The Journal of Water and Air VIII

I have been told that the sound of guns isn't just coming from us, the planes have guns as well and I have been ordered to go help at my station rather then write. It is true that me doing this job seems meaningless if we all end up in a field in a fireball. I will return to writing when I have the chance.

I am no longer writing for the newspaper, the journal from here on out will be for myself, the newspaper can go to hell and I intend to tell them that if we survive. The newspaper is the least of our worries at the moment, we are no longer in the dirigible. While I was on it I never felt safe but now that I am in this small inflatable raft in the ocean I feel even less safe. It doesn't help that we are in enemy waters and stand to be captured at any moment, if we are found at all. I am anxious but the slightest shift might tip the boat and that would be unfair to the others, so instead I will write to pass my time.

I helped with the gunning as much as I could and I was told that I did my job well and efficiency. Therefore me being there can't have been a factor in the hole of our defense that allowed the plane to shoot a hole in us. We didn't notice it right away, not with all of the other planes around, but it was large enough that we lost a lot of air and started to sink. I couldn't call what we did a fall, it was too slow for that, and all that the captain could do was try and steer us away from the enemy. It is a credit to the captain's ability that we landed in the ocean but with our steel frame we weren't going to manage to stay above the water once all of the hydrogen was gone so we all took to the lifeboats that our dirigible had as standard issue. If we were closer to our own troops we would have been fine because we could have made it to a friendly port and gotten refilled. Had they caught the leak sooner they could have just patched it and it would have been fine. It was the heat of battle though and no one can be blamed for the slip.

I say that no one can be blamed but I think that the captain blames himself. A thousand things happening every minute and he thinks that he can keep track of every one of them. I make my living off of words and I can't start to describe his face as we watched the dirigible sink. There was such loss and sadness that I haven't been able to talk to him since. My words would be empty and meaningless, and they would be disrespectful to man with such a face, he has become a shrine of misery and I can't sully that with my attempts at comfort.

I can't imagine that I look very cheerful myself, all things considered. All of the things I wrote for the paper went down with the mail room in the dirigible, they were the last things on my list of things to save when I was given a chance. I was far more busy with things like warm clothing and food. My typewriter has also gone down to the bottom of the ocean, though it hardly seems important. Like I have already written, I will quit the newspaper if we survive all of this. They are not paying me enough to go though a shipwreck. Just as I was starting to get comfortable in my new home this is what happened.

To be continued...

The Journal of Water and Air VII

“He always told us you were bound for better things then he had had, that you were too smart for the ocean, he said he would never let you set foot on a boat. Did he ever?” was all the captain said and knew by my face that he had me. Father had always left Mother and I ashore when he went on one of his voyages but I had always thought it was because he didn't want our company. It was why I grew so close to my mother, she was always the one there while my father spent most of my life a distant figure.

“Just the same, if he said some much of this to you then he could said some of it at home,” I said bitterly. I don't remember a time when I have talked like this, to anyone, it's far too personal, it must have been the stress. I think it was the stress that caused the captain to sit and talk to me to start with and reminiscing was just a form of relaxing, I should have thought of that and kept it pleasant, but it was far too sensitive of a subject.

“I think you should think over your life a bit more before you condemn your father,” the captain said, standing. “I think you've been looking at what he does the wrong way. I know it isn't always easy to read him but he isn't as bad as you think. He was a good captain, one of the best.”

Now that I am sitting here and writing all of this I am getting more and more indignant with the captain, just because my father was a good captain does not mean he was a good father and the captain has no business telling me that he knows more about my life then I do. I don't have time to be writing about this now though, we are over our target now and I am supposed to be writing to get things for my article, not thinking about personal things.

The men are preparing the bombs below us I am told, though I am not allowed down there because it might distract them. Instead I am allowed up here, where there are all of the buttons that will release the bombs when they are ready. I ask why they aren't just always ready, to save the trouble, and I am told that it would be too dangerous. Everyone is very patient with my questions here, unlike with the crew, but sometimes they look over at the captain so I wonder if he isn't behind it somehow.

Our bombs have been dropped, I looked down and saw the fire and dust billow up from beneath us. I don't know how I would feel if it had been a city but this time it was a military camp, which makes me feel alright. Soldiers kill one another and that is how war works, but children aren't paid to fight and I think I might have felt bad if we bombed one of their cities like they bomb ours. I have seen the results of some of the bombing runs they make on our city and I wouldn't like to feel even partly responsible for that sort of damage. This is my first taste of death just the same however, down below me there are men screaming me for help and in pain even if I can't hear them. There is a sort of detachment that is gained in this type of warfare, you can't see the people you are killing, you can't hear them, you just press a button and they die, you can almost make believe you have done nothing.

I take back what I just wrote, there is another battlefield here in the sky, one that has now come to us. Though I knew that not all of the fighting happened on the ground, I hadn't thought of it being an entirely different layer here in the air. No sooner did I think it was all over and lower my guard as the report came from the lookouts, enemy planes were after us. I had never actually seen a plane in action before, I have never had any interest in the air shows they appear at, or the cocky men who saunter around and make their livelihood endangering their lives in them. Now they were after us and I had to think of them as weapons that could shoot us down or catch us on fire, instead of toys to entertain the stupid populace.

To be continued...

