The Book "Signs of Blue Sky"

CHAPTER ONE

THE AIRFIELD

The tin eagle

With two short signals and a strident gnash of wheels heated under the sabots’ pressure, the train stops to the station. I get down. Then, after a long whistle, the train starts to move again. I suddenly remain the only inhabitant of the modest platform. Like a gray veil, the desert stretches in every direction.
The poor décor triggers inside my soul a feeling of deep emptiness, having the brackish taste of shuttered illusion. I remain motionless for a moment, as for recollection, looking at the brick-colored walls, grinded by the wind and the rainwater. Two steps away from me the station chief appeared, like the guardian of a lighthouse. He watches me suspicious. I carry a bag on one shoulder, under the left arm I have some newspapers, and my clothes doesn’t seem to tell him much. I raise one more time my eyes towards the piece of tin written with white on a horribly blue background, and then I lower them to the man in uniform in front of me. “Good day!”
“Sir!”
“I’m looking for an airfield. Can you tell me how to find it?”
The railroad worker realize with whom he’s speaking, “Right! You must take the road behind the train station and keep it so until you arrive to an iron gate. It’s there.”
I look around me, just like searching for a familiar face to make my loneliness go away. I see none. I take a few sips of water from a water pump and I go, followed by a dusted dog, with its fur full of thistles.
Guarded on both sides by poplar trees, the road to the airfield looks like a parkway, above which the intense green of the leaves is arching. In the distance I can see some blocks of flats. All around me, fields. I increase the tempo…
This is no ordinary day. Nor the road or the thoughts, at which’s gates the memories knock…

I am unable to comprehend what kind of elements combined within me to create that sensible part which later gathered around it all the rest, I mean all that after a while I’ll learn that is named aviation. And I don’t know either what spring gave birth inside me for the thirst for flight. And when?
Maybe when the balance of my poor child’s universe was disturbed by the mute flights of the gliders from the Iaşi1’s flying club. The landing of a few on the Flămânzi2’s surrounding fields was stirring up true storms of happiness. The groups of children were set in motion and their hubbub was filling up the entire village. I was running ‘in corpore’ towards the site of the miraculous apparition. I was looking at the machine with a sick curiosity and I just couldn’t get it how those people, whom doesn’t seem too young, not too old, and had no wings and no feathered tail, could fly above the houses in that thing that was lying on the ground like a wounded celestial showing, on the yellowish carpet of the field.
Or maybe when I needed an entire evening to calm down from my silly crying, helped also by some slaps of my mother’s, because of the extremely bad fact that, being too small, I hadn’t been able to make it on time before the mother-plane, with the bird towed, took off towards home. My trouble was that the baby-plane had landed on a freshly cut alfalfa field and I, to be more agile, have abandoned my shoes on the road... I watched the show from the distance, resigned in front of the stretch of spikes, and with my little soul torn apart by the pain, crying.
Or maybe on that late summer, when hidden on a flax field, I was throwing, with the evilness of the raw mind, with rock to a utility plane which was spraying insecticide without being aware of the danger... I’ve just found out that a plane flying could explode if hit by a foreign body, like my rock... But contrary to my crazy desire to assist to an aerial catastrophe, nothing happened, besides the fact that for about two weeks my entire skin itched horribly because of the insecticide.
Or maybe on the nights of the hot summers when I was struggling in my sleep and throwing the cover off me so my wings could grow, for my colored dreams to unfold all the way, and my undisturbed and calm flight to cut the universe over the infinity of houses and people who were watching me mused...
It was then when the desire for flight was ignited within me?! Who remembers anymore?! I know only that those happenings recorded in a corner of my mind and covered by the life’s fine dust, have stirred up later a hidden impulse which lives inside us, maybe in each and everyone of us, and which calls us, pushes us to defeat the barriers of the ordinary for that rare moment when you feel, deep inside your being, the sky beneath your feet...
For some time the thought of flying languished in me, mostly soothed by my mother’s words, “I’ll show you airplanes!... You want to break your neck? I’d rather do it myself... I made you, I’ll end you...” At that given moment I had no words to fight back. But secretly, my mind started to imagine a lot, perhaps mostly out of the desire not to please my mother, who, I had a hunch, will give up in the end.
My father, always thoughtful and silent, had other problems on his mind at that time. He kept a distant air regarding my duels with my mother, rarely intervening, in an unconvincing way, ”You, woman, let him be...” My mother couldn’t take it and snapped at him, ”You don’t tell him anything! Let me talk my mouth off... Can’t you see what nonsense flies through his mind?! On a brand new day he’ll step up on your head. Cause you’re the one who plays his tune and lets him by his own...” Over my mother’s revolt, my father remained the same, ”Can’t you see that he don’t know what he’s talking about?! When he’ll grow up he’ll see what’s with these professions. If only he’ll be healthy...” Later the things tied up on an unstoppable rush that neither I nor they had too much time for hard decisions. The Military High School, the Military Aviation School, and now... the airfield.
The clouds become a little rarer. The light comes in obliquely, from one side. The air starts to warm up, shuttering the morning’s breath. I look behind me. It seems to me that the road is so long that I can’t see its end, and that I’m not here, but some other place, suspended in time, flooded by memories and stung by warm hopes.
The pleasant smell of the acacia trees’ flowers woke me up. On my right, from the road’s edge, a small forest begins. Among the trunks rising up to the sky I see blocks of flats. They have the air of old houses, consumed by the time and carrying the heavy burden of all things that they might have seen in their long life.

