How a Shot-to-Pieces Fighter Flew 200 Miles on Trim Tabs and Stubborn Will While Its Pilot Spent a Lifetime Arguing With Anyone Who Turned His Story into a Miracle Headline

The headline was so big it practically fell off the screen.

Japanese Shot His Plane 73 Times — He Flew 200 Miles Home With No Controls

The words glared up at Captain Tom Mason, USN (Ret.), age ninety-eight, from his great-grandson’s tablet. The font was dramatic, the photo beneath it less so: an old black-and-white shot of a tired young man leaning against the nose of a fighter, cigarette in one hand, flight helmet in the other.

Him.

Tom stared at the ghost of his younger self for a long moment, then at the headline again.

“No controls,” he muttered. “That’s a new one.”

Across the kitchen table, Liam shifted in his chair, mug of tea cupped between his hands. He was twenty-one, all elbows and nervous energy, a journalism major who still believed you could change the world with sentences.

“That’s the working title,” Liam said carefully. “My editor likes… impact. We can tweak it before it goes live.”

Tom snorted. “Impact is what happens when you hit the ocean at two hundred knots.”

Liam winced. “Grandpa—”

“Great-grandpa,” Tom corrected out of habit.

“Great-grandpa,” Liam said, “you’re the one who agreed to the interview. You wanted people to hear the story. This is how people my age find stories now.”

“With carnival posters?” Tom asked.

“It gets their attention,” Liam said. “Once they click, they get the real thing. The nuance.”

Tom tapped the screen with a knuckle, the skin thin and spotted. “Nuance, huh? All I see up there is numbers and drama. ‘Japanese shot his plane’—like it was the whole country aiming just at me. ‘Seventy-three times’—we don’t even know the exact count. And ‘no controls’? That’s a lie.”

Liam opened his mouth, then closed it. He looked down at his notes, pages of them, full of Tom’s words from last week.

“You said the control cables were severed,” he tried. “You said the stick went slack in your hand. That sounds like no controls.”

“That sounds like most controls,” Tom said. “Not all. I had trim. I had engine. I had luck. Headline doesn’t care about the difference, but I do.”

The air between them tightened.

Liam set the mug down with a soft clink. “Do you want people to know what happened or not?” he asked. “Because if we call it ‘A Technical Examination of Partial Flight Control Loss in the Western Pacific, 1945,’ nobody’s going to read it.”

“And if we call it this,” Tom said, jabbing the tablet again, “they’ll think I was some miracle pilot who rode a bullet magnet home without touching anything. They won’t think about the guys who designed that trim system. Or the mechanics who kept her flying. Or the kid in the Zero who was just as scared as I was.”

Liam’s mouth tightened. “You think I don’t care about that? You think I pitched this to my editor because I wanted to turn you into a meme?”

“You pitched this because it’s a wild headline,” Tom said. “You want people to say, ‘Wow, can you believe this?’ over their lunch.”

“So what if they do?” Liam shot back, temper flaring. “If even a few of them keep reading and actually learn something about the war that isn’t just dates and flags and ‘we were the good guys, they were the bad guys,’ isn’t that worth a little flash up top?”

Tom stared at him, the kitchen suddenly too small for both their frustrations.

He’d had this argument before, in different words, with different people. A documentary producer in the 80s who wanted him to say “miracle” on camera. A talk show host who’d tried to get him to reenact the cockpit controls with his hands for the crowd.

Now here it was again, wearing his own bloodline’s face.

Nora’s voice floated in from the living room. “If you two raise your voices any higher, the neighbors are going to think we’re reenacting World War III in here.”

Tom glanced at the doorway. She appeared a second later, small and steady, her white hair pulled back, dish towel over one shoulder.

“We’re not fighting,” Liam said quickly. “We’re… discussing emphatically.”

“That’s what your great-grandfather used to call it when he argued with his CO,” Nora said, sliding into the chair beside Tom. “How ‘emphatic’ are we talking?”

Tom angled the tablet toward her. “Apparently I flew home from the war with no controls and a personal grudge against all of Japan.”

Nora read the headline, lips moving. Her eyebrows climbed.

“Oh, that’s a lot of words,” she said. “And not many of them are subtle.”

“It’s just a headline,” Liam said, exasperated. “The article itself is respectful. It talks about the Japanese pilot. It mentions the ground crew. It quotes you on trim tabs and superstition and everything.”

Nora looked at Tom. “You told him the story?” she asked.

