Cold Victory

“Hey, don’t I know you from somewhere?” the sergeant at the Ann Arbor recruiting office greeted J.B.

“Until I graduated last summer, I was enrolled at the University of Michigan, so you may have seen me around campus.”

“Nah, it was somewhere else.” The sergeant snapped his fingers a couple of times, trying to jog his memory. Then his face lit up. “You’re the guy who was all over the papers! The one who dropped candy to the kids of Berlin? Why aren’t you in uniform?”

When he was younger, J.B. had imagined that being in the papers would be exciting; now that he was, he found it more like an invasion of privacy. “Yeah, I was on the Airlift most of the fall, but I’m out of uniform because I’m not on active duty, and that’s the reason I’m here. I want to talk to someone about going back.”

“On the Airlift?” The Sergeant sounded flabbergasted.

“Last I heard, we’re still flying ‘round the clock,” J.B. reminded him.

The sergeant considered him sceptically while scratching the back of his head. “Let me see.” Something about the way he said it gave J.B. a sinking feeling. The sergeant started opening and closing the drawers of his filing cabinet until he found what he was looking for. He removed a manila folder, opened it, read something in it, and then excused himself to go into the back office.

J.B. could do nothing but wait, so he looked out the window at the students, hurrying past. Temperatures had dropped to near freezing, and everyone was bundled up in gloves, scarves, and boots. It made him wonder how the Berliners were surviving now that winter had arrived.

“Captain Baronowsky?” A new, firm voice drew his attention.

J.B. jumped to his feet to face a major. Since he wasn’t in uniform, he could not salute, but he tried to make a military impression and addressed him as “Sir.”

“You’d better step inside my office,” the major suggested.

J.B. complied and sat in the chair the major indicated. The major went around to the other side of the heavy wooden desk, sat down and got straight to the point, “I’ve got a file on you a mile long, Baronowsky. You were yanked off the Airlift less than two weeks ago because of a Congressional request. And now you want to go back? What do you think the USAF is? A travel agency?”

“I didn’t ask to be sent home. I wanted to continue flying.”

“Then why didn’t you?”

“Well, sir, the nature of my orders did not leave me a lot of room for negotiation.”

The major snorted in acknowledgement and concluded, “But now you want to negotiate?”

“Not exactly, I just want to go back on active status and deploy on the Airlift again.”

“The answer’s ‘no’.”

J.B. hadn’t expected anything that definitive and he protested, “Why? From what I’ve seen in the papers, we’re flying more than ever before. The Berliners voted overwhelmingly in favour of continuing the fight, and with winter here, they’re in desperate need of coal. We’ve got to keep flying, and we need men with four-engine ratings to do it. It doesn’t make any sense for me to be sitting on my ass here in Michigan when I could be helping supply Berlin. The president himself called Berlin his number one priority.”

“You think I don’t know that?” The major shot back. “But whether it makes sense or not, some congressman doesn’t want you flying the Lift, and the USAF isn’t going to risk making any congressman unhappy. Period.”

“Let me explain about that, sir!” J.B. begged. “The congressman we’re talking about doesn’t know me from Adam.” The major’s eyebrows shot up. “I’m serious. He’s probably forgotten my name by now if he ever bothered to learn it. He only made the request to pull me off the Airlift as a favour to a senior vice president of General Motors, who I presume, used some sort of persuasive argument to convince the congressmen that doing him a favour was in his interest.”

“This ‘senior VP at General Motors’ wouldn’t happen to be your father or something, would he?”

“My dad? Hell, no! My Dad works on the shop floor for two bucks an hour.”

“So just what does this VP have to do with you? And if he didn’t want you flying two weeks ago, why won’t he object to you flying now?”

“As of two days ago, sir, that VP is so pissed with me, he told me to my face that he hopes I crash and burn. If there was some way for him to kill me himself without going to jail, he’d do it.”

“Why? What have you done to him?”

“I refused to marry his daughter. Or, more precisely, withdrew a proposal I’d made last spring, and I’m probably about to get sued for the costs of a wedding that isn’t going to take place. So, maybe you can understand that all I want to do right now is to get out of Detroit and back to Germany as quickly as possible.”

The major laughed and then shook his head in bemusement. “Women troubles, huh? Sometimes I think we’d be better off without the ‘fairer sex.’”

“Not really, sir.” J.B. thought wistfully of Kathleen. “We just need to stay away from the wrong kind of girls.”

“Like the daughters of senior corporate executives with the ears of congressmen? You’ve got an interesting definition of ‘the wrong kind of girls,’ Baronowsky! Then again, in my experience, it can be pretty hard to tell Miss Right from Miss Wrong. Sounds like you learned the hard way.”

J.B. grinned and admitted, “I just had a whole college course in what defines the ‘wrong girl’ for me.”

The major laughed at that and reconsidered J.B. “Can you guarantee me that no congressman is going to be writing General Vandenberg to demand that we release you from active duty?”

“My word of honour, sir.” J.B. held up his hand as if to swear an oath.

The major picked up the file on his desk and considered it. “You’re a bit of a celebrity too, I see. Flew with Halvorsen, huh?”

“Yes, sir. And I heard Colonel Howley pleading with people to donate to this Operation Santa Claus thing. You know, getting people to donate gifts for the kids in Berlin. Maybe I could put in a big plug for that — even get Hal, that’s Lt. Halvorsen, to join for an interview or something like that?”

The major snorted and looked at J.B. with new interest. “What kind of job were you gonna have with GM? Public Relations?”

J.B. laughed. “No, I’m just a dumb engineer.”

“Yeah, well, you may be right. It might be good publicity to send you back ‘to help the kids’ and all that. I’ll check with Army public relations and see what they say. Write down a telephone number where I can reach you.” He handed J.B. a small notepad and a pen, “I’ll call you if I get the green light.”