COULDN’T TAKE IT

I was testing an airplane one day. Its wings came off, and I jumped out in my chute. I am convinced that the people on the ground watching me got a bigger thrill out of it than I did. I was too busy.

For one thing, Admiral Moffett, who was later killed in the Akron, rushed home to his office in an emotional fit and wrote me a very nice letter about what a hero I was. I wasn’t any hero. I had just been saving my neck.

And for another, my mechanic came up to see me in the hospital right afterward. I wasn’t in the hospital because I was hurt, but because the military doctor on the post made me go there. After I had got into the hospital I discovered that my heart was beating so violently that I couldn’t sleep, so when Eddie, my mechanic, came up they let him in.

He didn’t say anything at all for a while. He just sat on the bed opposite mine and twirled his cap, looking down at the floor. Finally he said, “When your chute opened, I fell down.”

I pictured him running madly across the field, watching me falling before I had opened my chute, and then stumbling just as my chute opened. “Why didn’t you watch where you were going?” I said banteringly.

He kept looking at the floor, twirling his cap, his face expressionless. “I wasn’t going any place,” he said.

The conversation wasn’t making much sense to me. “Didn’t you say that when my chute opened, you fell down?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, as if he were talking to the floor. He was in a sort of trance.

“Well,” I said, puzzled, “then you must have been running across the field watching me. You must have stumbled and fallen.”

“No,” he said, like a man in a dream, “I didn’t stumble on anything. I was just standing there looking up, watching you.”

I was getting frantic. “Well, how in the hell did you fall down, then?” I asked.

“My knees collapsed,” he said.