1 Iaşi = Major Romanian city and the Capital of the Moldova region
2 Flămânzi = The author’s place of birth, a Moldavian commune in Botoşani county, northern Romania
few children play in a small playground. Beside that, it was quiet. Only the desperate knocks of a woodpecker on the old body of an acacia tree are brought to my ears by the wind.
I leave behind me a general store and a barrelhouse, and there I am, at the end of the road. I have in front of me a metallic gate painted in an uneven blue. In the middle of it, locked on four robust screws, lies crucified an eagle made of tin. It has on its left and right two massive characters: ‘A’ and ‘V1.’ But that I’ll discover much later, after I’ve passed through the gate countless times. Now, in the first day of my arrival, I could see only the gate, as a threshold that I was crossing into the airfield’s world.
I stop at the entrance, a little disconcerted. Beyond the gate, I can see a wide alley flanked by a hedge, about two meters2 tall. All around is a flood of vegetation, which rises, pulling the earth’s sap upwards, in the top of the acacia trees. I can’t see buildings. Until far, where the alley bends right, the same passage uniformly dressed with the earth’s green and sprayed with small spots of yellow light. No trace of resemblance with the idea ‘constructed’ by myself on how should a Fighter Regiment look like. I look around me alienated and, for a moment, the feeling of emptiness that was following me since I put my foot on the train station’s platform returns. Embarrassed, I almost don’t know what else to do. Near the personnel entrance door, placed laterally, I see a man in blue. He fidgets on his chair looking at me with questions in his eyes, ”Sir..., are you looking for someone?”
”You know, I came here...,” I try to explain to him, but I don’t have the time to finish my words. He makes a sign, asking me to show my ID. I complain. From the back pocket I extract the ID papers and the service order. He puts on his glasses and then he realizes... ”Sir!”
”I’m a graduate and I was assigned to this unit.”
The man looks at me, like trying to measure me with his eyes. ”Of course...! Why didn’t you say so...?! Welcome and God help you! Best of luck,” the aviation specialist said and then, with a wide and ceremonious gesture, reached out his hand to shake mine. ”Pilot?”
I hesitate for a moment. In my veins the blood rushes like crazy, a wave of sweat runs down my spine, and my heart is rumbling in my chest... I carry inside the pocket a military pilot license, and in the secret I feel very proud about my accomplishment, but the small number of my flight hours makes me very sad... I mumble a mostly whispered ”Yes” and I grab my papers from the man’s hand. He sits down again on the chair from which he got up, letting me understand that I can enter. ”There are others who came?”
”There are a few more at the runway,” he tells me; then with a rushed gesture, he looks at his wristwatch, ”Soon the weather probe3 must takeoff...”
”Where’s the runway?”
He takes a short glance at me, and I have the feeling that I see reproach in his eyes, something like ’What, you don’t know?!’ A forced smile appears on my face.
”Walk straight ahead and ask someone again. It’s pretty far. From the first crossroads, to the left. You can see the planes!”
I was already on my way…

