Jim Hamilton makes money flying airplanes, and is tolerable at that. He is intolerable at almost everything else, however, including writing stories which he insists upon doing despite repeated pleadings from family and friends for him to stop. He is untalented, unpublished, and unbearable, and if you find any of the stories included herein to be interesting or entertaining, please keep it to yourself or there will be no living with him. Why these good and talented people have chosen him to share ranks is an impenetrable mystery, but we must trust in their judgment and respect them for their merciful suffering of this apparent fool.

Thunder That Comes From The Ground

Jump Pilot

Pax Americana

Thunder That Comes From The Ground (May 20, 2009. Issue 5.) (Non-Fic)

The soldier filled the window seat of the small regional jet to overflowing with his camouflage ACU uniform and tan brushed-clean suede desert boots. He was enormous-- six feet seven inches tall, two hundred and seventy pounds, shorn black hair. He took no notice of me as I rattled my flight case and computer bag into the bin over his head- just sat silently, head down, worrying with dried, callused hands. His palms were stained a brownish purple to the edges of his fingers. Whether this from birth or something else I could not know. He kept them turned away from himself and others as he rubbed them and scratched at pieces of dead skin.

As I eased into the seat next to him, his eyes came up to meet mine and he gave a slight, crooked smile, teeth apart, and his hands rested on his knees, palms down. I found it necessary to angle my legs toward the aisle and sit at the far left edge of my seat to accommodate us both in the small plane. He told me he was going home to visit his family for a few days, the he would be returning to Iraq soon. I asked about his experience with the war, and his eyes fell to his hands again. As his fingers examined and pruned one another, he began to describe his forward observation base coming under mortar attack:

"It's not like the movies at all. The shockwaves travel through your whole body before you even hear the sound. It’s like-- thunder that comes from the ground. This time, the guys with the mortars were set up behind this berm, which they somehow managed to set on fire...."

There was no fear in his voice. There was almost nothing at all-- the timbre and tempo of his conversation was a familiar time-killing monotone, of the kind used by people accustomed to hours of travel. I found him easy to listen to.

"... and as soon as arty saw the fire, well that was it." he said, spreading his hands away from him like a crashing wave, indicating that the overwhelming fire directed against the enemy mortar team. "Goddamn they're dumb. They don't even aim the things; just try to land rounds inside our perimeter. Sometimes, they'd freeze a ring of ice around a mortar shell, set in halfway in a mortar tube set up outside of our FOB, and just walk away. When the ice melted..."

He rubbed his fingers and hands as before, more as he spoke, his eyes were alive and dead at the same time, wandering, alert, not wanting to see. A patch velcroed to the center of his chest, three small black chevrons, said "Sergeant". A unit patch on his right shoulder as well as his left said "Combat". Everything about this man screamed "Infantry", but he wasn't. I asked what he did for the Army, and he said,

"Ah… I was in intelligence. I was an interrogator." He searched my face for reaction. They read the same papers over there. I tried not to think of waterboarding and dogs and perverse piles of naked men in institutional hallways, but it was pointless.

"What kind of techniques did you use in your interrogations?" I asked.

"Well, it varied. Whatever the situation called for."

He began to withdrawal. Fingers traced calluses, picked hangnails, rubbed small finger-muscles. I redirected.

"What kinds of questions did you ask? Was it like police interrogations?"

"Yeah, yeah, like that. You know, the nouns. Always get the nouns. Who, what, where, when. Names. Get a name. 'Give me a name, a name, I need a name', like that. Then places they've been, times, and you start to weave together a whole picture of what's going on." As he came to this last part, his hands rose and began tracing parts and pieces in the air, pulling them around, drawing lines between them. When he was done, they went back to his lap and began rubbing one another again, slowly, relaxingly. He had divorced his mind from his hands, and they only came together under certain circumstances. When that job was done, his mind left them behind again.

"But I wasn't even in the infantry. I was intelligence. The combat guys? The ones knocking down doors and pulling triggers? Jesus. These men are... fearless. They just don't give a shit. And they are incredibly good. So good. When they come back..." He held up his giant's hands, as if holding a melon he was about to crush.