The Journal of Water and Air VI

This is the day that I have been assured we will complete our bombing run and then get out of the enemy territory as quickly as we can. I understand that all of the conditions are perfect but that doesn't make me feel better. The wind will be in our favor for getting away, the enemy doesn't seem to know that we are here because we have been hiding in the clouds, and it is the night of a full moon so we will be able to see our target. Just the same I almost wish we would be using our guns so that there would be something for me to do. I feel horribly helpless but I have been told that it is the best if I just pretend like I'm not here for the time being and write my pretty words about what they are going to do was the phrase one sailor used. I can't push myself on the crew so that is what I'm stuck doing.

I am sitting in the bridge, at a table out of everyone's way, where I will get the best view possible of all of the action. The captain set me up and has since not even looked at me since. The first mate did tell me to stop with the typewriter though, which is why I am writing in this journal instead as the events unfold. I suppose that the sound of me pounding on keys was too much for already frayed nerves and I should have known better without being asked. I will edit this later and write it up as a proper article since I don't write in here like I would write a newspaper column.

The captain just left me, he sat down for a few minutes to talk and he seems so calm that I am gaining confidence in how things might go. He says he has never had any real problems during a bombing run before and that while he will not be lowering his guard, he expects this one to go off alright. I hope it wasn't anything in my facial expression that led to him believing I needed comforting though, I have a reputation that I would like to build and if I am so easy to read no one will ever trust me on the crew. They are all so tough and determined that they put me to shame.

Of all times for the captain to decide to talk of old times, now when we are about to complete this mission, he sits down next to me again, sipping coffee, as cool as you'd please. I will write the conversation as close as I can remember because it has completely distracted me from my fear and concern. Nothing else is happening yet so I'm not neglecting work.

“I see you've been busy at writing for that paper you work for. I remember how proud your father was when you got into college, he couldn't stop telling me about it. He talked to me a lot since I was the youngest of the crew and sometimes reminded him of you. I was ambitious back in those days, lots of big talk came from my lips and your father told me that you were like that too. He said you were always talking about how you were going to be better then him. Then you got into college and I thought he would pop he was so pleased,” was what the captain opened with.

I don't see how that could be right, I know that the captain is talking about the same man as I know but I can't combine the two images into one person. My mother, when she was alive, was always very supportive and was the one who helped me through my studies. I would try to talk to my father about school and he always acted as if I was boring him, like he wasn't pleased with me in some way. The things he had to say my entire life about learning from books was never complimentary, and now the captain was trying to tell me that my father was proud of me for the learning I got from books.

“He had an odd way of showing it,” was all I said. The bitterness in my voice, I am a rotten actor, made the captain look at me sharply for a second and for a second I thought he was going to scold me for bad mouthing my father, like mother used to. It was much the same look.

To be continued...

The Journal of Water and Air V

You wouldn't think to see the sky today that there was ever a storm cloud to cross it. I mentioned this to the captain and he told me that it is often like this, both on the ocean and in the air, storms come without much time to prepare and you have to take your chances. He told me that the people in his command and himself get extra pay for the danger that they endure and he seemed shocked that I wasn't getting paid in a like fashion. I have promised myself that I will bring this up the next time I write to the paper. It isn't right that I run the same risks and get paid the same as I did when I had both feet still on the ground.

There is more to say then just this though about my conversations with the captain. He doesn't only make me feel dissatisfied and cheated in my job, he also gives me a new look at the ocean that I have never had before, even though I am a captain's son. It is strange I admit that I have to take to the air to really understand my father's element but so it has been going. My father is a very quiet man but the captain has many stories to tell, some of them even involve my father. I had never realized that my father went to places like China and India before I was born. When I was a child he always made local voyages where the longer he would be gone was a couple of months. He would come back as if he had never been anywhere and sit by the fire and dismiss anything I asked of him until I just stopped asking in the end. Voyages that I wanted so badly to hear about when I was a boy I now am learning about, and they are full of such danger that I almost wish that I didn't know my father endured them and I am grateful for not having learned about them until now. They would have given my nightmares if he had mentioned half of what happened on the ocean back in those days. The captain's stories are full of ships wrecking, explosions, storms, fires, and diseases that could kill the entire crew of a ship in a few days time. I am filled with new admiration of my father's age knowing that he lived through all of those dangers.

I have been told by several crew members, who take their pleasure in trying to make me uncomfortable, since they know I am not of this world of theirs, that we are growing close to the enemy. This could mean several things, it might mean that we will be shot down before we can do anything by guns on the ground. It could mean that we would me engaged by an enemy airship or one of the small fighters that the enemy has began to develop and are only now just taking to the air to challenge dirigible dominance. What we hope for above all else though is that we will be left undisturbed to make our bombing run and then flee in safety. There is a limit to the amount of time that we can remain in the air and we have to get back to a friendly port before that time is up.

Everyone is more on edge I have noticed, now that we are closer to action, it isn't just me. The captain has been speaking to me less, spending more and more of his time on the bridge with his many mysterious tools speaking to him. The crew's laughter seems more forced and everyone is speaking more softly even though there is no way that we could be heard the many miles between us and anyone listening. The arms drills have also increased recently, I am certain that the captain is trying to make sure his men will know exactly what to do, no matter what happens. I am not left out of this, like the captain said, there will be no idle hands on his ship. I have a post when we are under attack, at one of the guns. I will not be firing the thing, I have no training for it, but I have been told that it doesn't take a lot of training to hand the gunner whatever they ask for so that is my job. At least the gun I'm posted at is on the second deck so if we catch fire that will give me a minute more then the people on the first deck to get away, not that I suppose it will make much difference but it is a comfort to think about just the same.

To be continued...