1 ‘A’ comes from ‘Aviaţie’ and ‘V’ from ‘Vânătoare,’ meaning ‘Fighter Aviation’
2 2 meters = 6.56 feet
3 ‘Weather probe’ is the Romanian military aviators’ favorite designation for the weather reconnaissance flight. This vital type of mission is carried out by a designated plane or helicopter which takesoff with about two hours before the beginning of the day’s flight operations, and performs a minute check of the atmospheric conditions in all the air zones that will be used for military flight ops; after landing, the crew of the weather probe will present the situation encountered to all of the pilots that will fly on that day. The Commander of the weather probe – usually a superior officer – will supervise from the control tower all flight ops – the Flight Leader

The light of the future mornings

I was overwhelmed by emotion. I don’t know if it shown on the outside, but I could feel it inside me rolling on every corner. The heart was beating on my temples, I had in my soul a shivering happiness, the thoughts were flowing torrential, from everything that had happened and was left behind, towards that new day, like a bridge between my dreams and the reality that started to conquer my being.
It wasn’t hard for me to get to the runway. Without many questions, driven by a certain sense like a calling, I woke up at the margin of the flight field. An immense field, mistaken in the distance with the Bărăgan1. I couldn’t see its limits, I could only guess the hemstitch with the sky’s blue, arched above like half of a sphere. In the distance, under the rain of sunshine, the MIGs were shinning clearly. The thought ignited in a young pilot’s mind flew away with lightning speed... I could se the runway. I could feel under my soles the caress of the concrete’s joints. The arrow of my imagination was running, and it almost wasn’t a thought, but had become a plane, pushed to the sky by its steel heart. There, where the ground that I walked on was uniting with the sky, the thought enthusiastically took off, making its way on the unseen paths of the air. Then, in that moment, I understood my road. The hard work. The continuous struggle. I clearly understood what I got to do and for what I managed to get there. Was it a threshold?! Perhaps. Because beyond it was the airfield, a real airfield and not a fantasy, were the planes and the people, and, above all, was the supersonic flight, ’the humanly supersonic flight’ which had carried me to the edge of the runway, and which I must sustain, carry it further like an emblem of manhood, raised as a flag in the light of the future mornings.
I stopped and looked around. I wanted to fully enjoy the moment that I was living. Inside me the smooth conversion from a state next to dreaming to the one of reality had begun, and I wanted to get enough of the sweet core of that long awaited arrival, after such a long hunger. I was entering a new life. I had in front of me a future that was starting right from my feet...
The concrete was burning. The air, now boiling hot, was dancing near the ground, covering the face of the earth with unreal waves. The planes were shinning and their silver was dripping down, covering the concrete and making you believe that they have endless wings. People were minding their own matters. I saw no bosses. I heard no orders. Just the planes, lined up on the flightline, were waiting...
The meeting was simple. Welcoming words, wondering glances, irony-touched smiles, jokes. I was surrounded, didn’t know whom to answer first. Everyone had a new name for me. I couldn’t get them all. In the head all were entering, but only a few remained, and I was trying to pay attention by building a reserved attitude, didn’t succeeding, and that thing was annoying me, making me feel a sort of envy, from which Bibi2 will save me not then but later, after the weather probe started taxiing prior to enter the runway, sniffing the air, preparing its take off.
I was standing in front of the alert cell3, a short building, hidden by bushes of pines. At the entrance it has a sort of a bower, where a few benches sleep under, arranged in the shape of a ’U’.
I knew the Commander4 from the time when I was in school. He came to us for a discussion about the flight and the planes. Professional guidance... I haven’t memorized very well his face, but remained stuck in my

