Binky's Voice

A Story

by EDWARDS PARK

I’M SORRY this story has to be about the war. Some of us ordinary people who were in it got such a concentrated dose of living that we have had trouble digesting all of it. This story about Binky has been sitting heavily upon me for the past three years. I’m going to tell it now, and try to get rid of it, once and for all.

I was an Intelligence Officer in New Guinea, assigned to one of General Kenney’s Fighter Squadrons. If you ever saw that British picture Target for Tonight, you’ll remember that the Intelligence Officer was the man who briefed the air crews before their missions and interrogated them after they landed. Of course, in New Guinea our pilots didn’t need much briefing, and they never saw anything but jungle and mountains to be interrogated about, so my job boiled down to being a friend and guide to them.

I tried to keep them interested in the job, even when there were weeks of milk runs with never any real action. I had to keep telling them that they were important to the Grand Strategy of the war, even when they were flying P-40s that creaked with age and weariness and which had no hope of being replaced. I helped them write letters to their girls, and listened to their troubles, and got beaten by them at poker. It was all part of my job.

Binky was one of our pilots.

He had been with us about four months, which was long enough for a new man to shake down, and Binky was really very much like any of the others. He was an Easterner and had a university degree; and, as you might expect, he was a bit reserved and standoffish when he first joined the family. But it’s pretty hard to stay that way when you are working with thirty-five other young men like you, and being interdependent with them, the way fighter pilots are. His reticence was all in his favor, for we were suspicious of a new man who made too much noise, and we respected Binky for his hard work in the air.

He was a handsome boy — lean and dark, and built like an athlete. When he stepped up on the wing of his Kittyhawk, with his goggles pushed up on his helmet and his oxygen mask flapping under his chin, he looked like one of those magazine advertisements — “In the Air Forces, it’s Camels every time!” or whatever it was in those days.

It’s unusual for such a good-looking man to be popular, but Binky was. He would have made a good Commanding Officer.

One morning, early in 1943, the squadron was alerted for a strike on the Jap base at Pandau. We were operating from “Brimstone,” which was a muddy little airstrip hacked out of a green, stagnant sea of jungle. Only to the north was this shimmering ocean of giant trees and black swamps broken. There, the great steaming mountains tumble up on the horizon, and there, too, was the fighting.

Our pilots knew the tortuous valleys in those mountains as they knew the lines in their own hands; and they also knew the weather — the way the clouds built up into a towering wall, faster than our tired old planes could climb over them. We flew most of our missions up there, in those days, escorting the transports that brought supplies and reinforcements to the Australian Infantry at “Outhouse.”

That’s a funny name, I suppose, but to us it was deadly serious. Outhouse was a little gold-mining settlement in the mountains. The Nip wanted it, and for three months he had his foot on the threshold. But those Australians held him, and finally began to push him slowly back, back through the misty valleys, to his advance base at Pandau, thirty miles away. Our squadron was overhead all through that show.

2

WELL, we were alerted for a combined bomberfighter strike on Pandau, and we were also detailed to send two ships off at first light of dawn for a weather recco. That meant simply flying up to the target, checking the weather, and reporting it in code on the way home. The weather was so treacherous over the mountains that you could judge it only about ten minutes in advance.

A Flight Commander named Shaw was posted to make this weather hop, and since Binky usually flew Shaw’s wing, he was picked as the second man. When we drove down to the strip in the jeeps that morning, the night was still black and the air was cool. We passed the revetments where our ships were parked, and there was the roar of their engines, and the blue flashes of their exhausts, as the crew chiefs preflighted them.

Shaw and Binky got ready right away, carrying their parachutes and Mae Wests out to their ships and strapping on their guns and jungle knives. I never thought of briefing them. A weather hop was so simple! I’ve often wondered since if I should have.

As soon as they could see the strip, they taxied to the end, checked their mags, and off they went. I didn’t stand beside them and stick my thumb up, the way they do in the movies. I didn’t even know they were gone, until I heard the snarl of their engines as they climbed up into the morning.

The sun came up, and the day’s heat started to set in. The pilots lay around in the cool of the alert shack, playing bridge or solitaire, or just dozing. Davis, the CO, got the flight leaders together to figure out spacing and positions in the air, and that sort of thing. Davis was a stickler for tactics.

Little by little, there was a certain tightening of the atmosphere inside that grass-roofed shack. The time for the strike to take off came nearer and nearer, and the boys were quieter as their wrist watches ticked away the seconds.