“I told him a story,” Tom said. “Apparently that wasn’t dramatic enough.”

“It was,” Liam protested. “You flying a shot-up Corsair two hundred miles with half your control system gone is dramatic all by itself. I just… I’m trying to get people to it.”

“And he thinks he has to shout to do that,” Tom said.

“That’s how the internet works,” Liam snapped. “You have to shout to be heard.”

Nora held up a hand. “Alright,” she said. “Time-out. Before this turns into one of those ‘kids these days’ versus ‘old folks stuck in the past’ brawls, why don’t we do what we actually know how to do in this house?”

“What’s that?” Liam asked warily.

“Tell stories,” she said. “Properly. Henry—”

“Tom,” he corrected automatically, and she rolled her eyes affectionately.

“Tom,” she said, “why don’t you tell him the part you didn’t put in the first interview? The part you only tell when you’ve had two cups of coffee and you’re not worried about whether anyone understands.”

Liam straightened. “There’s more?” he asked.

“There’s always more,” Nora said. “That’s the problem with headlines. They can’t hold it. But maybe if you hear all of it, you’ll figure out how to get closer than this…” She tapped the tablet.

Tom sighed. The argument was still there, coiled in his chest, but the bigger thing—the heavier thing—was the story itself, pressing against his ribs like it wanted out.

“Careful what you ask for, kid,” he said to Liam. “I start at the beginning, you might be here past dinner.”

Liam flipped open his notebook, pen already in hand. “I’ve got time,” he said. “And a fully charged phone.”

Tom looked past him, into a sky that only he could see: bright, high, and full of tracers.

“Alright,” he said quietly. “It was March of ’45. Off Okinawa. And the first thing you need to know is this: nobody flies home ‘with no controls.’ Not unless they’ve got angels working the cables. I didn’t have angels. I had trim tabs, a stubborn airplane, and more fear than I knew what to do with.”

He wrapped his fingers around his mug and let the kitchen fade.

---

1. The Mission

The Pacific in 1945 was too big to think about all at once, so they gave you a small piece and called it your war.

For Lieutenant (junior grade) Tom Mason, USN, that piece was a patch of sky and sea somewhere east of Okinawa, three hours north of his carrier, the USS Harding. He flew an F4U Corsair—a long-nosed, bent-wing brute that looked like it wanted to pick a fight with the horizon.

On the morning in question, the horizon was a dull line in haze, and the radio squawked too much.

“Blue Four, tighten up,” came the voice of Blue Leader in his headset. “We’re not on parade, but we’re not wandering around like ducks either.”

“Roger, Blue Lead,” Tom said, nudging the stick. His plane slid a bit closer to the formation.

Three Corsairs in a loose finger-four, escorting a pair of TBM Avengers that trundled along like flying tractors, full of bombs meant for a Japanese radar installation somewhere along the coast.

“Clear day for a fight,” Ensign Mark “Rook” Davis, Blue Three, said cheerfully over the radio.

“You say that like it’s good,” Tom replied. He could see Rook’s plane to his left, wobbling just a little. The kid had less than twenty hours in the Corsair. Good reflexes. Too much enthusiasm.

“Better than clouds,” Rook said. “At least we’ll see them coming.”

Blue Leader, Lieutenant Joe Holden, chimed in. “Less talking, more looking,” he said. “Eyes open. If we do this right, the TBMs drop their eggs, we go home, and Rook doesn’t get a chance to be a hero.”

“Aw, sir, you wound me,” Rook said, but his tone softened. He knew Holden meant it. They’d lost two new pilots in as many weeks. The joke was the only way to pick up the pieces.

Tom scanned the sky. The Corsair’s cockpit sat high, with a good view forward and to the sides, less so behind thanks to that long spine. He shifted in his seat, craning his neck.

Nothing but blue and the dull gleam of their own planes.

Below, the sea rolled, indifferent.

He thought briefly of the Harding behind them, her white wake a scar on the water. Of the men down in the mess, the guys on the flight deck now watching a patch of sky where four specks moved away from them.

“Blue flight, approaching initial point,” the TBM leader said. “We’ll drop in five. Stay with us.”

“Copy, Turkey Lead,” Holden replied. “We’ll keep the flies off your tail.”

Tom’s stomach tightened, the pre-attack coil he’d never entirely gotten used to. He ran a quick scan of his instruments—engine RPM steady, manifold pressure in the green, fuel where it should be. Control surfaces responsive. All the gauges said the same thing: you’re fine. For now.

