Letters From A Bombing Run

Ray waxes poetic in his reflections and gets transferred to utah

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Uh Second Lieutenant Raymond J. Conan uncapped his pen at four in the afternoon on May fifth, nineteen forty five, staring at a blank sheet of paper that needed to bridge the gap between a training field and a bank in Chicago. Ray was a bombardier, a man whose professional life was defined by the cold mechanics of a Norden bombsite and the precise physics of high altitude destruction. But his private life was a whirlwind of playful defiance. He started that afternoon's letter with a greeting that would become a hallmark of their correspondence. Dear Lamy Pie, it was a moment of levity during a week when the world was holding its breath. In Europe, the German surrender was only days away, but for a stateside trainee like Ray, the war was still a looming bureaucratic machine. He and his sweetheart, Shirley Rutledge, had just come off a spat, the kind of lover's quarrel that felt monumental in the vacuum of military service. Ray didn't offer a solemn apology. Instead, he leaned into the absurdity of their relationship. He told her he loved the way they went about things, even the part where they got mad and threw stones at each other. His peace offering was characteristically irreverent. He suggested they go out, eat some worms, and get back to where they started. To Ray, a relationship of consistently sensible letters sounded like a death sentence of routine. He took pride in the fact that they could send slams at each other better than any two people he knew. In his mind, their bickering wasn't a sign of instability, it was proof of life.

SPEAKER_00 1:53

He told her they'd lived through every battle so far, and he reckoned they'd keep doing it for 50 years, calling her a swell opponent for the half century of slugging it out he hoped they had ahead.

SPEAKER_01 2:08

The levity in Ray's letters often masked the genuine anxiety of a young man trying to navigate family politics from a distance. That same May afternoon, he confessed to Shirley that he'd finally found the courage to write to her father. It wasn't a standard letter of intent. He admitted he'd only managed about four lines before his nerves gave out, forcing him to fetch a bottle of beer. This pattern repeated every four lines until the letter was finished. By the end, Ray was admittedly tight, and his memory of what he'd actually written was hazy. He joked that he might have accidentally offered to marry Shirley's father instead of her, or suggested they adopt him to clear up the confusion. He predicted the old man would respond by sending them two straitjackets as a wedding present. This was Ray's way, turning the terrifying prospect of seeking a father's blessing into a farce involving beer-induced typos and hot foots. He was a man who performed his vulnerability through a lens of slapstick humor, a coping mechanism for a generation that was being taught to suppress everything in the name of duty. By May 19th, the setting had changed, but the internal weather remained the same. Ray was now stationed at a field he described as a quote, system of confusion. Based on his descriptions of the desolate, treeless landscape and the 30,000 officers milling about, he had likely arrived at Kern's Army Air Base in Utah. Kern's was a massive replacement depot, a city of tar paper buildings rising out of the alfalfa fields southwest of Salt Lake City. It was a place designed for transitions, not for living. Ray wrote to Shirley on a cold, windy night describing the base as a desolate void that only her presence could make alive. Without her, he was just passing time, waiting for the military to decide where his skills as a bombardier were needed next. He spent his nights on trains and in barracks trying to solve the impossible geometry of wartime travel. He'd calculated a plan to meet her in a Tumwa, Iowa, a halfway point where they might squeeze in a Saturday evening and half a Sunday, if the Burlington route trains didn't require reservations, and if she could slip away from her job at the bank by 1145. The desperation in these logistical details was palpable. He told her that being with her was the most important thing in the world, a promise he'd give anything to keep. The technical reality of Ray's role as a bombardier was always present, hovering just beneath the surface of his romantic longing. A bombardier was the man in the droop snoot of the aircraft, the one who took absolute command of the plane during the final bombing run. He had been trained to use the Norden Bombsite, a top secret analog computer that cost as much as a small house and required an oath of secrecy that Ray was sworn to protect with his life. If his plane went down, his first duty was to destroy the site with a specialized incendiary charge to keep it out of enemy hands. By May 21st, Ray sensed that the big it overseas deployment was imminent. He hadn't been told much, but the signs were there. They had started drawing overseas equipment. In the Army Air Force's personnel distribution command, this was the final administrative hurdle. They were checking legal matters and finalizing records. Ray was stuck in Squadron Z, so far from the center of the base that he joked he could only see the mess hall on a clear day. He was a second lieutenant, but the sheer scale of the operation at Kearns intimidated him. He joked that he got scared stiff every time he even saw a PFC, because the base felt like a machine that could swallow him whole. As the sun finally came out over the Utah desert, Ray's thoughts turned toward the philosophical. He sat in the sun, reading and thinking about the emperors and dictators who had the power to deprive millions of the simple pleasure of being alive and free. For a man trained in the clinical application of high explosives, his reflections were surprisingly sensory. He wondered how men could be so greedy for power when they clearly couldn't appreciate the power of being alive, the thrill of a sunset over the mountains, the ocean in the moonlight, or the fields of colored grass. He believed the men who started wars must never have felt the wonder of being in love, because if they had, they wouldn't send their people to die. This was his personal manifesto. The war was a defense of the small, beautiful things, the fried peapods and the music from a song to remember that haunted his thoughts. He even devised a clever, albeit screwy solution for their future social lives in Chicago. To avoid shocking bartenders, he suggested they start ordering their bourbon in thin, delicate wine glasses. It was a classic Ray solution, maintaining the rebellion of their spirit while wearing the costume of propriety. Ray's letters to Shirley were more than just romantic correspondence. They were a lifeline of ordinary humanity, thrown across a country, mobilizing for destruction. He obsessed over the tiny details of their future, asking her if her ring size was five and a half or seven and a half, and threatening to either step on her finger or perform fancy operating to make it fit. He worried about whether it was proper to give an engagement ring in a nightclub, admitting he hated the idea of doing it in front of their families. Even as he faced the prospect of flying B-29s toward Japan or Europe, a reality that he admitted he dreaded in his darker moments. He kept his focus on the bank in Chicago. He teased Shirley that if she didn't greet him with a kiss, he'd tell everyone at her work she had a cork leg and put snakes in her boss's desk. These jokes were his shield against the grim reaper's ledger of air combat statistics. He was a young man from Michigan, transformed into a weapon of war, desperately trying to prove he still existed outside the uniform by filling pages with ink and making plans for roast duck, hamburgers, and a life where they could be mixed up together forever. As he closed his letter on that May night, he told her he'd never walk alone because she'd always be there. He couldn't find the words for how much he loved her because, as he put it, maybe there just aren't that kind of words. Think about the person you know who would appreciate this story and share this episode with them.