JINX RUN
“Never volunteer for Mission 13,” they warned. “It’s bad luck.” But Hash did. And
over Amoy, even the green correspondent could see that they would never get back.
I tripped the trigger, and tracers lined splashes across the harbor.
S AN AAF soldier-correspondent I was
strictly excess baggage on this mission,
and I was mighty glad the little tail gunner
had crawled back into the waist to keep me
company. But when I saw him squinting ominously
at the port engine, I felt the first rumblings of
something uncomfortable deep in my stomach.
“Anything wrong?” I yelled. I had to yell; you
could run a boiler factory in a B-25 and not notice
it.
“Pilot just called me,” he shouted back. “He
thinks number one prop kicked the runway on takeoff.
We’re nose heavy from all the extra guns and
ammo. If it did get chipped, the vibration could tear
the engine off.”
He seemed to take it quite calmly, and his shrug
suggested that when the engine fell off, then he’d
start worrying. Airmen are like that. So, absorbing
some of his confidence, I smiled and shrugged back
at him. I knew something of his background, as a
matter of fact, his squadron Public Relations
Officer had suggested I interview him, but I wanted
to get acquainted with him a little more casually
and naturally, first.
A
He was small, slender and quick-moving. He
had bright, black shoe buttons for eyes and a ready,
if somewhat toothy grin. His name, incidentally,
was long and polysyllabic—the kind that stops a
roll-calling First Sergeant cold. Everybody just
shortened it to “Hash” and let it go at that. I
remember thinking that “Hash” was about as
U.S.A. a name as you could give a man.
So I smiled, and shrugged back at him and said:
“Anything I can do?”
“Don’t think so, Cap,” he said, shaking his
head. “Unless you want to set up the flak suits.”
He was smart, too, you see. He knew that I
wanted to keep myself busy so I wouldn’t have to
think too much about our target. Only an hour ago
I’d watched the armorers nurture all the guns with
nickel steel; nose turret, waist and tail. After that,
they put rockets in the wing tubes. We were to fly
this mass of destruction all the way to Amoy
Harbor and throw as much of it as possible into a
train of coastal junks. They’d be putting out for
Fort Bayard near the Indo-China border just about
the time we’d arrive. So Intelligence said, and we
had to take their word for it.
But one thing about which they didn’t have to
remind us was Amoy’s flak. You heard about it all
over China, and in India and Burma, too.
Variously, it was described as so thick: “You could
stick a cigar out of the plane and light it on an
explosion,” or “if your engine conks, you could just
land on the flak, itself.” Intelligence had
understated a bit and told us that enemy planes
would be very unlikely, but that ground fire might
tend to “hamper the operation considerably.”
Looking for the flak suits, then, was a job I
tackled with a fair amount of enthusiasm. I poked
around over the closed belly hatch first, searched
the tail next, then came back and explored behind
the radio desk. Hash was busy priming the waist
guns. I tapped his shoulder.
“No flak suits,” I said.
He turned, wrinkling his forehead at me. “You
sure?”
I told him where I’d looked. Then he nodded
slowly and snapped his fingers—small, sensitive
fingers they were.
“They cleaned out the ship, today,” he said.
“They must’ve forgotten to put them back.”
I watched him closely as he moved into the
crawlway leading to the tail. I couldn’t see his
thoughtful frown, of course, but I knew it was there
from the taut way he held his narrow shoulders.
A strange man, Hash. Out of the same biscuit tin
as the rest, yet subtly, disturbingly different. And
then I reflected on what I knew of his background,
and wondered that he wasn’t even more different . . .
ROUND HEAD popped out of the thin space
over the bomb bays. It was Hibbard, the
engineer and turret gunner. I grinned at him.
“Coming back to see how the other half lives,
Sarge?”
He didn’t laugh at my joke. I don’t know,
maybe it wasn’t so funny anyway. He wriggled
from the passageway, let himself down with about
as much grace as an overloaded B-29, then wiped
his flat nose with an oil-stained finger. He flicked
his eyes back and forth, not letting them meet mine.
“Everything okay for you, sir?” he asked.
“Fine, thanks,” I told him.
“You know how to handle the waist guns?”
I nodded. “I can shoot ‘em. Won’t guarantee to
hit anything, though.”
Officially I was being logged on the Form I as
waist-gunner. Actually, I was taking a magnetic
wire recorder along to try to describe and pick up
some of the sound effects of the mission. The AAF
sent correspondents like myself to all the battle
fronts early in 1945 to report on air war for its
official weekly radio program. Almost invariably
the air crews were beautifully cooperative and there
was never much of the barrier of formality between
us and the enlisted men.
Because of that I could look at Sergeant
Hibbard and say, as I did: “Come on, Sarge. What’s
on your mind? Spill it. You didn’t squeeze yourself
over the bomb bay just to ask how I was getting
along.”
He glanced momentarily toward the tail before
he answered.
“Well, Cap’n,” he said, “I just wondered if
anything’s gone wrong back here, too.” There were
shadowy ripples on his brow.
“Wrong? I don’t think so. The flak suits are
missing, that’s about all.”
“I thought so,” he said, nodding his thick head.
“He shouldn’t have volunteered for this mission.”
“Who shouldn’t have?”
“Hash,” he said, hefting his shoulders rearward.
“I got a funny feeling about havin’ him along.”
“You’ve flown with him before, haven’t you?”
“Sure . . .” he said, drawing the word out and
A
then letting it hang in midair.
“From what I’ve heard he’s a top-notch gunner,
too,” I pointed out.
“It’s not that,” he said. He was shifting his feet
uncomfortably, scraping one big G.I. brogan
against the other. “You see, this is Hash’s thirteenth
mission.”
I looked blank. “So what?”
“Thirteenth,” he answered. “Don’t you get it?
Bad luck.”
“Propwash,” I said.
He was persistent. “We almost didn’t get off the
runway. The prop may be nicked. Weather says it’s
scattered cumulus from here to Amoy, but there’s a
hell of a reasonable facsimile of a thunderstorm
line about thirty or forty miles ahead. Now your
flak suits are missing. That’s too many things to go
wrong right at the start.”
“But how can you blame Hash? He had to fly
his thirteenth mission sometime.”