I got some new intelligence reports out of my safe-box, and was passing them around, when there was the whine of an Allison engine, and we glanced out in time to see a P-40 slip around the traffic pattern and land. One P-40. No one thought much about there being only one. It just meant that either Shaw or Binky had found some sort of trouble and had been forced to return early. The boys lit cigarettes, and murmured over their bridge games, and turned the pages of their dog-eared magazines.

Shaw walked in. His face was streaked with dust, except where his goggles had been, and his shirt was dark with sweat under his shoulder holster. He lit a soggy cigarette and looked up at me as I came over to get his report.

“Binky went on alone,” he said. “I told him to come back with me, but he wasn’t receiving me.”

“What was the trouble?” I asked.

“Damned carburetor. . . . I couldn’t get over the hump.”

“How was the weather?”

Not too hot. Binky should be reporting it by now.”

We had a receiving set on my desk. Davis nodded to me, and I went over and switched it on. I found fighter frequency, but there was nothing but the scratch of static and, occasionally, a ground station asking Brimstone control for a radio check. Shaw took off his holster and unbuttoned his shirt, and flopped down on one of the cots. His bare chest glistened in the heat. Davis sat beside me as I listened to the hoarse breath of the radio. The shack was quiet except for the flutter of cards being shuffled and the sound of someone softly whistling to himself. I turned the volume up, and the static rattled so viciously that I turned it down again.

Someone said, “Two no trump,” and just then Davis and I both heard a faint voice over the ether. It was unintelligible, but Davis said, “That sounds like him.”

The control station boomed out, very loud in comparison. “Station calling Brimstone, repeat your call, repeat your call. Go ahead.”

We waited, and listened, but there was nothing but static. It was bad that day. Davis looked at his watch. “He isn’t receiving them, either,” he said. “He should be back in about half an hour.”

He started to got up, and just then we heard the voice again, and could distinguish a few faint, blurred words: “. . . not receiving . . . Pittsburg Mary, Pittsburg Mary, New York . . .”

“Hah!” Davis grinned at me. “Mary means lousy weather. Hey, Shaw!” he called. “What’s Pittsburg? ”

Shaw rolled off the cot onto his feet and came over to the desk. “Pittsburg’s the target,” he said. “Did you hear him?”

“Yeah. He said something about New York. What’s that?”

“That’s the mountains. They’ll probably be Mary too.”

“ Here he is again,” I said.

Binky’s voice swelled in, this time, loud and clear: “. . . Brimstone from Daisy Special, I am not receiving. Pittsburg Mary, New York Mary. Pittsburg Mary, New York Mary . . .”

The pilots had forgotten their cards and their magazines and were looking towards us expectantly. Davis glanced up at them.

“No mission today, boys,” he said.

I could feel the atmosphere snap, like a stretched elastic band that has been cut. The alert shack that had been so quiet before was suddenly full of voices and laughter. We were a veteran squadron. Our pilots weren’t very eager any more.

I pushed back my canvas chair and got up to turn the radio off. As I bent towards it, I became conscious that Binky’s voice was speaking again. I remember that as I heard it I was glad that Binky was well out of that bad weather — safely on the way home. Then I became aware of his words, and I looked up and shouted, “Quiet!”

There must have been urgency in my shout, for every voice was suddenly still. Except one — Binky’s.

“. . . from Daisy Special. I am still circling at Pittsburg, angels four, cannot get above overcast. Everything is Mary ...”

“Jesus!” Shaw said, softly. “He’s right in the middle of it!”

We were all packed around the radio, but there was nothing but our breathing.

Davis cleared his throat, “He’s only got four thousand feet. He must be down in a valley.”

I looked at the big topographical map that was pinned to the table beside my desk. Every peak around Pandau and Outhouse went to at least six thousand. Binky was caught in a box, and the clouds formed the lid.

“Do you think he could get to Outhouse?” I asked Davis.

“Depends on how lost he is,” Davis muttered. “Shh!”

That lonely, tired voice wavered again through the crackle of static: “. . . will attempt to visit Outhouse. Brimstone from Daisy Special, will attempt to visit Outhouse. Please inform them to expect me.” The formal wording was too much for Binky, and we could feel his exasperation as he broke away from it: “Tell Outhouse I’m coming, and I can’t hear a damn thing!”

A drop of sweat rolled down the length of my nose and splashed on the desk. There was a hot press of bodies as we crowded together, listening.

A new voice came in — Australian. That could only be Outhouse.