1 Bărăgan = Plains situated on southeastern Romania, on the left side of the Danube river, from the point where it starts to flow due north; Borcea airbase is located in that area.
2 Bibi = Borcea MIG-21 fighter pilot callsign, Captain Dumitru Bălan.
3 Alert cell = Romanian Air Force pilots’ favorite designation for the building of the combat readiness duty, where the pilots on QRA live during the 24-hour shifts. This designation, ‘alert cell,’ comes from the pair of military aircraft prepared to be scrambled when the alert is given. The building also houses the flight mission preparation room (brief/debrief), the gear-up room, and various other offices and rooms.
4 The Commander that the author talks about is the fighter pilot Dorel Luca, Captain and Fighter Regiment Commander at that time. Today, he has retired from active duty with the rank of Colonel and as the CO of the 86th airbase, the modern day designation of Borcea military airfield where most of the action occurs on. Colonel Luca flew the MIG-21 fighter jet till the last days of his active duty, achieving the performance of being one (if not the first) of the three most skilled MIG-21 fighter pilots of the world! See the ‘Annex’ section of the book for more information about Colonel Dorel Luca.
mind the facility attitude that he showed when walking among those that knew him and among us, the little ones, who recognized him, the easy slalom among data and strictly professional notions, the unpredictable returns to the roots of the idea of flight.
I saw him approaching on the narrow alley. I had a starting and I think that my cheeks caught fire.
”You came?”
I stay mute, looking dumb around me, as if someone else supposed to answer that question. Clearing up, I try a form of report while I twist myself in something that resembles as hard as I could to an ’Attention’ position.
”Okay, okay! Let’s go to eat,” he says and starts walking. Like a flock of birds hearing a certain signal, everyone gets up. I join them. I’m surprised of the way that they’ve welcomed me. It was like we were living for a long time together and only a bad wind had took me away for a while, making me wander.
Caught on discussions, I don’t see Bibi approaching. I only feel him on my left. I slow down and turn to him, without letting him say something, ”You look really good in flight clothes...!”
”Nevermind the jokes. When have you arrived?”
”Once with this day which, look, will be clear,” I tell him remaining with my face turned to him, trying to catch his reaction... He looks at me again like he’d missed an essential detail. “I got it. Here you don’t have a chance to cure yourself, but this is your problem...”
”You’re speaking from personal experience?”
”What do you think?!...”
I don’t think anything. I don’t even pay attention to him. I’m happy and this is all that matters...

