The Way the Crow Flies Page 6

  He’s in civvies. Mimi has already taken his uniform to the cleaners so it will be crisp for the handing-over ceremony toward the end of the week. This morning he wears tan trousers with a cream-coloured sports jacket she picked out for him in Paris. He pretends not to notice that it’s raw silk, and he would never spend his money on himself this way, but he does submit from time to time to her sartorial interventions. She’s the boss, after all.

  He does what he always does when he moves into a new office: places a framed photo of his wife and children on the big government-issue oak desk. This office is much the same as the one he occupied at RCAF 4 Fighter Wing back in Baden-Baden, Germany. And the one before that in Alberta, and before that at the Pentagon, where he was an exchange officer in the Accounts Branch; a succession of smaller and smaller desks in shared offices all the way back to the supply section at the RAF station in Yorkshire during the war. This desk, these green metal filing cabinets, the shelves with The Queen’s Regulations and Orders in three thick blue binders; the photo of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, the photo of the Governor General, a Department of National Defence map and four white walls—he could be anywhere. It even smells the same: floor wax and pencil shavings, the tang of shoe polish and wool uniforms. The view is similar too. Out his window, green hedges, white buildings, blue sky—no jet stream though. Just a single yellow Chipmunk banking into view.

  The handing-over ceremony will occur in this office. It will be attended by the commanding officer—the CO—and the staff of the Central Officers’ School. Jack and the officer he is replacing will shake hands, then co-sign a document in formal recognition of the change in command. Standard operating procedure—SOP—in the military: there must be no break in the continuity of command and control. Afterwards, a meet ’n’ greet will be followed by lunch at the mess, during which a detailed schedule of one-on-one briefings between Jack and his senior staff will be drawn up. He will tour the facilities and meet the instructional and support staff, so that, by the end of the day, all concerned will have been made aware that Jack has taken up his position as officer in command of the Central Officers’ School—OC of the COS. Another SOP: a leader must be seen and identified by his men, whether he is commanding a wing of jet fighters or a building full of desks.

  Jack notices some paper stuck behind the radiator below the window ledge. He bends to retrieve it. I’ll be darned. A copy of the Schwarzwald Flieger—Black Forest Flyer. The monthly magazine of RCAF 4 Wing, Germany. It’s a small world. The issue is from February 1958, and on the cover, the newly elected Prince and Princess of the Fasching Karneval stand triumphant before the Narrenzunft—the Fools’ Council. Fasching is the German lead-up to Lent—bigger and wilder than Mardi Gras. The photo was taken at the Kurhaus in Baden-Baden. He and Mimi were at a similar do one year later, two among dozens of personnel and wives who had turned out to mingle and celebrate with hundreds of Germans. He flips through. In among the birth announcements, squadron scuttlebutt, Little League news and ads, the schedule of events is printed—party after party, Children’s Fancy Dress Ball, Rose Monday Ball … Canadians welcome. Willkommen. So many nice times. So many nice remember-whens. He tosses the magazine onto his desk. No doubt it belongs to the outgoing officer. He’ll want to hang onto it for sentimental value.

  When you get your transfer message telling you where you will be posted in a few short months, two factors determine whether your reaction is elation or disappointment or something in between. The first thing you look at is: who’s in charge? Group Captain Harold Woodley is Centralia’s current CO, a man whose reputation as a wartime pilot enhances his relaxed style of command, which is vintage air force and synonymous with firmness of intent. Jack was pleased. Veterans—especially pilots—tend to know that, although they are answerable to a big organization, that organization is made up of human beings, not just systems. The second factor is geographic, and this better be good or you’ll have an unhappy wife on your hands—although Mimi could make a radar station on Baffin Island into a social mecca. The air force has an efficient informal communications network, otherwise known as the grapevine, and Jack knew Centralia’s reputation as a great place for kids, with plenty to keep the wives busy. The city of London is just down the road, the small town of Exeter is even closer, not to mention countless villages, flea markets, auctions and the great inland freshwater sea of Lake Huron for swimming, camping and picnicking. He knew that the officers’ mess is well run and that the station as a whole has healthy links to the civilian community—curling leagues, charity events, all manner of sports and recreation. So, although nothing can compare to 4 Wing, Jack’s reaction to his transfer message last spring—once he got over the irony—was pretty much on the elation side. But no matter where they sent him, he would have the sense of a fresh start; the optimism that imbues every change, coupled with his belief that no situation is beyond improving—after all, in the military, change is the only constant. He pulls out one of the heavy blue binders—Administration—and flips through.