“Brimstone from Outhouse, we understand situation. We are standing by for Daisy Special. Over.”

Our controller answered with relief in his voice. “Roger, Outhouse. Thank you.”

We all felt better. It was good to know that Binky had friends expecting him — if he could make it.

We waited and listened — to the continuous mutter of static, and to Brimstone occasionally snapping at some ground station to “clear the air.” I looked at the faces of my friends around me and realized that at moments like these, I could never hope to be really close to them. Each man was living every second with Binky. Each was intent, peering through a rain-swept canopy as he plunged through foggy valleys at two hundred miles an hour. Each man was probing the blurred earth for a sight of a tiny, rutted runway that meant a chance for life.

Outhouse didn’t have enough of a strip to take care of a fighter. Binky would have to crash-land there, but at least he would be safe.

A new pilot voiced a thought that had been in my mind. “Why doesn’t he bail out?” he asked Davis.

Davis pointed to the map. “All the terrain here is over three thousand feet high. He’s only showing four thousand on his dial. There’s only a few spots where he has room for his chute to open. Anyway, those valleys are crawling with Nips.”

3

WE WERE all very quiet after that.

I was thinking about the enemy at Pandau. I could picture some Jap Intelligence Officer listening to his radio, just as we were, and making notes that a Yankee Kittyhawk was lost, almost over his head. It would be quite a thrill for him, I guessed. But he would be like me in one way. He wouldn’t really be able to picture it. We were both just ground officers, after all.

When the voice came in again, we all jumped. There was a lull in the static, and Binky was very clear. He sounded tired as hell, but there was a sharp quality to his voice that was eloquent of fear and, at the same time, hope.

“Outhouse from Daisy Special. Believe I am north of you. Will vector one eighty, angels zero. Give me a flare if . . .” It faded right out.

“He’s right down on the deck!” someone said.

I tried to think of Binky sweeping over the treetops in a valley I had never seen.

Brimstone boomed in, very loud and formal: “Outhouse from Brimstone, did you receive Daisy Special’s last message? Go ahead.”

“Brimstone from Outhouse, we are firing flares and standing by. Over.”

“This is Brimstone. Roger.”

The static rasped again in my ears. We held our breaths, and the air in the alert shack was as heavy as a blanket.

Tediously, the seconds ticked past on our watches. Somewhere at the other end of the airstrip, a B-25 was running up its engine. The distant growl floated to our ears through the still, hot air. We waited by the radio, without moving. Only, sometimes, a man would swallow.

Then, wavering through the miles of ether, so small a sound that it might have been voiced inside our own heads, we heard one word — one lone monosyllable — from Binky. It had a whole world of relief pent up in its utterance: “Thanks!”

Shaw looked up from the radio. “He’s made it!” he whispered.

Davis scratched his nose and grinned vacantly. We stirred, and breathed, and my heart pounded in my ears as we waited for the confirmation that he was safe on the ground. The radio hummed softly, waiting. Even the static had let up momentarily.

Then the Brimstone controller spoke. His voice was impersonal and disciplined, but there was a current of excitement as he said: “Outhouse from Brimstone, is Daisy Special with you? Go ahead.”

The Australian voice at Outhouse came back in deliberate words, with no attempt at coding: “Brimstone from Outhouse, Daisy Special is not here. There is no aircraft in our vicinity. Sorry.”

There was a long pause, and then Brimstone said, “Roger,” and the implacable static hummed again. You see, there was only one other place where Binky could have landed.

We went quietly out into the sun. It felt cool after being cooped up over that radio for so long.

4

FOR the week that followed, the squadron’s morale was in bad shape. As a ground officer, and consequently an outsider, I could sense the change in the pilots better than they could themselves. I could see that their bargain-counter, life-and-death religion had been shattered, and I could feel all about me the heartbreaking bewilderment of youth towards injustice.

Their greatest defense had been their belief that if they followed the rules of the game, they would come through. If a man “bought it,” there was always a reason — a rule he had broken.

The trouble was, Binky had followed the rules, lie had been trapped unavoidably in bad weather, in an old crate that couldn’t take the buffeting of a tropical storm and was useless for instrument flight. He had been too low to bail out, so he had made a valiant attempt to land at Outhouse. And the Nips, hearing his request for a flare, had obliged him and brought him safely down on their own strip at Pandau.

It simply wasn’t fair.

Of course it was a death sentence for Binky. That particular crowd of jungle-isolated Japs wasn’t taking prisoners. They were half-starved, anyway, and they couldn’t spare transport to get people back to their prison cages. I knew all this through my reports, better than the pilots did. Some of them held out hope for Binky, but I knew.