The sign

The mess hall, the snack, the multitude of voices, the wondering glance of the waitress, all is left behind. I’m outside. Everyone was leaving for the flightline.
”Wait up to see a takeoff.” I feel myself being grabbed by the arm. Bibi reaches his open hand at me, showing me a key with a piece of binder twine tied from it, like those wore at their neck by little children, for not loosing them. ”You’re probably tired. Go on and get some rest. At the ground floor of the bachelor’s block, the second room on the left.”
”And which one is the bachelor’s block?!”
He waved his arm like nevermind. ”Ask at the gate...”
”You’ll fly too?”
”Yeah, right... all day long... You’ll see. Now you better leave...”
I raised my arm as a salute, Bibi answered the same way, and left running to catch up with the others.
I was looking at them and almost feeling bad for not being with them. They were true fighter pilots, and I was just a dumb rookie who came to be cured of the flight disease in a Fighter Regiment about which I knew so many things as I knew about the Tooth Fairy of the childhood’s tales. I was, honestly, very jealous. Unavoidably I had to accept for some time the stupid condition of untrained pilot, who is prostrating to the supersonics like in front of the holy icons, and forgets from one flight to the other the number of steps that the red ladder used for climbing into the cockpit has...
I was walking. It was just me and my revolt. I didn’t even see the weather probe which was closing in rapidly. First came to me the engine noise bouncing of the runway, of the fallow earth, of the flight command post’s big building, and returning bent to my ears. The MIG had descended to only a few meters of the ground, but with a speed much greater then the one needed for landing. Suddenly, she screwed herself up into the blue sky with three right side short, quick barrel rolls. With a stifled noise, she released from the tailpipe a yellow-orange fire wreath a few meters long, repeated the barrel rolls on the left side and then, with a vigorous move, arched her trajectory by sticking the nose probe into the air above, pulling to the vertical like a white light, ignited by the sun rays... Mused, I followed her until high up, where she merged with the blue background of the sky which, only then I could see, had completely cleared up, looking like a real crystal. ’Good sign of clear sky,’ I thought and turned around, decided to drown my bitterness in a deep and dreamless sleep, in Bibi’s one room from the bachelor’s block...
It wasn’t hard for me to find it. A cube invaded by lilac and wearing a red tile bandeau on its pointy roof, mottled pieces of windows, and the door wide open.
As I came in I was hit by a wet and cool air, untouched by the hot whip of the sun. The thought of rest turned into desire. I searched for my key. Before opening I stopped. It seemed to me that I was violating a territory that wasn’t yet mine... Finally, I gave up. Inside myself the need for rest had defeated timidity, although I was expecting a voice coming from somewhere to yell on my back, ’Hey, stranger, what you’re doing here?’...
But nobody yelled. The interior accepted me.
The modest space of the one room started with the small lobby, plastered up on a pale white. On the left was the bathroom door, a sink and a shower. Inside the big room, two extensible sofas were placed on each side of it, on the left and on the right, under the window was a table and two chairs, on a corner was a locker used as a wardrobe, and on the opposite corner were some improvised shelves, on which a few books were resting. I looked skeptically at the sofa on the right, it seemed too short for me, I choose the one on the left, and, without much thinking, I took off my shoes and lied down. I was unwashed and full of dust. My hair was dripping sweat. I smelled like a sweated horse. But above all these, the tiredness fell like a heavy boulder.

The fourth waterman1

I woke up with my face being pushed against the pillow by a big palm that grabbed the back of my neck. I turned around. Bibi was standing near my bed. He had his face lost in a cranked grin, and in his left hand was a package. ”Get up and eat!”
The blood-red sunset could be seen through the raised curtain. My eyesight was unclear. The body was still asleep. I took a look in the mirror: my moustache was weary and on the right cheek I had a wristwatch-shaped red mark. I have slept soundly.
Bibi lit up a cigarette as he was sitting on the other sofa, releasing the smoke in small round clouds.
”You flew?” I asked him while unfolding the package decided to grab something to eat.
”I did, but I’d rather woudn’t...”
”Why?”
Bibi exploded, ”It was a time when everything worked perfectly. I was doing some heavenly landings, the things were flowing simply and naturally, I had the feeling that I know enough in order to master the plane, the flight days were passing quickly, I was getting onboard the plane like I was going to a hell of a nice ride, everything was smooth and nice until, without realizing immediately, the airfield life changed completely.”
”You changed, or...?”
”The hell I did,” he almost yelled and got up on his feet nervous, measuring with his paces the distance to the table to bring closer the ashtray. ”What change do you see in me, when the flight days are getting rarer!? We either don’t have tires or we don’t have fuel or the weather isn’t on our side and, on top of that, some goddamn order keeps us on the ground...”
”Stop! Give me a break. How should I know all this?!”
”You don’t, but you’re gonna feel it. I’d better shut up. It’s just that I don’t want to discourage you,” he said making a sign of giving up with his hand.
I just finished eating. I wrapped up the paper and the remains and I asked with my eyes where the garbage box was.
”See in the bathroom,” he told me, and, with a nervous gesture, he put out his cigarette, squashing it against the ashtray, for then to disappear through the door without adding something else.
I was alone again. The silence of the room suddenly became sinister. I could feel myself deepening inside an unknown that I wasn’t ready for.
I pulled the bag near the bed and I start to unpack the most needful things: the shaving set, the uniform, the flight suit... I was in the bathroom, just arranging a few things on the little shelf above the sink, when Bibi came back with a bottle of ’Fetească Albă’ wine. He pulled out from a place unknown to me two glasses of different shapes and sizes, put them on the table, and then he poured from the yellow-colored liquid. With a glass in one hand, he reached the other to me, remaining on a waiting position. I took it.
”Break a leg!”
”Damn right,” I said and I drank. The wine had a pleasant taste, and my throat dried up by the sleep received it happily. ”You stay here alone?”
”No, I stay with Moşu’2. I think you know him. He’s on vacation for a month.”
I knew Moşu’ and I was sincerely glad for his vacation… For a while I had a place to sleep assured. Bibi read my mind, “If you want you can stay here till you find a place of your own.”
“Thanks,” I said and I got back to the bag abandoned near the bed. A worry less…
“Yet, it would be a problem,” Bibi said visibly in a maze pointing with his free arm towards the sorry excuse for a wardrobe in the corner.