“Sure,” he nodded. “But he didn’t have to force
it by volunteering. See what I mean?”
I clapped his shoulder. “Look, Sarge, forget it,”
I said. “Maybe Hash had a good reason for wanting
to come along. Besides, Intelligence says there
won’t be any enemy fighters, so Hash is just
supercargo like myself.”
He shrugged then, and climbed back atop the
bomb bays. I watched his wriggling feet disappear,
then sat down at the radio desk and put the
earphones on my head. Funny, a big, beefy guy like
Hibbard being superstitious. Yet, it was usually
these rough-and-tumble birds who had horoscopes
tattooed on their chests and wept in their beer over
sentimental songs. Thank Heaven, I thought, I
wasn’t superstitious.
And just to make sure I wouldn’t ever be
superstitious, I put my knuckles down on the radio
desk and rapped wood.
HEN I heard words crackling in the earphones.
“Pilot to waist, over.” I answered and then the
pilot came back:
“Scott, you and the tail gunner better hang on
back there. We’re going through a thunderstorm.”
The pilot’s name was Knudson and he came
from Minnesota; he was incredibly young, blond
and rawboned. I think North American’s designer
had him in mind when he conceived the B-25; that
was how beautifully he handled it. He anticipated
what I was going to say about the thunderstorm and
added: “Guess weather slipped up this time. But
these babies looked as though they formed
orographically over the mountains and it’s pretty
tough to predict that kind.”
“Roger,” I said. “We’ll hang on.”
Hash dropped the K-ration and scrambled to his battle station
I went into the crawlway and inched back to the
tail compartment to tell Hash. Combat missions
were enough trouble, I thought sadly, without
having to put up with weather, too. Tough luck,
those thunderstorms. Tough luck. I stopped and
scratched my chin. Tough luck? A jinx working? I
shook my head. Luck, jinxes, black cats, witches on
broomsticks. Nuts.
Hash, after I told him the news, followed me
back into the waist. We moved about for a moment,
settling ourselves, then sat. Almost immediately we
hit the storm. I didn’t have time to grab; the
airplane went down and I went up. My head hit the
top of the fuselage hard, when I came back again I
grabbed the ammunition box for support. We began
to whip all over the sky. Outside of the Plexiglas
window there was nothing but milky grey stuff. I
could feel my stomach turning over. I knew the
edges of my jaws must have been getting green. I
looked at Hash to see how he was taking it.
The son of a gun was grinning at me.
I steadied myself; by gum, if he could he casual
I would, too. Maybe small talk would help, I
thought. Just conversation—about most anything.
“Hash,” I said, “what made you come along this
trip?”
T
“Needed the mission,” he said. His small black
eye-buttons looked off to one side.
“There would have been another mission
tomorrow. A milk run. And it would have counted
just as much as this mission.”
“Yeah, but I need all I can get,” he said. His
eyes dulled a little as though he were looking far
off. He upped his shoulders in a faint shrug to show
that he didn’t particularly want to talk about it. I
knew, then, why Hash seemed so different at times
than the others. It was because communication with
him wasn’t quite the same.
In a war, you see, your men have got to be as
standardized as your weapons. They’ve got to have
the same reflexes, the same hungers, and even the
same gripes. It makes all of their minds tick in
pretty much the same way. Most of the time a
grunt, or a couple of unprintable words will get
across an idea that a philosopher would use a whole
book to explain. It’s one of the reasons soldiers will
never fully explain to civilians what war is like.
Hash had been standardized with the rest since
he’d joined the Air Forces, but it was his
conditioning before that which prevented him from
being completely like the others. Watching his
eyes, I wondered if he couldn’t be thinking about
that odd past of his, right now. I wondered it he
could be recalling a schoolyard bully who had
given him a trouncing because of what he was. Or a
good citizen jostling him out of line at the theater.
Or a fraternity steadfastly passing him up at pledge
time . . .
A sudden tattoo of hail on the plane’s metal skin
yanked me away from my reflections. I wondered
if I couldn’t get something out of Hash.
“What’re you going to do after the war?” I
asked casually.
He showed his white teeth, very even teeth, but
a little too large for the rest of him. “Eat a
cheeseburger,” he said. “I’m sick of Chinese eggs
and C ration.”
“No,” I grinned. We were on familiar ground
again. “I mean—are you going to get a job?”
A broken shadow rippled across his face. “Have
to finish school first,” he said. “After that . . .” He
drew his lips inward and bit on them gently. “After
that I’ll get a job—if I can.”
“What do you mean, if you can? You’re as good
as the next guy, aren’t you?”
This time his dark eyes swung on an azimuth
with mine and stayed there. He spoke too softly for
me to hear, but I could tell, from the movement of
his lips that he said: “Am I?”
UDDENLY there was no more stuffed cloud
outside the windows, and the airplane had
leveled. Hash and I both jumped to look. There was
China down below, all right, endless green
mountains and a vast mosaic of rice paddies. But
which part of China was anybody’s guess. I
switched the interphone and called the pilot.
“How’re we doing, Knute?” I asked.
His youthful voice was hesitant. “Well, we’re
off-course, that’s for sure. The navigator’s trying to
figure it out now. We may have to radio for a fix.”
“Won’t the Jap listening stations pick up our
signal if we do?”
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s what I’m worried
about. Damned if everything doesn’t seem to be
going wrong today.”
I tried to keep the word “jinx” out of my mind,
but it burrowed in just the same. I guess you get a
little keyed-up and foolish about such things when
you’re on a mission. I looked at Hash and saw that
he had started back for the tail again.
Some ten minutes later the order came to radio
for a fix. I told Knute: “Roger,” and then started to
bat out the Morse on the Liaison transmitter. Secret
receiving stations in various parts of China would
pick up my C.W. on directional receiving antennas,
then relay their figures to a central control station
in Kunming. Control would plot these directions on
a map and where all the lines crossed, of course,
would be our position.
It seemed as though I waited for hours, actually
it was only ten or fifteen minutes before the fix had
been taken and Control’s fist was chirping, sending
me the data. I relayed it over the intercom
immediately, then signed off. The Japs had
receiving stations with directional antennas, too. I
didn’t want to stay on the air any longer than
necessary.
