Children of an Equal God

‘They came flying from far away, now I'm under their spell,
I love hearing the stories that they tell.
They've seen places beyond my land and they've found new horizons,
They speak strangely but I understand.’

Japanese mecha animes are something that a lot of nine or ten year olds are enthralled by. However, for this not so tiny tot, it exercised a hold on his imagination that was even stronger than the customary obsession with cricket. With all the inherent innocence of that age, I readily believed that giant battle robots in deadly combat and evil aliens out to enslave the planet were as real as the whacks of the ruler that I repeatedly received for daydreaming about them in class. With increasing age and increasing (though much slower) wisdom, I reluctantly abandoned those happy fantasies, but discovered the more conventional world of aviation. And secure in the knowledge that these dreams had at least a tinge of reality, I readily fell in love with planes ranging from the biplanes of the Red Baron to the Tomcats and Fulcrums of the modern era. Airframe, engine, speed, performance, armament-I lapped it all up. Lucky enough to have a fellow enthusiast for a close friend we endlessly discussed Spitfires, 109s, 262s, Phantoms, Foxbats and the like. On one occasion this enterprising twelve year old decided that now that he possessed all the knowledge there was about planes, it was high time that he designed one himself. In all solemnity, I drew up a design complete with all specifications down to chord thickness ratio and thrust to weight ratio. However, as may be expected all these years down the line, I would refrain from subjecting my masterpiece to the critical eye of any aeronautical engineer!

‘You'll never say hello to you,
Until you get it on the red line overload.
You'll never know what you can do,
Until you get it up as high as you can go.’

I worshipped pilots. Not content with just anyone who could fly a plane, I read up as much as I could about fighter aces. I liked Manfred von Richtofen of course, but Erich Hartmann-the Second World War ace with a score of 352 aircraft shot down was my idol. Other names nobody of my age (or most other ages for that matter!) had heard of also became commonplace to me. To me, a fighter pilot was the highest evolution of man, the perfect human being, the crème de la crème of any era. As for almost any other teenager, Top Gun simply reinforced that image. It was the one thing I wanted to do more than anything else in my life-every other career seemed so mundane and downright contemptible.

‘Is a dream a lie if it doesn’t come true,
Or is it something worse?’

To this day, at the oddest of times, an overpowering feeling of regret and frustration runs through me...

Progressing beyond the fierce dogfights of the Second World War and with the internet in general and Wikipedia in particular a veritable gold mine of information, I came across the aces of the jet age. I looked particularly for Indian pilots, but unfortunately, no Indian pilot after independence had ever shot down more than two aircraft. Patriotic duty done, I turned to the glamour boys of modern aviation-the U.S. Air Force and Navy with all their legendary aircraft. The longest war fought by these two services was in Vietnam and here I came across another hero…

Randall ‘Duke’ Cunningham flew F-4 Phantoms in combat in Vietnam from 1968-72. One of the earliest products of the Navy Fighter Weapons School (Top Gun), he shot down five enemy aircraft along with his Weapons Officer Willy ‘Irish’ Driscoll and the two became the Navy’s only aces of the Vietnam conflict. After his tour of duty, he became an instructor at Top Gun. Many of his experiences were indirectly used in the movie, including the scene where Maverick (Tom Cruise) hits the brakes and forces the enemy to overshoot. Duke subsequently went into politics and was elected to the House of Representatives in 1990. It seemed only fitting that one of the country’s best and brightest should now go on to serve his country at an even higher level.

‘Don't you know that all my heroes died?
And I guess I'd rather die than fade away.
These days - the stars seem out of reach,
But these days - there ain't a ladder on these streets…’

Randall ‘Duke’ Cunningham is now serving an eight year sentence for bribery, mail fraud and wire fraud related to Defence contracts at the United States Penitentiary in Tucson, Arizona…

‘Though nothing, nothing will drive them away,
We can be Heroes, just for one day.
We can be us, just for one day.’

On 9th July, 1945, a new diplomat arrived as First Secretary to the Swedish Embassy in Budapest, Hungary. Nothing in his life up to this point had marked him out for any distinction whatsoever. Having trained as an architect in the USA, he was unable to find a job after his return to Sweden and his wealthy and influential relatives had to repeatedly step in to help him find employment. But today, Raoul Wallenberg is the only person other than Winston Churchill to be made an honourary citizen of the United States, has been mentioned in the Guiness Book of World Records for the ‘Most Lives Saved’ and has been honoured in different ways by over twenty countries. For in 1944-45, Wallenberg saved more than 15000 Hungarian Jews from certain death in gas chambers. He did this by issuing fake Swedish documents to the Jews and then identifying them as Swedish citizens trapped in war-torn Hungary. On some occasions, he climbed on the roof of the death trains and calmly proceeded to hand in the documents through the doors that had not already been sealed, oblivious to the fire from the Nazi guards, and then demanding that the prisoners be released as they were Swedes. Near the end of the war, Raoul Wallenberg was arrested by the Russians and has never been seen again…

‘I, I remember standing, by the wall,
And the guns, shot above our heads,
And we kissed, as though nothing could fall,
And the shame, was on the other side,
Oh we can beat them, for ever and ever.’

There is only one member of the Nazi Party buried at Mount Zion in Jerusalem. This opportunistic businessman, like many others, had sought to profit from the German invasion of Poland. He hired Jewish slave labour and a Jewish accountant to work in a factory he had acquired in Poland. But by the end of the war, he was destitute because he had spent his entire fortune bribing German officials to classify his workers as essential labour and so keep them out of the death camps. All his business ventures failed after the war and he had to be supported financially by the people he had saved. Derided as a traitor to his race in his last years in Frankfurt till his death in 1974, his own wife summed him up thus-‘He did nothing exceptional before the war and nothing exceptional after it. He was fortunate therefore that in the short fierce era between 1939 and 1945 he had met people who had summoned forth his deeper talents.’ Decades later, a film about this unremarkable man won seven Academy Awards . The name of the character portrayed by Liam Neeson in this movie was Oskar Schindler…

‘No farther seek his merits to disclose,
Or draw his frailties from their dread abode,
(There they alike in trembling hope repose)
The bosom of his Father and his God.’

It takes great skill, courage and hard work to be be a fighter pilot. Harold Faltermeyer’s Top Gun anthem is still as moving as ever. But there are quieter forms of heroism that perhaps demand just as much courage. Courage that exists in often unremarkable and imperfect men and women. Their deeds are no less heroic because of their flaws. In fact, maybe their heroism is all the greater because they have to rise above those very imperfections. Most importantly, perhaps every fighter pilot is not so perfect after all…