1979 novel by Ensan Case
Wingmen is a war novel by American author Ensan Case. It was originally published on November 28, 1979, by Avon Books. The novel follows the lives and the relationship development between Ensign Fred Trusteau and Lieutenant commander Jack Hardigan, two United States Navy fighter pilots who are part of the fictional fighter squadron VF-20, during World War II.
After its original publishing, "Wingmen" soon went out of print and fell into obscurity. However, through the years, the novel started gaining a cult following and recognization as one of the first instances of gay protagonism in the genre, which led to its first republication in 2012, by Cheyenne Publishing. It's Case's first and most known of his two published novels.
Plot.
The novel is set in the first half of the 1940s, during World War II. Unsatisfied with the squadron to which he belongs, Ensign Fred Trusteau, a United States Naval Aviator, offers to fill a vacant position in the Air Group Twenty's fighter squadron. He is then quickly transferred to VF-20 (the "Fighting Twenty"), which is led by Lieutenant commander Jack Hardigan, a man which Fred almost instantly considers more organized and well-mannered than his older commander. Right on his first day in the squadron, Fred breaks into a party held by his new fellow pilots and draws attention thanks to his trick of tying a knot in a cherry stem without using his hands, making him win the right to use the services of a female prostitute, to which he unwillingly agrees; after the event, he is given the nickname "Trusty" and is readily recognized among the group.
After a bridge match, Fred and some of his new friends are invited by Jack to play with him in his private room. There, both Jack and Fred have a good time, while the latter finds out they need someone to write the squadron's War Diary and proposes to fill the role, eager to impress the skipper. Jack, on the other hand, is constantly pestered by the commander of their air group (CAG), Buster Jennings, and so full of work on the ground he barely has time to fly. On a goodwill gesture, he goes to a party held by Eleanor Hawkins — a former shipmate's widow — with some other pilots, including the Executive Officer of Fighting Twenty, Duane Higgins, Jack's longtime friend and former wingman. At the party, Eleanor shows clear interest in Jack, but he is hesitant to show affection, puzzling Duane. Some days after another friendly conversation with Jack, Fred has a wet dream and discovers he fell in love with the skipper. VF-20 then leaves on the aircraft carrier "Ironsides" to its first mission, a wartime training cruise. While searching for the ready room, Fred, the first pilot to land on the carrier deck, accidentally collides with Admiral Berkey in a passageway, and the two have a friendly conversation before he goes his way. At that night, he decides to spend some time alone on the deck edge elevator and finds Jack there, in the first of a number of occasional meetings of the two in the place.
During a routine training flight, Fred intercepts a lost army trainer aircraft and is congratulated by Admiral Berkey, which raises his reputation in the squadron. Some days after, he and Jack squadron office have a chat in the squadron office, where they discuss their personal upbringings. Their newfound closeness starts to annoy Duane, who takes a dislike to Fred. The training cruise ends, and Fred goes on a night out in Honolulu with fellow pilots Brogan and Schuster. Brogan gets too drunk, and starts a fight with the officer of the deck on their return to "Ironsides". Thanks to that, they're restricted to the ship for one week and have to receive an official reprimand; Jack, however, secretly removes Fred's one from his officer jacket. The squadron's first combat mission is revealed to be a training airstrike against the isolated Marcus Island. While destroying some enemy planes, Fred's Hellcat is hit by a blast and starts to malfunction. For a short time, much to Jack's dismay, Fred is presumed to be dead, but he manages to reach another carrier with his damaged aircraft. Afterwards, the two have a short talk and Jack realizes he's falling in love with Fred. Confused, Jack starts to avoid Fred's presence, while also having to deal with his father's sudden death. However, after their combat mission in Wake Island — in which Brogan is killed when they're rescuing Jennings — they reconnect with each other, now closer than ever.
Trying to discover more about her relationship with Jack, Duane sets up a date with Eleanor, and the two start a romance. Shortly after their involvement in the Battle of Tarawa, Jack and Fred are doing the last of the day's CAP when Flight Control finds out a bogey on their radar. The pair does an interception to what turned out to be a bunch of Japanese aircraft snoopers — Jack destroys two of them, and Fred, three. Their impressive performance earns them an Air Medal, and Fred becomes widely known as "the Killer" to the people of "Ironsides", making Duane's envy towards him grow even further. During Christmas season of 1943, Air Group Twenty goes to spend some rest and recreation time at the Moana Hotel. Jack manages to book a sharing room with Fred and for the first time, despite Duane's suspicions about the nature of their relationship, they share moments of romantic intimacy and sleep together. Subsequent to this happening, both accept Jennings' offer to be part of a perilous "bat team", who takes down Japanese snooper aircraft after sunset, leaving Duane to lead the squadron's strikes in the upcoming Battle of Kwajalein. In the night before the battle, Fred, Jack and Jennings engage in a clash with a force of Japanese torpedo bombers attackers, and Jennings fails to return. Thanks to spending the night playing poker, Duane leads a sloppy strike which ends up with three squadron pilots dead, and is reprimended by the skipper. Duane later gets angry with his demotion in the next strike and Jack's lack of objections over his marriage with Eleanor, and hints about the true nature of the latter's relationship with Fred, causing the tension between them reach its peak.