Outside it had cleared completely. The sun
glinted on our wings and the engines droned on.
There was no hint, yet, that our nose-heavy takeoff
had damaged the propellers. Below, a large river
appeared, looping and winding like a dragon’s tail.
The green jungle carpeted away from it on either
side, looking so soft that I felt I could have jumped
into it without injury.
Then Knudson’s voice came again: “We’ve got
our position, now. We should reach the target in an
S
hour.”
Suddenly Hibbard’s voice, rough and hoarse cut
in. “We can’t make it, Lieutenant—we better turn
back!”
“Turn back?” Knudson echoed. I could visualize
him sweeping his eyes over the dash, checking the
air speed, the oil, the manifold pressure. “What for?
We’re okay.”
“Everything’s gone wrong. We got a jinx on
board. We’ll never make it!” Hibbard sounded
almost hysterical.
“What jinx?” asked Knudson, with a touch of
impatience.
“It’s Hash, sir. It’s his thirteenth mission. He
shouldn’t have come.”
Knudson said: “Don’t be silly, Hibbard.”
“But look what’s happened—it proves it! A
close takeoff; maybe a bad prop. A thunderstorm.
No flak suits. Then we get lost and have to use the
radio. They’ll have every anti-aircraft gun in China
waiting for us at Amoy.”
“We’re not turning back,” Knudson said.
“I won’t go on!” Hibbard’s voice was rising.
“I’ll bail out, I’ll . . .”
“That’ll be enough, Hibbard!” The young
lieutenant’s voice had rime ice all along its leading
edge.
There was a long pause and then Hibbard said
quietly: “Yes, sir.”
It was some time later that Hash returned from
the tail. He had two boxes of K-ration in his hands
and gave one to me. He sat down beside me using
the canvas-covered frequency meter for a chair.
“Dinner ration,” he said. “It’s got the cheese in
it. You like cheese, sir?”
NODDED perfunctorily and kept watching him.
We each took our trench knives, dug into the
paraffin covered boxes and began to eat. We didn’t
speak, but it suddenly became apparent to me that
we were having a conversation—a silent one. It
sounds crazy, but you can do that on missions. If it
had been in words, it might have gone like this:
“Well,” I would have said. “Here we are on
another one. I suppose you’re thinking about the
same things I’m thinking about. Wondering if we’ll
make it this time so we can get back to ‘em.”
“What things do you want to get back to, Cap?”
I might have spread my hands to cover up my
inarticulateness. “Oh, you know. Steaks. Tile
bathrooms with running hot water. Football games.
Sunday dinner with the family.”
“Sure, I know,” he’d have answered. “But with
me the memories are different. You know that. You
know I wasn’t brought up in your America.”
I knew that, all right. I had snatches of Hash’s
past, some from the squadron P.R.O., some from
casual bull sessions with his barracks-mates. I
knew why Hash sometimes acted a little
mysteriously according to their standards. Now I
could almost hear these things from his own lips:
“There was the curio shop,” he seemed to say.
“I was only a kid and it hadn’t occurred to me that
anything could be wrong with a curio shop. But
when I came home from the university that day
there were men parading up and down in front of it
carrying signs. The signs told everybody not to buy
anything there. When I asked my father, he just
shook his head sadly and sent me off.”
He put a dagger slice of cheese on an energy
biscuit and munched it thoughtfully. “That night
they smashed the windows with bricks and helped
themselves to the things inside. My father reported
it to the police, but they couldn’t do anything
because the others were too powerful. Besides,
some of the police were in sympathy with them.
“It wasn’t long after that that they came to the
house. A score of men, foaming with curses,
elbows locked, faces a hot red in the light of the
torches. They burned the house.
“I went to live with friends. I had to sneak
through alleys on my way home from school. But
they got me one night, tracked me down and found
me. It wasn’t as bad as it might have been.
Everything healed in about six weeks and I’ve only
got two or three scars. My parents weren’t so
lucky. They just found them in an irrigation ditch
one morning . . .”
I nodded as though Hash had actually said these
words to me. There was the essential difference;
the rest of us were at war to keep things we had.
Hash was at war to eliminate something from the
world; something called Fascism, Nazism,
Intolerance, the Devil—the name didn’t matter
much when you were on the boot end of it. Nor did
the location . . .
The earphones abruptly were barking: “Target
ten minutes off! Stand by!”
I nodded and gestured to Hash. He dropped his
unfinished K-ration and scrambled to his battle
station in the tail. I kept the earphones on my head
and, stooping, removed the lid from my wire
I
recorder. My face fell apart in mid air—I had
completely forgotten to load the machine with wire
spools; is would be impossible to record anything!
HE THOUGHT I’d been fighting off all along
made a sudden salient into my mind. Jinx! I
don’t know exactly why, nor am I too proud of
myself now that I look back on it. Maybe the idea
of a jinx offered an easy excuse for my own
stupidity in not checking the wire spools in the first
place. And while my reason insisted that the idea of
a jinx was completely absurd, my subconscious
kept hammering on the thing. The mission is
jinxed—we’ll never make it!
I spent the next few minutes busying myself
with the waist guns, struggling hard to blot out the
idea. It seemed like no time at all before the harbor,
rivers fingering from it like tentacles, appeared
below. We banked and started down.
There were tiny dots on it, ships and sampans,
looking like water bugs, their wakes wiggling
behind them. And just about that time the flak
began to come up. There must have been fiftyseven
varieties. White puffs and black puffs and
tracer streaks. Some would burst just off the wings
and then seem to streak away in the opposite
direction as we moved past it.
Accurate? Either the Japs down there had
uncanny director machines or they were reading the
pilot’s mind. It got so thick that I took to picking
out patches of sky instead of flak puffs—there were
fewer of them.
“There’s the convoy!” called Knudson’s voice
excitedly. “Intelligence called it right—they’re
right down there at one o’clock!”
I looked as he dipped the wing; there were four
junks slugging along in single file near the mouth
of the harbor. They were so close together that we
could get them on just one or two strafing runs.
That is, if the flak didn’t get us first.
“Let’s go!” said Knudson, then, “I’ll pull out to
the left and you can let ‘em have it from the waist
and tail. You got that back there?”
