Chapter 8 chapter Five

The person who gave Aunt Innag the watch was an Air Force pilot.Air Force pilots of that era!After hearing the news, my brothers and sisters screamed like frogs, and I turned somersaults on the ground. This is not only a great joy for our family, but also a great joy for our town.Everyone believed that the aunt and the pilot were a perfect match.Master Wang in the school kitchen, who participated in the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea, said that pilots were made of gold.Can gold make man?I asked him suspiciously. In front of the teachers and commune cadres who were still eating, he said, Wan Xiaopao, you are such a fool. Equivalent to seventy kilograms of gold.I took what Master Wang said home and taught it to my mother, and my mother said: Oh my God!In the future, your uncle will come to our house as a guest, what shall we entertain him with?

In those days, all kinds of myths about pilots were circulated among us children.Chen Bi said that his mother had seen Soviet pilots in Harbin, all wearing suede jackets, high suede boots with gold teeth, wearing gold watches, eating Leba sausages, and drinking beer.Xiao Xiachun (later renamed Xiao Xiachun), the son of grain depot keeper Xiao Shangchun, said that Chinese pilots ate better than Soviet pilots. ——He listed the recipes for Chinese pilots for us—as if he was cooking for the pilots—in the morning, two eggs, a bowl of milk, four deep-fried sticks, two steamed buns, and a piece of soy bean curd; at noon, a bowl of soy sauce Meat, one yellow croaker, two big pastries; at night, one roast chicken, two pork buns, two mutton buns, and a bowl of millet porridge.After every meal, there are fruits, you can eat whatever you want, bananas, apples, pears, grapes...you can take them home if you can’t eat them.Aviator leather jackets have two large pockets, why?Designed for fruit...their portrayal of the life of a pilot makes us salivate.Each of us dreams of becoming a pilot when we grow up and living that fairy-like life.

The Air Force was going to the County No. 1 Middle School to recruit pilots, and my elder brother excitedly signed up.My grandfather was born as a long-term laborer for landlords, and was a farmer. Later, he carried stretchers for the People's Liberation Army and participated in the Battle of Menglianggu. They carried Zhang Lingfu's body from the mountain to the foot of the mountain.My grandma's family is also a poor peasant, and my great-grandfather is a revolutionary martyr. Our family background and social relations are beyond the standard.My older brother was their high school athlete, the discus thrower.One day he went home and ate a fat sheep's tail. After returning to school, he had nowhere to use his energy. He picked up a discus and flipped it vigorously. The discus roared over the school wall and flew into the crop field.It happened that a farmer was driving an ox to plow the field there, and the discus landed on the ox's horns impartially, cutting off all the ox horns neatly. ——That is to say, my elder brother is from a good background, studies well, is in good health, and has a prospective uncle who is a pilot. Therefore, everyone thinks that even if the Air Force only selects one pilot from our county, it will undoubtedly be my elder brother.But then my older brother was rejected because he had a scar on his leg from a boil when he was a child.Lao Wang, a cook at our school, said: "There are scars on your body, that is absolutely unacceptable."When the pilot reaches high altitude, the scars on his body will burst under high pressure.Not to mention the fact that there are scars on the body, even if the two nostrils are not normal in size.

