Ghosts

About four and a quarter years ago, I sat in a cold room in an uncomfortable chair with my eyes locked onto the screen of an expensive and sophisticated video player. The screen swam with gray criss-cross patterns. Data transferred back and forth on the screen giving coordinates, atmospheric conditions, and conditional release information for the product materialized in the sky by the work of my team. The room was striped in the garish colors of an old and tired unit established in the dawning days of aviation. Pictures on the walls proceeded through the years of fighting machines launched and recovered in the hands of men with uncommon knowledge of simple physics and smiling skulls on their jackets. The picture ran from the Curtis-Martin biplane prototype first launched off of a converted oiler through the heyday of Grumman’s legendary run of cats, Wildcats, Hellcats, and finally, the Tomcat.

The screen showed the middle of a town I have never had the opportunity to visit. The grids of streets slowly pinwheeled giving some scale to the enormous distance between the video capture and the target. Numbers cycled through while the screen switched back and forth between a tactical loadout of the plane and the resolutions offered of the town. The screen went back to its original target, white crosshairs arbitrarily selecting the tracked vehicle with the protruding weaponry. White ghosts milled around the machine, heat registering strong on the infrared. A mechanical and bored voice interrupted the silence of the taped occurrence. A new set of numbers on the left of the screen started a downward trend. The numbers grew smaller, into the teens, as a large and glowing machine pulled up to the track. The machine began expelling occupants, dozens of men who sat around smoking and talking. The truck full of men was not a target. The numbers fell past three and the screen flared white.

My job started then. I had to sit with my clipboard and estimate what the mess of white splotches represented as losses to the enemy. I had to estimate the number of dollars lost to our single drop of a ton of steel and PBXN-9. White shapes slithered away from the burning vehicle parts leaving trails of white, liquid warmth. None made it far before all movement ceased. The room I sat in was cold, as all steel rooms are, and festively decorated for the season. Behind me, the man who had dropped, or "pickled," the shot gathered his papers and his coffee cup.

He spoke from behind us, "Night, guys."

"Goodnight, sir."

"Oh, and Merry Christmas."