The Girl in the Blue Beret

3.



MARSHALL ALWAYS ARRIVED EARLY FOR HIS FLIGHTS. HE TRIED to nap in the pilots’ ready-room at Charles de Gaulle Airport. He hadn’t slept well, his final B-17 mission blending in his dreams with the 747 he would be flying across the ocean for the last time. He read the newspapers and stoked up on coffee and peanuts. In his experience, peanuts balanced the caffeine turbulence without cutting the uplift of the caffeine itself. He wanted that uplift today. The night before, several of the crew had taken him out for a retirement wingding, complete with a late-night frolic at the Folies de Pigalle. He could hardly pay attention to the titillation, for thinking of his visit in Belgium.

Today his first officer, Erik Knopfler, who was twenty years Marshall’s junior, caught him trying to nap. “Hey, old man, getting your beauty sleep? That’s what you get for staying out late partying.”

“Yeah, they’re telling me I’m old. ‘Happy birthday, here’s your burial plot.’ ”

Carl Reasoner, the flight engineer, joined them. He said, “I know we’re always razzing you senior guys, but Marshall, I’d rather fly with you than most of these guys today coming out of Vietnam.”

“That goes for me too,” said Erik.

“Well, thanks, guys. I appreciate that. I walked all the hell over Paris yesterday, and my heart runs like a top. Yet they say I’m too old.”

“Oh, we have to get rid of you, you know,” said Erik with a laugh. “We don’t want you old guys hogging all of the seniority.”

“That’s diplomatic,” Marshall said. “Just wait till you hit the big six-O!”

In the washroom, Marshall spruced up and gave himself the once-over in the mirror. Loretta would have wanted him to look good on his final flight. He couldn’t be sixty, he thought.

At the dispatch office, he checked the weather forecast and worked out the fuel load. Then he stopped at scheduling, where he gave the crew his captain’s briefing. He tried to be august as he presented the flight plan and ran the crew through routine checks. He dwelled too long on ditching procedures, but he didn’t want to slight anything. And instead of leaving it to the first officer, he would do the damn walk-around himself this time, he thought. He wanted to kick the tires. One last time.

After the briefing, Erik ogled an attractive flight attendant in a short skirt as she descended the stairway.

“I’d like to see her twist down the aisle of the plane like that,” he said. “But man, the girls on my last flight must have come from the Salvation Army.”

“They were better in the old days, huh, Marshall?” Carl was teasing him again. “Everything was better then, I hear.”

“Naturally.”

Marshall set off for the plane, his travel bag in one hand and his “brain bag”—his flight manuals, maps, flashlight, and hijacker handcuffs—in the other. He felt pleased by the respect the younger guys gave him. “Bus driver!” his son, Albert, then a teenager, had once taunted him.

Marshall was prepared for hijackings, bombings, unruly passengers. He had to be ready with his skill, his sang-froid, his instantaneous judgment, his focus. He had learned to make his eyes radiate alertness. He practiced unblinkingness. He could go sixty-four seconds without blinking. He had to ease up a bit when he began to need artificial tears. He hated having to carry a bottle of eyedrops.

He jokingly called the younger pilots whippersnappers. He had been one himself. The one who crashed the B-17. He quickly corrected that thought. He was the one who safely brought down the wounded bomber.


THAT MORNING HE was especially careful in the cockpit, concentrating fiercely on every item as the first officer went down the checklist. It was so easy to make a simple mistake. He wanted to savor the joy of the takeoff, the sweep of the flight, with his mind fully at ease. The 747 lacked the more intimate contact with the ground and sky that he had known in smaller planes, but it had grandeur. It conferred distinction. The captain of such a mighty vessel had reason to be proud. He loved to taxi. He loved to lift. Sometimes he forgot to breathe, he loved it so.

He took off, banked, trimmed, and set the course. He was climbing, due west. Soon he was flying past Rouen, Le Havre, Caen, Bayeux, Sainte-Mère-Église. He was flying above the Normandy beaches. Sword Beach. Juno. Gold. Omaha. Utah. So often when he flew out of Paris or London, he imagined what it would have been like if he could have flown on D-Day. But he never got that chance. He had flown only ten missions, and all his months of expensive training had ended in a fiasco in a bumpy field in Belgium.

Yet the people he met in Belgium remembered him and the crew. They had hidden three of them from the Germans and tended to the wounds of others. They had dwelt on the crash for all these years. It had become part of the local lore, a mythology. The day the aviators fell from the sky. He remembered that field in Belgium during the war with devastating clarity, but the people were unknown to him. And now Marshall knew that one of them had died protecting a young, lost American.

Passing control over to Erik, Marshall sat back. His eyes scanned the instruments automatically, monitoring the machine as he had done innumerable times before.

He had tried to put the war behind him, but sometimes it surfaced. Over the years he thought from time to time about the girl in the blue beret and wondered what had become of her. A twinge of regret fluttered deep inside him now, and this feeling, like his earlier tears, surprised him.


THE FLIGHT HOME was routine, fairly smooth, until they hit a light chop over Newfoundland and Marshall had to speak to the passengers about seat belts. He didn’t get chatty, the way some pilots did. Just fly the goddamn plane, he told himself.

As they neared New York, the purser got on the intercom to tell everyone that this was the final flight of their captain’s career.

“Land, ho,” Erik said now. “I guess you won’t miss flying in weather.”

“I’ll take weather,” he said. “Gladly.”

He had a bad horizon going in, with a carpet of popcorn clouds, but they cleared as the plank shape of Long Island came into view. Now began the most challenging part of any flight—the landing. Marshall leaned forward. They were easing down to lower altitude, and the swamplands of JFK were becoming distinct. Marshall had always enjoyed the low-altitude stages of flight, when details of the landscape became plain. Today the egrets wading in the swamp looked like flags of surrender.

He made the turn toward Long Beach, over the inlets and swamp to the beckoning runway.

The landing was buffeted a little by crosswinds. He turned into the wind, sidling like a crab as he maneuvered against it. They were over the threshold. He pulled the yoke slightly, flaring. They were centered above the runway.

“Forty, thirty, twenty,” Erik called out.

Marshall pressed the rudder pedal. The nose swung around just as the main gear kissed the concrete. Perfectly aligned, the big ship settled to earth. Kicking the crab out, it was called.

“Nice,” said Erik.

“See. It’s still possible to actually fly a plane once in a while.”

Marshall heard the intercom click on and then some kind of staticky noise. He began to grin, realizing he was hearing applause from the passengers. He was being sent out on a high note, and he found it gratifying.