Free Old Songs in a New Cafe by Robert James Waller

either money or adventure or both, and it was impossible to gain much of the first without acquiring a considerable amount
     of the latter.”
    Some were members of Claire Chennault’s dashing American Volunteer Group—the Flying Tigers—mustered out of various branches
     of the U.S. military in 1941 to fly P-40 fighter planes with tiger teeth painted on the air coolers in defense of China. When
     the AVG was disbanded, sixteen of the remaining twenty-one Tigers decided to throw in with CNAC.
    Dinjan is the penultimate stop, the last caravanserai, on the World War II lend-lease column stretching from the United States
     to Kunming, China. Along sea and air routes to Calcutta, and then by rail to Dinjan, moves virtually everything needed to
     keep China in the war, including perfume and jewelry for Madame Chiang Kai-shek.
    Japan controls the China coast and large slices of the interior. Until the spring of 1942, lend-lease supplies were shipped
     to Rangoon, freighted by rail up to Lashio, and moved from there by truck over the Burma Road to China.
    Then Vinegar Joe Stilwell’s armies, sabotaged by British disinterest in Burma and by the indecisive, fac-tionalized, and corrupt
     government of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, were driven north. With the Japanese owning Rangoon, the railhead at Lashio,
     and portions of the Road, China was closed to the outside by both land and water. So it fell to the pilots to ferry materiel
     from Dinjan to Kunming. To fly the Hump.
    As he reaches higher altitudes, Charlie pulls on a shirt, chino pants, woolen coveralls, and a leather flight jacket. Going
     through 10,000 feet he switches over to oxygen. At 14,000 feet, he needs more power in the thin air and shifts the superchargers
     to high. Above the Hump now.
    In summer, the monsoons force him to fly on instruments much of the time. With winter come southern winds reaching velocities
     of 100-150 miles per hour, and he crabs the plane thirty degrees off course just to counter the drift. Spring and fall bring
     unpredictable winds, frequent and violent thunderstorms, and severe icing conditions.

    He will fly over long stretches where there is no radio contact with the ground, up there on his own, blowing around in the
     mountains without radar. “You had good weather information on your point of origin and your destination, and that was about
     it,’ he remembers. The primary instruments in use will be Charlie Uban’s skills and instincts,
    The winds push unwary or confused pilots steadily north into the higher peaks where planes regularly plow into the mountainsides.
     And there are other problems. Ground radio signals used to locate runways in rough weather have a tendency to bounce from
     the mountains. Even skilled and alert pilots mistakenly follow the echoes into cliffs.
    Electrical equipment deteriorates from rapid changes between the cold of high altitudes and the tropical climate of Dinjan.
     Parts are in short supply, navigational aids faulty or nonexistent. But maintenance wizards do what they can to keep the planes
     rolling.
    Pilots fly themselves into fatigue, sometimes making two round trips across the Hump in one day. Still they go, their efficiency
     and competence shaming the regular army pilots in the Air Transport Command. CNAC, with creative, flexible management and
     more experienced pilots, becomes the measure of performance for the entire ATC.
    General Stilwell wrote in 1943: “The Air Transport Command record to date is pretty sad. CNAC has made them look like a bunch
     of amateurs.” Edward V. Rickenbacker, chief of Eastern Airlines and America’s ace fighter pilot in World War 1, studies the
     situation, discounts all of the army’s problems with airports, parts, and maintenance, and simply concludes that CNAC has
     better pilots.
    Charlie Uban is paid $800 a month for the first sixty hours of flying. He gets about $7 per hour, in Indian rupees, for the
     next ten hours. For anything over seventy hours,