They were ten minutes from target when the radar call came in.

“Blue flight, Harding CIC,” a calm voice said in their ears. “We have bogeys inbound, bearing one-eight-zero, angels ten, speed high. Possible bandits. Adjust heading ten degrees port, maintain altitude. Intercept probable before target area.”

“So much for a milk run,” Rook muttered.

“Stow it,” Holden said. “Blue flight, left ten. Keep your eyes peeled. If we’re lucky, it’s just a patrol. If we’re not…”

He didn’t finish.

They turned.

Tom scanned again, more intensely now. His eyes flicked between possible specks and the instruments, the Corsair humming around him.

He saw them at the same time Holden did.

“Bandits, twelve o’clock high,” Holden growled. “Looks like… eight, maybe ten. Zeroes.”

They were pretty, in a way Tom wished he’d never had to learn: sleek Japanese fighters, A6M Zeroes, glinting in the sun as they curved down from above. He could almost see the pilots’ faces.

“Harding CIC, Blue Lead,” Holden said. “Tally-ho. Engaging bandits. Turkey Lead, break off to the east, drop to angels five. We’ll cover as best we can.”

“Roger, Blue Lead,” came the reply, tight. “Dropping.”

The Avengers began a slow descent, turning away.

“Blue flight, we’re outnumbered, but not outclassed,” Holden said, his voice going into that calm, leader-cadence that had kept more than one man alive. “We drag them, we don’t get dragged. Stay with your wingman. If you lose sight, call it. Nobody plays lone wolf, understood?”

A chorus of “Roger”s answered.

The Zeroes came on.

---

2. Seventy-Three Holes

The fight began with lines and circles.

They traded their neat escort formation for a loose weave. The four Corsairs climbed a bit, trying to erase the Zeroes’ altitude advantage. The Japanese spread out, elegant in their curved approach.

Tom picked one out and stuck with it. The trick, he’d learned, was not to get hypnotized. The enemy plane was a threat, but so was the one you couldn’t see yet.

“Blue Two, this is Four,” he said. “I’ve got your right.”

“Good,” Holden replied. “Keep it that way.”

The first pass was a blur: Zeroes streaking past, guns flashing, tracers tearing through the air. Tom mashed the trigger, the Corsair’s six .50-caliber machine guns roaring. He saw hit flashes on a wing, then the Zero rolled away, smoke trailing.

“Nice, Four,” Holden said. “Don’t chase. Don’t—Rook, get back here!”

Rook had taken the bait, following a damaged Zero down and away. Another Japanese pilot slid in behind him, guns bright.

“Three, break right!” Tom yelled.

Rook pulled too late. The Zero’s shots stitched across his fuselage. The Corsair shuddered, yawed, then began a slow, unwilling roll.

“I’m hit,” Rook said, voice sharp with surprise. “I—my controls are—”

His plane dropped into a steeper dive.

“Bail out!” Holden barked. “Three, get out!”

The Corsair’s canopy blew off. For a fraction of a second, Tom saw Rook’s helmeted head, the flash of his hand on the release, then the plane rolled again, and the sea reached up.

The impact was a distant splash, swallowed almost immediately by the bigger noise of the battle.

Tom’s stomach lurched. He forced his eyes back up, throat tight.

“Blue Three is down,” he said, because naming it made it real. “No chute.”

“Logged,” Holden said, his own voice rough. “We’ll mourn him later. Right now we’ve got eight Zeroes who want to make it a matching set.”

They twisted, climbed, dove.

Tom got on the tail of another Zero, squeezed the trigger. This one went down, pieces flying off its wing. He didn’t watch it hit. He couldn’t afford to.

Something flashed in his peripheral vision—sunlight on glass, the flicker of a rising plane.

“Four, break left!” Holden shouted.

Tom yanked the stick.

The world tilted.

Tracer rounds carved the air where he’d just been. A few found him anyway.

He heard them before he felt them: a rippling thak-thak-thak against the Corsair’s skin. The cockpit filled with the sharp stink of cordite and something acrid underneath.

Worse than the noise was the change in the controls.

The stick, which had always been firm in his hand, went suddenly loose. Sloppy. He pulled back; nothing. Pushed forward; almost nothing. It felt like the plane was attached to him by wet rope instead of steel.

“Aw, hell,” he breathed.

“Four, report,” Holden snapped.

