Galloway made a last-second minor correction to line up with the center of the runway, then flared perfectly and touched down smoothly. The runway was rough. The landing roll took them past the Pagoda, the Japanese-built control tower, and then past the graveyard. There the hulks of shot-up, crashed, burned, and otherwise irreparably damaged airplanes waited until usable parts could be salvaged from them to keep other planes flying.
Where, Galloway thought, Pickering can see the pile of crushed and burned aluminum that used to be the Grumman Wildcat, his buddy, First Lieutenant Dick Stecker, dumped on landing… and almost literally broke every bone in his body.
Galloway carefully braked the aircraft to a stop, then turned it around and started to taxi back down the runway.
“You still want to turn your wings in for a rifle?” Galloway asked.
Pickering turned to look at him.
He didn’t reply at first, taking so long that Galloway was suddenly worried what his answer might be.
“I was upset,” Pickering said, meeting his eyes, “when I saw Stecker crash. If I can, I’d like to take back what I said then.”
“Done,” Galloway said, nodding his head. “It was never said.”
“I did say it, Skipper,” Pickering answered softly. “But I want to take it back.”
“Pickering, they’re short of R4D pilots. I’m an R4D IP”-an Instructor Pilot, with the authority to classify another pilot as competent to fly an R4D. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re checked out in one of these. I’m sure there’d be a billet for you on Espiritu Santo.”
“If that’s my option, Captain,” Pickering said, “then I will take the rifle. I’m a fighter pilot.”
“It takes as much balls to fly this as it does a Wildcat,” Galloway said.
“More. These things don’t get to shoot back,” Pickering said.
Galloway chuckled, then said, “Just to make sure you understand: I wasn’t trying to get rid of you.”
Pickering met his eyes again for a long moment.
“Thank you, Sir,” he said.
[FIVE]
Corporal Robert F. Easterbrook, USMCR, was nineteen years old, five feet ten inches tall, and weighed 132 pounds (he’d weighed 146 when he came ashore on Guadalcanal two months and two days earlier). And he was pink skinned-thus perhaps understandably known to his peers as “Easterbunny.” Easterbrook was sitting in the shade of the Henderson Field control tower, the Pagoda, when the weird R4D came in for a landing. It had normal landing gears, with wheels; but attached to all that was what looked like large skis. None of the other Marine and Navy R4Ds that flew into Henderson were so equipped.
“Holy shit!” he said to himself, and he thought: That damned thing is back! I’ve got to get pictures of that sonofabitch.
Twelve months before, Corporal Easterbrook had been a freshman at the University of Missouri, enrolled in courses known informally as “Pre-Journalism.”
It had been his intention then to work hard and attain a high enough undergraduate grade-point average to ensure his acceptance into the University of Missouri Graduate School of Journalism. Later, with a Missouri J School diploma behind him, he could get his foot on the first rung of the ladder leading to a career as a photojournalist (or at least he’d hoped so):
He would have to start out on a small weekly somewhere and work himself up to a daily paper. Later-much later-after acquiring enough experience, he might be able to find employment on a national magazine… maybe Collier’s or the Saturday Evening Post, or maybe even Look. It was too much to hope that he would ever see his work in Life or Time-at least before he was old, say thirty or thirty-five. As the unquestioned best of their genre, these two magazines published only the work of the very finest photojournalists in the world.
On December 8, 1941, the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Bobby Easterbrook had gone down to the post office and enlisted in the United States Marine Corps Reserve for the Duration of the War Plus Six Months. He now regarded that as the dumbest one fucking thing he had ever done in his life,
Even though his photographic images had appeared in the past two months not only within the pages, but on the covers, of Look and Time and several dozen major newspapers, that success had not caused him to modify his belief that enlisting in The Crotch was the dumbest one fucking thing he had ever done in his life.