Barry Hanna is recognized as one of our nation’s finest contemporary writers. Here, Hannah reads an excerpt from his story Testimony of Pilot.

Who had Barry escorted B-52s on bombing missions in North Vietnam. He was catapulted off the bottom. Richard in his suit at 100 degrees temperature, often at night, and put the F-4 when all it could get. The tiny cockpit, the immense, long, $2 million fuselage, wings, tail and jet engine quad. Barry, the genius master of his Dragon flying up to 20,000ft, had to be cool.

All his trips want this easy. He’d have to blast out in daytime and get with a B-52s, and a Sam missile would come up among them. Two of his mates were taken down by these missiles, but Quad Barry, as on saxophone, had endless learned technique. He’d put his jet perpendicular in the air and make the Sam look silly.

Even shot down two of them. Then one day in daylight, a MiG came floating up level with him and a squadron quad. Couldn’t believe it. Others in the squadron were shot, but Quad Barry knew where and how the MiG could shoot. He flew below the canons and then came in behind in the other. MiG wanted one of the B-52s and not mainly him, but MiG was so concentrated on the fat B-52 that he forgot about Quad Barry.

It was really an amateur suicide pilot in the Mag Quad. Barry got on top of him and let down a missile, rising out of the way of it. A missile blow off the tail of the mag. But then quad Barry want to see if the man got out of the cockpit. He thought it would be pleasant. Is a fella got out with his parachute working and quad.

Barry saw that the fella wanted to collide his wreckage with a B-52. So Quad Barry turned himself over and content evaporated. The pilot and cockpit. It was the first man he’d killed.

Tags: Fiction