Work Text:
Jack Kidd is a military man before he’s a military man, a boy raised by a soldier who was raised by a soldier who was raised by a soldier. The Great War spared his dad, gave him scars, gave him medals.
“The army made me who I am today,” his dad says to him, a thousand times, as he grows up. “The best and hardest things I’ve ever done, I did as a soldier.”
Jack Kidd is a military man by the time he’s seven years old.
They talk about it, him and his dad, when he graduates highschool. His dad pours him a whiskey, with a lot of ice, and they sit and pretend it’s Jack’s first drink, and talk about what he’s going to do.
“I could enlist right now,” Jack says, looking at the slightly ugly wallpaper his mother made them hang the year before, the slightly ugly chair that barely matches it, the terribly ugly curtains, the family portraits on the mantlepiece, next to three Purple Hearts.
“You could,” says his father. “If that’s what suits you, long term, you could.”
“But?”
“But you’re smart,” his father says. “You’re sharp, and careful, and brave. You’d be a good officer. You could go to college.”
“I could,” Jack says in response, without meaning to mimic his father’s tone. “I could, I suppose.”
His father takes a drink of his whiskey, and Jack copies him, because it feels right.
“But?”
“But I don’t like the look of what’s going on in Europe,” Jack says. “And I wonder-”
“That’s why I think you should go to college,” his father cuts in. “Because you’d be a good officer. You’re looking at the big picture. You don’t get to see the big picture on the ground.”
“Yes, but if there’s a war, if I could help-”
His father holds a hand up. It’s a demand for instant silence and it’s a rare gesture, so Jack stops, and sips his whiskey, and waits. There’s a very complicated something happening on his father’s face, pride and consternation and something else Jack’s only seen in flashes.
“If there’s a war,” his father says, “There are never enough good officers to go around.”
Even though there’s half an inch of whiskey left in each of their glasses, and the ice isn’t melted yet, the statement seems final. The conversation, or at least the part of the conversation where this particular matter was up for discussion, is closed. Jack knows full well that whatever decision he makes, his father will support him without question, because that’s how it’s always happened - they sit down, over ice cream or cocoa or whiskey, now, apparently, and talk through the options, and then Jack makes his decision. It’s how he decided on a sport as a kid, it’s how he decided a summer job when he was 14. It’s a good system. Even when he makes a choice that isn’t the one his dad would have made, they’re on the same page, and he supports him. Jack knows what he wants, sort of, or he did an hour ago. But now he knows what his father wants, too.
Jack goes to college.
That's 1937. He graduates in 1940, with the war in Europe heading into its second year, and is mostly confident that he made the right decision. America isn't in it yet, for all that Jack would have thought the powers that be would have learned their lesson from the first time.
“Sitting back and letting Germany tear Europe apart was the wrong choice twenty five years ago,” he says to his father, sitting in the slightly ugly chair, drinking whiskey, the night after graduation. “It's not a better course of action this time round.”
“War is no small thing,” his father says. There's a tightness around his eyes that Jack doesn't like. “And it's not at our doorstep yet. I see your point, but I don't blame them for waiting.”
“History will,” Jack says.
His father laughs. “I suppose you'd know, with your fancy college education.”
Jack laughs too, because for all the classes he's attended over the last three years he isn't sure that the greatest thing gifted to him by college wasn't knowledge, but time.
“Have you thought about what you're going to do next?”
“Enlist,” Jack says, straight away.
There's a rueful little smile on his father's face. “What have you chosen?”
Jack's going to be a pilot.
“You said it,” he tells his father when he looks surprised. “When I finished school. You said it's hard to look at the big picture on the ground. So. Pilot.”
**
Jack's a damn fine pilot, it turns out. Not the best pilot at Kelly Fields, but pretty good. He's a Second Lieutenant in pretty short order, and by the time the bars are pinned on his uniform he's realized that the real work of being in the military isn't actually going to be flying the forts.
That's going to be important, he knows that. It's going to be vital, going to be life and death, every time. But it's not going to be the thing that makes his war important.
I think I underestimated the impact that the other men in the unit would have on my experience, he writes to his father. Which perhaps was foolish of me, knowing how close you are to the men you served with, seeing you with Uncle Joe and Uncle Lester and all of the rest of them, my whole life. But I hadn't quite realized how much of it was going to boil down to managing dynamics between the men, even when we're all the same rank.
There's a lot to manage, between Bill Veal’s boisterous bull-headedness and the competitive edge of the rest of their class. There's a lot of clashing ego and a lot of posturing and Jack finds it's easy to set himself above the rest simply by refusing to take part. They might think it makes him aloof. He knows better.
Then there's whatever the hell is going on with Cleven and Egan, who are as wildly different as any two men can be until you get them in the sky, and are -
Something.
They are so unimaginably unreasonable about each other right from the very first moment, it sets his teeth on edge and makes him want to smack them with a copy of the regulations and then they go and have the audacity to be the best pilots in their class, in anyone's class, and-
He'd hate them, if he had any common sense.
Although, once he thinks about it, common sense is the problem. Jack’s not a man prone to irrational emotional responses, if he’s feeling something strongly it’s because he knows exactly what it is, and why he feels like that. If he’s going to hate the Bucks, as they are now apparently going to be known, he is going to have to understand exactly what the hell is going on with them, and he just - doesn’t.
**
Pearl Harbor marks the beginning of a war Jack’s been watching from a distance for two years, and he listens to the news over the wireless with a sinking heart.
“I wanted us to be in it,” he says to his father when he makes it home for a very fleeting Christmas visit. “I wanted us to be in the war, because I truly believe that the Nazis won’t stop at Europe, and waiting for them to destroy all our Allies before they strike at us has always felt wasteful and shortsighted.”
