 | Remembering Old Tigers by Benjamin Robert (Bob God) Taylor © 2005 |
| | Remembering Old Tigers by Benjamin Robert (Bob God) Taylor © 2005 |
It was on a lazy south-Florida Saturday in the summer of nineteen fifty-five that the sacred knowledge was passed to me. Mom was out canvassing the neighborhood soliciting donations for the March-of-Dimes and Pop-Pop was out selling fresh fruits and veggies from his truck. I wasn�t quite two years old at the time, although I remember it as clearly and vividly as though it had happened just today.
My Dad and I were alone together at home and I remember him speaking to me as though he knew that I could understand him and that I would remember his every word; and I do.
Dad was a master carpenter, so we had some very nice furniture when I was a child; not expensive, mind you, but well made functional and attractive pieces ingeniously fashioned of discarded scraps from varied jobsites Dad worked on. The coffee table in our living room on one-hundred-forty-first street was a perfect example. A plywood cutoff for the top surface, trimmed with 1"x2" fir sides, all expertly fitted with blonde wood-grain Formica� and standing on flat black art-deco wrought iron legs that today would be described as �ultra-mod a go-go!�
Mom always kept a pad of plain white stationary and a spiral-bound, lined stenographers notepad on that coffee table and Dad produced a red and a black magic marker from somewhere. He said that he wanted to tell me something important when he called me over, then he began to draw on the plain white paper. Right away, the magic marker bled through two or three sheets; Dad removed them and began drawing again using the tabletop as a blotter. When he finished the drawing and the story that went along with it, both magic markers had bled through the paper to the formica and, in addition to the sacred knowledge I am sharing now, I also learned that day that a person can remove magic marker from Formica� with spit.
What my Dad drew on that piece of paper more than fifty years ago was an airplane - with shark's teeth. It was perfect. Actually, he drew a side view and a top view, just like the old spotter flash cards for identifying planes, and they were both perfect. I cannot imagine what it must be like to just draw perfectly symetrical wings without plotting a series of points using dividers and a flexible french curve, but these could have been text book illustrations. The aircraft was a Curtis P-40 �Tomahawk� flown against the Japanese by American pilots before America was officially in a war with Japan. The American Volunteer Group of the Chinese Air Force became famous as the Flying Tigers under General Claire Lee Chenault; no other aerial squadron in history has ever come anywhere close to matching their incredible combat record.
My Dad was an expert on the Flying Tigers; having served under Chenault in the 14th Air Force well after the AVG had made history. He talked for more than three hours that day, about how the P-40s were armed, Chenault�s unconventional tactics, even the fact that Chenault was from the same neighborhood that Dad came from. This isn�t some repressed or distorted memory or an invention of prose; I have remembered this event vividly ever since it happened and, since that time, there has never been a time that I have not remembered it. Over the years, from time to time, Dad would make remarks about the Flying Tigers or General Chenault or relate some gem of Flying Tiger philosophy to anything from sharpening a knife to knowing which side of a pencil line a saw should cut on.
Much later in life, long after Dad made the trip to the happy hunting grounds - and after I had independently read everything I could get my hands on about the Flying Tigers, I had the opportunity in the late nineteen nineties to get to know Eric Schilling a little through a series of e mails he and I exchanged ... It was kinda bizarre to see e mails on my Mac from a man that I knew my father had worshiped as a great hero and whom I too had admired and respected my entire life - well, ever since that Saturday afternoon in 1955 - but nothing can compare to my having had that brief glimpse into history through his eyes or having got to know a few of his insights and opinions about life in general and the nature of geopolitical conflict in particular.
It's a shame that the internet only came along so recently, while at the same time it's a good thing it came along when it did! Corresponding with Erik and getting to know him even just a little bit was a priviledge that I will always remember with honor and pride, but mixed with a melancholy that my Dad never enjoyed the same opportunity. Erik, at the time that he and I spent online together, was a quiet, mild-mannered retired gentleman, but with very strong convictions about many things. The world is a better place for his having been here and I am sure that I can speak for all who knew him when I say that nobody can ever fill the void his departure from this world has left. May he never run out of fuel or ammunition, and fly high forever!
The sacred knowledge of the brave men of the American Volunteer Group of the Nationalist Chinese Air Force, passed down to me by my father, is knowledge that must not be lost in time; it is imperative to keep the legend of the Flying Tigers alive, not just for the original AVG, but for men like my Dad. He made a clear distinction between having served under Chenault in the 14th Air Force and the "Real Flying Tigers" of the AVG, but to me remembering the Old Tigers will always mean remembering my Dad as well.
NOTE: The Flying Tigers are heroes. Brave, couragious, freedom-loving, honest, straightforward gentlemen. Today the word "hero" seems to have lost its meaning. The word is tossed around as though it applies to anyone who simply does what any decent person would do in any given situation. Certainly, the firefighters from NYC and Belleville, NJ who sacrificed their time - and for many of them their lives - after the WTC terror were / are heroes; HOWEVER, the NYPD pigs who jumped on the bandwagon of the firefighters' good press and proclaimed themselves to be heroes as well, are most certainly NOT heroes. Contrariwise, Not a single pig suffered any worse damage than a broken fingernail that September eleventh - the cowardly bullies were all at local donut stands when the stairwells collapsed on the REAL heroes, but they're first in line to grab the glory.
That is NOT what heroes do. Firefighters are heroes, yes. Pigs are NOT heroes, they're just pigs, plain and simple; filthy, dirty creatures who wallow in their own feces with no higher goal than self-satisfaction.
Another irksome misuse of the word "hero" is its misapplication to describe a person who does well in athletics. Get this straight; being able tyo play games well does NOT make a person a hero. Unless an athlete endangers their own life to save the life of another person, or faces overwhelming unlikelihood of survival in an attempt to perform a feat of derring-do that saves others from harm, athletes - in and of their athletic accomplishments alone - are not heroes either.