I was glad when, the next week, everyone was alerted for the same strike on Pandau and our squadron once more was ordered to provide two planes for a weather hop. I felt that the boys needed to face that job again, and I think Davis felt the same way. He asked Shaw to make the flight, and picked Collins, who had been Binky’s tentmate, to fly wing.

That black early morning was so precisely like the other in every detail that, as the two pilots were getting their equipment ready, I found myself looking twice at Collins to make sure he wasn’t Binky after all. They set their parachutes on the hood of a jeep and drove the fifty yards to their revetments, where the warmed-up planes were waiting. Abruptly, as it happens in the tropics, the darkness melted away, and in the twilight I heard their engines cough into life. A moment later they were taxiing out to the strip, and then there was the beating roar of their take-off.

I had a funny feeling that morning, almost as though I were about to take off on a combat mission myself. It was the same gnawing in my gut that I’d had when I debated at college—the feeling I used to get during the speech before mine. I went over to my desk and fiddled with some reports, and then I switched on the radio and tuned it to fighter frequency. As it warmed up, Collins’s voice faded in, giving Shaw a radio check.

“. . . from Peacock Special Two, you are loud and clear. Can you hear me? Go ahead.” Our squadron code name had been changed since last week.

Shaw’s voice answered, “Roger.” At least they were making sure of their communications, this time.

I lit a cigarette and settled myself for a long vigil. I knew those two pilots were just starting on a long mission, during which they would keep radio silence to a great extent, but I couldn’t help that feeling of wanting to be on hand. I couldn’t get over that curious stage fright.

It was a long vigil. Many of the pilots moved their cots closer to the radio so that they could hear any message that might come through. Davis sat down beside me after a while, because he didn’t want to miss anything. We talked quietly together while the radio buzzed and the card players murmured and the heat pressed heavier upon us.

“They must have been listening all the time — just like this,” Davis said. I knew what he meant. He was thinking of last week, of the Nips at Pandau squatting around a radio receiver in some moldy dugout.

There was a pause, and then he said, “I wrote his mother last night.”

I looked up at him. “What did you tell her?”

“Missing.”

Of course. There was nothing else he could have said. Just “Missing,” and hope that after a while she wouldn’t expect him home any more.

Davis drummed on the desk with his fingers. He looked tired and thin, and yellow. He looked as though he needed about six months’ leave. Finally he spoke again. “He doesn’t have a prayer, does he?”

I shook my head. “No.”

He swore, vulgarly, tersely, and wearily. I flipped him a cigarette and we lit up again. We smoked too much in those days.

“What are you going to do after the war?” he asked.

“Probably sell apples,” I said.

He twitched his mouth in a smile. “Make room for me at your corner.”

A little dusty breeze sprang up, and whispered through the alert shack. I undid my shirt and held it open.

“You were at college before, weren’t you?” I asked.

“Technical school, yeah,” he said. “I got in two years.”

“ Whereabouts? ”

I never did find out where Davis went to school. Just as I asked that question, we heard a faint voice on the radio.

5

I’VE read novels which describe people’s hair standing on end. It’s one of those things you read so often that it ceases to mean anything. You see it in the book, and just go on reading. But at that moment, when I heard that tiny voice reaching out through the layers of static, I felt a twitching in my scalp — a sensation of something changing its position. I think I have sufficient license to say that my hair stood on end. The voice we heard was distant, and weary, and compelling, and so hideously familiar that for a moment I thought my mind must have snapped. It was Binky’s voice!

“Brimstone from Daisy Special, will attempt to visit Outhouse. Please inform them to expect me. Tell Outhouse I’m coming, and I can’t hear a damn thing!”

I guess we all went white. I was looking at Davis, and I know he turned sickly pale as he half stood up. There was a curtain of silence inside the shack as the other pilots sat up and stared at us. The radio was utterly still. Someone got up and walked over towards us, then stopped for a moment, as if to consider, and then stepped up beside us. That started the others, and there was a sudden stirring as everyone moved closer to the radio. Still, there was not a word from anyone. The radio seemed dead, except for that slight, monotonous power tone. We started when there was a snap of sound, and then a new tone on a different pitch. A voice spoke, slowly and carefully, in all the formality of radio procedure: “Peacock Special Leader from Special Two, did you hear a message just then?”

Shaw’s voice was expressionless. “Yes.”