“I don’t disagree,” his father says, whiskey in his hand.
“But I didn’t want it to happen like this,” Jack tells him, and doesn’t trouble himself about the way his voice shakes. “I didn’t want us to be in it because of something like this.”
“No one did,” his father says. “No one wanted this, no one ever wants something like this.”
They drink in silence.
“I never wanted this for you,” Jack’s father tells him, a little while later. “I never wanted a war, for you.”
Jack stares at him. “You always said the army made you who you are.”
“The army did,” he says. “But I could probably have been a perfectly fine man without the war.”
“You’re a perfectly fine man now,” Jack insists. Something about this conversation makes him want to hide his face in a pillow and scream, the way he did when he was small and things felt too big. He hasn’t done that in years. It’s stupid, and childish.
His father laughs, and it’s hollow. “So are you,” he says. “But I’m not the man I was before my war, and you won’t be the man you are now after yours.”
There’s no denying he’s right. “I hope I’ll still be a man you can be proud of,” he says, without meaning to.
His father takes the glass of whiskey out of his hands, and puts it down on the table between them, takes Jack’s wrists in his long fingers, and squeezes tight.
“Don’t ever doubt my pride in you,” he says. “That’s yours, you’ve earned it.”
**
Christmas is strained, the reality of what’s coming next pulling like a spiderweb across the family. Jack makes his way back to Texas after two days at home feeling like he’s leaving the last of his life before behind. His father waves him off as if he feels the same way, and Jack is something approaching scared for the first time in a while.
His entire flight class has been reassigned, with the advent of America’s entrance into the war, and out of all of them the only ones remaining at Kelly Fields are Jack himself, Bill Veal, Buck Cleven and Bucky Egan. They’ll be training and leading the newly formed 100th Bomb Group, part of the 3rd Air Army, and Jack watches as the intake forms pile up and the unit takes shape on paper, and on the ground.
Three hundred-odd men, it will be, at the end of the day, with crews included. Sixty pilots, or thereabouts, cut up into different squadrons, each with their own leader. Jack will be one of them. Half of him relishes it, knowing that he’ll be holding the reins on the tactical decisions in the moment, knowing that he’ll be able to have some modicum of control over what happens to his men, when it comes down to it. The other half knows he will have only a modicum of control, and that he’ll be more than a little responsible for the outcome of any given mission, as he’ll be the one leading the way.
I wonder, he writes to his father, not quite sure if he’ll send it, or save the letter to reference the next time he has a chance at a conversation in person, the next time he has an excuse to be the one who buys the bottle of whiskey. I wonder if this was what you meant when you said that I’d make a good officer, the need for it to be my decision we live or die by. I wonder if that isn’t arrogance instead, the belief that I’d do better than any other man. I’m a good pilot. A great pilot, even, though there are better than me in our group. But I’m a fine leader.
You’ve done both, he keeps writing. You led men at Cantigny. Was it easier to do that than to follow?
Cantigny had been a bloodbath, and his father had been infantry. All the loss suffered on his watch had happened up close and personal. Jack tells himself he didn’t choose to be a pilot because the losses would happen at a distance, but he’s not entirely sure he believes it.
The 100th takes shape and they sit out 1942 in furious impatience. Jack logs hundreds of hours in the air and spends hundreds of hours on the ground, figuring out the map of the men around him, the way in which they’re becoming something strange and sacred to each other.
It is bizarre, the next unsent letter reads, the way in which background and education and beliefs and heritage seems to matter so little and yet take up so much space. All our days are spent navigating differences, fighting petty battles and waging minor wars all of our own in little factions and yet none of it means anything as soon as you take us off the ground, or even out of the bar. It’s almost like we’re pretending it matters still, whether you’re a Catholic or not or whose dad is Irish and whose is Italian, who worked through college and who’s never washed a dish. It all used to matter so much, and now none of it matters at all, because the only important thing is whether the next man can fly a fort as well as I can.
Most of them can, Dad. Most of them are just as good as me, almost. I’m not foolhardy enough to say that it doesn’t bring me relief to know that. As far as I can tell, I’m going to war with the best pilots in the Air Force, and I’m pretty damn glad to be able to tell you that.
They’re probably some of the best men in the Air Force too.
They’re all college men, or mostly, officer class, or whatever that means. There’s a lot that makes them all the same, and there’s a lot of them, all blurring together. Jack tries not to think of them all as the same, tries to learn them and know them, tries to feel it out, the balance of souls and egos and personalities. He’s got the slightly alarming knowledge that these men will most likely be the ones he keeps for the rest of his life, or their lives, these will be the men, god willing, who his children grow up knowing as uncles. He tries to remind himself of this as they drive him slowly insane.
The problem is, he thinks about writing to his father, they’re all pilots.
They’re all pilots - Biddick with his wild eyes and sharp tongue and capacity for charm and chaos, Dye and his sly words, sliding in under people’s skin, flicking switches and pushing buttons he’s got no business knowing about. Cruikshank who looks like someone just kidnapped him out of a choir, John Brady who was kidnapped out of a choir, practically, and his incredibly judgemental face and the way he sees everything.
Jack tells himself he isn’t picking favourites, but he is. They all are. Buck’s picked DeMarco, steady and placid and an absolute menace in the sky and out of the corner of his mouth. Bucky’s picked Biddick and Brady, though he’s pretending he hasn’t for the latter, and Jack watches him triangulate and tease and bully with a sick taste in his mouth. Biddick and Brady have the worst fucking luck of the whole 100th, and if anyone was going to hang his heart from their heartstrings, Egan is the worst candidate. The first loss is going to ruin Egan. No one seems to see that except Jack.
