D-Day Pilot Comes Out of the Past

My name is Cody Etu. What I am going to tell you will chill you to the core.

It happened one summer day.

I was driving my dad’s extra car, a Jeep Wrangler, kind of rusty and it overheated sometimes. I was going down the street, and it was hot outside, and the wind was rustling the tops of trees, whirling the leaves to and fro, in a moaning and groaning sound.

The Jeep started to overheat, so I pulled onto the gravel shoulder to let the engine cool.

I was sitting in the Jeep with the door open and top off and checking my cell phone for messages when I heard a faint propeller sound from a coming airplane.

I got out to see what it was. It was flying toward me and gradually powering down getting closer to the ground. It looked like an old plane, and suddenly it all made sense.
There was a grass airfield right across the street, Harson’s airstrip. One small plane was parked there, and a funnel-type of kite was fluttering at the top of a tall pole.

The plane kept coming closer and it seemed very loud. I noticed what looked like gun barrels sticking out of each side of the wing. It was a single engine, with a long cockpit, and was dark green with a single star on one side.

The pilot brought the plane in over the top of my dad’s Jeep and landed it with a soft thud on the grass airfield. It was going away from me, so I couldn’t see it real good, but the pilot brought it to a halt next to the hanger.

I got back in the Jeep and sat for a moment. There did not seem to be anyone coming up to greet the pilot. He quickly got out of the cockpit, walked along the wing, and jumped to the ground. I could tell he was heavy with gear, what looked like a parachute on his back, and heavy belts crossing over his shoulders.

He started waving. It took me a minute to realize he was waving at me. I wasn’t sure what to do, but figured the pilot needed help, so I started the Jeep up and drove it through a shallow ditch and onto the grass airfield.

When I got close I noticed the pilot seemed stressed.

"Hey," he said to me. "I got lost. I got away from the squadron. I’m almost out of fuel."

"What squadron?" I asked, thinking it must be from a local military base.

"The 101st Airborne. They got away from me going over the beaches, somewhere near Bayeux."

I was puzzled.

"Where am I now?" he asked. "What part of France is this? I’ve got to find my squadron."

I am thinking, France? What is this guy talking about. Then I noticed he glared at me,
looking quizzical.

"I don’t recognize you. Are you French? Your clothes are not French. Look, I have to find my squadron. Victory depends on it."

"What victory?"

"D-Day. Eisenhower. Churchill. The landings. We have got to beat the Germans."

I took a step back and looked at his airplane. It looked old, like a classic military fighter I see at air shows. The engine was hot and smoke billowed out around the propeller shaft.

"What year was that plane made?" I asked.

"Nineteen Forty Four, maybe Forty Three," he said.

The pilot was now in near panic. Not only had he lost his squadron, he had lost time, and feared he was losing his mind.

Part of me suspected a hoax.

This guy is pulling my leg.

I circled his airplane. There were bullet holes in the cockpit canopy, and the wings, and the gun barrels were still hot to the touch. I picked a piece of frayed black rubber off a tire, looked at it real close, then put it in my pocket.

"When is the last time you fired those guns?" I said.

"Just before I landed. I had to take out a Messerschmitt."

"Excuse me," I said. I called my dad on my cell phone. He didn’t believe me, but told me to call 911. I did. In 15 minutes a sheriff’s car arrived. Then another. Then another.

It seemed like the entire sheriff’s department was approaching on foot across the grass airfield.

One of the commanding officers told a deputy to take a statement from me.

They swarmed over the plane, and took the pilot off to the hanger for questioning.

An hour or so later an elderly man made his way across the grass airfield and approached the airplane.

He studied it for a few minutes, walking to the back, then to the front.

"This is a P-51D," he said to no one in particular. "Only one of these survived the war.
And this is not it."

One of the deputies said, "What war?"

"World War Two," the elderly man said.

The deputies all looked at each other.

There was a silence that yawned across the entire airfield.

I gradually made my way to my Jeep. No one seemed to care, so I started it up and drove off.

My dad still didn’t believe me.

"It’ll be in the paper tomorrow," I told him.

When I opened the newspaper the next day I expected to see the story on the front page. It wasn’t so I went through the paper quickly expecting it to jump out at me. It didn’t.
Then I turned each page slowly. No story of a World War Two fighter plane landing
at Harson’s airfield. Nothing on the web. Nor on the radio or television, either.

My dad just smirked. I hated when he did that. So I took my camera and went back to the airfield to get a photo.

The plane was gone. I drove up to the hanger and asked a lady standing outside the door about the World War Two fighter pilot who landed yesterday.

She said, "Sonny, I don’t know anything about a fighter pilot. We haven’t had a plane land in five days."

I took a good look around. I even checked for the tracks left by the tires on my dad’s Jeep. They were there. But there were no tracks of an airplane anywhere nearby.

I took a photo anyway, of the area where I thought the plane had landed.

When I drove off I noticed the lady looking out the door at me.

I checked the newspaper again the next day. No story.

"Dad," I’m telling you what I saw. I’m not making it up."

"Then that is what you need to believe, Cody."

One final shot, I drove to the sheriff’s office and asked a deputy about to get in his squad car if he had heard anything about a World War Two war plane landing at Harson’s airstrip.

"You pretty much have got to go to an airshow to see a plane that old," he said.
"Or a museum."

Driving home I began to believe that I had entered an altered state of consciousness.

When I was going to bed that night I cleaned out the pockets of my pants. There was a piece of frayed black rubber in one pocket.

I held it in my hand and just stared at it.

I didn’t know what to do except go to bed.