My arguments against the war, against our last president, against or about anything, fell to nothingness. I was sitting next to something impenetrable, impossible to understand, but that must be understood. I knew I would never be able to touch it, that no one could, that these words are pointless. He must have known that his words were pointless as well, but he kept on speaking, trying,

"This is our generation's war."

Jump Pilot (March 5, 2009. Issue 1) (Non-Fic)

Nobody gives a shit about a jump plane pilot. Flying skydivers is to aviation what washing dishes is to the restaurant industry. You’re just a replaceable cog in the machine, and you and all your peers are there for the same reasons: You need flight time to get to a better job; you had a better job but lost it. Now, this crap is all you can find for work. You love flying so much, you’re willing to put up with almost any working conditions and any pay scale to keep pushing rudders, pulling throttles, ballet dancing with a machine in midair. You have nothing else to do. You’re not the show, and you know it. The skydivers are the show, and so long as you keep spiraling up with a load, spitting them out, spiraling down empty, picking up a minimum of fuel to haul a maximum of jumpers on the next run, you’ll keep right on making that five dollars a load for as long as you can stand it.

So I wasn’t surprised at all when, just as we reached the minimum jump altitude, the clamshell door of the 1959 Cessna 182B banged open to my right, all five jumpers bailed before I knew what was happening, and the last one fell out backwards, flipping me two middle fingers and grinning like a butchers dog as he left.

The mechanic of the plane and drop zone owner had been explicit on the handling of this old aircraft: Keep the mixture lean. Keep the engine hot. If you don’t, those old valves are going to give you a shitty intake, not like the slick polished manifolds you have today, and you’re going to foul those sparkplugs right up and be in a world of shit.

But when you wake up before dawn, drive an hour and a half, preflight your aircraft with a flashlight so that you can get that first load of jumpers - real-life adrenalin junkies with darty eyes and twitchy skin, needing another fix after-whatever it was they did last night - and you spiral to 12,000 feet, nah they say, take us to 14,500, you don’t need oxygen up to there, and we get more hang-time, and you like ‘em, they’re a bunch of goons, so you say "Alright" and make that high-altitude upwind human bomb run over a toothpick of asphalt down below, and they climb out all over your wing like spiders, all wanting to let go at the same time, and you’re at full control deflection just to stay wings-level, and they let go all at once and you shoot skyward like fucking bottle rocket after having lost all that weight, and whoosh, that’s it, you’re all alone now, and have to do a full sideslip to get the clamshell door to quit flying in the slipstream and bang down against the fuselage so you can reach over and latch it with your right arm full outstretched, holding that side slip in, click, got it, then the long descent down, full-deflection descending left-hand sideslip to keep that big Lycoming engine out of the slipstream, cowl flaps closed, don’t want to shock-cool the goddamn thing and then back right-hand full deflection sideslip because all the gas in your right tank just ported over to the left side, and you gotta even it out before you land so you do that left, right, left, right knowing the harder you can mash that rudder against the wind, the faster you can descend and get another load and the more money you make for the day, and your legs burning at the end, enter the pattern, land, taxi in and there they are, been on the ground three minutes now, waiting on you, and you go do it all again, and again, and again, until dusk, then a night jump, well, I guess keeping the mixture at near-shutoff levels throughout the day sometimes just slips the mind, you know?

Right after rotation, the engine began to cough. It was summer, I was overweight as always, and there was no place straight ahead or just to the left or right to ditch in should the engine cough its last, so my only option was to keep climbing. The higher I got, the more the engine complained about it, and the quieter it got in the back. I pulled one ear cup off my ear, turned to the jumpmaster and shouted, "I DON’T THNK WE’LL MAKE IT TO TWELVE THOUSAND I’LL LET YOU KNOW WHEN WE’RE AT THREE!" He nodded and turned to talk in to the ears of the other jumpers.

As the altimeter wound through 2,700, I busied myself with mixture settings, switching from one magneto to the other, then both, anything to get more manifold pressure, a smoother sound, better power. At 3,000 the clamshell door swung up and out and four men were gone in a flash, and that last one with his grin and his two flipped up middle fingers. I looked down at the olive drab relic of a chute that I was required to wear. Multicolored wires hung from it in corroded conduit, ripped from the ejection seat it had been a part of nearly twenty-five years previously. I decided not to follow.