Jack tells himself he isn’t picking favourites, but he likes Everett Blakely just a little bit better than he likes the rest of them. Blakely’s irreverent and reckless and out for trouble just like all the rest of them, but he’s deadly damn serious when it counts, in the sky, he’s focused and sharp and creative, and he’s got better luck than most. He buys Jack a whiskey every now and then and plays darts better than everyone else and seems mostly dedicated to making the pretty blonde girl who works in the typing pool fall in love with him, and teasing his bombardier. Blakely’s easy to like, and Jack likes him. But he isn’t picking favourites.
**
Jack goes home for Christmas again, with 1943 looming in the distance. The wireless plays news out of Europe on constant loop, and a lot of his father’s buddies from the service are in and out. None of them talk about the war, but Jack can see the way in which they’re all carrying it with them still, the way they’re taking it in turns to pass it to each other. Jack’s father is far from the only one of them to be sending a son off for the second Great War of their lives.
“They’ve started calling it World War Two,” Jack overhears his Uncle Lester say to his Uncle Joe when they come over one evening, ostensibly to borrow a bunch of tools. “World War Two. All that, just to be a serial.”
**
The brass makes Bucky Egan the 100th’s Air Executive, which any man in the group including the man himself could tell you was the wrong choice. No one’s exactly happy with it - Bill’s grumbling about being told to make his bed by a man who can barely brush his own hair and Cleven is wearing a face that says being in the sky without Egan is his worst nightmare, and Jack- well. Jack wants to believe better of the Air Force. Wants to believe that the brass should know better. He also knows, deep down at the bottom of his soul, that the job should have been his, that he would be the very best choice for all he’s not the very best pilot, and he is shamefully glad that no one in charge seemed to see this.
Can’t see the big picture from the ground, he thinks to himself, and raises a toast to Bucky when he’s promoted, and again when he goes ahead to England.
Leading the 100th without John Egan is a lot harder and a lot easier than Jack would have imagined. The absence of him has served as a stark flag to the rest of the group that they’re about to be in the war, that they’re going to start waving men into planes and possibly not see them again.
“Egan’s flying missions while he’s over there,” Ev says to Jack one night in the O-Club, when they’re nursing matching single whiskeys and watching Cleven and Biddick hold court.
There’s something not exactly right about either of them.
Egan isn’t supposed to be flying missions before the 100th get to England, is the thing, he’s supposed to be out there being Air Exec, which generally involves sorting out the logistics required to support a couple of hundred men, sorting supplies and uniforms and crew lists and checking the ground crew have what they need, not-
“Who told you he’s flying missions?”
Ev rolls his eyes. “Biddick,” he says. “Bucky told him and Buck before he left. Gonna be an observation pilot, apparently.”
So not flying missions, precisely. But close enough. Not being behind the yoke won’t save him.
Jack takes a deep breath. “Well,” he says, “At least that way he’ll be able to tell us what we’re looking at when we get there.”
**
Our Air Executive Officer has gone ahead to England to get everything ready for our arrival, Jack writes to his father, in between stacks of requisition forms and enrollment papers. And we’ll be following his path in the morning, first to Nebraska and then to Greenland, and then on to England.
I’m not able in good faith to tell you that I’m not afraid, but I’m not only afraid. I am a lot later to this war than I ever thought I would be, and while I have not been exactly eager for combat, knowing far too much about how that will be, I have been eager for impact, and combat is my only avenue for that.
Choosing the airforce has kept me out of this war longer than I would have liked, but I am confident my judgement was largely correct, and this is where I belong. I am a very good pilot, which I can say without feeling as if it’s arrogance, and I am hopeful that I am just as good an officer as you thought I would be.
I am hopeful that it will be enough. I wish I could sit with you for an evening before I fly, share a whiskey and tell you my thoughts on what we’re facing, but there’s no leave to be had, and I’m not sure I could tell you anything you couldn’t guess, either. I chose the big picture, when I chose the airforce, and I’m hopeful that it will be enough.
**
As it turns out, you can’t see the big picture from the air, either.
There had been something wrong with Egan from the moment they made it to England. Cleven had ignored it, or maybe just hadn’t looked at it closely enough, but Jack had seen it written large, and so had Biddick, and Brady. There’s an unspoken covenant, in the 100th, a silent vow held together by a bunch of men who would probably never tolerate any such thing from anyone who wasn’t so intrinsic to their survival, the 100th is a wall around the Two Bucks and when something is wrong they look the other way.
Except for Jack, who looks straight at it, because if there’s something on fire in his house he wants to know about it.
So he knows there’s something wrong with Egan, from almost the first night, and by the time they reach Bremen, that first mission, he knows exactly what it is.
We lost men today, he writes to his father, a letter he knows won’t make it past the censors. First mission, and we lost three whole crews. They weren’t mine.
Adams, Petrich and Schmalenbach had been Bill’s. Veal and his crew had a mechanical failure early doors and turned back well before the action began. Jack put his fort down and pulled his boys out against the soundtrack of Bill howling for his missing men, and he white-knuckled his way through Interrogation and the aftermath with the thirty names of the dead clattering around his head.
He knows every single one. There’s a moment when he thinks, uncharitably, that Egan will write the letters and he won’t know half of them, but that’s a lie.
Jack can still feel the reverb of the flak in his teeth. He can feel it shaking through his bones. The shape that the fort made, Adams’ fort, coming down out of the sky, perfect nose dive, spiralling smoke and probably screaming. It’s all repeating over and over, an echo of an echo of an echo, and it feels like he’s never going to stop seeing it.
