이것이 전쟁이다! guns. Fighter jets of the Air Force were going into their whistling attack runs at almost unheard-of flat angles in order to stay within the thin layer of open sky between rice paddles and the lowering clouds. The mountaintops stuffing those clouds made them as dangerous as the masses of tanks and armored cars jamming the roads of Central Korea. Now, in this second week of the war I was to have a chance to fly with the jets while they tried to stop the Communists. Lieutenant Colonel Bill Samways was to pilot my Shooting Star. I was carefully fitted with crash helmet, Mae West, parachute and oxygen mask and then tightly strapped to the seat. Colonel Samways painstakingly briefed me on how to escape from the cockpit in case we were hit, how to regulate the flow of pure oxygen as we climbed for altitude before the attack, and impressed upon me the urgency of keeping clear of the control stick with my body no matter what happened. As we taxied out to the end of the runways to join the other four planes of the strike, it seemed as though every crew chief along the lines of glistening jets gave me a friendly and understanding grin as we went by. I always had heard that jets were noiseless once a person was inside the cockpit, but that was not true. As Samways opened the throttle for the take-off it sounded as though we were astride the feeder lines in a great oil refinery. The noise gave a feeling of being strapped to a rocket of godawful strength. It was one hell of a sensation. And wonderful. Within just seconds we were thousands of feet in the air and Japan was far behind. Samways nuzzled the plane close up under the wings of the other planes and I could see the two five-inch rockets slung below which converted these jets into flying artillery. As soon as we left the ground the noise disappeared. There was no vibration at all. Finding a rear vision mirror just beside my head I spent the next several minutes trying to take pictures in it which would show Colonel Samways in the cockpit behind me. I was thinking too of what good luck it was that this jet had Ⅲ. Korea 1950 l 33
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