1 Fourth waterman = Expression that the author uses to explain the condition of the young and inexperienced pilot who is at the beginning of his career, comparing him with the last waterman from a boat of four, the one who must work hard to keep up with the others, his position showing the degree of experience he accumulated at that time…
2 Moşu’ = Callsign of a Borcea airbase MIG-21 fighter pilot, Captain Valentin Blânda, meaning ‘the ol’ man’

I assured him that I’ll be okay. I lined up my clothes across the bed, I grouped them as much as possible by destination and finally discovered that three nails a little bit longer will reasonably solve my need for a wardrobe… On top of that, I had at my feet a pile of paper sheets used for packing, kind of a crumpled, but that wasn’t much of a problem. “Can I find three nails at you?...”
He got up and brought me, from the neighbors probably, three big nails and a piece of iron bulged at one end. I already had my eyes on the lobby’s watery white wall. I stretched up the sheets which miraculously had remained intact. Bibi was watching me leaned against the door frame, then he entered the room, I heard the noise of a drawer, and he came back with a handful of taps. I wanted to jump for joy, but I didn’t. With the paper attached to the wall downwards the ‘hang tree’ I started to arrange my clothes: the uniform on the first nail from the door, the civilian clothes on the middle one and the flight suit on the last one. Simple as that. I took one step back and I admired for a moment my masterpiece…
Bibi was back on the sofa and was smoking. I raised my glass and drank again. “And how did you say it’s the life around here?”
He remained silent for a few minutes. I could see on his face the effort he made to pull himself together, it wasn’t easy for him to speak, and I was asking too much from him in just one question.
“You’re sure that what I have to say can help you in some way?”
“Don’t worry, I’m one of those who don’t give up that easily in front of the cruel reality.”
“Oh, nooo! I don’t even think at this kind of problem. I know you enough to be convinced that you won’t give up. I wanted to tell you that the life of the airfields, the life of those who live here, had diluted. The times have changed. Those years, you know what years, remained only in the books of Doru Davidovici1 and in the memories of the elders. You’ll meet them. Watch them carefully and you’ll feel very clear this!”
“You know, yet I don’t quite get it… basically the people are the same. Serving Her Majesty THE FLIGHT, in a blink of an eye they became her servants…”
“Take it easy! I’m not talking about this. I want to say that, in time, the pilot’s liberty to manifest what he really is was diminished. Orders, stipulations and instructions came from every direction, restricting him inside a slow-working training system, forcing him to subdue the will, to order it on imposed directions like inside a narrow corridor through which, to pass, you have only one way.”
“Now I understand. You’re prone to…”
“Forget about that,” he interrupted me. “You’re forced by the circumstances to suppress the minimum doses of professional freedom, to sign yourself your own lose of pilot skills.”
“In this situation you have an excuse, although is not good for a pilot to look for excuses. Misbehavior is a manifestation of the natural laws. It’s a part of you, it belongs to the people and you don’t bear the entire responsibility for its apparition. The mistake isn’t your fault, but your trouble…”
“Perfect! But convince them too of your truth… As long as for any limping you’re shot in the wing, the smell of the gun powder follows you like a curse… You’re naïve, Foozie2!”
I shut up. I cowered myself like on a free-fall. I don’t know how much time I stood like that. Bibi respected my silence. After a while I reached to the table, took the glass and drank. All of it. Bottoms up…
The dim light coming from the lightbulb hanging from the ceiling was raining above everything a greasy light. I told Bibi something, perhaps a joke, he laughed loud and poured again into the glasses. The silence was shuttered…
He took me until my head started to spin through all of the corners of the airfield, to the hangars, the mess hall and the flight preparation room, from the ‘white house3’ to the ‘yellow house4,’ we stopped at the alert cell and we ‘took off’ a few times, we got back or didn’t got back, we ‘died a little bit with everyone’ and we resurrected again, keeping the promise that, no matter what’s gonna be, we’ll keep our wings safe from shots… We dripped a few drops of wine on the floor. For one moment, we kept quiet. Afterwards, we went crazy again. Bibi updated me on the local gossip, the chiefs were in too, like in almost all of the subordinates’ discussions, we took a little tour through the ‘street fauna’ till each one calmed down on his own bed, covering our thoughts with what we, then and there, apart, had: him, memories, and I, hopes… Ingrate condition of fourth waterman…
The wine was over. The gray cigarette smoke was floating in the room. Bibi opened the window. It was pretty late. From one side, the full moon’s silver light was shivering over the field. The chill of the night was doing to me good. The thoughts were coming home, entering inside me to rest. The last one, which came home harder, before I was unconscious, lingered one moment under the forehead, undecided: on the evening of my arrival I drank; I knew not exactly what for; I drank maybe for that day of beginning, for the days that were to come, for the airfield that was starting right from our tall walls room, room to which, I was feeling, I started to belong.
After that, I don’t know any further.

