Remembering Malcolm this day

“Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,

… put out my hand, and touched the face of God.”

– From the poem “High Flight”

by John G. Magee Jr.

They laid Malcolm to rest the other day, with full military honors. He was one of a thousand American World War II veterans who die each and every day in this country; if you listen carefully you can always hear taps being played somewhere.

If some people are the salt of the earth, Malcolm was a salt mine. If he said he had your butt covered, you knew you could cross it off the list of things you had to worry about. From many others such a promise means you had better be wearing armored pantyhose. Not Malcolm; he had spent much of his adult life coming through for people who relied on him, getting there when he said he would.

He started delivering on his promises to others in 1943, when he joined the Army Air Corps at the age of 17. Before long he was flying B-25 bombers, and when he was done flying for the Air Force 28 years later he had flown just about everything just about everywhere. Between World War II, Korea and Vietnam he flew 120 combat air missions, usually in big planes with big packages – bombs for the enemy and supplies for the friends.

He flew in the Berlin Airlift of 1949, helping to break the back of the Russian blockade of Berlin, Germany. He and the other fliers did so by landing huge planes loaded with supplies for the city’s inhabitants on an airfield so short that more than one of Malcolm’s fellow pilots died in a pileup at the end of the runway. But for those pilots Berlin would never have remained free, more proof that few things remain free without someone having fought and died for that freedom. Had Stalin known that men such as Malcolm were determined to keep Berlin free the Russian dictator might never have tried blockading it in the first place.

Such a man might reasonably have put all of his faith in his planes, his talents and his comrades (including his wife of 51 years). He also put a lot of his faith in his God, however. He wore his religion as I am sure he wore his rank of colonel and his medals; quietly and confidently. That a man who had every reason to put his faith in himself and his planes chose instead to put his faith in God spoke well of his God, and the wisdom of not relying solely on horsepower and RPMs to give you lift in life.

By the time he became my patient in the mid-1990s he had long since put away the uniform and the many medals, but he never hung up the gravitas, the sense he gave that he was a man of substance. He was dignified without trying, and impressed people without effort. He sometimes wore a leather “bomber” jacket that looked like it belonged on him, but never boasted about bombing anyone. He told me he had been a flyer, but not that he had flown 120 combat missions and had more than 12,000 hours of flight time. He told me he had flown in the Berlin Airlift but never of the courage it took to land a plane someplace where slightly overshooting the runway piled you into an apartment building. What he didn’t tell me told me a lot.

He did not tell me what kind of man he was, but he didn’t really need to; I could tell that. I could tell by his quiet confidence, by the way he asked measured questions and then carefully measured my answers. I could tell by the way he measured me; not by how smart I was, or how much I knew, but by whether he and his wife could rely on me. He cared more about my character than about my title, because as a patient he was looking for a doctor who could be trusted as a comrade.

Malcolm knew that I had never carried a gun, and never would, but that was not what he wanted from me. He knew there are places in the human experience where patients need their doctors to stand with them on the wall against the enemies of pain, suffering, and indignity. He wanted to know whether I would stand on that wall with him, and whether he could rely on me to cover his butt. He wanted to know whether I would stare into the darkness with him when Death came knocking and help him identify whether it was friend or foe, and whether at that moment it should be fought off or welcomed.

The answer to his question for me was yes, that I could and would stand with him. That such a man trusted me on his last flight out meant a great deal. It was a privilege to serve with him.

Erik Steele, D.O. is a physician in Bangor, an administrator at Eastern Maine Medical Center, and is on the staff of several hospital emergency rooms in the region.