There was no answer. The radio tone snapped back to normal pitch, and everything else was still. I stared at the ugly grillwork of the loud-speaker, and the thought entered my head that I should turn it off. I almost reached out my hand for the switch, but I didn’t. I just sat and stared at it.

Binky’s voice kept echoing in my ears. I could recapture every syllable, every intonation of that speech — the same words that ho had spoken near the end of that last flight. It had been real. It had come out of that very loud-speaker, in the English language, in the radio idiom of the Air Forces, in an Eastern American accent.

Binky’s voice had just spoken to us, and Binky had landed, one week ago, on the Jap strip at Pandau, where the enemy had a policy of coolly murdering every prisoner.

The radio tone broke into that carrier pitch again, and we stiffened in our seats. It was Shaw, this time..“Brimstone from Peacock Special, everything is Jane, everything is Jane. Go ahead.”

Jane was code for clear weather, and that meant the mission was to take off as scheduled.

Brimstone acknowledged, and Davis, beside me, seemed to wake up from a sleep. He straightened, and looked at the faces around us, and cleared his throat. He looked at his watch. “Take off in ten minutes,” he said. His voice was husky.

No one moved. Everyone’s attention was welded to that radio, as if to capture and inspect each insignificant rill of static. We waited because we knew something more would happen.

We were right!

There was a click, and a prolonged burst of static. Then that faint, horrifying voice, searching, appealing, desperate; and yet, most dreadful of all to us, it sounded hopeful!

“Outhouse from Daisy Special. Believe I am north of you. Will vector one eighty, angels zero. Give me a flare if I am clear to land.”

There was a second of breathlessness before a little sigh went through all of us. Then the radio chattered with high-strung, barely audible words.

“That was him! Let’s go back!”

Shaw’s voice answered firmly. “Stay with me, Collins. Stay in position!”

We tensed over the loud-speaker, breathless, while the seconds ticked by. A paralysis of bewilderment seemed to have gripped us.

It was shattered by Davis, who jumped to his feet, startling us so that we all looked at him. For the first time we saw him crimson with anger.

“Son of a bitch!” he roared. “Get the hell out to those ships and stand by for take-off! On the double!”

That hotheaded bellow was the saving of our squadron. What we needed was a burst of clean, hot temper to disperse the stench of fear that had settled upon us. I could see the color come back into each pilot’s face as he strapped on his equipment and ran for his plane. I stood outside the hut and listened to the increasing roar as one engine after another broke into life. The smell of highoctane exhaust filled my nostrils, and the dirty brown dust from sixteen propellers swirled around me, and I felt strong again, and confident.

The rest is a story which you can read in any official log of operations. I can’t describe it, because I wasn’t in it. When Shaw and Collins landed, ashen white and trembling, I took them to the radio, and the three of us listened to the few curt orders and remarks which constituted the conversation of a squadron in action: “Stay in close, Four!” and “Take the left, Blue Flight!” and “Peacock, four o’clock high!” and “Don’t drop your tanks yet!” We had to be contented with that much until the boys landed and told us their story—how they cleared the sky above the low-level Mitchells; how they were intercepted by five scared Nips and downed three of them within ten seconds; how the Mitchells plowed up the strip with their bombs, and then our boys followed in a strafe, viciously attacking everything they could find, until their ammo was nearly gone.

Pandau never recovered from the devastation of that raid. Three weeks later the first Australian patrols, ragged and bearded, slipped around the perimeter of the base. In two days, after a short, bitter fight, a brawny Australian Brigadier stretched out for a much needed nap, on a captured Jap hammock, in the bullet-scarred Jap headquarters. Pandau had fallen.

Among the trophies that the Aussies found at Pandau were two which came to the attention of the Intelligence Section, and subsequently into my possession. One was a class ring from one of our Eastern universities. It was found on a dead Jap officer, along with a photograph he had taken of a recent execution ceremony. None of us wanted the photograph. I gave the ring to Davis, and he enclosed it in the second letter he wrote to Binky’s mother.

The other souvenir is simply a broken record — an unmarked eight-inch disk, cracked down the center. It was found in the wreckage of what had once been a recording machine. The enemy used them occasionally to pick up our radio talk and play it back at his leisure. This disk is facing me, on my desk. Although the crack makes it difficult, it is possible to play it on any phonograph. It’s not very interesting — just some dull Army radio messages, one of them from a lost flyer who is trying to land at a place called “Outhouse.”

Now that I’ve finished this story, I think I’ll take that record outside and smash it to bits.