He wonders at what point Adams knew they were doomed, how long he had to live with that.
They make Jack Air Exec of the 100th a few days later, and as much as he knows it was the right decision for a myriad of reasons, Jack can’t quite help the rage he feels at the casual way Cleven manoeuvred everyone around until he had exactly what he wanted. It might have been the right call for the 100th, but everyone knows that’s not why Buck did it.
And now Jack’s on the ground.
“If you clench your jaw like that the whole time they’re up you’ll fuck up your teeth,” Red says to him, the first time they stand together on the tower waiting for the forts to come back down.
Jack forces himself to relax. To look like he’s relaxed. To try.
“You’ll get used to it,” Red tells him, and when Jack looks closely he can see the way Red himself is forcibly relaxed.
There is something horribly familiar about this man, who he’s never really looked at before.
Oh, you look just like my dad.
“Is this your second war?” Jack asks, which is probably bad manners, because he should probably know that already.
Red shrugs. “You’ll get used to it,” he says again.
**
Jack does not get used to it. He sits in the briefings and stands on the tower and remembers not to clench his jaw about half the time. He counts the forts up and then counts them back down again and most days the second number is smaller, and then he goes down to the offices and wipes names off the board. Jack sits in on every single interrogation, stands by every single bed in the infirmary, and every single night he goes to the O-Club and drinks a single whiskey and leans against the bar so that the boys know he’s still in this with them.
They’re dying one by one and he’s watching.
He stops writing directly to his father, and instead sends breezy letters addressed to the whole family that talk about the misadventures of Meatball and the bicycle races around the mess. He stops naming individuals when he writes, because he doesn’t want to field enquiries about dead men down the line.
If he had his way, Jack would probably stop engaging with individuals at all, because it’s starting to choke him, writing their names on the chalk board and wiping them off again hours later. But he’s not getting his way, because he’s in the 100th, and they’ve dug their claws in deep.
No one’s quite the same as before, but they’re giving it their very best impression, and Jack has stitched himself into the fabric of this unit because that’s what leaders do, that’s what soldiers do, because he grew up with his dad’s unit a swirling ever-presence around their life, and knows that’s how it works, when you share a war.
So he eats with the men and drinks with the men and when they leave the base for the pubs in town he stands stern and perfectly pressed in the back of the crowd and fixes any RAF man with a gimlet eye and watches and watches and watches, with Bill a hulking presence at his back and twitchy Little John Brady a mimic across the room. Jack sits back and lets things unfold, holds the threads of it all together with an expression he knows the rest of them think is aloof. Buck catches his eye here and there, like he knows exactly what Jack is doing, and Jack thinks to himself this should be your job too, god damn it. But Cleven’s got his hands full, with Egan’s everything unravelling in front of them and Curt Biddick dancing round them like someone appointed him their guardian angel.
Jack plays mother and nursemaid and confessor and referee and tries to tell himself that the tower is far enough off the ground to give him a view of the big picture.
**
Every now and then, they let him fly.
Every time, there’s a brief moment of pure and utter fucking peace, a moment where Jack can see every single piece of the big picture, lined out across the sky and spread out beneath his wings, and he is exactly what he was made to be.
And every single time, the flak starts up and the fighters come out of the clouds, and Jack is reminded brutally there is not going to be any real peace for him for years, or forever, depending on how this next hour or so goes.
He leads the group to Regensburg, riding shotgun as Blakely does all the work, and then stands in the desert like some kind of beached figurehead as Bucky Egan paces the line of shot-to-shit forts and repeatedly finds neither of the birds he’s pretending he’s not looking for.
Buck makes it back.
Biddick doesn’t.
All the wheels come off the wagon, at that point. Regensburg is the turning point of the war for each and every one of them, one way or another.
Hung out to dry by the brass, pulled apart by the losses, floored by the way Egan’s knees go out from under him.
They make it back to England and through interrogation, and Jack watches the remnants of his unit fray past recognition.
“Go liberate a case of whiskey from the bar,” he says to Blakely. “Tell them Red said you could. And then drag this sorry lot back to the gym, ok?”
Ev looks at him a little blankly. “Yessir,” he says, facetious on autopilot, and does what he’s told.
They drink and take it in turns to spar in the ring in the gym, get to knock each other about a little bit and get to hold each other up a little bit, to lean together and push and shove and feel the reality of each other a little bit. It’s a decent remedy for the fatal nature of what they’re facing.
Jack stands at the edge of the room and watches. Can’t get up there and swing too, because he’s the Air Exec, and he has to stand apart, at least a little, so that they can respect him in the morning, but can’t leave the room, because the whole world is in this room.
Eventually the boys drink themselves exhausted and fight themselves out and drag themselves off to bed. Jack goes back to the war room and stares at the map table and the lists on the wall, and forces himself to breathe. They’re down nearly half of the crews they flew in with.
He writes himself a list of the letters he’s going to need to write in the morning. There will already be a list somewhere, a clerk will have typed up a list, or one of the girls in the typing pool, the list will exist. But he writes it out anyway. A hundred names, give or take.
Ev’s waiting for him when he gets back to the barracks.
“The Bucks haven’t come back,” he says, instead of you look like shit or are you alright or what the fuck are we going to do now.
“I told Cleven three days,” Jack says, instead of I think I’m starting to be a person my father won’t recognise, and I think I understand that this is what he was always afraid of. “I’ll go check on them in the morning.”
Ev makes a face, like he knows he should volunteer to go instead but really doesn’t want to. Jack relates. There is nowhere in the world he wants to be less than anywhere near the grief of John Egan right now.
