engines, “… envisioning misadventures and figuring out what to do about them ahead of time.”

  But now and then in clear weather he thinks about other things. He thinks about his girl, Emma Jo, back in Iowa and calculates the days left before he gets his three-month leave in the States. And he remembers Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927. He was six years old at that time, but somehow understood the magnitude of Lindbergh’s achievement even then. That’s what brought him here.

  His family moved to Waterloo, Iowa, where he grew up building model airplanes and reading magazine articles about the new world of flight. At fifteen, he bicycled out to the old Canfield Airport and used $2 from his Des Moines Register paper route to purchase his first airplane ride on a Ford Trimotor.

  Bouncing around in a single-engine Taylorcraft, Charlie Uban learned to fly at Iowa State Teachers College in 1940 as part of the federally sponsored Civilian Pilot Training program. At Iowa State College in Ames he studied engineering and passed the secondary stage of the CPT program. He learned cross-country techniques at a school in Des Moines, taught flying for a while in Aberdeen, South Dakota, and was trained as a copilot for Northwest Airlines in Minneapolis, where he picked up his instrument skills.