  His phone rings. Surprised, he reaches for it.

  “Jack, it’s Hal Woodley. My wife needs to know something ASAP.”

  “Fire away, sir.”

  “What’s your wife’s first name?”

  “Mimi.”

  “Righto.”

  This job comes with a promotion. From squadron leader to wing commander—the equivalent of the rise from major to lieutenant colonel in the army. Wing Commander McCarthy is now in charge of upwards of a thousand students, department heads, course directors, instructors and admin personnel at the Central Officers’ School. Aircrew selection and orientation, logistics and administration, construction and aeronautical engineering, military and executive development at several levels, leadership and management—it’s all covered. There is even an exchange arrangement with the MBA program at the University of Western Ontario in London. There are Technical, Language, Finance, Management and Basic Officer Training sections, as well as an Office of Training Standards. Just about everything there is to know about the air force, apart from flying an airplane. Ground training.

  He reshelves Administration between Finance and Discipline. He opens his desk drawers. Stray paper clips, elastic bands. A hefty stapler, tablets of lined yellow paper. A brass pencil sharpener in the shape of an airplane. He spins the tiny propeller.

  Thanks to the air force, Jack got his MBA at one of the finest schools in the world—a single eye-straining year at the University of Michigan. He could earn better than double out in the civilian world—on civvie street. His job here is, in civilian terms, a management position comparable to a corporate executive vice-president in charge of operations. He will report directly to the CO, his time his own to organize as he sees fit. He is, for all intents and purposes, his own boss.

  As such, Jack has devised a couple of rules for himself. Ask before telling. And listen more than you talk. His job is to know what everyone else’s job is, to get everyone pointed in the right direction and then get out of the way. He’s bound to encounter some resistance—resistance to change is only human—but if he listens, he’ll find out what ain’t broke and doesn’t need fixing. And if he asks the right questions, his subordinates will tell him what he would otherwise have to tell them. Like many effective managers, he’ll appear not to be working at all. Jack smiles to himself and reaches in his inside pocket for a folded personnel list. Rule number three: learn the names.

  The next thing he’ll do is seek out the station warrant officer—the equivalent of a factory superintendent, the fella who knows what makes the whole place tick, technically subordinate to Jack but in reality ranked just below God—and say hello. Jack consults his list: Warrant Officer Pinder. He refolds the list.

  The third thing: Friday beer call at the officers’ mess. All the news that’s neither fit to print nor to speak aloud at a meeting will come out at these bull sessions. Jack only ever has one, maybe two beers, keeps his ear to the ground and enjoys himself thoroughly
, standing around with the rest of the gentlemen and rogues, “telling lies.”

  Over the course of his first week he will study personnel files. He’ll consult them the way a pilot consults a map before a mission. The paper acts as a guide but should never be confused with the real thing. Behind every name, rank and serial number is a human being. Barking orders may work in battle but gets you nowhere in peace-time.

  And Jack is acutely aware that the Western world is in one of the longest stretches of peace and prosperity in its history. Not to mention anxiety. Everyday life resembles a hot-air balloon floating in a clear summer sky—it looks effortless from the ground, yet it’s fed by fire, kept aloft by tension. Jack recalls his daughter’s morbid reference to “melted skin.” He and Mimi do their best to prevent their kids from dwelling on the threat, but in 4 Wing they, like the other air force families, stored a week’s supply of food and water in the basement locker of their PMQ; there was an evacuation plan, and regular drills at the children’s school. Part of life. The Cold War has escalated, marshalling unprecedented destructive force, most of which operates as an elaborate deterrent and requires a large bureaucracy to administer it. This is a war that is not so much waged as managed.