The sky is cloudy dark, no stars, the sort of sky you couldn’t fly in, no moon, just this sort of strangely indistinct black, and Jack stands outside the makeshift corrugated iron home they’ve been forced into and tries to force himself back into the shape of his own skin. Of his uniform jacket.
“Three days will be enough,” Ev says, and claps him on the shoulder hard enough to hurt.
Three days is so fucking gracious. Jack thinks of Marjorie Spencer and her wicked smile and lovely laugh and that pink dress she always wears and the way she would fix this.
God, Texas is so fucking far away.
**
Nothing’s really the same after Regensburg.
Cleven and Egan come back from the forts and get back in the sky and Jack stays on the ground. He stands on the tower and counts forts up and counts them back down again and the first number is always bigger than the second.
The 100th is getting pretty thin on the ground, the number of crews remaining from the original thirty who flew out slipping into the teens, and Jack feels like every single one is a fatal wound.
Some days, he doesn’t make it off the tower.
He takes his lists and paperwork up with him, sometimes even the damn typewriter, and sits there desperately trying to see the big picture while he writes the latest batch of I am sorry to inform you letters, waiting for the empty balconies to fill back up with men hiding their anxiety a lot better than he is.
Red’s the first up there most days, stands there chewing a cigar he never lights, while Jack tries not to make guesses at how many forts he’s going to get back today.
Jack tells himself he hasn’t memorized certain tail-numbers, tells himself he doesn’t look for any particular forts, tells himself there aren’t some specific crews he’s more desperate to see back than others.
Ev. Buck. Bucky. Brady. DeMarco. Veal. Crank. Dye. And the rest. And the rest.
He learns the names of all the replacement crews, because not doing so would be to admit that they’re just temporary, and Jack has to believe they’re all coming back down or he’s not ever going to be able to send them up there.
“Do you miss it?” Red asks him, staring up at the line of departing forts one morning, as the boys head off to Europe.
It’s Dye’s 23rd mission.
“Yeah,” Jack says, without needing to ask him what he means. “I do. I miss flying.”
Some of missing it is the sky, and some of missing it is the understanding that he’s making a difference, and some of missing it is just- not having to wait to see who comes back.
He tells Red that, and Red laughs the same empty strange laugh they’re all using at the moment.
“I keep waiting for the mission where I get used to the waiting,” Red says, and Jack’s heart sinks a little.
“I was hoping that was just around the corner,” he tells Red, and Red laughs that laugh again.
“Find something else to do,” Red says, and all the laugh drops away. “Stop sitting up here, find something else to do.”
**
The main problem is there isn’t really anything much to do, apart from write letters to the families of dead boys and organise long lists of equipment to be sourced from somewhere. Jack spends a lot of time with the ground crews, partially out of necessity because that’s where most of the logistics need is, and partially because they’re the only other people who really seem to understand how fucking dreadful the hours between wheels up and wheels down are.
They’re all enlisted men, Jack writes to his dad, sitting in the sunshine watching Kenny Lemmons light the hardstand on fire , and so they’re all pretty damn young - makes me think you were right to nudge me towards college, eighteen is so young - and none of them have much in the way of school, they’re all farm boys or factory boys, really, but my God you wouldn’t believe how smart they are. It’s a whole different way of thinking, kinda like the navigators are, the way they just see everything completely differently, like there’s a map of every single object visible to them and no one else. It’s sort of awe-inspiring. I’ve always really thought of the forts as almost magical creatures, because so much of being a pilot is instinct and nuance and feeling and luck, but they’re manmade creations, and these men, boys, almost, can bring them to life in a way that’s completely beyond me.
He doesn’t write about the ways the ground crew are that are not beyond him, the grim way they’re aging beyond their years, the way they count the forts up and down and never come back with matching numbers, the way he’s pretty much sure Ken knows the tail number and call-sign of every single fort he’s ever got back in bits or not at all.
“Come to make yourself useful, Major?” is what Kenny says to him every time he comes down, sun high in the sky, to chew up some of the hours between take off and landing.
“Not sure how useful I could be to you, Sergeant Lemmons,” is what Jack says in return, “Unless you’ve got a job for a college boy who couldn’t tell one end of a nail from the other?”
There’s always a job like that for him, a great pail of screws to sort by size or a toolbox someone tipped over and needs organised, or a stack of crates to inventory. Sometimes Kenny gets him to polish bits of metal Jack is pretty sure go straight to scrap, but it’s not like he cares. The ground crew bring him coffee and salute him cheerfully and let him feel useful and busy once all the letters are done and the parachutes ordered and the crewlists reconfigured to fill gaps left by the dead, and Jack is deeply, deeply grateful.
**
Dye and his crew fly their 24th mission, and then go up for their 25th.
The whole base is holding their breath all day. There’s a suffocating sense of anticipatory glee and terror all folded in together amid the broad pretence that there’s nothing extra special going on.
The vast majority of the 100th is up with Dye today and Jack is pacing the tower hours before they’re due back, choking on his conflicted feelings and trying to work out how he’d explain this to his dad if he had the chance.
If Dye and his crew don’t come back, I don’t know what will happen to this unit. If they don’t make twenty five, and make it home, I think we are at severe risk of losing men to their own hands tonight, and so if there is only one fort left in the sky today it needs to be Sunny II. If Glenn Dye doesn’t walk into the O-Club tonight for the boys to cheer and say goodbye to, I don’t know what will happen.
If only one fort comes back it needs to be Dye.
Jack knows this, on an empirical level, knows it from a morale point of view and a technical point of view and an operational point of view, and yet.
If Dye and his crew are the only ones who make it back, and I lose Blakely and DeMarco and Brady I don’t think I will be anyone recognisable to the people who knew me before if I make it back to the States.