1 Doru Davidovici (1945-1989), famous Romanian Air Force pilot, known especially for his writings, on which he portrayed like no one else on this side of the world the flight, the pilots and the life on the airfield. Lieutenant-Colonel Davidovici died on April 20th 1989, crashing with the dual control MIG-21UB no. 6946 red (in the first cockpit, Lieutenant Dumitru Petra) while returning to base after a training sortie. See ‘Annex’ for more information about Doru Davidovici
2 Foozie = Callsign of the author of this book and main narrator, Colonel Dumitru Berbunschi, Lieutenant at that time
3 ‘The white house’ = Nickname popular among the Borcea airbase personnel for the building of the 86th Fighter Bomber Regiment’s Commanding Staff
4 ‘The yellow house’ = Popular nickname for the building which contains the bureaus of the maintenance and logistics personnel assigned to the 86th Fighter Bomber Regiment at Borcea airbase

The acceptance

You don’t enter too easy inside the universe of an airfield.
Even if the first days make you have general opinions with which you get along easily and your thoughts calm down, you think you find out everything and nothing can surprise you, well, it isn’t like that. Above your will to integrate yourself and to understand, hover fatally the unseen laws that govern the existence of the people of these isolated fortresses. You don’t see them and nobody cries them to your face, and only when you start to convince yourself and to enlighten those that you live among that you came there to stay, that you’re not up to pointless travels separated by a summer or a fall, between two seasons of professional villeggiatura, you begin to feel them. You find out that you’re never gonna get pass them by forcing them. You know the fortress if you play by the rules. No compromises.
I had quite a few days since I came on the airfield. My roads to the runway were getting more and more numerous. I was passing near the planes humbly, searching to find out as many as I could by trying to look free and easy, but being very hardly able to make my clumsiness go away.
After the graduation, we were seven pilots that ‘landed’ on the Fighter Regiment. We hardly broke away from the habit developed in the imposed monkhood years lived in the Military Academy. We went everywhere together. When one of us remained alone, uncovered, like a baby too soon weaned by its mother, the things suddenly changed. We were becoming suddenly vulnerable, we were stuttering and losing our words. Shy, overcame by everything we saw, we had not the courage to speak if the others weren’t around. We haven’t had yet the needed discrimination to help us separate, finally, from the flock. We were continuously faithful to the nest in which we grew up. Manole1 was the ideologist, Piticul2 the one with the arrangements, Bibi with the orientation, Mircea3 was chief regarding the underground matters and the things beneath things, Raţă4 was the agitator, Patrocle5 our delegate to the arguments, Ciuru6 the uncrowned leader, and I…, around them. We cried our needs in one voice and we haven’t had clear in our minds the possibility of existing independently one from another.
In time, the crew got separated. The floating courses got split up, and the boats were forced to face the sea with the power of their own paddles.
I’ve searched out for friends. I’ve learned not to disrupt people from their own works and to let them do their job the best they could, to listen them without speaking and to respect their silence. I was changing like the wind. Living out of compromises. Killing time from one day to the other by choking myself with boring discussions. I wasn’t flying. And maybe that was why all these were flowing, I don’t know if towards hell or heaven, perhaps that’s the way it supposed to be, for finally the brain to completely awake and start searching, asking questions, finding viable answers.
… Then came the time of the flight readiness duty. The airfield lives like a giant eye, always awake, scouting the corners of the sky. The wake is its permanence.
At the alert cell I found Henţ7. He greeted me cordially. He made a sign to me, inviting me to climb into the cockpit of the ‘second degree8’ fighter. I was waiting. He climbed on the edge of the cockpit and with a