  He pulls a frayed textbook from the shelf: Principles of Management: A Practical Approach. We can do better than that. He has begun to assemble his own management text, a compilation of the latest articles coming out of the States, places like Harvard and Michigan. The world is changing rapidly and the military, being among the largest corporations in the world, can either lead or lumber behind like a dinosaur. Leaders today have to understand teamwork. That’s the key to all the latest advances in science and technology. We’ve virtually wiped out serious infectious disease, we’ve got satellites orbiting the earth, you can’t open a newspaper without reading of another breakthrough. And we do it without enslaving people—that’s why thousands of East Berliners voted with their feet before the Wall went up.

  Jack is not alone in believing that the military chain of command is not simply a series of orders and knee-jerk responses, but a model for the flow of information and accountability. Air force types—especially if they are veterans—tend to share this thinking. But it’s important to codify and teach it so that it’s not dependent on unwritten traditions and individual temperaments. He tosses the old textbook into the wastebasket.

  A cool head and a light hand are as important in an office as they are in a cockpit. A man who can’t keep his cool can’t make a good decision. So Jack’s management style is relaxed, but when he makes a “suggestion” it is rarely mistaken for anything but an order.

  This is something he learned from his flight instructor years ago, right here in Centralia. Simon was famous for his suggestions. In the air, from the instructor’s seat beside Jack: “You may want to try stalling the engine.” And after seconds of deadly aerial silence, “Shall we see if you can roll out of it?” The cool Queen’s English, coming out of a spin: “Good, now I wonder if you can land without bending the kite out of shape.”

  In April 1943, Jack and the rest of his class already had their wings and were embarking on advanced training. They were cocky, eager to go operational—to fly ops. Jack was not quite eighteen, none was over twenty. Simon entered the classroom, his RAF cap pushed rakishly back on his head, its sides permanently bent in the “fifty-mission crush”—the long-term effect of wearing a radio headset in the cockpit, a badge of operational status. His tie loose, moustache pencil-thin, he sat on the desk, lit a cigarette and addressed them, wearing his upper-class accent like an old scarf.

  “I know you sprogs think you know how to fly. You, and most of the great apes at the stick of any given aircraft, haven’t a bloody clue how to fly, and it’s not my job to teach you. It’s my job to teach you sorry bastards how to stay in one piece long enough to bomb the Scheisse out of the Germans like gentlemen. Questions?”

  “Squadron Leader Crawford, sir …?” one skinny boy ventured.

  “My name is Simon. Life is too short—especially yours, especially mine once I climb into the seat next to you—to waste time with a lot of syllables, so call me by my fucking name, there’s a good lad.”

  They called him by his first name and revered him as an elder because, at twenty-three, Simon was an old man. A living exception to the rule “There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old bold pilots.” One of the few to fly both fighters and bombers. A decorated Battle of Britain ace who had requested reassignment from Spitfires to big lumbering Lancaster bombers “because being in a Lanc makes me feel more akin to a tin of Spam, and what’s lovelier than Spam, really?” A different sort of risk, the opportunity to fly with a crew; Simon needed to keep himself interested. He came to them having survived a full tour of duty overseas: thirty bombing missions.

  Simon was a great flight instructor because he never took control too soon. He waited to see if his pupil could handle it first, because once you went operational, nothing would happen according to Hoyle. Jack’s hand shaking on the control column, head bursting on the verge of red-out after a steep dive at eight thousand feet, recovery at six hundred, his wheels touching down, one side then the other, then the other and the other again, then both—“Bit of a ropey landing, Jack.”

  Hauling himself over the side, legs almost buckling on the tarmac, Jack realized that Simon was still strapped in on the instructor’s side. “You can go straight back up now, mate, or find yourself gun-shy next time round. Either way you’re going to shake for two days.”

  Jack managed to reply, his voice trembling uncontrollably, “I’m easy.”

  Simon tossed his hat onto the grass next to the tarmac. “See if you can come level with this mark when we land.”