“Roger,” I said, and then heard Hash’s thin
voice from the stinger: “Got it, sir.”
The floor under me dipped sharply and the
horizon swung to a cockeyed angle. We started
down. I gripped the gun handles and spraddled my
legs. I doubted very much that I’d score a hit
because my instruction in aerial gunnery had been
confined to a couple of grunted remarks by the
crew chief: “This is the safety catch, and these are
the triggers and the red tipped ones are tracers.” It
didn’t make much difference; the real fire power
would come from the nose, and Hash and I were
along on the very remote possibility that we’d be
attacked by a Jap plane.
One of the black puffs suddenly blossomed not
fifty yards from the wing tip. The ship rocked
crazily and I heard fragments thunk into its sides. A
jagged hole was abruptly there in the Plexiglas,
inches from me. I felt my knees get weak.
We were getting into machine-gun range now,
and the tracers from below were glowing, shivering
pieces of worms coming in our direction.
Then the water came at us like a moving wall.
The junks were ahead and I couldn’t see them at
the moment, but I knew what they’d look like
flashing past as we banked away, and I made ready
to fire. At that moment the whole airplane bucked
and shuddered and I knew the nose cannon had
been fired. The forward guns set up a noisy
yammer.
We flattened our glide and the centrifugal force
made an accordion out of me as my feet pressed
hard into the floor. We slapped over on the left
wing and started to climb. I glimpsed the junks,
saw bluish smoke rising from them, and spurts of
flame on their decks. I tripped the triggers; the gun
jolted under my hand in three short bursts. My
tracers fell far astern of the junks and made a forest
of feather-lopped splashes in the harbor.
On top of my bursts I heard Hash’s tail guns
slobber away. I saw his slugs splatter the deck of
the first junk and then crawl along to the others. I
don’t think one of them hit the water. That, I had to
grin to myself, was real shooting.
CAUGHT the head on silhouette from the corner
of my eye first. It was still distant, and not much
more than a blob over the horizon. I stared at it; my
jaw dropped. The realization of what it was went
through me gradually, like a chill. It came toward
us with a terrible speed, a knife-edge wing and a
circular cowling. I gaped for a full second before I
could make myself think and act. And then I
pressed my throat mike and said, a little hoarsely:
“Waist to pilot—Zero, nine o’clock high!”
I should have realized what had happened when
I didn’t hear the feedback of my own voice in the
earphones. I must have been too excited to notice. I
waited for a moment, got no answer, and then
T
I
repeated the call: “Zero—nine o’clock high!”
Still no answer. And then I looked at the
intercom box, and the wiring and everything else. It
hadn’t been hit—it had just gone inexplicably
wrong, as radio equipment sometimes will.
Inexplicably? Could it have been the jinx—the
same jinx that brought a Zero out of a clear blue
sky when it was a well-known fact that practically
no Zeroes were left in China?
We were skidding around, now, so that we
could come in on a second pass on the junks. The
Zero was steadily waxing fat in my sights. It wasn’t
yet time to shoot, but I threw out a burst, anyway,
hoping to attract the attention of the men in the
forward compartment. The tracers fell away in their
peculiar, illusory curve.
And then the Jap fighter was only a few hundred
yards away, head on. His wing guns would start to
wink at any moment. The flak had stopped—they
were relying on the Zero to shoot us down. I held
my breath, chopped my back teeth together and
squeezed the twin triggers. You could have put a
small mountain in between where my tracers went
and where the Zero was.
He let go a short burst from his own guns, and
at that moment Knudson slapped our nose down for
the second run on the target. The fighter rocketed
overhead and out of sight. I jumped to the right
waist window, but he was already out of range and
turning back. . . .
The forward guns sounded again. I kept my eyes
glued to the banking Zero, watched him bring
himself about and behind us. I hoped that Hash
would spot him in time—hoped until it hurt. The
next few seconds dragged themselves out as though
they were being tortured on a rack. And then, there
was a harsh yammering from the tail.
We made our second pull-out on top of that and
the floor pressed into the balls of my feet again.
That was when a bright pinwheel of flame suddenly
hurtled from behind and under the tail. As we
banked, I could see it hit the water and send up a
dizzy spray of smoke and steam. Goodbye, Zero. I
let cubic yards of breath out of me in one
monstrous sigh of relief.
The junks were already sinking, and I was very
happy to see that we had begun to hightail. We got
right down on the deck and ran from the renewed
flak just as fast as we could. It wasn’t until the
endless mountains and paddies had been under us
for nearly an hour that I could relax again.
Hash had come out of the tail and was sitting on
the frequency meter.
“Brother,” I told him, “that was close.”
He nodded, grinning. “For a while I was almost
beginning to believe I was a jinx.”
“How’d you know about that?”
“I heard Hibbard on the interphone,” he said. “I
don’t know—maybe we were jinxed to start. But it
broke when they sent up a fighter instead of flak.
Our chances were getting slimmer all the time, and
when the ground fire stopped for that fighter it gave
us just the lull we needed.”
I nodded. “And if the interphone hadn’t gone
out, I’d have warned the pilot, and we wouldn’t
have made our second run . . .”
Then I leaned back a little and looked squarely
into his dark, shoe-button eyes. “But, tell me—why
did you insist on taking this trip, your thirteenth
mission? No shrugging, now—what’s the straight
dope?”
HE SAME faraway focus that had reflected his
thoughts of the looted curio shop, the burned
house, and the two lifeless bodies in the ditch,
appeared.
“There’s no time to waste,” he said. He spoke
slowly, prospecting for words. “I’ve got to do all I
can, fly every mission I can possibly fly. Not for
the medals—although even they might mean
something when I go back and try to fight for my
people. The idea is, that I’ve got to earn the right to
fight; earn it so completely, that anybody can
recognize it. See what I mean?”
I saw it all right. The end of the war would
mean no more fighting for the rest of us but it
would just be the beginning of Hash’s fight.
What’s that? You’re asking me if Hash came
from Germany or Italy or someplace like that? No,
sir. I thought you knew. He came from the United
States of America, just like you and me.
His full name is Hashimiro Takasachi, and he’s
third-generation Japanese-American. But we called
him Hash—about as U.S.A. a name as you can give a man.
