JAMES DICKEY
The Promised Fire
At
the new altitude we went into the bomb run. The bombardier, Lieu–
tenant Madison , took over the plane, and we steadied on through the
run , getting off the two-thousand pounders and the payload of incendi–
aries we had, maybe as a warm-up for the big raid the Colonel had been
talking abo ut. It's always a relief when you get the bombs off the racks
and out of th e plane. Major Sorbo circled us without drawing flak or
any more fighters , and I could see two fires, one a lot bigger than the
other, where we had hit the city, or the other planes had. It was an easy
enough run so far. We were supposed to have dropped some two- thou–
sand pounders, some incendiaries and some frag bombs on the Kiba area
of Toyko, the waterfront, and we had, and now we could pick up the
home heading and get out of there .
The next thing was not fire, though later I realized that it had to
do with fire, had fire in it, but it did not seem like fire that was separate
from us, or that could have been to one side of us, or above or below
us. No; it was like the inside of the plane had exploded, and that we,
each one of us , had exploded. It was like we were
inside
an explosion, or
that maybe we had exploded from inside ourselves. That's as close as I
can come to saying it. Major Sorbo was just coming out of the turn for
home when it happened.
When I could think I saw I was over the butts of my guns. The
wind was knocked out of me, but I could move all right, and I held to
the strap of my seat-harness and turned around.
The plane leaned up on one wing like it was going into a turn,
but it kept leaning; nobody cou ld have been controlling it and making
it do any such way. Then the nose went down, and I knew we were
completely gone; everybody on the flight deck was probably dead. One
of the waist gunners, I think it must have been Ledford, was stretched
out right in the middle of the air, his arms and legs going wild trying to
fetch up aga inst something solid. Then he was gone - on the floor , on
the wall, the ceiling, I couldn't tell. Equipment was flying all over the
inside of the plane; you couldn't tell what anything was, except that I
saw a chest-chute bounce off one wall and a hand reach out for it and
miss, and the chute was gone and the hand was gone. We were nose–
down now; spinning; the wings were going around the airplane.
"Man, I am here , " I heard myself say, and it didn't surprise me too
Editor's Note: "The Promised Fire" is excerpted from the novel by James Dickey
entitled
To the White Sea,
to be published by Houghton Miillin and Company.
