Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [20]
Through fifteen hits on the plane, through fire and deafening noise, the fourteen men on the Mercator instinctively acted as one. Covered in blood, his flight suit on fire, Corder managed to crawl out of the mangled turret. Lieutenant Owen Farley knocked out the flames, and an ordnance man named Richard Nelson bandaged Corder. Bullets continued to shower the plane, and Nelson draped his larger frame over Corder’s body to protect his injured friend.
My father was piloting a plane that was now rudderless, with both engines on the starboard side knocked out or on fire. The hydraulic system was out, and the holes in the plane created even more instability. A plane in this condition is almost impossible to fly, but keeping it aloft was not all he had to do. He had to fly it with enough precision to avoid the continued passes by the MiGs and dodge the incoming tracers. If he couldn’t do that, they wouldn’t survive. To limit the maneuvering room of the MiG jets, he decided to force the plane down from seven thousand feet above the water to fifty feet. The plane shook as it dived, four thousand, two thousand, five hundred feet. Then came the real test: Dad had to use his considerable strength to bring the plane level again—the water just five stories below them—and hold it there. One of the men on board said my father’s unflinching arms looked like they had been chiseled in marble, for nearly two hours flexed and unchanging.
The dive worked, and the MiGs disappeared into the clouds, but the plane still had a lot of water to cross before it was out of harm’s way. When the crew was sure that the MiGs were gone, Dad brought them back up to a safer sixteen hundred feet. Then one of the two port engines started to go, and it was hard to keep aloft the now one-engine rudderless plane. It dropped back to three hundred feet. Even my father’s strength might not be enough to save the plane. Commander Mayer radioed that they were thirty miles out from a small landing field at Miho, Japan, and that they had begun to jettison the plane’s nonessential equipment to lighten the load. It worked. The plane maintained three hundred feet until landing. President Eisenhower was notified what happened immediately. We found out half a day later.
It seemed everyone on base knew before we did. But all our next-door neighbor Bob Greenwood told Mother was that Dad’s plane had had a flat tire and that he had landed at Miho, a couple of hundred miles from Iwakuni. Commander Greenwood got Dad on the phone, and Dad simply told Mother he was fine and he would join her at a dinner party that night. At the dinner, Commodore Staley came in late and told Mother that Dad was delayed talking to investigators. Investigators, she asked, for a flat tire? Mother knew something more was wrong, and she turned to Commodore Staley and asked, “Don’t I deserve to know what’s going on?” “Yes,” he said and took her to the next room and told her what had happened, that Corder had survived and that Dad was all right and was a hero in fact. Finally, hours later than expected, Dad walked in, still dressed in his flight suit. He took one look at the assembled guests, and the first thing he said was, “Holy smokes, Liz, you told me this was a party. It looks more like a wake to me. Let’s play charades!”
One night at home was followed by a long debriefing at the Seventh Fleet command in Yokosuka. The first news stories said that the Mercator hadn’t shot back because the guns jammed. Dad and the crew went to Washington to testify first about nonexistent jammed guns and then about actual surveillance activities. All the while, we read about it in our only news source, the Stars and Stripes, but we later heard from friends in the States that the crew was on every news program, on television and radio, in every newspaper, in Life and Time,