“Never volunteer for Mission 13,” they warned. “It’s bad luck.” But Hash did. And
over Amoy, even the green correspondent could see that they would never get back.
I tripped the trigger, and tracers lined splashes across the harbor.
S AN AAF soldier-correspondent I was
strictly excess baggage on this mission,
and I was mighty glad the little tail gunner
had crawled back into the waist to keep me
company. But when I saw him squinting ominously
at the port engine, I felt the first rumblings of
something uncomfortable deep in my stomach.
“Anything wrong?” I yelled. I had to yell; you
could run a boiler factory in a B-25 and not notice
it.
“Pilot just called me,” he shouted back. “He
thinks number one prop kicked the runway on takeoff.
We’re nose heavy from all the extra guns and
ammo. If it did get chipped, the vibration could tear
the engine off.”
He seemed to take it quite calmly, and his shrug
suggested that when the engine fell off, then he’d
start worrying. Airmen are like that. So, absorbing
some of his confidence, I smiled and shrugged back
at him. I knew something of his background, as a
matter of fact, his squadron Public Relations
Officer had suggested I interview him, but I wanted
to get acquainted with him a little more casually
and naturally, first.
A
He was small, slender and quick-moving. He
had bright, black shoe buttons for eyes and a ready,
if somewhat toothy grin. His name, incidentally,
was long and polysyllabic—the kind that stops a
roll-calling First Sergeant cold. Everybody just
shortened it to “Hash” and let it go at that. I
remember thinking that “Hash” was about as
U.S.A. a name as you could give a man.
So I smiled, and shrugged back at him and said:
“Anything I can do?”
“Don’t think so, Cap,” he said, shaking his
head. “Unless you want to set up the flak suits.”
He was smart, too, you see. He knew that I
wanted to keep myself busy so I wouldn’t have to
think too much about our target. Only an hour ago
I’d watched the armorers nurture all the guns with
nickel steel; nose turret, waist and tail. After that,
they put rockets in the wing tubes. We were to fly
this mass of destruction all the way to Amoy
Harbor and throw as much of it as possible into a
train of coastal junks. They’d be putting out for
Fort Bayard near the Indo-China border just about
the time we’d arrive. So Intelligence said, and we
had to take their word for it.
But one thing about which they didn’t have to
remind us was Amoy’s flak. You heard about it all
over China, and in India and Burma, too.
Variously, it was described as so thick: “You could
stick a cigar out of the plane and light it on an
explosion,” or “if your engine conks, you could just
land on the flak, itself.” Intelligence had
understated a bit and told us that enemy planes
would be very unlikely, but that ground fire might
tend to “hamper the operation considerably.”
Looking for the flak suits, then, was a job I
tackled with a fair amount of enthusiasm. I poked
around over the closed belly hatch first, searched
the tail next, then came back and explored behind
the radio desk. Hash was busy priming the waist
guns. I tapped his shoulder.
“No flak suits,” I said.
He turned, wrinkling his forehead at me. “You
sure?”
I told him where I’d looked. Then he nodded
slowly and snapped his fingers—small, sensitive
fingers they were.
“They cleaned out the ship, today,” he said.
“They must’ve forgotten to put them back.”
I watched him closely as he moved into the
crawlway leading to the tail. I couldn’t see his
thoughtful frown, of course, but I knew it was there
from the taut way he held his narrow shoulders.
A strange man, Hash. Out of the same biscuit tin
as the rest, yet subtly, disturbingly different. And
then I reflected on what I knew of his background,
and wondered that he wasn’t even more different . . .
ROUND HEAD popped out of the thin space
over the bomb bays. It was Hibbard, the
engineer and turret gunner. I grinned at him.
“Coming back to see how the other half lives,
Sarge?”
He didn’t laugh at my joke. I don’t know,
maybe it wasn’t so funny anyway. He wriggled
from the passageway, let himself down with about
as much grace as an overloaded B-29, then wiped
his flat nose with an oil-stained finger. He flicked
his eyes back and forth, not letting them meet mine.
“Everything okay for you, sir?” he asked.
“Fine, thanks,” I told him.
“You know how to handle the waist guns?”
I nodded. “I can shoot ‘em. Won’t guarantee to
hit anything, though.”
Officially I was being logged on the Form I as
waist-gunner. Actually, I was taking a magnetic
wire recorder along to try to describe and pick up
some of the sound effects of the mission. The AAF
sent correspondents like myself to all the battle
fronts early in 1945 to report on air war for its
official weekly radio program. Almost invariably
the air crews were beautifully cooperative and there
was never much of the barrier of formality between
us and the enlisted men.
Because of that I could look at Sergeant
Hibbard and say, as I did: “Come on, Sarge. What’s
on your mind? Spill it. You didn’t squeeze yourself
over the bomb bay just to ask how I was getting
along.”
He glanced momentarily toward the tail before
he answered.
“Well, Cap’n,” he said, “I just wondered if
anything’s gone wrong back here, too.” There were
shadowy ripples on his brow.
“Wrong? I don’t think so. The flak suits are
missing, that’s about all.”
“I thought so,” he said, nodding his thick head.
“He shouldn’t have volunteered for this mission.”
“Who shouldn’t have?”
“Hash,” he said, hefting his shoulders rearward.
“I got a funny feeling about havin’ him along.”
“You’ve flown with him before, haven’t you?”
“Sure . . .” he said, drawing the word out and
A
then letting it hang in midair.
“From what I’ve heard he’s a top-notch gunner,
too,” I pointed out.
“It’s not that,” he said. He was shifting his feet
uncomfortably, scraping one big G.I. brogan
against the other. “You see, this is Hash’s thirteenth
mission.”
I looked blank. “So what?”
“Thirteenth,” he answered. “Don’t you get it?
Bad luck.”
“Propwash,” I said.
He was persistent. “We almost didn’t get off the
runway. The prop may be nicked. Weather says it’s
scattered cumulus from here to Amoy, but there’s a
hell of a reasonable facsimile of a thunderstorm
line about thirty or forty miles ahead. Now your
flak suits are missing. That’s too many things to go
wrong right at the start.”
“But how can you blame Hash? He had to fly
his thirteenth mission sometime.”