Anyway, since my aunt's romantic relationship with the pilot, we've been very sensitive about Air Force matters.I am now in my fifties, and I am still very vain and showy. If I win a lottery ticket of 100 yuan, I would like to find a loudspeaker to broadcast it to the whole city.Think about it, when I was in elementary school, I had a prospective uncle who was a pilot, what kind of virtue would it be. Fifty miles to the south of our place is Jiaozhou Airport, and sixty miles to the west is Gaomi Airport.The planes at Jiaozhou Airport are big, stupid, and dark. The adults say they are bombers.The planes at Gaomi Airport are silver-gray, wing-sucked planes that can smoke and do somersaults at high altitudes.My elder brother said it was "J-5", a copy of the Soviet Union's 'MiG-17', a real fighter plane, and it was this kind of plane that beat the shit out of American planes on the Korean battlefield.Our quasi-uncle naturally flies this kind of fighter.At that time, the atmosphere of war was very strong, and the planes at Gaomi Airport took off for training almost every day.They squeezed their wings and flew over our Northeast Township, setting up a battlefield above our heads.Three will come in a while, and six will come in a while.After a while, one bit the tail of the other and circled around.After a while, it plunged down suddenly, and the nose of the machine was about to touch the big poplar tree at the head of our village, and then pulled up suddenly, flying up like a kite flying into the sky.One day, there was a loud noise in the air—my aunt said that once she delivered an elderly woman, the woman was convulsed and was about to use the knife when she heard a loud noise outside. The woman was shocked and dispersed. I lost my focus, the spasms disappeared, and the child was born as soon as I exerted myself—shattering the window paper in every house.We were stunned, and after a while, the teacher took us out of the classroom and looked up.In the clear blue sky, we saw a plane flying ahead with a cylindrical thing dragging on its tail, followed by several planes chasing after it.Around the cylindrical thing, first a cloud of white smoke exploded, and then the sound of rumbling guns reached our ears.But the sound of the cannon was far less violent than the loud bang just now. That bang was the second loudest I've ever heard in my life. ring.

It was as if those pilots deliberately didn't knock down the towed target. The clusters of white smoke after the explosion of the shells just circled the target until the towed target disappeared from our field of vision without hitting it.Chen Bi touched the nose that gave him the nickname "Little Old Maozi", and said contemptuously: Chinese pilots' skills are too poor.If the pilots of the Soviet Union were replaced, the target would be knocked down with one shot! ——I know that Chen Bi said this out of jealousy for me. He was born in our village as the head of our village, and he has never seen a Soviet dog. How do we know that Soviet pilots are better than Chinese pilots?

At that time, those of us children in remote villages did not know that Sino-Soviet relations were deteriorating.Chen Bi used the Soviet pilots to demote our military pilots. Although it made people, especially me, very unhappy, no one thought about it elsewhere.A few years later, when the Cultural Revolution began, we were in the fifth grade of elementary school, and our classmate Xiao Xiachun exposed the past, which not only made Chen Bi suffer, but also made Chen Bi's parents suffer. After suffering, he lost his life.A Soviet novel found in his home was about a hero of the air force who lost his feet and went back to the blue sky.Ordinarily this was a genuine revolutionary inspirational novel, but it turned out that Chen Bi's mother, Ai Lian, was the concubine of the Soviet revisionist pilot, and Chen Bi was the bastard left by Ai Lian and the Soviet revisionist pilot.

The "J-5" fighter jets at Gaomi Airport practiced during the day, and the planes at Jiaozhou Airport were also unwilling to be lonely—they sailed at night.Almost every night around nine o'clock—the time when the county's cable broadcasts were about to end—the searchlights at the airport were suddenly turned on.Although the thick beam of light shone on the sky above our village, although it had been scattered, it still shocked us.I always say stupid things inappropriately: If only I had such a flashlight! --madness!My second brother would scold me when he heard me say that, and at the same time, he would goug my head with his bent fingers.Of course, because of our uncle-to-be, my second brother has also become half an aviation expert. He can proficiently recite the names of the heroes of the Volunteer Air Force and can accurately tell their heroic deeds.It was also he who told me that the loud noise that broke the window paper was called a "sonic boom" and it was the sound made by a supersonic aircraft when it broke the speed of sound, before he needed me to help him pick lice from his head.

What is supersonic speed? ——It just flies faster than the sound!You idiot! ——The aircraft drill at Jiaozhou Airport, except for the fascinating searchlights, the rest were nothing impressive.Some people also said that it was not a drill, but a guide for the lost plane. Those huge beams of light swept back and forth, sometimes intersecting, sometimes parallel, and sometimes a bird would suddenly appear in the beams of light, flying around in panic, like a fly that had fallen into a bottle.Always a few minutes after the searchlights were turned on, the roar of the plane sounded in the sky.After a while, we saw a big dark guy with a rough outline outlined by lights from the head, tail, and wings, appearing in the beam of light.It seemed to slide down those beams of light and return to its nest.

Airplanes have nests, just like chickens have nests.