  He was assuming they would land, not crash. They went back up.

  Later, in the mess, surrounded by buddies, Simon bought the beer: “Here’s to being above it all.”

  At Jack’s level, there was only an hour or so of required flying time with an instructor, after which you did your “circuits and bumps” on your own. But there were two or three pilots with whom Simon flew overtime. He said it was because they were bloody hopeless. Jack was among them. Top of their class.

  Wearing night goggles, flying blind, able to see only his instrument panel, Simon drilling it into him, “Trust your instruments.” Because when you can’t see the horizon, your brain and body will tell you that right is left and up is down. You’ll compensate for a felt left turn by banking right. You’ll enter a terminal dive with no sense of velocity or direction, heedless of the approaching earth until your aircraft begins to come apart with the stress of speed.

  Simon waited until the last second, then removed Jack’s goggles so he could see he was in a sideslip, perfectly executed but for being a mere three hundred feet from the ground. “Power up, mate.”

  BAT. Blind approach training. Next time, Simon didn’t remove Jack’s goggles until they had landed smoothly. “Not bad for a Canadian.”

  Simon had a lot of attractive qualities but the one that inspired the most trust—and got you to do your first controlled stall at ten thousand feet—was his relaxation. It was also a quality that inspired fear, because you could never properly gauge the danger. Treetops piercing the fog. Unscheduled thunderheads. “Not sure I like the looks of that.”

  They flew for the fun of it. Got lost on purpose, followed the “iron compass” home, catching up with and overtaking freight trains below.

  It’s odd to think this of a man he has seen once in the past nineteen years, but if he were asked, Jack would answer that Simon Crawford is his best friend. Squadron Leader Crawford, DSO, DFC with Bar—Distinguished Service Order, Distinguished Flying Cross, twice. The ancient Chinese saying dictates that once you save a man’s life, you are responsible for him. But the old son of a bitch needn’t have taken it that far—Jack would have loved him anyway.

  He leans back in his chair and clasps his hands behind his head. He has done
well. Wing commander at thirty-six. He never would have believed it but he enjoys flying a desk. He likes the life, he likes the people. They know how to get things done without a lot of fuss. And if they survived as aircrew in the war, there’s not much that can faze them. He isn’t given to jingoistic declarations, but Jack loves the air force.

  That’s why it comes as a bit of a surprise to find himself staring out of his window at the unclouded sky, and imagining a different office in a different organization. An auto plant or hospital. An oil refinery in Saudi Arabia perhaps. Management skills travel well; he could work just about anywhere. Is it possible he’s just the slightest bit bored? Or is it the sleepy effect of sun and cornfields, the hemispheric distance between him and the tension of the Eastern Sector, as they called the Soviet Union back in Germany? Does he miss the proximity of the Mk 6 Sabres back at 4 Wing? Life near the sharp end? The smell of jet fuel, the frequent reminder roaring overhead of why he is in his office doing what he’s doing? “Anyone who wants a quiet life should not have been born in the twentieth century,” said Leon Trotsky. Anyone who wants a quiet life should come to Centralia, thinks Jack, and smiles to himself.

  It was good timing, running into Simon in Germany last summer. Because when Jack got his transfer message this April, he had Simon’s number and was able to phone. “You’ll never guess where they’re sending me, Si….” They both laughed when Jack said, “Centralia.”

  Simon called back a few days later. “Listen, mate, I’ve got a favour to ask you….”

  Jack picks up his phone, then remembers that Simon asked him to use only pay phones. He puts it down again, gets up and leaves his office. He noticed a phone booth next to the PX, he’ll call from there, then head to the mess for lunch.

  The ennui that descended briefly in his office is dispelled by the fresh air as he emerges from the building and trots down the concrete steps. Simon described the favour as “glorified babysitting, really,” and while it’s true that what Jack has been asked to do is not exactly rocket science, it does promise to enliven this posting. He follows the sidewalk along a row of poplars, toward the parade square. Not a creature is stirring. Not even a Chipmunk.