Once A Fighter Pilot, Always A Fighter Pilot

I have a soft spot in my heart for fighter pilots, and that’s why I took more than passing interest in the story of Jeremiah O’Keefe, who passed away recently in Mississippi at age 93.  Jerry, as he was known, flew a Navy fighter in World War Two and, as the news story recounted, pretty much remained a fighter pilot all his life.

Let’s go back to April, 1945.  America and its allies are winning the war against Japan in the Pacific, closing in on the Japanese homeland.  O’Keefe takes off on his very first mission, part of a 24-plane squadron assigned to protect American ships unloading troops and supplies on Okinawa.  Suddenly, they’re warned of a large number of enemy planes heading their way – kamikazes, intent on ramming themselves into the ships below.

Jerry and his fellow pilots intercepted the Japanese planes, and by the time the battle was over, he had shot down five of the enemy, thus becoming – in his first taste of combat – an “ace.”  Jerry’s squadron was named, appropriately, the Death Rattlers.  Jerry kept flying and shooting down enemy planes until the war ended – and won a chest-full of medals for his heroics.

Like most of the young men who served in uniform in the war, Jerry went home, took off his uniform, and went to work in a family business – funeral homes and insurance.  He served a term in the Mississippi legislature and eight years as mayor of Biloxi.

Jerry O’Keefe became a champion of equal rights for black Mississippians.  When somebody at the Biloxi city hall issued a parade permit for the Ku Klux Klan, Jerry rescinded it, and when Klan members marched anyway, he had them arrested.  He got death threats, and a cross burned on his lawn, but he never backed down.  After all, he was a fighter pilot.  Japanese kamikazes or Kluxers, you just didn’t mess with Jerry O’Keefe.

One of my uncles was a fighter pilot in World War Two.  He flew Thunderbolts from England to support the allied campaign in Europe.  Had to bail out once when his plane was hit by anti-aircraft fire, but survived to fight another day.  After the war he finished his college education, went to medical school, and became a doctor.  He was a terrific doctor – smart, creative, compassionate, willing to try just about anything to help his patients.  Personally, he lived a bit on the edge.  I loved him dearly and thought he was one of the most interesting people on earth.  He was always, in my mind, a fighter pilot.

I paid tribute to my pilot uncle in my first novel, Home Fires Burning.  There’s a young fighter pilot in there, Billy Benefield, who is inspired by Uncle Bancroft.  He lives on the edge.  He’s the kind of guy who lands his Army Air Corps plane in the pasture next to his girlfriend’s house so he can take her for a ride.  Later, he battles Japanese planes in the Pacific.  He could have been Jerry O’Keefe.

As a storyteller, I’m drawn to characters who have some edges, some flaws, some texture.  People who are anything but dull.  Sometimes they get themselves into big trouble because they take risks and do outrageous things.  But that makes them infinitely more intriguing that folks who never take a chance with life.  Give me a fighter pilot any day.

In Harm's Way In Faraway Places

Leslie Williams passed away a few days ago.  He was 95 years old, and one of the few living members of a famous World War Two command known as the Tuskegee Airmen.

It was a bold and controversial experiment the American military embarked on in 1939.  With war clouds gathering, in a day when the military and most of American society was racially segregated, Congress approved funds to recruit and train African-Americans as pilots.  Leslie Williams was among the first to join.  He and his fellow cadets learned to fly while they attended classes at nearby Tuskegee Institute.  The best-known unit that came out of Tuskegee was the 332nd Fighter Group.  They painted the tails of their P47’s and P51’s red and gained fame as the “Red Tails,” distinguishing themselves in combat in the skies over Europe.   Their exploits have been chronicled in books and movies.

I’ve long been fascinated by the story of the Tuskegee Airmen – partly because of their distinguished military record, partly because of the racial discrimination they had to overcome, and deal with constantly, to earn the right to get in those cockpits.  Leslie Williams, in an interview a few years ago, said, “In those days, no one had to salute blacks, but we could be court-martialed if we didn’t salute a white officer.  The discrimination was bad.”  But Williams and his fellow officers endured all that and prevailed. 

In a much broader sense, I’m intrigued by that entire generation of young American men and women who lived through Depression and brought their nation through a conflict of staggering proportions.  After World War Two, everything was different.  Those young Americans changed the world, and the world changed them.