All his father’s war stories feature the men who made it home with him. All his father’s army stories are littered with names belonging to men Jack grew up knowing. But his father’s unit ended the war with a sixty percent casualty rate.
You never told me any stories of dead men, Jack says to his dad in his head. When I get home, if I get home, will we sit in Mom’s ugly parlour and talk about all the boys we lost? Will there be any of these men left for me to raise my children around?
The whole thing is leaving him breathless and sick to his stomach and when the forts start coming back Jack forces himself to be busy with paperwork inside the tower until the chorus of voices reaches a fever pitch below, jubilant and raw and desperate with joy and relief.
Dye buzzes the tower and Jack is thrilled and sick with fear.
The rest of the group has hung back, evidently, to let Sunny II and her boys have their moment, and then they come in one by one, a long, long line. Jack counts them down and tells himself he’s breathing just fine. Just fine.
**
They celebrate Dye with a sort of desperate miserable joy that makes them all look like mad, broken men, and all the replacements stare at them as if they’re miracles and legends and heroes.
Jack has one whiskey and watches and breathes and breathes and breathes. The big picture is spread out across the room, Jack’s so close to it that he can’t fucking see it, but he can feel it, the way the lines of the drawing scribble over all of them, blurring the boundaries of who’s who and what’s what until they’re all just-
Pilots.
Part of the war machine.
“I’m sending Bucky to London,” Cleven says to Jack at the end of the night, when they’re shepherding everyone back to barracks. “He needs a break.”
There’s something dire and grim in Buck’s face when he says it, and the words are the biggest understatement Jack’s heard for a while. Nothing has been alright since Regensburg and Bucky has been the worst of it, in many ways, brittle and bombastic, spinning out of control in slow motion, going so gradually everyone could pretend it wasn’t happening.
Jack’s keeping track of the men in his head, monitoring who’s closest to the edge. Bucky needs a break. Right after him will be John Brady. And after Brady it will be someone else, and then someone else, and then someone else, because they’re all fraying at the edges.
“Alright,” Jack says to Cleven, instead of what he wants to say, which is thank you for dealing with this so that no one else has to, thank you for keeping your dog on a leash, I hope he doesn’t bite you, I will not be able to face your girl, I will not be able to face myself in the mirror.
“Alright,” Cleven mirrors.
“You’re leading the wing tomorrow,” Jack tells him, because Buck looks like he’s waiting for Jack to say something else. “It’s Bremen again.”
Cleven nods, grim again, and Jack can see it written all over his face. Damn Bremen.
**
God damn Bremen. God damn it.
**
He’s supposed to go, is the thing. He’s supposed to go, to fly command pilot in the co-pilot seat with Ev in Just-A-Snappin, to go to Bremen with the 100th, but then there’s something that needs his attention on base, some piece of paperwork or personnel issue or batch of forms that didn’t get filled right, and-
Jack stands on the tower when they start coming back, and there are so few of them. They’ve lost pretty much all the first-time crews, damn near a hundred brand new men who’d gone to face the Germans for the first time and never made it back.
They’ve lost Buck, and with him DeMarco.
They’ve lost Blakely, and with him Crosby, and with him everything.
Blakely is Jack’s best friend, really, his most regular co-pilot, his right hand man because he’s never caught in the bullshit, because he reads his mind on a single look, because Jack can depend on him. Because Jack likes him. Loves him. Thinks probably if he’d had a brother he’d have felt like this about him. Thinks maybe Everett Blakely is as close as he’s going to get.
Was.
Was as close as he’s going to get.
God damn Bremen.
For the first time in his career as Air Exec, for the first time in his career at all, Jack doesn't go to Interrogation. It's not exactly a choice, really, he just- doesn't go. Can't go.
He doesn’t mean to, but he stays on the tower. He’s not looking for forts, not watching the skies, not really waiting for anything, just- He stays on the tower.
He stands there all night. No one comes to bring him coffee, or tell him to get down, because all the good men he came to England with are either dead or completely fucking ruined. They might not even know he’s here. It’s entirely possible that no one has thought of him in hours. It’s exactly how he wants it, just for now. He just wants to be here. He’s not looking for Ev, or the big picture. He’s just standing on the tower.
He stays there until the sun comes up, and Red comes to tell him he’s just had Egan on the phone. Buck Cleven is dead and Bucky Egan is coming back from London to do something about it and-
Jack Kidd should probably find a way to speak to Marjorie Spencer.
Jack Kidd should probably find a way to get off the fucking tower and do his fucking job.
The mess is empty except for Bubbles and Brady, who are sitting staring and red eyed at a table long-since cleared, a half-written letter, a lake of grief. It’s just the two of them, mismatched parts of different sets, spiderweb cracks, the starkly upsetting inside of Jack’s grandmother’s china cabinet once she’d started losing her mind and forgetting how the world worked and where the teacups went.
“Red just got a call from Bucky,” Jack says to them, when they’ve been staring at him for a few moments. “In London. Saw the papers, wanted to know how the game went.”
It’s exactly the words Red used, sounds so fucking nonchalant. If this is what the big picture is, Jack fucking hates it.
“Did he tell him?” Brady asks, scrubbing his face with his incongruous pianist’s hands, like they’re getting out of bed.
“Bucky’s coming back now,” Jack tells him, like some kind of herald of doom. “We’re up again tomorrow, he wants in.”
“You can’t let him fly,” says Little John, the lesser John, the careful John. “That’s madness.”
It is. It’s lunacy, it’s murder, it’s a bad fucking call, but it’s been made way over Jack’s head.
There’s something seething and unkind in Jack right now, the pettiness that he doesn’t usually like to own up to all tangled with the sickening grief snaking through everything.
