literally sticking to his guns until he completed his mission under ferocious enemy
fire.Good! Now the trick was to keep the plane aloft long enough to accomplish two
objectives: first, get far enough away from the island to allow rescue from the sea
before capture or killing by the enemy; second, give his planemates time to
parachute out of the burning aircraft.The TBM sputtered on its last few hundred yards. Unbeknownst to Bush, one man
freed himself. Neither fellow squadron pilots nor Bush ever were sure which
crewmember this was. As he jumped, however, his parachute snarled and failed to
open. [fn 6]Green writes that when Bush was swimming in the water, he realized that "his crew had
disappeared" and that "the loss of the two men numbed Bush."
For the 1992 presidential campaign, the Bushmen have readied yet another rehash of the
adulatory "red Studebaker" printout in the form of a new biography by Richard Ben
Cramer. This is distinguished as a literary effort above all by the artificial verbal
pyrotechnics with which the author attempts to breathe new life into the dog-eared Bush
canonical printout. For these, Cramer relies on a hyperkinetic style with non-verbal
syntax which to some degree echoes Bush's own disjointed manner of speaking. The
resulting text may have found favor with Bush when he was gripped by his hyperthyroid
rages during the buildup for the Gulf war. A part of this text has appeared in Esquire
Magazine. [fn 7] Here is Cramer's description of the critical phase of the incident:
He felt a jarring lurch, a crunch, and his plane leaped forward, like a giant had
struck it from below with a fist. Smoke started to fill the cockpit. He saw a tongue
of flame streaming down the right wing toward the crease. Christ! The fuel tanks!He called to Delaney and White--We've been hit! He was diving. Melvin hit the
tower dead-on--four five hundred pounders. West was on the same beam. Bush
could have pulled out. Have to get rid of these bombs. Keep the dive....A few
seconds...He dropped on the target and let 'em fly. The bombs spun down, the plane
shrugged with release, and Bush banked away hard to the east. No way he'd get to
the rendezvous point with Melvin. The smoke was so bad he couldn't see the
gauges. Was he climbing? Have to get to the water. They were dead if they bailed
out over land. The Japs killed pilots. Gonna have to bail out. Bush radioed the
skipper, called his crew. No answer. Does White know how to get to his chute?
Bush looked back for an instant. God, was White hit? He was yelling the order to
bail out, turning right rudder to take the slipstream off their hatch...had to get
himself out. He leveled off over water, only a few miles from the island...more,
ought to get out farther.... that’s it, got to be now...He flicked the red toggle
switch on the dash--the IFF, Identification Friend or Foe --supposed to alert any