Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [26]
“Funny,” Blackburn began slowly, “but I can’t tell whether that’s breakfast . . . dinner . . . supper . . . or—
“For Christ’s sake! My eyes!”
When they got back to base, the other gunners led Blackburn to the flight surgeon, who peered into the angry red eyeballs that had searched for German fighters in the August 17 sun and sent Blackburn to bed. For a good many days the gunner couldn’t even see the food they had to spoon into his mouth. After a while, though, the doctors looked at his eyes and said that if he was careful his eyes would be pretty good again, someday. He was through firing and sighting, though. They said that the long hours of staring up into the flaming sky, searching for German planes, had injured the delicate tissues of his eyeballs, had injured the nerves. They said it had begun to happen while he was still peering and firing that day on the way to Africa. They said it had been a wonder he could see anything at all that day.
Blackburn agreed with them. It had been hell, staring up into the sky, trying to catch those single-engined fighters, and the twin-engined ones, and the four-engined ones. The Germans had used an awful lot of four-engined planes that day, an awful lot. . . .
It’s on those rainy nights, when conversation in the hut dies away and a gunner flops onto his sack, too weary to talk, too weary to write letters, and sinks into a sort of mental void, that the inevitable quality of his job comes home to him. It comes in phrases that roll on and on through his brain, and his face will be without expression as it happens to him, except maybe the lines at the corners of his eyes will begin to form and the hard part of the corners of his mouth will draw down a little tighter.
The gunners in a Liberator hut talked for a long time about Dick Castillo, and they waited a long time for word to come back through the International Red Cross. This man and that man in Castillo’s crew was reported a prisoner. This man and that man . . .
Dick, who came from Springfield, Ohio, and was a staff sergeant, was tail gunner in the Liberator Rugged Buggy. The other crews saw what happened to him, and told about it.
Rugged Buggy was on her way in to a German target in the summer of 1943, before the Libs went down to Africa for the Ploesti oilfields mission, when flak smashed the number three engine. German fighters saw the feathered prop and came in, as they always do, firing as the Lib slipped from formation. Other crews could see Rugged Buggy almost heave herself up as the pilot tried to nurse her back to the shelter of the other planes’ guns, but little by little Rugged Buggy dropped away.
Two of the attacking pack of twenty Focke-Wulfs went down as the crippled plane’s guns poured out thousands of rounds, but the other Nazis pressed the attack. Cannon fire silenced the Lib’s waist guns, and great rents and wounds began to show in her wings and tail and fuselage. Rugged Buggy’s defensive fire slowed. Finally, only Dick Castillo’s tail guns were firing, traversing back and forth, framing one attacker just long enough to beat him off, then swinging to another quarter. The tail guns seemed almost to be shooting around corners, to be firing everywhere at once. Over their radio, the leader of the German fighter element ordered his pilots to spread out and smash this verdammte Yankee gunner.
That was the beginning of the end. While one trio of fighters attacked from dead astern, engaging Castillo’s fire, the others cut in from the sides. Maybe they planned it the way it happened, maybe they didn’t, but other crews in the formation of B24s up above saw enemy fire crisscross just forward of Castillo’s tail position, saw the fabric tear loose in great sheets, saw the bare skeleton of Rugged Buggy’s vertebrae exposed.
The Lib slipped off on one wing, and still Dick Castillo was firing. Two enemy aircraft definitely were destroyed by the hosepipe of death that splurted from Rugged Buggy