Bucky Egan is going to come back to his dead - what? - best friend and burn the whole fucking world down, and he’ll take nine good men with him, and everyone will look at the wreck he makes of everything and talk about the horror of the loss of Egan and Cleven, the way they were the heart of the 100th, the rallying point, the central focus, and Jack, who has been stitching this nightmare together with bleeding fingers and eyes strained by not enough light, will stand at the side with the ghost of Everett Blakely and think-
Something about the big picture, probably.
**
Bubbles and Brady corral Egan between the two of them and Jack sits in his office with the routes for Munster and the lists and the letters and the weight of the fucking world on his shoulders, and does his job like it’s the only thing left to him, like it’s the only thing he can do.
The big picture is up on the wall, the map of Europe, the little twinkling pins of cities and factories and railroads scattered across the canvas, the lines of red string strung out from the coast across the ocean. Up there right now is Munster, but Jack can see all of the rest of them imprinted on the back of his eyelids like flashbulb explosions.
Trondheim, LeHarve, Regensberg going all the way down.
Jack does his job until it’s fully dark outside, until he’s missed dinner and he knows the mess will be empty, until he knows everyone left alive will be in the O-club. He does his job until he doesn’t have any excuses and then he goes to the bar.
The room feels huge. There are so few men. Jack does the thing he always does, gets himself one whiskey and stands at the bar with the glass sweating in his hand and makes small talk with the small cast of men who rotate past him.
Brady is standing a little way away, holding a whiskey as well, standing alone, standing alone, and Jack can’t look at him. Jack can’t look at any of them. There aren’t enough of them.
He’s felt like this before. He’s felt like this before, after missions, after bad losses, he’s felt like this before and every time he’s felt like this he’s pressed his shoulder up against Ev’s and breathed through it.
Today he holds the breath til his head swims and lets it out as slowly as he can, like it’s the last breath he’s ever going to get.
And then the door opens and Blakely walks in and-
**
I will tell you about this, Jack writes, drunk on relief and one more whiskey than he usually has, I will tell you about this when I get home and I will find words for this and I will tell you, and I think this might be the one thing that happens in this war that you’re not going to be able to understand. I don’t know anything about any of the men that you lost but I don’t think any of the men you didn’t lose came back from the dead.
**
Ev is a miracle and a hero and Jack’s brother, back with him, and the elation of it, the elation of that miracle and Ev’s shoulder against his at the bar and there’s a moment, there’s just a moment, a single moment, where everything is absolutely fine.
**
The next day the 100th goes to Munster, and one plane comes back.
One.
No Crank, no Brady, no John Egan. No Bubbles.
Jack doesn’t stand on the tower, goes to Interrogation and sits at the side of the room with Croby and Ev and listens to Robert Rosenthal and his crew recount the tatters of the whole god damn group.
Some chutes seen from some forts. Some crews definitely all lost.
“What the fuck do we do now?” Ev asks him quietly, as they watch the crew file out of Interrogation, one by one, each of them a strange impersonation of a man.
It’s a damn good question.
**
The weekend of Bremen and Munster leaves them with just one of the original crews of the 100th. Just Everett Blakely, and a handful of men, and Jack Kidd.
Ev’s what the fuck do we do now rattles around Jack’s head for the whole of the Monday of the next week, and it bumps into various options in there, knocks things over and tips things loose and spills things all over the inside of his mind until it draws a new big picture.
Jack writes himself a list, invisibly, staring up at the chalk board in the war room, with its unfamiliar names and months worth of smudges.
He’d joined the Air Force to win the war, to help win the war, to help bring peace to Europe and cut the Nazi threat off at the knees and make sure none of the horror and carnage crept any closer to the States than it already had, to end up on the right side of history, to end up victorious, to go home to his father a man he could be proud of.
He’d taken the job of Air Exec thinking that was maybe the best way to achieve those things, but now, coming into the middle of October in what he’s now understanding to probably be the middle of the war, and not the end, he thinks maybe he cares less about winning the war than he did before. Maybe it’s not winning the war that will make him a man his father could be proud of. Maybe it’s not saving Europe that will make him victorious, and maybe it’s more about saving the 100th. What’s left of it.
So he writes himself a list. He writes a list of the things that need to be done, on a scrap of paper, sitting on an empty crate of rivets in one of Kenny’s little warehouses, and when he’s done he reads the list through twice, so he knows it’s stuck, and then he goes out onto the hardstands and drops it into one of the barrel fires the boys have lit to keep themselves warm as they work.
“Do you want me to see what I can do about getting you boys some gloves?” he asks Ken, because the man’s hands are white with cold.
It’s not technically his job to supply the ground crews. He’s starting to care less and less about what his job actually is.
Ken laughs, and shakes his head. “No point,” he says. “Couldn’t wear them even if we had them, not to work in.”
Of course not. “Fair point,” Jack allows, and makes a mental note to make sure there’s enough oil to spare for barrel fires, and to see about getting more hot coffee down to the hardstands through the day.
**
The first couple of items on the list are damage control. They’re easy calls, for all Jack thinks they’ll be unpopular.
Rosenthal and his crew are sent to the Flak House. Jack makes what he terms a strong recommendation to the brass and the medical staff, and tries desperately not to think about how this was supposed to be John Brady, with his clenched jaw and shaky hands, how Brady was supposed to get a rest, a break, a chance to breathe, and instead he got John Egan as a co-pilot and a one-way ticket out of the war, one way or another.
So that’s item one. It doesn’t go down well, which isn’t surprising, and Jack doesn’t care. Let them be mad at him, let Rosie mutter under his breath about overreactions, Jack’s got his eye on the big picture.
