F-M Endnote

The Major in the Target Room

I have been asked who he was, the American in the London target room, and I have to say that I do not remember his name, only his manners. He was a major in the Army Air Forces, perhaps twenty-eight, with spectacles that he took off when he wished to be believed and put on when he wished to be exact.

He told me his history at the door, the only thing he said that afternoon that was not a question. He had flown. He had earned his wings in 1940 and come to England in the late autumn of 1942 expecting to go on flying, until a flight surgeon held up a chart and found that his eyes had slipped a line since anyone last looked. One line. It was enough, and he was grounded that week. He was told, kindly, that the Army Air Forces had pilots in abundance. What it lacked was a pilot who could tell the other pilots where to go.

The officer who interviewed him afterward, reading his record, had noticed the degree. He had taken it in architecture at Carnegie Tech, in Pittsburgh, and the interviewer saw what I saw the moment I heard it: that a man trained to know how a building stands is also trained to know how it falls. He spent the next two years learning how timber-framed streets burn, which roofs take fire and which let it through, from people who had gone and counted. He had never been to Germany. He knew its towns by their roofs.

I answered all of his questions, as you have read. He thanked me for each answer. I have thought since that it was the thanks I minded. He was a courteous man doing exactly what he had been trained to do, and I have never decided whether that makes the afternoon better or worse.