“I’m hit,” Tom said, forcing his voice to stay level. “Controls are—” He pulled again, harder. The Corsair wallowed lazily instead of responding. “—soft. I’ve got… not much.”

“Can you turn?” Holden asked.

Tom tried a gentle right bank.

The plane thought about it. Wobbled. Came back almost level.

“Not really,” he said.

“Can you climb?”

He eased back, watching the altimeter. The needle crept up, grudgingly.

“A little,” he said.

“That’s more than the kid got,” Holden said. “Count your blessings. Can you stay in the fight?”

Tom looked around.

The sky was chaos. Smoke trails, flashes of sunlight on wings, the stutter of gunfire. A TBM in the distance trailed smoke but kept going, engines laboring. Another Corsair from a different flight darted past, chased by two Zeroes.

Can I stay in the fight?

He felt the Corsair shudder beneath him, a wounded animal.

“No,” he said, the word tasting like defeat. “I’ll just get killed and not help anyone. I’m barely keeping her straight.”

“Then you bug out,” Holden said. “Straight line back to Mama. Keep your nose pointed at Harding and don’t do anything fancy. We’ll keep them off you.”

Guilt flared. “You need—”

“We need you alive more than we need you flopping around up here like a goose with a broken wing,” Holden snapped. “That’s an order, Four. Go home.”

“Yes, sir,” Tom said, because training ran deeper than pride.

He turned as much as the Corsair would let him, nudging the stick and the rudder pedals, coaxing the nose toward the east, toward where his gut said the carrier was. The compass agreed, more or less.

The Zero that had shot him made one more pass, perhaps hoping to finish the job. Tom saw the tracer line, jerked as much as he could, felt more hits rattle the airframe.

“Really don’t like you,” he muttered at the empty sky.

The Japanese pilot, maybe assuming the mortally wounded Corsair would fall away on its own, broke off, wheeling back toward the thicker part of the fight.

In the relative quiet, Tom took stock.

Left wing: holes. Right wing: more holes. Oil temperature: holding, somehow. Fuel lines: one gauge flickered, making him uneasy. The control column: sloppy, almost dead.

He moved it again.

Nothing.

His stomach dropped.

He tried elevator trim, thumb moving the little switch on the throttle that adjusted the small tabs on the tail.

The nose dipped. Overshot. He clicked it the other way. The nose rose.

He exhaled.

“Okay,” he whispered. “We’re not dead yet.”

He tried rudder trim. The ball in the slip indicator slid one way, then the other. Crude, but something.

The Corsair, once an extension of his body, had turned into an argument. But it wasn’t a full silent treatment. It would still answer, if he spoke the right language.

---

3. No Controls, Some Control

Later, back in the ready room, the mechanics would show him the severed cables. They’d lay them out on a table—steel cords torn apart by bullets, ends frayed like bad rope.

“Lucky they didn’t all go,” one of them would say. “You lost your primary control runs, but the trim motors are on a different path. Old bird was looking out for you.”

They’d count the holes then, too. They’d circle them in yellow chalk, like a doctor marking bruises. Seventy-three by their tally, though Tom always said, “Give or take. I wasn’t inclined to measure.”

Right now, alone in the sky, all he knew was that the obvious ways of making a plane move didn’t work anymore.

He had trim. He had throttle. He had gravity.

He also had two hundred miles of ocean between him and home, and a steadily ticking fuel gauge.

“Harding, this is Blue Four,” he said into the radio. “I’ve taken hits. Primary controls not responding. Attempting to return. Request vector.”

There was a pause, long enough to make him sweat.

“Blue Four, Harding CIC,” came the answer, calm as ever. “We read you. Say altitude and heading.”

“Angels eight, heading zero-seven-five,” Tom said, glancing at the instruments.

“Copy, Four,” CIC said. “Turn left ten degrees to zero-six-five. Maintain altitude if able. We’ll talk you in.”

“Roger,” Tom said.

He tapped the trim switch, watched the nose dip a hair, tapped again. The plane grudgingly adjusted.

“Come on, you ugly duck,” he murmured. “Work with me.”

The next thirty minutes were a lesson in patience and terror.

Every small adjustment had to be planned like a chess move. Tap trim up, wait. See how much the nose rose. Tap it back if it went too far. Ease throttle up to climb, but not so much that the engine over-revved. Pull it back to descend, but not so much that he bled off too much speed.

He learned the Corsair’s new moods by feel: the way she wanted to roll slightly left on her own now, the way she yawed when he changed power. He countered with trim, tiny corrections that took seconds to show, seconds during which his imagination happily supplied images of falling out of the sky.

