Friday, July 25, 2014

"I have told the truth"

Wow.

Bear with me, this may be a long and rambling post disguised as a book review. It is rare to read a piece of fiction that can strike such a chord with you, but every once in a while…

About a month or so ago I found a promotion for several audiobooks, offering the chance to download one for free. I picked Code Name Verity, the story of two young women during the middle of the Second World War.



If this sounds familiar on this blog, it is. I read Violins of Autumn earlier, and like that book, this one also centers on the British Special Operations Executive and its agents, but the two books could not be more different. Verity is the book Autumn only wishes it could be.

Codename Verity tells the story of Julie Beaufort Stewart and Maddie Broddart, two young women who could hardly be more different, yet quickly become the closest of friends. Both are members of the Royal Air Force’s Women’s Auxiliary, though both eventually find their way to the roles they were meant for: cool, aristocratic Julie (a Scot descended from no less than William Wallace (Braveheart)), who can effortlessly be anyone she wants to be, is recruited into the British SOE. Maddie, daughter of eastern European Jewsish immigrants, is one of the few pre-war women pilots in England and is eventually allowed to join the Air Transport Auxiliary, Brittan’s answer to the US WASP program. One fateful night they find themselves on an ill-fated mission to occupied France.

The first half of the book is told through a diary written by Julie as she is interrogated by the Gestapo. Her mission in France was over before it began, bailing out of a burning plane and quickly captured by the enemy, but even by these meager standards she has fared better than Maddie, based on the pictures of the wrecked plane and its remaining occupant her Nazi interrogators show her. The diary is supposedly for the Gestapo captain in charge of her interrogation, but mostly it’s a meandering narrative about her and Maddie met, and how their friendship grew, and perhaps most of all, how Maddie came to fall in love with flying.
The second half of the book comes totally out of left field and it’s an emotional roller-coaster. You’ve written off both of these girls from the very beginning, Maddie in the plane crash and Julie marked for execution, and with D-Day more than six months away you know there’s no cavalry coming. Yet the plot twists come fast and furious and author Elizabeth Wein could give a master class in suckerpunching your readers. You have forgotten that Julie is a spy, and in a spy’s world no one is who they say they  are and nothing is what it seems.

This book is a wonderful piece of genuine literature. It is beautifully written (and if you get the audiobook, which I highly recommend, beautifully narrated). I’ve heard it said that even the most articulate American sounds crass by English standards, and this book kind of makes me think whoever said it might be on to something. Though Wein is American by birth, it should come as no surprise that she’s spent much of her life in England, Scotland, and other places with significant British influence.

It should come as even less of a surprise that Wein is a pilot herself. I don’t think any non-pilot could have truly captured the love Maddie has for flight, or how magical, beautiful, exhilarating, and sometimes terrifying it can be.

I have thought much about flying lately. I’ve had a few chances to go this year, only as a passenger, but better than not being up there at all. I met a young airline pilot at a party earlier this year and realized how much I missed being surrounded by peers who share my passion. I also recently rented How to Train Your Dragon, and found it odd that it captures just how magical the notion of human flight is so much better than most of the aviation movies I’ve seen. I also now understand the people who saw Avatar and became very depressed because Pandora is not a real place, I feel the same about Toothless. As an animal lover and an aviator I would love a pet that combines the loyalty of a dog, the playfulness of a cat, and the maneuvering characteristics and firepower of a F-35 J

About a month ago I was manning a recruiting booth for the Coast Guard Auxiliary’s Aviation program at a local Women Can Fly event, and I thought of Maddie as I saw these young girls stream in and out of the building. You could quickly tell who had just been up for a ride, see it in their faces. One girl and her father came up to talk to me, she couldn’t have been more than a freshman in high school, and said she wanted to be a pilot in the Coast Guard when she graduated from college. It is heartening to see how far we have come; yet disheartening to see how long it has taken. Women have been pilots for almost as long as there have been pilots, yet they still make up less than ten percent of the pilot population. They even today, in 2014, face outright sexism that would not be tolerated in virtually any other arena. People seem to think there is some magical quality one needs to be a pilot, and while they’re wrong about the specifics, they’re not wrong in general. It’s a quality that transcends race, sex, creed, or religion: It’s love. Love of flying.

“But it ain't all buttons and charts, little albatross. You know what the first rule of flying is? Well, I suppose you do, since you already know what I'm about to say.”

“I do. But I like to hear you say it”

“Love. You can learn all the math in the 'Verse, but you take a boat in the air that you don't love, she'll shake you off just as sure as the turning of the worlds. Love keeps her in the air when she oughta fall down, tells you she's hurtin' 'fore she keens. Makes her a home.”

(-Malcom Reynolds and River Tam, Serenity)

I’ve flown with men who have flown in places I have only read about in the history books: Guadalcanal; The Chosin Reservoir; Hanoi. I have flown with men who have flown counter-narcotics in Central America in a 4-engine piston plane, where 100 feet above the ground was considered “too high”. I have flown with men who have flown rescue aircraft into superstorms so others may live. Yet probably the best pilot I have ever flown with was a young woman, just a few years older and a few hundred hours more experienced than me. She was one of my instructors at school, and it was her passion for flying that showed through in every aspect of everything she did. That passion was relentless, and it made her relentless. When she wasn’t flying (6 days a week weather permitting), she was in the maintenance hanger, soaking up every bit of knowledge about each of the different types of aircraft we flew. She was very demanding, of herself and her students, and that meant sometimes she was a royal pain to fly with and learn from, but I never learned more, or was a better pilot, than when I was flying with her. Yet despite all her professionalism and just generally being a hard-ass, there was no hiding her exuberance that came from flying, like her giddiness when we (flying a light piston twin) received ATC instruction to reduce speed to follow a Citation private jet on approach (“Dude! We just got told to slow down to follow a jet!”)

My point in this rambling mess is that aviation should be the most, not the least, inclusive community in the world. We have all looked up at the sky, at the birds, and wondered what it’s like in their world. Those of us who know have been granted a special privilege, and we should extend a welcome invitation to all who want to join us.

Also, Codename Verity was a very good book and you should go read it J



 -Mike, out.

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