Midway

By: Raymond Byrnes

05:34 04 JUN 42: After long, patterned days of stale

gazing at a blank, sunglass-green sea, a U.S. Navy

patrol pilot radios his estimated map coordinates

for a miles-wide Japanese aircraft-carrier fleet.

Navy dive-bomber, torpedo-plane, and fighter-escort

pilots take off and circle into formation high above

their carrier, each one aware it could take half his

fuel just to find the enemy 150 miles out.

One fighter group, its search futile, heads back to

refuel. Without signaling, Mark Kelly swings down

over the waves. Behind him, Johnny Talbot barks

at Mark to bank around and ditch into the wind.

Soon after, sputtering on empty, others begin to slide

in twos and threes onto the sea. Survivors scramble

from opened canopies to inflate their tiny rafts

and lash pairs together for better rescue visibility.

Meanwhile, a torn torpedo plane returns. Its bloody

pilot describes tracer-bullet blizzards, his buddies

killed all around him in swarms of agile Zeros, and

dense anti-aircraft fire from ships they tried to sink.

Ensign Charles Markland Kelly Jr., Task Force 16

Fighter Squadron 8, still strapped inside his

cold, broken cockpit, still trails the USS Hornet

now 81 years away. Ensign Kelly, MIA, is 25.

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Raymond Byrnes is widely published in print and online journals and his work has been featured as Editor’s 

Choice in at least six, including Typishly, Third Wednesday, and The Writer’s Almanac. He lives in Virginia.