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The clouds that had hindered the Eighth Air Force heavy bombers just an hour earlier were breaking up now, their remnants pushed eastward toward Germany by the steady, prevailing wind. The pilots of Blue Flight had a far better view of the ground and the fleeing Germans than the bombardiers who came before them had experienced. The eager rookie flying Blue Three, Lieutenant Bobby Sample, could barely contain his excitement at the spectacle unfolding below. Look at those krauts! he blurted into his microphone. It's like a traffic jam down there. You won't even have to aim. You're bound to hit something. That briefing officer wasn't kidding when he called it the Triangle of Death. That name was proving quite appropriate. The Triangle was ten square miles bounded by two towns, Tron and Chambois, and Hill 262. Within that three-sided hell, the fleeing Germans seemed bumper to bumper, shoulder to shoulder. Their exodus looked like a river of felt grout surging eastward, being decimated by Allied artillery and then slamming against the dam of ever-strengthening American forces and the battered Poles still clinging to the hill. Knock off the chat, S-3, Tommy scolded, and don't get any ideas about shootin' them up either. They're the artillery's job, not ours. Stay well clear of the Triangle unless you want to get knocked down by our own guns. We got other fish to fry anyway. Other fish to fry, protecting Patton's wide-open right flank. His headlong advance to close the Falaise Gap had turned Third Army into a narrow salient over ten miles long, curving north toward the British line still miles away. The left flank of that salient faced the fleeing and panic-stricken former defenders of Normandy. They were still a formidable fighting force, just like any cornered creature, but they were quickly running out of ammunition and hope. The Germans the Third Army faced on their right flank were a different story entirely. Heavy in armor, well-supplied, and with room to maneuver, they were determined to slice through the American offensive and allow the breakout of their trapped comrades. Only the fighters of 19th Tactical Air Command were available to cover Patton's right flank. The four P-47s of Tommy Moon's Blue Flight were just a small part of that covering force. The radio was alive with the familiar voices of 301st Fighter Squadron pilots serving as ASOs. Herb Clinchmore was one of them. He would have been flying Blue Four right now had not his loudly expressed lack of empathy for the ground troops singled him out for some on-the-job training. I don't care if he was drunk when he said it, Tommy told himself. He had it coming, and it'll do him good. It sounded like Clinchmore's education was progressing nicely. He was already hard at work directing air support for Fifth Infantry Division, guiding jugs from another squadron to attacks on the highway junction south of Survey. Charlie Webster was on the air too. The sound of his voice sent a chill down Tommy's spine. Where Webster is, so's my brother. And voices don't lie. When the pitch goes up an octave, they're in one hell of a fight. Roger, halfback, Tommy transmitted. Copy your coordinates. Target concentrated vehicles with armor. Can you mark me a target line? Negative, negative on the line, Gadget Blue. Things are a little crazy right now. Target marking only, yellow smoke. Come in top to bottom, okay? Top to bottom. Attack out of the north. Less chance of hitting the G.I.s to the west that way. With one terse transmission, Tommy organized Blue Flight for the attack run. Samples, the rookie flying Blue Three, would stay on his wing. Jimmy Tuttle, in Blue Two, would lead the other rookie in Blue Four, Lieutenant Ray Esposito. Tommy and his rookie flew one high orbit over the target area to get oriented. Tommy led Esposito around a wider orbit to buy time and distance behind Blue Leader's run. But Tommy's view of the melee below was troubling. Every tank and truck, American or German, looked alike from the air.
