PICKS & FINDS: James Salter
James Salter seems more like a European writer than an American. The author of six novels, his erotic “A Sport and A Pastime” was selected as a title in The Modern Library in 1995. His short story collection “Dusk” won the Pen/Faulkner Award in 1998 and in 2000 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Never a best seller, he has been honored for his style perhaps as much as anything else and has made a living through teaching and film work. A graduate of West Point, he flew more than 100 missions during the Korean War. “Gods of Tin”, (Shoemaker and Horn, Washington, D.C., 2004, Edited and introduced by Jessica Benton and William Benton) is a narrative of Salter’s Korean War experience including sections from his novels and memoirs as well as sections of a journal he kept during the War. Salter writes: “You lived and died alone, especially in fighters. Fighters. Somehow, despite everything, that word had not become sterile. You slipped into the hollow cockpit and strapped and plugged yourself into the machine. The canopy ground shut and sealed you off. Your oxygen, your very breath, you carried with you into the chilled vacuum, in a steel bottle.” Large numbers of the latest Soviet fighter, the MIG-15, flown mostly by Russians, challenged American control of the air. For American fighter pilots, the tour was 100 combat missions. The War began in 1950 when North Korea invaded the south. A bit later, a friend of mine, tiring of junior high school in North Dakota, attempted to dynamite our school. He was given the choice of reform school or joining the Marines. He chose the Marines and as a large boy, was named BAR man of his squad, carrying the large World War I assault rifle. When an overwhelming number of Chinese “volunteers” crossed into South Korea, my friend took part in the American retreat, exchanging his BAR for a lighter Garand and finally carrying a light carbine. He spent some time walking with the brains of his best friend frozen on his face. The War was easier for me. Unable to afford to continue college, I was unable being eligible for the Draft to find a full time job. I enlisted in the Air Force and as an Air Weather Observer found myself in a war room under an English hill, plotting weather maps for bomb runs we helped plan daily into Russia. My friend survived his first tour of duty, was discharged, came back to North Dakota, spent a few weeks driving a motorcycle around town, an Indian girl on the back, then reenlisted. I sometimes wonder if he has survived our wars between then and now. It is worth noting that the North Koreans twice occupied the South Korean capitol of Seoul. Over the recent Thanksgiving holiday a Baltimore television station had repeat showings of the superb 1989 film “Glory” starring Matthew Broderick as a young white Civil War officer leading America’s first unit of volunteer black soldiers portrayed by such actors as Denzel Washington, Andre Braugher and Morgan Freeman. As much as anything, it is the story of the creation of a fighting unit. It is presently shown as part of American military training. When I went through basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, I found myself with a cross section of America including Southerners with whom we refought the Civil War an argument which could always be ended by saying to the man in the bunk beneath us: “Well, we won”, leaving him grumbling. Also with us were pachucos with their black baggy pants with the silver stripe down the side and their temporarily greasy haircuts, always telling each other what to do to their mothers. As part of our training, we were shown the 1943 film “The Ox-Bow Incident”, about the lynching of three cowboys suspected of the murder of a rancher. When the men were suspended strangling, a lyncher stepped forward with a rifle and put two of them out of their misery, leaving the third, a Mexican played by Anthony Quinn, to die slowly. Our instructor mentioned that Quinn was left to die horribly because he was Mexican, and thus began for many of us an education about discrimination. Some of us continued in the military but many, like Salter, left to return to civilian life. But for many of us the military was a transforming experience, and one that many young people are poorer for never having known. However and whenever our present war in Iraq is resolved, it might well be worth considering some form of national service for young Americans, whether basic military training or some form of civilian service like the Peace Corps or the Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930s. Such service might be rewarded by a modified version of a G.I. Bill helping to finance perhaps two years of Junior College or training in a technical school, helping to close what seems to me a growing gap in American education. And in an America where I see the races growing apart, such a program might help to bring us together again.