His hands itched to do something. Years of training screamed at him to grab the stick harder, to stomp on the pedals, to bank to check his six, to jink in case some lingering Zero decided to finish him.

He couldn’t do any of that without risking losing what little control he had.

So he flew boring.

Straight.

Level-ish.

Terrified.

“Blue Four, Harding,” the voice in his ear said periodically. “You’re doing fine. You’re drifting a little south. Nudge it right with trim.”

“Working on it,” Tom said.

“How’s your fuel?” CIC asked.

He checked. “More than half,” he said.

“Copy,” came the reply. “Keep it coming. Carrier’s turning into the wind for you.”

The mental image of the Harding—big, solid, real—was a thin thread he clung to.

“Blue Lead, Blue Four,” Tom tried once. “You still up?”

There was static, then Holden’s voice. “Still up, Four. We’re bringing the party back your way. Don’t worry about us.”

“How many?” Tom asked, before he could stop himself.

A beat.

“Enough,” Holden said. “Eyes front, Four. We’ll see you on deck.”

The implication was clear: not all. Not Rook.

Tom clenched his jaw. His eyes stung, but it might have been from the smoke.

He focused on the instruments. On the next trim tap. On the next mental step in the math problem that had become his life.

---

4. The Argument in the Sky

About an hour into his homeward crawl, fatigue set in.

Not physical—he’d been in the cockpit longer than this on training flights. This was something else. A bone-deep weariness of thinking three steps ahead of a machine that had stopped playing by the rules.

“Blue Four, Harding,” the voice said. “You’re looking good. We’ve got you on radar. Another fifty miles.”

“Copy, Harding,” Tom said.

His leg cramped. He shifted, the movement making the plane wobble.

“Easy,” he told it. “You and me, we’re going to have words when we get back.”

He’d always talked to his planes. It was half joke, half superstition. The Corsair usually answered with a healthy engine note. Now, its reply was more ambiguous.

For the first time since the fight, his mind had room for another thought besides “don’t screw up.”

It slid in sideways. Why me?

Not in the self-pitying sense. More in the curious, disbelieving one.

Rook was dead. Blue Two had taken a hit but made it back. Blue One—Holden—was still up there, somewhere behind, bringing the others home.

He, Tom Mason, intermediate in talent, average in most things, was the one in the crippled plane that hadn’t quite given up.

“Because somebody has to,” another part of his brain answered. “And somebody just did.”

He argued with himself.

“If I screw this up, they’ll say I panicked,” one voice whispered.

“If you don’t try, they’ll say you quit,” the other shot back.

“If I ditch now, maybe I survive, maybe I don’t,” the first voice said. “There were search planes on standby. They practice this.”

“You’ve got a working engine and partial control,” the second voice said. “Ditching is not your best option. It’s just your easiest.”

So he argued. With his fear. With his training. With his obligation to the men on the Harding who were turning into the wind, clearing the deck, betting their afternoon that he’d get this right.

He thought about how many people were involved in just this one attempt to keep him alive.

The radar operator talking him in.

The air boss juggling launch and recovery schedules.

The deck crew checking arresting cables, dragging the crash nets into place.

The other pilots circling, tired, hungry, salty, giving up their turn to land so the guy with the crippled bird could try first.

“You owe them your best effort,” he told himself.

“And if your best effort isn’t good enough?” the fearful voice asked.

“Then at least you didn’t cheat them out of it by quitting early,” the other said.

It was the harshest, kindest argument he’d ever had with himself.

He kept flying.

---

5. The Approach

“Blue Four, Harding,” CIC said at last. “You are ten miles out. Carrier is steady into the wind. Turn right two degrees. Begin gentle descent. Do not, repeat, do not get creative.”

“Roger,” Tom said. “No creativity. Understood.”

The haze ahead thickened. A darker smudge resolved into shape: the Harding, a grey rectangle in a grey ocean, its deck speckled with tiny figures.

He felt something loosen in his chest.

Not much. Just enough.

“All stations, this is Harding PriFly,” another voice came on, clipped and authoritative—the Air Officer. “We have a returning aircraft with control damage. All non-essential personnel clear the deck. Crash crew to ready positions. Blue Four, you’re first in the pattern. Call the ball.”

“Copy, PriFly,” Tom said. “I’ll… do my best.”

He eased back on the throttle. Trimmed nose up. The Corsair began a shallow descent.

