Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [27]
Another burst of cannon shells ripped into the fuselage of the B24 as that second F-W went down, and the other crews, from their places higher in the sky, saw Rugged Buggy’s entire tail section, in which Dick Castillo still fought, break slowly away from the rest of the plane, pause a moment to tear loose the last shreds of well-molded aluminum bracing, and then flutter off by itself, twisting over and over as the forward part of the ship plummeted straight to earth.
Black dots and then white parachutes appeared in the wake of the falling forward section of the plane. From the slowly twisting tail section, where Dick Castillo fought, there came nothing except, just as it dropped into the undercast and was lost to the others’ view, one last spurt of whitish tracer fire that arced up into the sky, and then there was no more.
It was always that last burst of fire that streaked across the minds of the Liberator gunners in their huts those dull evenings. Every now and then word came from the Red Cross that another of the Rugged Buggy crew had turned up as a prisoner of war in Germany. The gunners kept waiting for word from Dick Castillo.
Combat is hard to catch in words. You say, maybe, twentymillimeter shells smashed the turret, ripped through the fuselage. But no phrase will tell the empty five seconds in the guts of every man aboard as they waited and even felt to know whether that had been THE attack. Or you say, Fire began to glow within the engine nacelle and eat slowly back into the wing, and no words you own can measure the limitless courage it takes for men in that plane to watch flame consume the very thing that bears them aloft, yet struggle not just to live but to strike back.
You write down what they did and tell how things were. But that isn’t all of combat. Combat is shells and fire and no oxygen, and it is also, maybe mostly, what happens in an airman’s guts and his mind. The splitsecond things you can tell. They happen and are dealt with by reflex, and there is no element of mind in them. But sometimes, after the splitsecond things have happened, there follow long minutes and hours that airmen call the time “the men get separated from the boys.” Those are the minutes and hours of eternity in which fires smother under extinguisher foam or roar on to explode fuel tanks and bombs, in which shattered tail surfaces stick by shreds to get you home or flutter off and start the crazy, spinning plunge to earth. Such times are of the mind and the viscera, and speak an infinite horror; you can tell little of them.
Part II
Mr. Rooney Goes to Work
Early days in the CBS television studios
After the Second World War, Andy Rooney returned to Albany, New York, to embark on a freelance writing career. In 1949, after finishing Conquerors’ Peace, a book on postwar Europe, Rooney joined CBS to write for the radio and TV personality Arthur Godfrey on his shows Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts and Arthur Godfrey Time. In 1956 he left Arthur Godfrey, and by 1959, he had started to write for The Garry Moore Show—a popular CBS comedy program. In 1962 Rooney began collaborating with CBS newsman Harry Reasoner to write and produce a series of popular hour-long specials narrated by Reasoner on everything from bridges and chairs to women and the English language. By the 1970s Rooney was writing and producing a series of trenchant primetime 60 Minutes segments on war, New York City, Washington, dining, and working in America. In his signature forthright style, Rooney reported the pieces from the ground up, crisscrossing America to take its collective pulse, all the while opining, conjecturing, cracking wry jokes, and sharing his refreshingly honest wisdom.
Chairs
T here is so much that is unpleasant and dull about living that we ought to take every opportunity presented to us to enjoy the enjoyable things of life. None of us can afford to become immune to the sensation of small pleasures or uninterested in small interests. A chair, for instance, can be a small and constant joy, and taking pleasure from one