“Sure,” he nodded. “But he didn’t have to force
it by volunteering. See what I mean?”
I clapped his shoulder. “Look, Sarge, forget it,”
I said. “Maybe Hash had a good reason for wanting
to come along. Besides, Intelligence says there
won’t be any enemy fighters, so Hash is just
supercargo like myself.”
He shrugged then, and climbed back atop the
bomb bays. I watched his wriggling feet disappear,
then sat down at the radio desk and put the
earphones on my head. Funny, a big, beefy guy like
Hibbard being superstitious. Yet, it was usually
these rough-and-tumble birds who had horoscopes
tattooed on their chests and wept in their beer over
sentimental songs. Thank Heaven, I thought, I
wasn’t superstitious.
And just to make sure I wouldn’t ever be
superstitious, I put my knuckles down on the radio
desk and rapped wood.
HEN I heard words crackling in the earphones.
“Pilot to waist, over.” I answered and then the
pilot came back:
“Scott, you and the tail gunner better hang on
back there. We’re going through a thunderstorm.”
The pilot’s name was Knudson and he came
from Minnesota; he was incredibly young, blond
and rawboned. I think North American’s designer
had him in mind when he conceived the B-25; that
was how beautifully he handled it. He anticipated
what I was going to say about the thunderstorm and
added: “Guess weather slipped up this time. But
these babies looked as though they formed
orographically over the mountains and it’s pretty
tough to predict that kind.”
“Roger,” I said. “We’ll hang on.”
Hash dropped the K-ration and scrambled to his battle station
I went into the crawlway and inched back to the
tail compartment to tell Hash. Combat missions
were enough trouble, I thought sadly, without
having to put up with weather, too. Tough luck,
those thunderstorms. Tough luck. I stopped and
scratched my chin. Tough luck? A jinx working? I
shook my head. Luck, jinxes, black cats, witches on
broomsticks. Nuts.
Hash, after I told him the news, followed me
back into the waist. We moved about for a moment,
settling ourselves, then sat. Almost immediately we
hit the storm. I didn’t have time to grab; the
airplane went down and I went up. My head hit the
top of the fuselage hard, when I came back again I
grabbed the ammunition box for support. We began
to whip all over the sky. Outside of the Plexiglas
window there was nothing but milky grey stuff. I
could feel my stomach turning over. I knew the
edges of my jaws must have been getting green. I
looked at Hash to see how he was taking it.
The son of a gun was grinning at me.
I steadied myself; by gum, if he could he casual
I would, too. Maybe small talk would help, I
thought. Just conversation—about most anything.
“Hash,” I said, “what made you come along this
trip?”
T
“Needed the mission,” he said. His small black
eye-buttons looked off to one side.
“There would have been another mission
tomorrow. A milk run. And it would have counted
just as much as this mission.”
“Yeah, but I need all I can get,” he said. His
eyes dulled a little as though he were looking far
off. He upped his shoulders in a faint shrug to show
that he didn’t particularly want to talk about it. I
knew, then, why Hash seemed so different at times
than the others. It was because communication with
him wasn’t quite the same.
In a war, you see, your men have got to be as
standardized as your weapons. They’ve got to have
the same reflexes, the same hungers, and even the
same gripes. It makes all of their minds tick in
pretty much the same way. Most of the time a
grunt, or a couple of unprintable words will get
across an idea that a philosopher would use a whole
book to explain. It’s one of the reasons soldiers will
never fully explain to civilians what war is like.
Hash had been standardized with the rest since
he’d joined the Air Forces, but it was his
conditioning before that which prevented him from
being completely like the others. Watching his
eyes, I wondered if he couldn’t be thinking about
that odd past of his, right now. I wondered it he
could be recalling a schoolyard bully who had
given him a trouncing because of what he was. Or a
good citizen jostling him out of line at the theater.
Or a fraternity steadfastly passing him up at pledge
time . . .
A sudden tattoo of hail on the plane’s metal skin
yanked me away from my reflections. I wondered
if I couldn’t get something out of Hash.
“What’re you going to do after the war?” I
asked casually.
He showed his white teeth, very even teeth, but
a little too large for the rest of him. “Eat a
cheeseburger,” he said. “I’m sick of Chinese eggs
and C ration.”
“No,” I grinned. We were on familiar ground
again. “I mean—are you going to get a job?”
A broken shadow rippled across his face. “Have
to finish school first,” he said. “After that . . .” He
drew his lips inward and bit on them gently. “After
that I’ll get a job—if I can.”
“What do you mean, if you can? You’re as good
as the next guy, aren’t you?”
This time his dark eyes swung on an azimuth
with mine and stayed there. He spoke too softly for
me to hear, but I could tell, from the movement of
his lips that he said: “Am I?”
UDDENLY there was no more stuffed cloud
outside the windows, and the airplane had
leveled. Hash and I both jumped to look. There was
China down below, all right, endless green
mountains and a vast mosaic of rice paddies. But
which part of China was anybody’s guess. I
switched the interphone and called the pilot.
“How’re we doing, Knute?” I asked.
His youthful voice was hesitant. “Well, we’re
off-course, that’s for sure. The navigator’s trying to
figure it out now. We may have to radio for a fix.”
“Won’t the Jap listening stations pick up our
signal if we do?”
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s what I’m worried
about. Damned if everything doesn’t seem to be
going wrong today.”
I tried to keep the word “jinx” out of my mind,
but it burrowed in just the same. I guess you get a
little keyed-up and foolish about such things when
you’re on a mission. I looked at Hash and saw that
he had started back for the tail again.
Some ten minutes later the order came to radio
for a fix. I told Knute: “Roger,” and then started to
bat out the Morse on the Liaison transmitter. Secret
receiving stations in various parts of China would
pick up my C.W. on directional receiving antennas,
then relay their figures to a central control station
in Kunming. Control would plot these directions on
a map and where all the lines crossed, of course,
would be our position.
It seemed as though I waited for hours, actually
it was only ten or fifteen minutes before the fix had
been taken and Control’s fist was chirping, sending
me the data. I relayed it over the intercom
immediately, then signed off. The Japs had
receiving stations with directional antennas, too. I
didn’t want to stay on the air any longer than
necessary.