I knew some of them intimately.  My father and three uncles served – two pilots, a soldier, a sailor.  In the post-war years, when I was a child and youth, they spoke sometimes in passing of their experiences – never of the moments in combats when they were in grave peril, but of the experience of being uprooted from a small Alabama town and sent to the ends of the globe.  In what they said, the memorabilia they brought back, in the letters to and from wives and girlfriends, I could feel their homesickness, their wonder at the places where they were stationed – England, France, Germany, Burma, China.  I came to realize that the war had altered them irrevocably in ways I could only glimpse and suspect.

I have taken liberally from those men’s war experience in my writing.  My first novel, Home Fires Burning, is set in a small southern town during the last year of the war – a story of the folks who stayed behind and supported the war effort, and the young men who came back, profoundly changed, to try to bring some order to their lives – to settle into jobs and raising families and being part of a community.

More importantly, what I sensed about my father and uncles and their time at war let me know that in all of us, there are things below the surface, rarely revealed, secrets of the heart, that nevertheless shape who we are and how we look at the world in vital ways.  It’s that life-below-the-surface thing, the subtext, the rough edges, that interests me most when I imagine characters.  As a writer, I can peer into my characters’ souls and feel things that are not obvious, but which are essential.

Leslie Williams survived the war and returned to his native California to become a successful businessman, and at age 60, finish law school and begin a 20-year legal career.  My father and uncles settled in my southern town and made lives in business and public service.  They were quiet lives, but they were meaningful lives.  They had gone in harm’s way in faraway places and come home to shape my own life.  I am forever in their debt.

Christmas Is For Storytellers

My favorite time of the holiday season is Christmas afternoon.

It stems from my boyhood in a small southern town  in a family of storytellers to whom I owe much of who I am as a writer today.

We were a large, rowdy group – my mother, her three brothers, in-laws, cousins, and my grandmother,  Nell Cooper.  She was a feisty, independent soul – widowed at a fairly young age with four children at home.  She raised and educated them and in her later years enjoyed having them close at hand.  Especially on Christmas afternoon, when we all gathered at Mama Cooper’s house.

It was the family tradition for the twelve cousins (I was the oldest) to draw names a couple of weeks before and exchange small gifts.  Mama Cooper would hand out presents to each of us, we would all have punch and cookies, and then the kids were sent outdoors to play with the stuff we had gotten from Santa that morning.  The adults would gather around Mama Cooper’s dining room table and tell stories.

Mama Cooper was the tee-totaling daughter of a Methodist minister, and she did not allow fermented spirits in her house.  Except on Christmas afternoon.  The boys would concoct eggnog, liberally flavored with bourbon, and the more eggnog that was consumed, the better the storytelling got.  My dad and three uncles had been in World War Two – two pilots, a sailor, an infantryman – and much of the storytelling involved that time in their lives.  Never about combat, but about far-flung places, girlfriends who became wives, the fast-moving and often chaotic world into which they had all been catapulted  from that small southern town.  And about life back home while the boys were off at war – the ration books, the gold stars in windows, the heady uncertainty, the powerful sense of relief when it was all over and they could put small-town lives back together.

Nell Cooper and her family, c. 1927

Curious kid that I was, I would leave the little young’uns playing in the yard, sneak back into the house, and hide in the living room, listening to the tales being told on the other side of the wall.  I don’t remember many of the details of the grownups’ stories, but I do remember vividly the realization that I was hearing things about my parents, aunts, uncles and grandmother that I could have scarcely imagined.  I understood that there was a rich texture to their lives, an undercurrent, that shaped the people they were now, and that the texture, the undercurrent, was the most fascinating part about them.  It made them intriguing, even exotic, and it had a profound impact on my evolving view of the world and human experience.

As a writer, I am all about characters and relationships.  There are things about people we see and hear, and there are things unseen and unheard.  There is a tension between the faces we show to the world and the things that are in our hearts and souls.  That tension has a great deal to do with who we are and how we relate to the people around us.  Our relationships are profoundly affected by our hidden places, our secrets, the soul stuff.  And how we each reconcile the tension between the obvious and the secret has a great deal to do with how genuine we are as people.

Okay, that’s all a mouthful, but it’s as close as I can get to my approach as a storyteller.  My job is to present a character who bubbles up from my imagination, present that character as honestly as I can, warts and all, and plumb the depths of the hidden stuff.  I hope, when the work is done, you’ll find something that resonates with your life, your world, your relationships.  If I do, I’ve been successful.

It all goes back to Christmas afternoon at Mama Cooper’s house.  Ever since, those few hours have been special to me.  This Christmas afternoon, I’ll take some time to be quiet and think about those good people there in Mama Cooper’s dining room and thank them for the gift they gave me without ever knowing they did.

Merry Christmas.