Free Last Message by Shane Peacock Page B

seemed always about to close.
    But he had a giant spirit and a giant heart. He was an adventurer, a hero, a matchless storyteller, with a charisma that women, children and even the odd grown man, like me, could not resist. I feel deeply honored to have even spoken with him.
    He was one of France’s earliest aviators, taking to the air in the days when that meant taking your life into your hands. And when the French decided that they wanted to fly mail from Europe to Africa and South America, across deserts and oceans and jungles, only the greatest swashbuckling fliers were used. He was one of them. That first airmail service made its pilots into national heroes, who flew by sight and often crashed in desolate places. Everyone in France was astonished at their feats. The very name of their company—Aéropostale—became a symbol of courage and adventure.
    â€œAéropostale?” I looked down at my shirt. “So that’s what that’s all about.”
    The great “St. Ex” was their biggest star. He would land his plane anywhere, in any conditions, to find and rescue his comrades. But he was different from the rest. He not only accomplished these feats, he could retell them too. Speaking in desert tents or Parisian restaurants, he could rivet audiences, his magnetic presence lighting up his surroundings.
    Then he began writing, his stories set in the skies. Within a few years he was one of France’s greatest authors.
    But he couldn’t stop flying, and the danger increased. As he headed toward his forties, many of his fellow pilots had been killed. His own accidents, some particularly gruesome and spectacular, began to take their toll on his body and mind.
    And then the war came. He immediately volunteered to fight and was in the first plane to spot the Nazi panzer divisions thundering toward Paris in the evil blitz that started World War II. When he described it in print, it was poetry.
    After Hitler overran a divided France, Saint-Exupéry was devastated. A romantic who was angered by the brutality of war, he was fed up with the bloodthirstiness on all sides. He wanted to side with humanity. He fled to New York City. He was soon criticized as a traitor who was staying out of the battle.
    And so he came back, to fight the Nazis the only way he knew how.
    But he was well past his prime, battered and bruised by his horrific accidents and ill-equipped to fly new-fangled planes with complex instruments. His friends feared that he was giving his life away for France and freedom.
    He soon found his way to Corsica.
    But while living in the United States, he’d written The Little Prince , a children’s story often read by adults, about imagination, friendship and the human spirit, about what was possible in a time of hatred. It appeared in print just as he landed in the Mediterranean, just as I came there too.
    I soon heard stories about him from French pilots, tales that were by turns thrilling, sad and hilarious. The great man had been grounded more than once by the powerful American air command. They couldn’t believe that his request to report had even been allowed. He was ten years too old, broken, so large that he had to be shoehorned into cockpits, almost incapable of operating the smoking-fast Lockheed P-38 Lightning planes that were the pride of the US Air Force. Americans guarded these expensive flying weapons as if they were gold, and “Major X” (as they called him) often crashed them. He seemed to the Yanks like someone from outer space: he would forget to wear his oxygen mask at 30,000 feet, write while flying, read while flying, take photographs of parts of France he loved instead of what he was supposed to be spying on, knew little English so he couldn’t understand the men in the control towers (Americans who didn’t know a word of French) and often let his wheels down only seconds before landing, bringing ambulances hurtling to the airstrips. He