1 Manole = The author refers here to Lieutenant Emil Dulman, Borcea airbase MIG-21 fighter pilot
2 Piticul = Callsign of a Borcea airbase MIG-21 fighter pilot, Lieutenant Viorel Baciu, meaning ‘the midget’
3 Mircea = Borcea airbase MIG-21 fighter pilot, Lieutenant Mircea Fuşcă
4 Raţă = Callsign of a Borcea airbase MIG-21 fighter pilot, Lieutenant Sorin Tănăsie, meaning ‘the duck’
5 Patrocle = Callsign of a Borcea airbase MIG-21 fighter pilot, Lieutenant Marian Patraş; ‘Patrocle’ is the name of a dog from a popular Romanian writing for kids
6 Ciuru = Callsign of a Borcea airbase MIG-21 fighter pilot, Lieutenant Dan Buciuman, meaning ‘the griddle’
7 Henţ = Callsign of a Borcea airbase MIG-21 fighter pilot, Captain Adrian Edu, meaning ‘hands’ (from soccer); a few years after, in 1992, Major Edu will be killed in the crash of the MIG-29UB dual control fighter no. 48 red that he and Lieutenant-Colonel Ion Tudor were flying, crash which occurred on the MK airbase runway
8 ‘Second degree’ = Type of RoAF military aircraft readiness; the ‘second degree’ aircraft is the one maintained on low readiness, able to takeoff within eight to twelve minutes from the moment when the order had been given – see also ‘first degree’ readiness

slow voice asked me, “Talk to me, Foozie!...”
I began. “The cockpit of the plane represents the place where the pilot, strapped on, tries to make a liv…”
In the next second I was feeling the speedometer trying to crush my forehead. I was feeling myself like I’ve swallowed and entire apple, and on the back of my head I had a rock in the shape of a fist…
“Wake up and lose the poetry!...”
I start to clatter about al kinds of contacts and buttons, dials and indicators, panels and switchboards. Anyhow, I don’t recall saying all two hundred sixty-eight of them. But I recall that Henţ took his time to carry me through all of his past flights, through my future flights, he took me up and down until I, numb and reverted in all of my old thoughts, went down the crewladder and remained next to him, having the look of the most humble man on earth. In my eyes, Henţ was no more the teenager lost among pilots, his musketeer mustache changed his face overnight, and I understood something from all that being first class pilot means and discovered without feeling a new and strange sentiment imbedded in my heart: to know…, to fly…, to work and later to be able to smile condescending to the others…
Much later I’ve understood even better that only there in the edge of the runway you find out the truth about your profession and you can, from one look within yourself and the others, to measure its meaning. And if when you’re far from the airfield and in your soul can appear doubts and fears alike, unjustified sometimes, when you enter the house that prepares your departures and then welcomes your arrivals, things change. Deep within yourself a huge force rebirths, strengthening you. You put on the flight boots and tighten the laces of the G-suit with a sort of a joy, you arm yourself with an almost savage courage, and the uncertainties disappear, devoured by the shadow of the determination. You become a different man. A man of the airfield…

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