God, I hate Flying
On Thanksgiving, and being thankful to those who have helped us become better people
The Story
Whenever I have a guest visit my class, I start by giving them a brief introduction, and then I ask them, “Why don’t you start by telling us all about your life, from birth to present, in seven or eight minutes. Where were you born, where did you grow up, what sports did you play, what instrument did you play in band, what did your parents do, what were your hobbies, where did you go to college, what was your first job, your second job, and how did you get to where you are today?” It is the best question, and I always learn new things, even about people whom I thought I already knew. For example, I recently invited a former student from about ten years ago to come to the school and give a talk, and when I introduced him, I highlighted the accomplishments and big roles he had held since grad school, and then I asked my question. He then started at the beginning and told us about his life from birth to present, and I learned that before I ever met him, he had already had ten years of big experiences, which explained why he returned for grad school, what he is doing today, and why. But I also had a whole new appreciation for him, and it got me thinking about three other people whom I learned to appreciate.
Ed
When I was a young architect, I worked at a big architectural/engineering firm in Philadelphia. There were about 500 people in that company, and at one point, I was working on a huge, $300 million pharmaceutical campus project with ten buildings and a team of over 100. One day, I was riding in a rental car out to a meeting at the site, which was about an hour away, with three other colleagues of mine: a structural engineer, a mechanical engineer, and an electrical engineer (I know, it sounds like the beginning of a joke, but it’s not). I was in the front passenger seat, and we were talking about vacations. I was about to leave for a two-week trip to Italy – Rome, Florence, and Venice, an architect’s dream trip – and I was probably going on a bit too much, talking about how I was looking forward to flying on Alitalia—the Italian National Airline—to Rome. Then Ed, the electrical engineer, who was sitting in the back, piped up and said,
“God, I hate flying.”
I remember immediately thinking something along the lines of “here is a guy who probably comes from a blue-collar background in South Philly who probably didn’t go to college and worked his way up to engineer from draftsman and has never even been abroad before.” It was arrogant, privileged, snooty, and judgmental, and I’m still embarrassed to tell this part of the story almost forty years later. Anyhow. I was in my mid-20s at the time, and Ed was probably about twenty years older than me. I had worked with him for a while; he was a very nice guy, and we got along well, but there it was: That instant, awful judgment in my head. So I bit the hook and asked, “Why’s that, Ed?” And he said something like,
“Well, I was shot down in helicopters nine times back in Vietnam, and I figure I’m all out of luck.”
After a long pause, I said, “holy cow, what was that like?” And Ed said, “Well, I was lucky. You see, in the cabin of a Bell Huey, there are two rows of three seats, but the last row has only two seats, one on each side of the engine, which runs vertically through the center of the cabin. The problem is, when you get hit and are going down, even if the pilot can land, it is often on uneven ground so the bird tips to one side, and when that happens, the rotors, which are still spinning, dig into the ground on the low side, the engine breaks free of its mounts, and the guy on the opposite side of the engine gets crushed. I was never in that seat.” There was a silence in the car, and before I could think of anything to say, he said, “Another time, for the bicentennial, in 1976, my wife and I decided to get out of town because it was going to be crazy in Philly, so we flew to Europe for a couple of weeks. When we were flying home, as we approached the airport, the landing gear would not lock into place, so the pilot flew us back out over the Atlantic and dove up and down trying to shake the gear loose so they would lock into place. He told this story while flapping his hands up and down, mentioned landing on a foamed runway, and said, again, “God, I hate flying.” He had obviously flown a lot more than I had.
But while Ed put me in my place, he did it gently. Later, on the way back from that meeting, I asked him what he did for fun, and he told me he hunted for dinosaur fossils—apparently, there are some good places in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. I said something about dinosaurs being green or brown, and he said, “How do you know that? No one knows what color they really were – they could have been pink or purple for all we know!” It turns out he knew a lot more about dinosaurs than I did. The last time I saw Ed was over 30 years ago, so I searched for him online recently and found his obituary page. He died in 2007 at the age of 65 after a long battle with cancer. He was married, and he had close friends who said wonderful things about him in the condolences section, including one old friend who wrote that they were the only two kids from the neighborhood who went to Vietnam, and how they didn’t talk about it much. Ed had been a crew chief on troop transports, and he was highly decorated. I would never have guessed it because he was so modest.