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I didn't know where I woke up. The bedsheets smelt like wet cigarettes and old beer. A small room with fading pink wallpaper appeared as my bloodshot eyes focused. I was in some roach motel I didn't recognize. The bag! Cold panic hit me like ice water. The leather travel bag was sitting in the armchair. I sighed in relief. There was a pack of smokes on the nightstand. I reached over for them. It was empty. Lousy luck is all I've had since I took on this assignment. The thing that drove me batshit was that I didn't even know who hired me, or what I was even supposed to do. All it took was two things at my office to get this wild goose chase started, a note and a bag. Oh yeah, the attached 50k of crispy hundred dollar bills might have had something to motivate me too. It was a note scratched with some fancy writing. Whoever scribbled it had spent a fair amount of time with a book shoved in their face. The ends of the letters curled like the eyelashes of a troubled dame. I assumed it was a woman, probably a librarian, or a man who secretly wore women's clothes. There are plenty of freaks and weirdos to go around in this town. Nothing surprises me anymore. But the message threw me for a curveball. Blubber Island. Was this some sort of joke? But 500 c-notes don't bullshit anyone in my line of work. Whoever dropped this off wanted the assignment to be done without error. Then why the absurd message, I wondered. For a second I suspected it might be too good to be true. I put my ear against the bag. Not a sound. Anyway, it was too light to be a bomb. And who in their right mind would toast 50,000 of their own cash? It'd be a lot cheaper to just hand me the dough and let me drink myself to death, if greasing me was their intention. The bag itself was an ordinary black leather travel bag, except the metal zipper had been melted shut. The only way to open it was with a knife. This mystery client must be in some big time danger. Whoever it was didn't risk a phone call or quick chat. Even the message was as enigmatic as the hieroglyphics on King Tut's tomb. Who or what the hell was Blubber Island? I was reading the note when suddenly the phone rang. Shizzy, private eye. I spoke into the receiver, still looking at the note in my hand. It was a long second of nothing. And then he spoke. Yeah, hi. Male, Caucasian, in his late 20s, with a serious drug habit. I waited for him to continue. You got a gun? The junkie asked. I got two. Who are you, punk? A dead line. I reached into the desk drawer and pulled out my .357 snub-nosed revolver. Somebody was watching me. I peeked through the blinds. The sun was sinking down on a city crowded with people going about. The sky turned shades of deep purple and the color of blood oranges. The junkie who made that call could be baiting me to rush outside straight into an ambush. But staying in here was pointless if they already knew where I was. I took it as a tip-off for the time being. One thing was for sure. I needed to get the hell out of there before someone came looking for me. My senses were on fire. I put on my coat and hat before grabbing the bag, gun, and loot. The air I breathed felt like cold threads being pulled into my lungs. I flicked off the lights. Soft blades of light from the street lamps outside cut into my office. For a moment, I leaned against the wall. What are you doing, man? You're gonna stick your neck out for 50K? Why not throw the suitcase out the window and write it off as a rejected proposal? I pictured my body lying on a cold metal table in an autopsy room. Morticians in blue scrubs wearing white masks walked around me while I stared down at myself with eyes like two dead goldfish. Then, the doorknob on the front door jiggled.
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In the 1970s, there were two wars raging in my world. Well, that's not exactly true. At our home, we were not allowed to watch television or read the news. Vietnam was only a slight ghost of a thing we only heard whispers of. Well, this story is not meant to belittle the great tragedies visited upon our country's young men. It is about a much more personal war. My war. I guess for you to understand my very real connection with PTSD, you'd need something to give you a quick introduction to my childhood. Let this article I wrote a couple of years ago stand in evidence of my qualifications. I died on Christmas Day. It was December 25, 1968. A god lived in our old house. A god who didn't allow his subjects to come from their room until he emerged from his. Christmas Day was no exception, and he didn't emerge until after lunch. Four innocent souls stood in doorways, trying to get a peek at the tree or the little bundles of heaven wrapped in colored paper and bows. The day moved on. The eggshells placed carefully to catch unsuspecting little feet were scattered with loving care. Their crunching sounds were barely audible but screamed in our universe. Step on a crack, break your mother's back. Step on a shell, go directly to hell. A mistake was made, by whom unimportant. The face of our god flushed red. Gone was the Christmas god. The remnants of presents were scattered throughout the room. The remnants of breakfast was still on the table. The remnants of a fire smoldered in its place. And the remnants of sanity swirled, rose, and vanished into the air. It happened quickly. It always did. I turned to see the fist of god. It has risen and was destined to fall. The first punch took my breath even as I tried to avoid it, a sin in itself. The second busted my lip, the taste of blood its little gift. I knew the taste of blood well. The third to my stomach bent me forward, allowing the tooth, already roaming around loose in my mouth, to be expelled outward with a mouthful of blood and a cry. It's hard to say which hurt more, the pain or the humiliation. But the mixture of the two is why I don't remember much else from that moment on that afternoon.
