Saving Graces by Elizabeth Edwards Page A

Mark Yakich’s book of poetry,
Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting To Cross
. Although I am Christian, this Buddhist tradition made it easier for me when we sat in the base chapel for the memorials when Lieutenant Commander Decker and three others died in May 1959, and when in November another VQ-1 plane crashed and again four men died, and again we all sat in the chapel, with our friends and their mothers, some beaten, some stoic, all filled with grief, alone in the front pew. I would stare at the still backs of the necks of my now fatherless schoolmates and imagine them bent over their boats and pushing them out to sea, sending the souls of their fathers home—until the next year. For children who were used to their fathers being gone, it was almost enough.
    I nearly had to test the redemptive power of that image with my own father.
    One night in June 1959, only a few weeks after April had left our house, my father didn’t come home. We didn’t worry. It was not unusual. The pilots and crew of VQ-1 could never tell their families when they were leaving for a reconnaissance flight or how long they would be gone. If Dad didn’t come home for dinner, we knew he was in the air somewhere. We could sometimes tell where he had been, or at least where he had refueled, by what he brought back to us. If he brought home bananas, he had been to Taiwan; a piece of jewelry for my mother, we decided, was Thailand. If he had landed at Midway, it was the best treat of all—pictures and stories about the gooney birds, heavy waddling albatrosses. Dad would delight us mimicking a gooney bird’s outstretched neck and graceless dance. We made a game of guessing.
    But on this mission, something went wrong. My father and Commander Donald Mayer, Daryl’s father, were piloting a P4 Mercator along the coast of North Korea. A large, heavy four-propeller bomber, built for nine men, with a gun turret in the back, it was holding fourteen men, and most of the guns had been replaced with cameras and surveillance equipment. My father was piloting the plane. As the Mercator made her maneuvers trying to set off—and thereby expose the location of—communist radar stations, two MiG jet fighters with red stars emblazoned on them made a pass. Dad and Commander Mayer weren’t surprised to see them. Chinese or Korean jets often flew close to watch the maneuvers near their coastlines, perhaps to intimidate.
    But this time they weren’t just watching. This time they were shooting.
    As the MiGs passed the converted Navy bomber, the sharp report of gunfire tore through my father’s plane. The crew scrambled, while the MiGs circled back to make another pass. The Navy gunner, Donald Corder, rushed to his only gun, but he never even got a shot off. In their second pass the MiGs blew out the gun turret, wounding him. They continued to make passes, six in all, riddling the helpless plane, which had nowhere to hide, no way to shoot back. It seemed they had no way to save the plane or themselves.
    Through fifteen hits on the plane, through fire and deafening noise, the fourteen men on the Mercator instinctively acted as one. Covered in blood, his flight suit on fire, Corder managed to crawl out of the mangled turret. Lieutenant Owen Farley knocked out the flames, and an ordnance man named Richard Nelson bandaged Corder. Bullets continued to shower the plane, and Nelson draped his larger frame over Corder’s body to protect his injured friend.
    My father was piloting a plane that was now rudderless, with both engines on the starboard side knocked out or on fire. The hydraulic system was out, and the holes in the plane created even more instability. A plane in this condition is almost impossible to fly, but keeping it aloft was not all he had to do. He had to fly it with enough precision to avoid the continued passes by the MiGs and dodge the incoming tracers. If he couldn’t do that, they wouldn’t survive. To limit the maneuvering room of the MiG