Paul
I was in college in the early 1980s, and there were a few Vietnam veterans on campus, including one in my architecture school class. Paul had been a conscientious objector, so after being drafted, he ended up as a medic flying in medevac choppers—unarmed versions of the same Bell Hueys that Ed flew in. Paul was thin, with dark, piercing eyes, a black goatee, and a black beret, and he wore his army jacket around campus. He was always cool and relaxed and would slowly roll a cigarette using drum tobacco from a pouch, while presenting his project to our professors during a design review. My most striking memory of him was from December of freshman year, when we were making our final presentations for a beachfront resort hotel project in the Caribbean, and Paul had a site model that did not look like anyone else’s. The professor, who was younger than Paul, asked,
“Your classmates all painted their site models in a realistic olive drab color, and you painted yours Kelly green – why?”
There was a long pause as Paul slowly rolled another cigarette, and then he said,
“Well, I saw enough olive drab over in Vietnam to last me a lifetime, so I thought Kelly green would be a nice alternative.”
You could have heard a pin drop as all the color drained from that young professor’s face. I used to have lunch with Paul now and then and got to know him enough over the five years we were in school together to ask him versions of the same question I would ask Ed five years later: “What was that like?” One thing I remember Paul saying to me in his slow, easy-going way was, “Well, you have to understand, the bodies of those early model Hueys were pure magnesium—for the weight—so when they got hit, they would burn so fast that the only thing to hit the ground was the transmission.”
Bill
Back at that big firm in Philadelphia, I once had a boss who had flown in carrier-based torpedo bombers in the South Pacific during World War II. The Grumman TBF Avenger, the same plane that President George H. W. Bush flew, carried a three-man crew—pilot, rear gunner, and radio man—and Bill was the tail gunner. When the plane went into a nearly vertical dive, he was on his back, facing up, shooting at enemy planes that were trying to shoot his plane down. On his ship, there were 21 of those planes with three-man crews, but only seven of those crews returned, and Bill’s was one of them. Once, he told me a story about how the guns would jam, and he then held up his hands for me to see how several of his fingers were bent in odd directions, from having been smashed while he was rotating his heavy gun around. Then one day, we were in an important project meeting with a dozen other people, and a senior design partner was berating him about something in a condescending way. I remember having a neutral, third-person observer perspective on the whole thing and wondering what that design partner thought when all Bill did was stare back at him with a faint smile on his face. That smile came from a man nearing retirement who had seen so much life—and death—by the age of 21 that nothing and nobody could ever bother or frighten him again. Surviving a tour as a tail gunner in a torpedo bomber makes being yelled at by the boss look like small change.
The Lesson
One of the themes of The Reflective Urbanist is constant learning and growth—for me as much as anyone else. I admit it, I am always trying to get just a little bit better every day at being me and being a decent human being. One challenge in life has been figuring out how to avoid making the same painful mistakes over and over again, but instead, to boldly go forward and make new and different mistakes. A related challenge has been sometimes having to relearn the same lessons, for example, the idea that you shouldn’t judge anyone, particularly if you don’t know a lot about them. I’ve come a long way since that car ride with Ed, and while I still hear a faint, judgmental voice in my head once in a while, I recognize it immediately for what it is and then dismiss it. (Let’s keep things simple and just agree to blame my parents for this little flaw of mine.) For me, these experiences reinforce the idea that we all need to be curious about other people—and try harder to get to know one another better.
As someone who, for reasons of luck and timing, has never been in the military or had to worry about going to war, I feel fortunate to be here. So, on this day before Thanksgiving, and two weeks after Veterans Day, this episode is dedicated, with thanks and gratitude, to Ed, Paul, Bill, and the many other US Veterans who traveled far from home to fight in theirs and other wars so that the rest of us didn’t have to, and so that we could all continue living in a free democracy.
Be curious, not judgmental.
- Walt Whitman
If you judge people, you have no time to love them.
- Mother Teresa