Letters to home

Flight Journal, Jun 1999 by Davisson, Budd

Somewhere in these pages, you'll be reading the thoughts and emotions of two young brothers gone to war. It was 1918, and the Civil War was closer to them in memory than WW II is to us today. It had, however, slid just far enough into history that veterans were being honored, the horrors were fading, and only the glory was left to shine through memory's often rosy window. Between the lines of these letters, a bright naivete comes through, and you can sense an eagerness to go to war and right some imagined international wrongs. What intrigued these brothers even more about the war they knew so little of was that theirs was to be war in the air. It was a new concept riddled with glamour. And adventure. No one had ever added the third dimension to warfare before. Also, although air combat was still young, it had already trimmed away the crudity of its early chapters. In the few short years since 1915, flying machines had evolved from frazzled, dragonfly crates capable of the occasional sting into streamlined killing machines. The Nutt brothers were attracted to their shape and their deadly, freedom-loving nature, as young men usually are.

It's almost amusing to flip through their letters and read endless tales of surviving mechanical failure after mechanical failure. They passed it off as a normal part of aviation because it was. It wasn't a question of whether the engine would quit, but of where and when. Another fact floats to the surface of their letters: because of the unreliable and short-range nature of their aircraft, they had actually flown very little before being committed to battle. Their foes had been in combat for nearly three years, while it is doubtful whether the Nutt brothers had more than 75 hours total flight time. That length of flight time would barely earn them a private pilot's license today. Their experience in the air was so limited it would be laughable were it not so tragic.

As you flip through the final pages of their story, and tragedy punctuates its ending, you sense a subtle change The surviving brother, Henry, without saying so, appears to have learned that war was real because death was real. War had lost some of its glamour.

Story ended, you turn the pages to another; this one about old enemies, the MiG and the Hornet, playing together in air combat's three-dimensional arena, seeking each other's weak points. The theory of war has become one of energy conservation, missile ranges, quick think radar and young men who are more men than young. War has become a profession, not a shining ideal to be supported by youngsters in tweed suits and Gatsby hats marching down Main Street behind a brass band.

In today's world of high-tech warfare, it is difficult to think of brothers gleefully marching off to fight a war in the skies. Warfare has changed. So, too, however, has the philosophy of patriotism and fighting for your country. For generations, it was something to be embraced. A thing of honor. If the media have done nothing else, they have stripped away the glossy coating of wars fought far away and exposed them for what they are. We have become more enlightened and less likely to feed our youth to unworthy causes. In the process, however, we have lost something of ourselves-something intangible in our national character that made America what it is. This is undoubtedly good. But that doesn't stop it from being sad. The loss of innocence is never cause for celebration. t