After a wave of pessimism grasps VF-20's pilots due their hazy survival chances, an angry Jack lets out a harsh rant a day before their attack on Truk Atoll, which has a motivational effect over them. The squadron's strike launch is not entirely successful, with Duane's division getting lost on the way, setting Jack and Fred's division to fight alone against a larger number of Japanese aircraft. Duane's division arrives in time to save Jack, who in turn starts to search for Fred, finding him injured inside his damaged Hellcat. They both ditch their aircraft, and Jack takes care of Fred until a submarine rescues them.
"Scrapbook" and epilogue.
After Truk, Fred's health problems make it impossible for him to continue in the Navy, and he's discharged as a full lieutenant. When his father dies, he takes over his family's hardware business, with a recently retired Jack as a part owner. Their company is very successful and they stay together until Jack dies from a heart attack, in 1969. At his funeral, Fred meets Duane again for the first time since his war days, and the two have a short talk about their past.
Characters.
Other characters include Lieutenant Commander "Deadly" Deal — the skipper of VF-8 —, Lt. Overstreet — the square-jawed officer of the deck —, Chief Carmichael — with whom Duane plays poker —, Commander Mat Braden — Jack and Duane's former boss —, and VF-20's members Ensign John Anders, James R. Bagley, Ensign David Bigelow, Lt. (junior grade) Bracker, Lt. Bradley, Ensign Duggin, Lt. (j.g.) Fitzsimmons, Lt. (j.g.) Frank Hammerstein, Lt. (j.g.) Heckman, Ensign William C. Hill, Ensign Luden Hodges, Ensign Horace, Ensign Hughes, Ensign Dave Jacobs, Ensign Tom Jenkins, Ensign Levi, Ensign Patrick, Ensign Dave Peckerly, Ensign Rogers, Lt. C. T. Schuster and Lt. (j.g.) Smith. A fictionalized depiction of Admiral Nimitz also makes a short appearance.
Background and development.
Christopher E. Case began his first steps in writing in the mid-1960s, on a typewriter. During these years, he began developing a big interest in military matters, especially related to the United States Navy participation in World War II, which led him to read Richard L. Newhafer's historical novel "The Last Tallyho" (1964). After going to college and serving a two-year hitch in the U.S. Navy, he rediscovered and re-read the novel a decade later, with mixed feelings about it. That was "the genesis of "Wingmen"", according to Case, who wrote the novel in 1978, when he was twenty eight years old, using the pen name Ensan Case. The author considered "Wingmen" as a sort of retaliation of the former novel, since "The Last Tallyho" presents two gay Navy pilots which "were portrayed as totally irredeemable cowards and slackers", something that pissed him off. Both novels are set aboard fictional American aircraft carriers in Pacific during World War II, with "Wingmen," in the words of Case, "[having] its protagonists a pair of gay pilots who were the exact opposites of Newhafer’s." He also "thanks to silly Dick Newhafer and his first Tallyho” on "Wingmen"'s dedication page.
Due to the time period in which the novel was materialized, heterosexual sex scenes were depicted in more detail in comparison to the homosexual ones, which are merely implied. Case explained that a major publisher would block a more explicit presence of the latter, which made him thought heterosexual sex insertions could "keep the mainstream reader interested and let [him] tell Jack and Fred’s story."
Setting and period.
Following a common historical fiction convention, "Wingmen" presents a fictional plot set in a past event. Though its characters, squadrons, air groups and carriers are all made up, the military operations they participate during the Pacific Ocean theater of World War II — namely the ones in Marcus Island, Wake Island, Tarawa Atoll (Battle of Tarawa), Kwajalein Atoll (Battle of Kwajalein) and Truk Atoll (Operation Hailstone) — all are based on real-life incidents. Most of the novel's action happens in 1943–44, amid the Pacific War, occasionally in some recognizable Oahu locations, such as the remarkable Pearl Harbor Naval Station and Ford Island Naval Air Station, as well as the Moana and Royal Hawaiian hotels.
Style and themes.
In his analysis of the novel, scholar Eric Patterson identified "Wingmen"'s main topic as being homosexual affection and desire inside an environment "that at once are intensely homosocial and intensely homophobic". Despite this, he believes labeling it as a "romantic gay novel" would be "somewhat misleading", due the popular patterns that usually are attached to the term and the generalizations that are made about gay men. To him, Case focused on portraying the complex dilemma in which men who love men and frequent all-male environments, because of their desire to share the "intense comradeship in work and in
play that men can create together", can be upon when they fall in love in love with a colleague and want to retain "both types of male intimacy." Comradeship being two men in those spaces is also deeply explored, with Patterson evoking Allan Bérubé to explain how the war can blurry the boundary between the homosocial and the homosexual, "and to some degree neutralized the homophobia that usually was ready to police that boundary and suppress the expression of affection and attraction between men." Living together through buddy systems and constantly saving each other's lives, homosexual men like Fred and Jack "become essential to one another", and were able to form a close relationship despite the constant surveillance and alienation "from the compulsory — and compulsive — heterosexuality all around them", many times here embedded by Duane Higgins, which Patterson describes as a "picture of the emergence of aggressive homophobia."
Patterson places "Wingmen" inside the "modernism realism" vein of World War II fiction depicting men in war — together with works like Norman Mailer's "The Naked and the Dead" and Herman Wouk's "The Caine Mutiny" — which follow "a strong tradition of realistic writing confronting the physical and psychological ordeal of war." Through a chronological narrative, Case "presents the perspectives of several central characters