Normally, landing on a carrier was a dance. You flew the pattern, you watched the Landing Signal Officer—the LSO—at the stern, you adjusted power and attitude constantly to keep the meatball, the visual landing aid, centered.

Tom didn’t have that option. His adjustments were delayed and crude. He had to think a good five seconds ahead of where the plane would be.

“Blue Four, PriFly,” the Air Officer said. “LSO has you in sight. You are a little high, a little fast. Start your turn.”

A turn.

He swallowed. Applied rudder trim, one click, two. The nose tipped ever so slightly. He added a touch of opposite aileron via what was left of the control system, hoping to keep the wing from dropping too far.

The Corsair grudgingly banked.

He felt like he was trying to steer a cow on ice.

“Looking good, Four,” the LSO’s voice came, tinny, from below. “Bring it down. Don’t chase the deck. Let it come to you.”

Tom could see him now, a tiny figure at the stern, paddles in hand. The meatball light glowed, moving slightly up and down as the ship rode the swells.

He focused on it the way a drowning man focuses on a rope.

“More power,” LSO called. “Don’t settle. You’re coming in a little right. Line it up.”

Tom nudged rudder trim again, heart in his throat. The Corsair drifted left, then right, then finally, mercifully, sort of straight.

The deck filled his view.

“Hold it… hold it…” LSO said. “Cut!”

Tom pulled the throttle back. The Corsair sank.

The next two seconds lasted a year.

The wheels hit harder than any landing he’d ever made. The tail dropped. He felt the jolt as the tailhook snagged an arresting cable.

For a heartbeat, he thought: We did it.

Then something snapped.

The damaged hook tore free. The Corsair lurched forward again, the arresting cable whipping past, useless now.

“Brace!” someone yelled over the radio.

The plane rolled, nose dipping. The barriers loomed—thick nets strung across the deck, meant to catch exactly this kind of mistake.

The Corsair plowed into them.

Canvas and cable wrapped around the wings. The forward motion stopped with a violent jerk. Tom’s harness bit into his shoulders, his helmet cracked against the headrest. His vision went white, then grey.

When it cleared, everything was still.

No impact with the water. No sudden cold.

Just the sound of the engine skittering down to idle, the hiss of steam somewhere nearby, shouts muffled by the canopy.

He realized he was holding his breath. He let it out in a shudder.

The canopy popped open, yanked back by eager hands.

“Welcome home, Lieutenant,” a deckhand shouted up at him, grinning wide. “You sure know how to make an entrance.”

Tom managed a weak smile. His hands finally let go of the useless stick.

“Somebody tie this thing down,” the Air Officer’s voice crackled from up in PriFly. “We don’t need it taking off again on its own.”

Crash crew hoses stayed at the ready until the engine was off and the plane was chocked. Medics hovered, waiting for signs of blood.

Tom climbed out, legs shaky. His knees nearly buckled when his boots hit the deck.

“You alright, sir?” a corpsman asked.

“I seem to be,” Tom said. “My stomach’s somewhere over there, though.” He jerked his head toward the barrier.

The corpsman chuckled. “We’ll fetch it after chow.”

Holden was waiting at the edge of the flight deck, helmet under his arm, expression a mixture of relief and restraint.

“Nice of you to drop in,” he said. “You look like hell, Four.”

Tom glanced at the Corsair. Holes peppered the wings and fuselage like a pox. The nose had a new dent from the barricade. One wheel looked… off.

“You should see the other guys,” Tom said automatically.

Then he thought of Rook and felt the joke curdle.

Holden’s gaze softened, as if he could see the thought.

“We’ll talk about him later,” he said quietly. “Right now the skipper wants to pat you on the back and the mechs want to poke holes in your bird. You up to it?”

Tom nodded, though every part of him wanted to curl up in his bunk and sleep for a month.

The mechanics swarmed the Corsair like bees. They poked, prodded, traced bullet paths with gloved fingers.

“Jesus,” one of them said. “Who did you tick off, Lieutenant?”

“Everyone, apparently,” Tom said.

They showed him the control runs: cables severed in multiple places, pulleys shattered.

“How were you moving anything?” the chief mechanic asked, genuinely curious.

“Trim,” Tom said. “Little switch on the throttle, baby moves on the tail.”

The mechanic whistled. “You steered this pig home on trim tabs?”

“And prayer,” Tom said.

