The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [172]
Flooded almost to tears with the rapture of survival, Ben unloaded from the jeep the instant it screeched to a halt and raced toward the hatchway of the revving plane. You're getting giddy, Reinking. If not now, when? With his war over, in his every heartbeat he could feel the surge of his chances with Cass. A woman with no regrets, two men—
He did not even have to calculate. All the rest of his life, should he live forever, he gladly would take odds that good.
* * *
Acknowledgments
This is a work of fiction, and so my characters exist only in these pages. There is, however, a breath of actuality to the plot premise of World War Two's disproportionate toll on a given number of young men who had played football together: by the accounts available, eleven starting players of Montana State College in Bozeman did perish in that conflict. I am indebted to my late friend, Dave Walter of the Montana Historical Society, for providing me the pieces of that quilt of lore. Research virtuoso of the state's past that he was, Dave also furnished a vivid sense of conscientious objector life in the Montana woods during the war in his history of the Civilian Public Service Camp at Belton, Montana, Rather Than War.
Montana's war losses are summed up in another key historical study, Montana, A History of Two Centuries by Michael P. Malone, Richard B. Roeder, and William L. Lang: "As in World War I, Montana contributed more than its share of military manpower—roughly forty thousand men by 1942—and the state's death rate in the war was exceeded only by New Mexico's."
A number of the women who piloted miltary aircraft in 1942-44 as WASPs—Women Air Force Service Pilots—learned to fly in the Civilian Pilot Training program before the war, as I had Cass Standish do. There were 916 WASPs—141 of those in the Air Transport Command, as Cass's ferry squadron would have been—when their branch of the service was disbanded ("inactivated") in December 1944. Thirty-eight women military pilots lost their lives in the course of duty. While East Base in Great Falls, Montana, was indeed a hub of ferrying Lend-Lease fighters, bombers, and cargo planes north to Alaska and Soviet Union air crews waiting there—the total is listed as 7,926 aircraft—the presence of Cass's flying women at East Base and on the route to Edmonton is my own creation.
Similarly, I have taken literary leeway with a few settings in the book. Citizens of Great Falls will find that I have put nonexistent Treasure State University on about the site of C.M. Russell High School, and the Letter Hill in back of it. Hill 57 did exist. The Reinkings' town of Gros Ventre and the Two Medicine country remain as I originated them in my Montana Trilogy, imagined versions that draw on the actual geography in and around Dupuyer, the hospitable armful of town of my high school years.
The Office of War Information from 1942 until 1945 had various sections involved in war news for domestic consumption, but the Threshold Press War Project, "Tepee Weepy," was foisted on it by my imagination.
In my characters' combat experiences, I have sometimes drawn on oral history accounts, memoirs, and unit histories for touches of detail. One source in particular I would like to single out, my late writing colleague and friend, Alvin Josephy. When we coincided at the Fishtrap "Writing and the West" Conference at Wallowa Lake, Oregon, in 1994, I heard Alvin's recording of the amphibious landing at Guam, and his memoir A Walk Toward