DeWitt looked at her with the grey eyes and shook his head.
‘I don’t remember him. I’m very sorry.’
‘He trained with you right here at Wolters,’ Reacher said. ‘You went to Rucker together and you sailed to Qui Nhon together. You served the best part of two tours together, flying slicks out of Pleiku.’
‘Your old man in the service?’ DeWitt asked.
Reacher nodded. ‘The Corps. Thirty years, Semper
Fi
‘Mine was Eighth Air Force,’ DeWitt said. ‘World War Two, flying bombers out of East Anglia in England all the way to Berlin and back. You know what he told me when I signed up for helicopters?’
Reacher waited.
‘He gave me some good advice,’ DeWitt said. ‘He told me, don’t make friends with pilots. Because they all get killed, and it just makes you miserable.’
Reacher nodded again. ‘You really can’t recall him?’
DeWitt just shrugged.
‘Not even for his folks?’ Jodie asked. ‘Doesn’t seem right they’ll never know what happened to their boy, does it?’
There was silence. The distant rotor blades faded to nothing. DeWitt gazed at Jodie. Then he spread his small hands on the desk and sighed heavily.
‘Well, I guess I can recall him a little,’ he said. ‘Mostly from the early days. Later on, when they all started dying, I took the old man’s advice to heart. Kind of closed in on myself, you know?’
‘So what was he like?’ Jodie asked.
‘What was he like?’ DeWitt repeated. ‘Not like me, that’s for sure. Not like anybody else I ever knew, either. He was a walking contradiction. He was a volunteer, you know that? I was too, and so were a lot of the guys. But Vic wasn’t like the others. There was a big divide back then between the volunteers and the drafted guys. The volunteers were all rah-rah boys, you know, going for it because they believed in it. But Vic wasn’t like that. He volunteered, but he was about as mousy quiet as the sulkiest draftee you ever saw. But he could fly like he was born with a rotor blade up his ass.’
‘So he was good?’ Jodie prompted.
‘Better than good,’ DeWitt replied. ‘Second only to me in the early days, which is saying something, because I was definitely born with a rotor blade up my ass. And Vic was smart with the book stuff. I remember that. He had it all over everybody else in the classroom.’
‘Did he have an attitude problem with that?’ Reacher asked. ‘Trading favours for help?’
DeWitt swung the grey eyes across from Jodie.
‘You’ve done your research. You’ve been in the files.’
‘We just came from the NPRC,’ Reacher said.
DeWitt nodded, neutrally. ‘I hope you didn’t read my jacket.’
‘Supervisor wouldn’t let us,’ Reacher said.
‘We were anxious not to poke around where we’re not wanted,’ Jodie said.
DeWitt nodded again.
‘Vic traded favours,’ he said. ‘But they claimed he did it in the wrong way. There was a little controversy about it, as I recall. You were supposed to do it because you were glad to help your fellow candidates, you know? For the good of the unit, right? You remember how that shit went?’
He stopped and glanced at Reacher, amused. Reacher nodded. Jodie’s being there was helping him. Her charm was inching him back towards approval.
‘But Vic was cold about it,’ DeWitt said. ‘Like it was all just another math equation. Like jc amount of lift moves the chopper off the ground, like this much help with that complicated formula gets his boots bulled up. They saw it as cold.’
‘Was he cold?’ Jodie asked.
DeWitt nodded. ‘Emotionless, the coldest guy I ever saw. It always amazed me. At first I figured it was because he came from some little place where he’d never done anything or seen anything. But later I realized he just felt nothing. Nothing at all. It was weird. But it made him a hell of a tremendous flyer.’
‘Because he wasn’t afraid?’ Reacher asked.
‘Exactly,’ DeWitt said. ‘Not courageous, because a courageous guy is somebody who feels the fear but conquers it. Vic never felt it in the first place. It made him a better war flyer than me. I was the one passed out of Rucker head of the class, and I’ve got the plaque to prove it, but when we got in-country, he was better than me, no doubt about it.’