The chief clapped him on the shoulder. “Well, we’ll write up the trim system for a commendation,” he said. “You… can have a cookie.”

Someone else started counting holes, because people need numbers to make sense of things.

They stopped at seventy-three, partly because they ran out of chalk, partly because it sounded dramatic enough.

---

6. The Years After

Back in the kitchen, in 2023, Liam’s pen had long since stopped moving. He was just listening now, eyes flicking between Tom’s face and the invisible Corsair in the air above the table.

“So you did fly home with almost no controls,” he said softly.

“I flew home with different controls,” Tom said. “It wasn’t that the plane stopped listening. I just had to speak a different language.”

“And the Japanese pilot?” Liam asked. “The one who hit you. Do you ever think about him?”

“Sometimes,” Tom said. “He did his job. I did mine. He pulled the trigger. So did I. That’s war.”

He stared into his mug.

“I saw one of them bail out once,” he said. “Not that day. Another fight. Chute opened, bright against the sky. My wingman said, ‘Should’ve shot him before he jumped.’ I thought, ‘That’s a man falling out of the world.’ I never quite got used to that.”

Liam swallowed. “In the article, I called them ‘enemy fighters,’” he said. “I didn’t say ‘Japs’ or anything like that.”

“Good,” Tom said sharply. “Keep it that way. We did enough dehumanizing back then. We don’t need to keep doing it for clicks.”

They sat in silence for a moment.

“Did you… get a medal?” Liam asked, hesitant, as if glittering metal might be a loaded subject.

“Distinguished Flying Cross,” Tom said. “Bit of paper. Bit of ribbon. Bit of tin. Toast in the wardroom. ‘Well done, Mason, you crazy idiot.’”

“And how did you feel?” Liam asked.

“Relieved to still be breathing,” Tom said. “Guilty as hell that Rook wasn’t. Annoyed that the citation made it sound cleaner than it was. They don’t mention the part where my hands were shaking so bad I could barely sign the damn receipt for it.”

“And years later?” Liam pressed. “How did it feel to tell the story?”

“Complicated,” Tom said. “First few times, it was just between us. Guys who’d been there. We knew the context. We knew what we’d lost that day, not just what I’d managed.”

He sipped his now-cool coffee.

“Then some historian came around,” he went on. “Then a documentary producer. Then a journalist. Each time, the story got shaped a little. Simpler. Cleaner. ‘No controls’ instead of ‘partial controls.’ ‘Japanese riddled his plane’ instead of ‘shots from a skilled pilot nearly ended him.’”

“Stories need shape,” Liam said quietly. “We’re not good at holding all the mess.”

“I know,” Tom said. “I taught your mother to read using fairy tales. I’m not against story. I’m just… allergic to lies. Especially ones that make war sound like an action movie.”

Liam looked back at the tablet, the headline still glaring.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s pick this apart.”

He read it aloud again. “‘Japanese Shot His Plane 73 Times — He Flew 200 Miles Home With No Controls.’”

“The first part’s kind of okay,” he said reluctantly. “The holes are real, give or take. Even if we stop being weirdly specific, ‘shot his plane to pieces’ isn’t wrong. It’s the ‘no controls’ that bothers you most.”

“And the way it makes it sound like a solo act,” Tom said. “Like I was some magic aviator who single-handedly outwitted physics. You strip away the ship, the radar, the deck crew, the designers, the mechanics. You make it about one guy and his grit. That’s a lie by omission.”

“But people like stories about grit,” Liam said. “They like believing someone can beat the odds. It gives them hope.”

“Hope’s fine,” Tom said. “But not if it rides on forgetting everyone else in the picture.”

The argument was still serious, still tense, but the sharp edges had dulled. They were leaning toward each other now, not away.

“What if I change it?” Liam asked. “Make the headline longer. Less… punchy. My editor will yell, but maybe she won’t fire me.”

Tom raised an eyebrow. “What did you have in mind?”

Liam chewed on the end of his pen, thinking.

“How about…” He spoke slowly, counting words on his fingers. “ ‘How a Shot-to-Pieces Fighter Flew 200 Miles on Trim Tabs and Stubborn Will While Its Pilot Spent a Lifetime Arguing With Anyone Who Turned His Story into a Miracle Headline.’”

Tom blinked.

“You just stole that from me,” he said. “That’s the exact sentence I muttered when I saw your first draft.”

“I know,” Liam said, grinning despite himself. “It’s good. It’s… you. It hints at the argument. At the fact that the story doesn’t end with the landing.”

