Beyond Survival. Gerald Coffee

like coffee perking. Coffee perking! God, would I love to have a cup of hot coffee!

      Again my eyes opened. This time as I blinked, the dried sweat at the corners of my eyes cracked loose and began to sting again, like the day before when it was fresh.

      I was aware of the roof now, close above me; the low side of what appeared to be a fairly large lean-to structure, maybe a stable. It was loosely thatched, and many of the sisal ties that held the dark, moldy straw to the crooked stick frame had rotted loose, dangling down in clumps and strands like grimy little stalactites. The thick bamboo uprights of the shed were polished to a dark patina from the rubbing of the tethered animals around me. Sure enough, a light brown cow—bony but content—was cudding away just a few feet from me, her breath making little steam puffs from black nostrils. I hadn’t thought the air to be that cold, even though I had awakened covered only by the combat fatigues I’d been shot down in and was curled into a fetal S to ward off the chill.

      A water buffalo stood near the cow in resigned stillness as three or four reddish chickens clucked and scratched aimlessly about its feet. A couple of scrawny milk goats tethered near the broad, open entrance seemed to complete my morning menagerie. As I lay there, quietly taking it all in, I was struck by the strange, dreamlike quality of the scene, the universal simplicity and serenity of the animals, the low bubbling of the opium pipe nearby, the unique mixture of smells, and finally, the incongruity of my own presence within it all, plucked suddenly from my familiar, professional environment and plopped down here in the middle of Southeast Asia among people we’ve been bombing and strafing. I’ve been captured by them. I am a Prisoner of War. I moved my head slowly from side to side, incredulous at my plight. God, I thought, I guess it doesn’t always happen to the other guy. I think I’m going to need you a lot, Lord. Please stay with me.

      I started to raise myself up on one elbow and tried, without much success, to repress the exclamation of pain. The water buffalo swung his stately head in my direction for a cursory check before raising its nostrils to test the dampness in the awakening air. My entire body seemed to beg: Don’t move me again, please! My right arm and shoulder ached more than the rest. I couldn’t remember ever feeling so sore and stiff in my life. How long had I not moved? Every joint in my body seemed to be fused in place to hold me mercifully still, as if in a body cast. Not surprising, I thought, since every limb and muscle had been wrenched—some past their limit—in that tumbling, plummeting ejection. Not to mention the subsequent pummeling at the hands of those first villagers as I had run their impromptu gauntlet up from the beach to the toolshed that had been my first “cell.”

      How long had it been now? Three days? Four? I wasn’t at all sure. I wasn’t even sure how long I had just slept. I seemed to recall arriving here at my stable the previous evening, but it could have been the one before that. The effect of having taken such a blow and being unconscious for a time was taking a long time to wear off.

      My neck and both forearms were blistered crimson, and I imagined my face looked the same. I wondered, could I have been burned by the pyrotechnic charges in the ejection system? We had never been briefed on that as a hazard. Or had the plane exploded at the moment of ejection? So much for wishing I had delayed the ejection just long enough to get out over the Gulf, closer to our rescue forces.

      Gradually, I groaned my way up to one elbow and then to a tenuous sitting position, leaning stiffly against the plaited bamboo that formed the back boundary of my little straw burrow. My grunts and expletives distracted the cow and the goats from their chewing. They stared curiously at their strange stable mate.

      The morning-twilight space between the top of the rickety mat walls and the scalloped eaves above revealed the pinkish silhouettes of thatched ridges and gables of other huts. As we had approached the hamlet in the dusk of the previous evening (or whatever evening it had been), the variegated clumps of huts and trees and foliage had appeared as a homey little island in a serene pond of gray-green paddies—all crisscrossed by a network of levees like the one on which we had wended our way. Once inside the village, however, it had become a warren of twisting footpaths, prickly hedges, smelly little ditches, vegetable patches, and a maze of plaited walls and fences—all partly obscured by dense clumps of bamboo and shrubbery. In the fading light it had all looked so peaceful, yet quietly ominous. The air was pervaded by the salty, pungent odor of nuoc-mam, the fermenting sauce stored in crocks in every house and used in varying degrees to spice up food. I would come to know it as possibly the most memorable sensory characteristic of Southeast Asia, a lifelong reminder of my experience there. After the survival gear on my torso harness and in the pockets of my G-suit, my boots had been the next thing taken from me. As we had continued on through the hamlet, the duck and chicken droppings that squished between my bare toes were all that connected the scene to reality.

      The straw beneath me was matted now into the shape of my sleeping form. It was surprisingly well defined, I thought; my sleep should have been fitful. My mind certainly had been alternatively embracing the hope of a terrible nightmare, and then trying to reject the all-too-evident reality. By now, the chronology of my final flight from the Kitty Hawk was clear: The struggle to control my disabled plane, the high speed, topsy-turvy ejection, the mad confusion of my capture, the unwitting strafing attack by our own A-1 Skyraiders as we scurried back to the shore as fast as the scrawny oarsman could propel us. And finally, the nagging uncertainty of Bob’s fate.

      We hadn’t been together all that long. He had recently completed the transition syllabus in the training squadron where I had been an instructor for three years. I had taught him and others—pilots and bombardier-navigators—to know and operate the aircraft systems, and the flight tactics of the aerial reconnaissance mission. As I had rotated back to sea duty, I was pleased we had been paired up as a crew. Bob was good, and our Trans-Pac flight of a Vigilante from central Florida to Japan and finally aboard the Kitty Hawk confirmed his skills. Our three-day layover in Atsugi, Japan—hotsi baths and massages, and liberty time with our new squadron mates—had drawn us closer. His young wife, Pat, a schoolteacher, and Bea were probably in touch right now, sharing the uncertainty of their husbands’ fates, and supporting one another as much as possible.

      How many times had I relived it these past few days, that brief glimpse of Bob, alive in the water and closer than I to the shoreline and the approaching boats? Obviously he, too, had cheated the odds for surviving an ejection so far outside the accepted speed and stability parameters of the system. But had he survived the hairtrigger contempt of our captors? The straffing attack? Had his life been spared as miraculously as mine from the deadly swarms of 20mm slugs rained down upon us by the planes of our RESCAP (Rescue Air Patrol)? God, he was my responsibility! Have I gotten him killed? What could I have done differently? What emergency procedure or flight tactic might have saved us? God, please let Bob be alive. Please be with him, wherever he is.

      I sat there in the half-light of the awakening stable, mentally wringing my hands and gnashing my teeth imagining all the things I might have done differently to avoid my present predicament and the apparent loss of my friend. The possibilities were endless.

      Had I continued to harbor this line of thought, I would have become a member of a deadly club; a few POWs I would come to know who assumed personal blame for the loss of one or more crewmen in their aircraft. And with the self-blame would come a consuming guilt. In the coming years, I would find enough more immediate reasons for guilt without laying this on myself as well.

      Somehow I realized, even at this very early stage, that what had happened was well within the range of risk we had all embraced. I was certain that had our positions been reversed, with Bob in command of the aircraft and responsible for our fate, he too would have accepted the addition to our mission with a positive nod and a thumbs-up just as I had. I struggled to the conclusion that if I was to maintain faith in myself to survive this ordeal—the ramifications of which I could not yet begin to fathom—I must learn to keep events in perspective and to keep the past behind me.

      The crispness of the morning air around my upright body seemed to sharpen my recollections, subordinating for the moment at least my awareness of the painful stiffness of my calcified body.

      Now, I couldn’t seem to erase the scene from my mind. Our guys had been relentless in their attack, hoping, I’m sure, to keep