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In many significant ways, Jim Morrison was indeed a most unique individual, and quite possibly the unlikeliest rock star to ever stumble across a stage. Morrison essentially arrived on the scene with an impressive collection of songs, enough in fact to fill the door's first few albums. How exactly this happened remains something of a mystery, since before his sudden incarnation as singer-songwriter, James Douglas Morrison had never shown the slightest interest in music, none whatsoever. He certainly never studied music, and could neither read nor write it. By his own account, he never had much of an interest in even listening to music. He told one interviewer that he never went to concerts, one or two at most, and before joining the Doors, he, "...never did any singing, I never even conceived of it." Asked near the end of his life if he had ever had any desire to learn to play a musical instrument, Jim responded, "...not really." So here we had a guy who had never sang, who had never even conceived of the notion that he could open his mouth and make sounds come out, who couldn't play an instrument, and had no interest in learning such a skill, and who had never much listened to music or been anywhere near a band, even to just watch one perform. And yet he somehow emerged, virtually overnight, as a fully-formed rock star who would quickly become an icon of his generation. Even more bizarrely, legend holds that he brought with him enough original songs to fill the first few Doors albums. Harrison did not, you see, do as other singer-songwriters do and pen the songs over the course of the band's career. Instead, he allegedly wrote them all at once, before the band was even formed. As Jim once acknowledged in an interview, he was "...not a very prolific songwriter. Most of the songs I've written I wrote in the very beginning, about three years ago. I just had a period when I wrote a lot of songs." In fact, all of the good songs that Morrison is credited with writing were written during that period, the period during which, according to rock legend, Jim spent most of his time hanging out on the rooftop of a Venice apartment building consuming copious amounts of LSD. This was just before he hooked up with fellow student Ray Manzarek to form the Doors. So the question that naturally arises, though it does not appear to have been ever asked of him, is, how exactly did Jim, the Lizard King, Morrison, write that impressive batch of songs? Safe to say that just about every singer-songwriter composes their songs in essentially the same manner, on an instrument, usually either a piano or a guitar. Some songwriters can compose on paper, but that requires a skill set that Jim did not possess. The problem, of course, is that he also could not play a musical instrument of any kind. How then did he write the songs? He would have had to have composed them, I'm guessing, in his head. So we are to believe that a few dozen complete songs, never heard by anyone and never played by any musician, existed only in Jim Morrison's acid-addled brain. Anything is possible, I suppose, but even if we accept that premise, we are still left with some necking questions, including the question of how those songs got out of Jim Morrison's head. As a general rule of thumb, if a songwriter doesn't know how to read or write music, he can play the song for someone who does, and thereby create the sheet music. But Jim, quite obviously, couldn't play his own songs. So did he, I don't know, maybe hum them? And these are, it should be clarified, songs that we're talking about here, as opposed to just lyrics, which would more accurately be categorized as poems, because Jim, as is fairly well known, was quite a prolific poet, whereas he was a songwriter only for one brief period of his life. Why was that? Why did Jim Morrison, with no previous interest in music, suddenly and inexplicably become a prolific songwriter, only to just as suddenly lose interest after mentally penning an impressive catalog of what would be regarded as rock staples? It certainly opens the doors to a lot of speculation.