“It’s long,” Tom said.

“So is the story,” Liam replied. “Maybe that’s the point.”

He sobered. “My editor’s going to say it’s too wordy,” he added. “She’ll say people bail on headlines after eight words. But… maybe that’s a fight worth having.”

Tom studied him.

“You’re willing to go toe-to-toe with your boss over a couple extra words and a little honesty?” he asked.

“Did you ram an enemy ship in that destroyer story you told me last year?” Liam shot back.

Tom snorted. “Fair. I’m not always allergic to reckless decisions.”

Nora smiled, eyes crinkling. “There it is,” she said. “The family resemblance.”

Liam tapped the tablet awake, fingers already moving to the keyboard icon.

“I’ll fix the ‘no controls’ part too,” he said. “Maybe ‘with his main controls shot away.’ Or ‘with only trim tabs and throttle working.’ It’s clunkier, but truer.”

“It’s clunkier because it’s truer,” Tom said. “Life doesn’t fit on bumper stickers.”

He hesitated, then reached out, covering Liam’s hand on the table for a moment.

“Thank you,” he said quietly. “For listening. Not just to the part with the bullets, but the part after.”

“That’s my job,” Liam said.

“No,” Tom replied. “Your job is what your editor tells you it is. This is being a good man.”

Liam swallowed, eyes suddenly bright. “I learned from you,” he said.

Nora cleared her throat. “Alright,” she said lightly. “Before we drown the kitchen in sentiment, how about this: Liam, you stay for dinner. You can work on your righteous headline fight after dessert. Tom, you can tell him the version of the story where you left out how you nearly threw up in your oxygen mask.”

“I did not,” Tom protested.

“You told me you almost did,” Nora said.

Tom sighed. “Almost is not did.”

Liam laughed, the tension finally breaking.

---

That night, after Liam had gone home with a Tupperware full of leftovers and a promise to email the revised draft, Tom sat alone at the table for a moment.

The kitchen was quiet. Outside, the streetlights hummed. Inside, the tablet lay face down, mercifully blank.

He picked up his mug. It was chipped on the rim, stained from years of use. Nora swore she was going to throw it out one day. He believed her as much as he believed in clean headlines.

He thought about the Corsair. About the trim tabs. About the men on the Harding who’d watched him come in that day, betting silently on whether they were about to see a landing or a crash.

He thought about the Japanese pilot whose bullets had torn his cables. Maybe that man had gone home from some other mission, hands shaking, telling his own version of a “miracle” story to a family that had no idea what he’d seen.

He thought about the arguments—then and now. The serious, tense ones in ready rooms and kitchens. The ones about timing, about blame, about the weight of six minutes or seventy-three holes or two hundred miles.

He thought, not for the first time, that maybe the real heroism wasn’t in the split-second decisions at all. Maybe it was in what you did with the years afterward. In how honestly you told the story. In how gently you held other people’s versions of it.

On the counter, his phone buzzed.

A new email from Liam:

SUBJECT: New Title (Don’t Kill Me)

Body:

Editor says it’s “a mouthful” but “kind of weirdly compelling.” She rolled her eyes at “trim tabs” and said nobody knows what those are. I told her that’s the point.

We compromised:

How a Shot-to-Pieces Fighter Flew 200 Miles Home on Trim Tabs and Stubborn Will

Subhead: And why its pilot spent the next 78 years arguing with everyone who tried to call it a miracle.

No “no controls.” No “Japanese” in the headline. They’re in the article, but in context, not as a punchline.

Is that good enough?

— L

Tom read it twice.

Then he typed back, slowly, his fingers not as fast as they used to be but no less certain.

It’s better.

Remember to mention Rook. And Holden. And the kids on the deck with the crash nets.

If you make me sound too brave, I’ll come haunt your newsroom.

— G

He hit send and set the phone down.

Outside, a plane passed overhead, just a distant hum in the night. Not a Corsair. Not a Zero. Just another human in the sky, trusting metal and training and luck.

Tom raised his mug in a small, private salute.

“To trim tabs,” he murmured. “To stubborn airplanes. To headlines that at least try. And to arguments that end better than they begin.”

He drank, the tea gone lukewarm but still good.

For the first time in a long time, when he thought back to that day over Okinawa, what came to mind first wasn’t the bullets or the holes or the terror.

It was the quiet afterward, on a deck that had tilted just enough to catch him, and the knowledge that he hadn’t flown home alone.

THE END