SALUTE

Before advancing a few choice bits of philosophy, speculation and what have you, I’m going to introduce myself. I do this so that you may promptly divest my theories of any importance whatever, and let them roll off your knife smoothly and without effort. That being done, you can proceed, if you like, to digest the illustrative anecdote concerning the little matter of Lieutenant Percival Enoch O’Reilly, Air Service, Regular Army, versus Lieutenant Ralph Kennedy, Air Service, Reserve Corps.

My name is “Slim” Evans, and I, in an idle moment in 1917, became a member of the Army Air Service. I still am, for the simple reason that I’d have to work twenty hours a day in civilian life to make twenty dollars a week. When I was constructed, the supply of brains, beauty and good sense was very limited. However, there was an overplus of noses and feet, so I turned out six feet five inches tall; thin enough to chase a fugitive collar-button down a drain pipe; and standing in a stooped position on a pair of feet so large that I couldn’t fall down if I wanted to.

On the credit side of nigh on to ten years as a flyer, I can put the fact that I’ve done practically no work, made much more money than I’m worth, have avoided monotony and lived through moments of great excitement, not to say thrills. Furthermore, I’ve met diversified people and events which, thank God, have kept me from being smug, complacent or bigoted about anything whatever. On the debit side of the ledger, I have only a couple of my own teeth left, and they do not meet; I have a bad left shoulder, three elegant and permanent bumps on my head, and more scars on me than there are on an ice rink after an evening’s skating.

With this background, you can attach as much weight as you want to this statement. People who’ve lived long enough and seen enough to comprehend a little bit of the complexity of human beings and the motives which spur them to their daily performances, will never be too hasty in damning a man to his eternal roast. On the other hand, they’ll be very cautious about attaching a pair of wings and a halo to any living human.

Once I did that. Everything was either good or bad, including people. There was no middle ground. As a result of that asinine viewpoint, there are memories that rise and smite me when the wind is in the east. R. E. Morse overtakes me and makes life a hell for hours at a time, as I think back to the dumb, cruel things I’ve done—and the fact that the same things have been done to me by others doesn’t help. Here, a girl I’ve misjudged; there, a man to whom I’ve said unwarranted things that I’d give my left hand to take back, and—oh, well, you know, I guess, if you’re out of your mental swaddling clothes.

Consequently, there may be some importance to be found in the fact that my own personally buried skeletons fade almost into insignificance before the climax of a situation that I watched on the Rio Grande, in which I, personally, had no part. Furthermore, the things I’ve seen—gone through, some of them, myself—in ten years of flying become almost like unreal, theatrical claptrap, in comparison with one moment, a mile in the air, that changed a couple of lives and made Penoch O’Reilly into a different man.