Outside it had cleared completely. The sun
glinted on our wings and the engines droned on.
There was no hint, yet, that our nose-heavy takeoff
had damaged the propellers. Below, a large river
appeared, looping and winding like a dragon’s tail.
The green jungle carpeted away from it on either
side, looking so soft that I felt I could have jumped
into it without injury.
Then Knudson’s voice came again: “We’ve got
our position, now. We should reach the target in an
S
hour.”
Suddenly Hibbard’s voice, rough and hoarse cut
in. “We can’t make it, Lieutenant—we better turn
back!”
“Turn back?” Knudson echoed. I could visualize
him sweeping his eyes over the dash, checking the
air speed, the oil, the manifold pressure. “What for?
We’re okay.”
“Everything’s gone wrong. We got a jinx on
board. We’ll never make it!” Hibbard sounded
almost hysterical.
“What jinx?” asked Knudson, with a touch of
impatience.
“It’s Hash, sir. It’s his thirteenth mission. He
shouldn’t have come.”
Knudson said: “Don’t be silly, Hibbard.”
“But look what’s happened—it proves it! A
close takeoff; maybe a bad prop. A thunderstorm.
No flak suits. Then we get lost and have to use the
radio. They’ll have every anti-aircraft gun in China
waiting for us at Amoy.”
“We’re not turning back,” Knudson said.
“I won’t go on!” Hibbard’s voice was rising.
“I’ll bail out, I’ll . . .”
“That’ll be enough, Hibbard!” The young
lieutenant’s voice had rime ice all along its leading
edge.
There was a long pause and then Hibbard said
quietly: “Yes, sir.”
It was some time later that Hash returned from
the tail. He had two boxes of K-ration in his hands
and gave one to me. He sat down beside me using
the canvas-covered frequency meter for a chair.
“Dinner ration,” he said. “It’s got the cheese in
it. You like cheese, sir?”
NODDED perfunctorily and kept watching him.
We each took our trench knives, dug into the
paraffin covered boxes and began to eat. We didn’t
speak, but it suddenly became apparent to me that
we were having a conversation—a silent one. It
sounds crazy, but you can do that on missions. If it
had been in words, it might have gone like this:
“Well,” I would have said. “Here we are on
another one. I suppose you’re thinking about the
same things I’m thinking about. Wondering if we’ll
make it this time so we can get back to ‘em.”
“What things do you want to get back to, Cap?”
I might have spread my hands to cover up my
inarticulateness. “Oh, you know. Steaks. Tile
bathrooms with running hot water. Football games.
Sunday dinner with the family.”
“Sure, I know,” he’d have answered. “But with
me the memories are different. You know that. You
know I wasn’t brought up in your America.”
I knew that, all right. I had snatches of Hash’s
past, some from the squadron P.R.O., some from
casual bull sessions with his barracks-mates. I
knew why Hash sometimes acted a little
mysteriously according to their standards. Now I
could almost hear these things from his own lips:
“There was the curio shop,” he seemed to say.
“I was only a kid and it hadn’t occurred to me that
anything could be wrong with a curio shop. But
when I came home from the university that day
there were men parading up and down in front of it
carrying signs. The signs told everybody not to buy
anything there. When I asked my father, he just
shook his head sadly and sent me off.”
He put a dagger slice of cheese on an energy
biscuit and munched it thoughtfully. “That night
they smashed the windows with bricks and helped
themselves to the things inside. My father reported
it to the police, but they couldn’t do anything
because the others were too powerful. Besides,
some of the police were in sympathy with them.
“It wasn’t long after that that they came to the
house. A score of men, foaming with curses,
elbows locked, faces a hot red in the light of the
torches. They burned the house.
“I went to live with friends. I had to sneak
through alleys on my way home from school. But
they got me one night, tracked me down and found
me. It wasn’t as bad as it might have been.
Everything healed in about six weeks and I’ve only
got two or three scars. My parents weren’t so
lucky. They just found them in an irrigation ditch
one morning . . .”
I nodded as though Hash had actually said these
words to me. There was the essential difference;
the rest of us were at war to keep things we had.
Hash was at war to eliminate something from the
world; something called Fascism, Nazism,
Intolerance, the Devil—the name didn’t matter
much when you were on the boot end of it. Nor did
the location . . .
The earphones abruptly were barking: “Target
ten minutes off! Stand by!”
I nodded and gestured to Hash. He dropped his
unfinished K-ration and scrambled to his battle
station in the tail. I kept the earphones on my head
and, stooping, removed the lid from my wire
I
recorder. My face fell apart in mid air—I had
completely forgotten to load the machine with wire
spools; is would be impossible to record anything!
HE THOUGHT I’d been fighting off all along
made a sudden salient into my mind. Jinx! I
don’t know exactly why, nor am I too proud of
myself now that I look back on it. Maybe the idea
of a jinx offered an easy excuse for my own
stupidity in not checking the wire spools in the first
place. And while my reason insisted that the idea of
a jinx was completely absurd, my subconscious
kept hammering on the thing. The mission is
jinxed—we’ll never make it!
I spent the next few minutes busying myself
with the waist guns, struggling hard to blot out the
idea. It seemed like no time at all before the harbor,
rivers fingering from it like tentacles, appeared
below. We banked and started down.
There were tiny dots on it, ships and sampans,
looking like water bugs, their wakes wiggling
behind them. And just about that time the flak
began to come up. There must have been fiftyseven
varieties. White puffs and black puffs and
tracer streaks. Some would burst just off the wings
and then seem to streak away in the opposite
direction as we moved past it.
Accurate? Either the Japs down there had
uncanny director machines or they were reading the
pilot’s mind. It got so thick that I took to picking
out patches of sky instead of flak puffs—there were
fewer of them.
“There’s the convoy!” called Knudson’s voice
excitedly. “Intelligence called it right—they’re
right down there at one o’clock!”
I looked as he dipped the wing; there were four
junks slugging along in single file near the mouth
of the harbor. They were so close together that we
could get them on just one or two strafing runs.
That is, if the flak didn’t get us first.
“Let’s go!” said Knudson, then, “I’ll pull out to
the left and you can let ‘em have it from the waist
and tail. You got that back there?”