Item two takes him to Colonel Harding’s office.
“What can I do for you, son?” is the greeting he gets when he walks into the wall of cigarette smoke.
It’s not that Jack doesn’t like Harding. It’s not that he doesn’t respect him, or doesn’t think that he’s a good leader, or a good pilot, or whatever. It’s just- The man is aggressive, and arrogant, and pig-headed, and all of those are great qualities in a pilot, and great qualities in a man whose job it is to inspire and motivate men, but-
Right now that’s not really what Jack needs from him. Right now that’s not the big picture.
“I need you to bench Blakely and his crew,” he says, and waits.
Harding waits too, chewing on his cigar, looking at Jack out over his moustache with an expectant expression.
“You do?”
“Yes,” Jack says, and puts his weight down firmly through his feet onto the floor, planting himself solid and steel like his dad always taught him, raising his chin so he’s looking straight ahead, steady and unapologetic. “Yes, I do. They are the last remaining crew from Kelly Fields, he is the last pilot left in the group, apart from me, with any significant combat experience.”
“This doesn’t sound like a good argument for keeping him on the ground.”
Jack barely doesn’t roll his eyes. “If Blakely goes down, we will have precisely zero pilots left who have any understanding of what they’re facing up there, and how to face it. We will have results like Munster every single day, where one fort comes home. We’ll start seeing no forts coming home. You need Everett on the ground, so he can teach. You need him here, showing the replacements the ropes, telling them how it really is, getting them ready, giving them a better chance. They need more training than they’re getting, and he’s the only man left to give it to them.”
Harding makes a gruff noise in the back of his throat, a noise that says Jack’s not telling him anything he doesn’t know, just things he didn’t want to hear.
Jack waits him out.
“Fine,” is the response he gets eventually. “Fine. Dismissed.”
**
To: Marjorie Spencer
From: Major JB Kidd
BUCK SHOT DOWN 10.8 STOP BUCKY SHOT DOWN 10.10 STOP STATUS UNCONFIRMED STOP NOT DEFINITELY DEAD STOP WILL WIRE ANY NEWS IMMEDIATELY STOP DONT PANIC YET STOP JKIDD
It is the most woefully inadequate telegram he has ever sent and it is the hardest thing he’s ever written. It’s the third thing on his list.
**
The rest of his list is letters. He writes so many god damn letters.
And then he goes back to doing his job, as if nothing happened, as if nothing changed, as if it’s still September and there’s still a 100th.
There’s a constant rotating cast of men through the doors of Thorpe Abbots, crew after crew after crew of them. Jack makes a point of speaking to each and every one of them, of looking each and every man in the eye, from the pilots to the turret gunners, of knowing their faces when he writes their names up on the board in the chalk he now feels on his skin like a permanent brand.
“Why do you put yourself through it,” Ev asks him one night, three whiskeys in against Jack’s one, as they’re standing at the bar and Jack’s just about done making polite conversation with a bunch of boys who won’t live to see next week. “Why do you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Get to know them,” Ev says. “Why do you put yourself through getting to know them, when you know what’s going to happen?”
Jack does his best not to clench his hand around his glass, does his best not to drop it on the floor. “Well,” he says, and takes a sip. It’s mostly ice. “Writing letters to their families when I know who they were is bad. But writing letters when I don’t know who they were is worse.”
**
It’s a month after Bremen and Munster before they get an updated list of POWs through from the Germans. Jack sits at his desk, John Egan’s disgusting shearling jacket over the back of his chair, Red standing over his shoulder and Croz hovering in the doorway, and he reads the names aloud.
They’re in alphabetical order, so they reach Brady, John D, first, and Croz makes a noise like he’s been shot, a weak sound that Jack feels deep in his bones. He can see the face of every single man, remembers how they liked their breakfast and what stories they always told and how they stood on the tarmac waiting to get into a fort and how they sounded when they slept. There are a lot of names missing from the list, a lot of men he can say for sure now are dead, Bubbles, Vincenti, McClusker, more, so many more, but there are a lot of names on the list. Brady, DeMarco, Cruikshank, Hamilton, Hoerr, Murphy, Solomon.
Cleven, Gale W. Egan, John C.
“God help the Krauts,” Red says, like he’s trying to make it into something other than a travesty.
The filthy collar of Bucky’s jacket is against Jack’s neck, and it’s not a dead man’s coat, and there’s a whole world of men still alive out there somewhere.
You didn’t really have to deal with prisoners of war, Jack writes to his dad in his head. I wonder what you’d say about it if you had.
Jack spends an excruciating amount of money and whiskey on bribing a clerk to let him have unlimited access to one of the little phone booths for an afternoon, and tracks down the records he needs with the help of a little more money, and an extra pass to London. He shuts himself in there when the offices are nearly empty for the day, and then he calls as many of the families of the men in the Stalag as he can. He speaks to Gerry Hamilton and Ruth Brady and Gloria DeMarco, he speaks to Murphy’s mother, and Crank’s wife, and the wives and mothers and fathers of a dozen other men, and then when he’s nearly hoarse, he calls Marjorie Spencer.
She doesn’t cry, and he’s not surprised, because she’s not a crier, Marge Spencer. She takes shuddery little breaths down the phone and says thank you, Jack, you’re a sweet man, and he says I don’t know who you think you’re kidding, respectfully, ma’am, and tells her he’ll call as soon as he has any news.
Neither of them mention that they both know there isn’t going to be any news until the war is over, unless it’s bad news.
It’s almost midnight when he’s done, and for a moment, Jack thinks about picking the phone back up and dialling home, dialling the only number he knows by heart, and speaking to his dad.
He has no idea what he’d say.