The engine hesitated and caught, coughed and sputtered, but brought me back into the traffic pattern and back to the hangar.

The jumpers were there, waiting, staring, anxious. The owner was there, too, ready to bless me out about the mixture. One hour, a new set of spark plugs, a review of mixture control procedures, a run-up test, and we were off. Hey, five more dollars. But standing in that hangar with its odors of auto polish, fuel, oil, dust and looking into the middle distance at the prairie beyond with its clumps of vegetation and rising heat shimmer while the mechanic muttered about the mixture broke me forever. I learned not to argue, and I learned not to make excuses.

Pax Americana (The Old Site, A Future Issue) (Fiction)

Ex-MIT Professor Joseph Straub cupped his small tin mug of stew to his face, the last cigarette of the day dangled between his fingers as he contemplated the small band of people with whom he had allied. He wondered if men like him had not viewed the same thing at the collapse of every empire, the small, natural gatherings of humanity around a fire and an ideal rendered obsolete - as all ideals eventually are, in the ashes left from the fires of all their pomp and glory - just this, just small people together, living for one another.

Straub had been caught unprepared, as had millions and millions of others, at the speed of collapse of his civilization. It was observed far too late, and by a colleague long dead, (Long? what did that mean anymore?)

It quickly became transparent that the rate of decay of any civilization was directly proportionate to the speed at which panic-inspiring news could be transmitted. During the Roman Empire and the Han dynasty, that rate was no faster than a man on foot or horseback. Here, in the information age, it was at the speed of light. The news that guerrilla cells were conducting massive surgical strikes on woefully unprepared and understaffed National Guard bases as the majority of their staff were in Iraq and Afghanistan jerking off to smuggled porn sent shockwaves through the media and the internet - by the time orders were cut to recall those units, 80% of all in-country Air National Guard units had been destroyed, 64% of Mechanized armor and artillery units had been rendered inoperative, and what remained of the infantry was utterly overwhelmed.

A panicked, suspicious, and rioting populace began to eat itself like a Culpepper Flag gone madly Ouroboros. The failure of public works followed like a string of firecrackers; first, sanitation, then water, then the electricity. Within two months, the nation had turned the lights off on 100 years of progress with one match set to the tinder-box of fear that its politicians and lobbyists had assembled and encouraged for influence and power. It all went up like a month-old Christmas tree, and this small group, this small fire, and many like it, were all that remained.

The guerrilla cells were operating openly now, moving with impunity, gathering together and seizing power at every opportunity. Once the ports and airports were destroyed or abandoned, the ability of forces to return to the defense of the homeland was nearly wiped out. Those units that were able to come back were without leadership, su pplies, ammunition, or a central command. Many were decimated. Some rallied, organized, and retaliated, building a secure front. At the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey - New York, Newark - the ports and airports were under 'American' control, though the massive civilian population there suffered unlivable conditions, and as much time was spent controlling fire, crime, disease and starvation as was spent fighting the enemy. Washington and the District of Columbia was now the most dangerous place in the world. Where there was not open fighting between insurgents and citizens, when they could recognize one another, there was general anarchy, lawlessness and depravity that would make a man wish for the safety of a maximum-security federal prison in the segregation wing of incorrigibly violent inmates.
It was only here, on the midwestern prairies that any semblance of civility could remain. Only here was there relief from the throngs of dead and dying refugees unable to pass the Rockies in any number, or cross the insurgent-held Mississippi to the Breadbasket, the final outpost of the legion, and the last stronghold of The United States. It was here, in a land bereft of hiding places and expansive metropolises, rich with clean water and ample natural food, where one man could see the approach of another at a distance of miles rather than inches, where the values and principles of liberty continued to exist. But it would not last, and Straub and his band knew this.

Short wave radio contact with other groups was brief and limited by what remained of car batteries and handheld generators. Groups with gasoline generators, the fuel to power them, and personnel enough to protect them were considered major outposts of the realm. It was around these outposts that bands like Joe Straub's orbited, traded for supplies and ammunition, and awaited their opportunity to strike back.