“Roger,” I said, and then heard Hash’s thin
voice from the stinger: “Got it, sir.”
The floor under me dipped sharply and the
horizon swung to a cockeyed angle. We started
down. I gripped the gun handles and spraddled my
legs. I doubted very much that I’d score a hit
because my instruction in aerial gunnery had been
confined to a couple of grunted remarks by the
crew chief: “This is the safety catch, and these are
the triggers and the red tipped ones are tracers.” It
didn’t make much difference; the real fire power
would come from the nose, and Hash and I were
along on the very remote possibility that we’d be
attacked by a Jap plane.
One of the black puffs suddenly blossomed not
fifty yards from the wing tip. The ship rocked
crazily and I heard fragments thunk into its sides. A
jagged hole was abruptly there in the Plexiglas,
inches from me. I felt my knees get weak.
We were getting into machine-gun range now,
and the tracers from below were glowing, shivering
pieces of worms coming in our direction.
Then the water came at us like a moving wall.
The junks were ahead and I couldn’t see them at
the moment, but I knew what they’d look like
flashing past as we banked away, and I made ready
to fire. At that moment the whole airplane bucked
and shuddered and I knew the nose cannon had
been fired. The forward guns set up a noisy
yammer.
We flattened our glide and the centrifugal force
made an accordion out of me as my feet pressed
hard into the floor. We slapped over on the left
wing and started to climb. I glimpsed the junks,
saw bluish smoke rising from them, and spurts of
flame on their decks. I tripped the triggers; the gun
jolted under my hand in three short bursts. My
tracers fell far astern of the junks and made a forest
of feather-lopped splashes in the harbor.
On top of my bursts I heard Hash’s tail guns
slobber away. I saw his slugs splatter the deck of
the first junk and then crawl along to the others. I
don’t think one of them hit the water. That, I had to
grin to myself, was real shooting.
CAUGHT the head on silhouette from the corner
of my eye first. It was still distant, and not much
more than a blob over the horizon. I stared at it; my
jaw dropped. The realization of what it was went
through me gradually, like a chill. It came toward
us with a terrible speed, a knife-edge wing and a
circular cowling. I gaped for a full second before I
could make myself think and act. And then I
pressed my throat mike and said, a little hoarsely:
“Waist to pilot—Zero, nine o’clock high!”
I should have realized what had happened when
I didn’t hear the feedback of my own voice in the
earphones. I must have been too excited to notice. I
waited for a moment, got no answer, and then
T
I
repeated the call: “Zero—nine o’clock high!”
Still no answer. And then I looked at the
intercom box, and the wiring and everything else. It
hadn’t been hit—it had just gone inexplicably
wrong, as radio equipment sometimes will.
Inexplicably? Could it have been the jinx—the
same jinx that brought a Zero out of a clear blue
sky when it was a well-known fact that practically
no Zeroes were left in China?
We were skidding around, now, so that we
could come in on a second pass on the junks. The
Zero was steadily waxing fat in my sights. It wasn’t
yet time to shoot, but I threw out a burst, anyway,
hoping to attract the attention of the men in the
forward compartment. The tracers fell away in their
peculiar, illusory curve.
And then the Jap fighter was only a few hundred
yards away, head on. His wing guns would start to
wink at any moment. The flak had stopped—they
were relying on the Zero to shoot us down. I held
my breath, chopped my back teeth together and
squeezed the twin triggers. You could have put a
small mountain in between where my tracers went
and where the Zero was.
He let go a short burst from his own guns, and
at that moment Knudson slapped our nose down for
the second run on the target. The fighter rocketed
overhead and out of sight. I jumped to the right
waist window, but he was already out of range and
turning back. . . .
The forward guns sounded again. I kept my eyes
glued to the banking Zero, watched him bring
himself about and behind us. I hoped that Hash
would spot him in time—hoped until it hurt. The
next few seconds dragged themselves out as though
they were being tortured on a rack. And then, there
was a harsh yammering from the tail.
We made our second pull-out on top of that and
the floor pressed into the balls of my feet again.
That was when a bright pinwheel of flame suddenly
hurtled from behind and under the tail. As we
banked, I could see it hit the water and send up a
dizzy spray of smoke and steam. Goodbye, Zero. I
let cubic yards of breath out of me in one
monstrous sigh of relief.
The junks were already sinking, and I was very
happy to see that we had begun to hightail. We got
right down on the deck and ran from the renewed
flak just as fast as we could. It wasn’t until the
endless mountains and paddies had been under us
for nearly an hour that I could relax again.
Hash had come out of the tail and was sitting on
the frequency meter.
“Brother,” I told him, “that was close.”
He nodded, grinning. “For a while I was almost
beginning to believe I was a jinx.”
“How’d you know about that?”
“I heard Hibbard on the interphone,” he said. “I
don’t know—maybe we were jinxed to start. But it
broke when they sent up a fighter instead of flak.
Our chances were getting slimmer all the time, and
when the ground fire stopped for that fighter it gave
us just the lull we needed.”
I nodded. “And if the interphone hadn’t gone
out, I’d have warned the pilot, and we wouldn’t
have made our second run . . .”
Then I leaned back a little and looked squarely
into his dark, shoe-button eyes. “But, tell me—why
did you insist on taking this trip, your thirteenth
mission? No shrugging, now—what’s the straight
dope?”
HE SAME faraway focus that had reflected his
thoughts of the looted curio shop, the burned
house, and the two lifeless bodies in the ditch,
appeared.
“There’s no time to waste,” he said. He spoke
slowly, prospecting for words. “I’ve got to do all I
can, fly every mission I can possibly fly. Not for
the medals—although even they might mean
something when I go back and try to fight for my
people. The idea is, that I’ve got to earn the right to
fight; earn it so completely, that anybody can
recognize it. See what I mean?”
I saw it all right. The end of the war would
mean no more fighting for the rest of us but it
would just be the beginning of Hash’s fight.
What’s that? You’re asking me if Hash came
from Germany or Italy or someplace like that? No,
sir. I thought you knew. He came from the United
States of America, just like you and me.
His full name is Hashimiro Takasachi, and he’s
third-generation Japanese-American. But we called
him Hash—about as U.S.A. a name as you can give a man.
