Ups And Downs FLIGHTS OF PASSAGE

By Paul Gray

Whenever possible, publishers like to send their books into the marketplace festooned with admiring quotations from familiar names. Hence this memoir, subtitled Reflections of a World War II Aviator, bears endorsements from the likes of James Dickey, Howard Nemerov, Russell Baker and Ted Williams. Ted Williams? Yes, indeed. And what does the "Splendid Splinter" have to say? "No matter what part of the service you were in as a young kid, you will relive many of the memories Sam Hynes has written about in this book." The sole problem with this recommendation is its exclusivity. In truth, Flights of Passage not only jogs memories but creates them.

Samuel Hynes, 63, is a literary critic (The Auden Generation, The Edwardian Turn of Mind) and a professor of English at Princeton. These accomplishments do not figure in his narrative, which ends a few months after the war and Hynes' service as a Marine dive-bomber pilot in the Pacific. Looking back, the author is convinced that members of his generation, who grew up not in college or at jobs but training for battle, shared a secret that "made us different from those who were older or younger than ourselves, or who were not in the war. I can't formulate the differences in terms that seem adequate to the experience, but perhaps I can recover something of the experience itself."

This task entails a willed return to innocence, to the raw emotions of an 18-year-old boy as he says goodbye to his father at the Minneapolis train station and sets off on an odyssey that will take him, in carefully prearranged steps, to bombing raids over Okinawa. Along the way, the provincial Midwesterner discovers unfamiliar places in his native land: Denton, Texas; Athens, Ga.; Memphis and air stations scattered along the coasts of Florida and California. He and the friends he acquires learn to fly planes, the machines and the maneuvers growing increasingly complex: "Sometimes I had secret doubts: would I ever be ready? Would I know when I was? The Navy's endless Tests were there to reassure me. I was passing, I was winning." Learning lessons, off duty as well as on, promises a path to maturity: how to find and then hold liquor; what to do when confronted with the uncharted terrain of women. "Sex was a journey of exploration. Girls were Africa and I was Stanley."

With the exhilarations of flight and the tight schedules of training, time speeds up. Hynes meets a buddy's sister and, almost before either one of them has a chance to think, marries her. Later she joins him at one of his numerous Stateside postings, in Santa Barbara, Calif., where they and some other newlyweds share a rented house and begin "playing at being Grown-ups." But the husbands, at least, hope that the game is temporary: "I think we were all frightened at the thought that the war might end, and then we'd have to start being grown-ups in earnest, with children and mortgages and debts."

This paradox shimmers throughout Flights of Passage: the war makes men out of Hynes and his comrades but also allows them to remain boys, irresponsible, as free as the birds when they climb into their cockpits. The author and his fellow pilots get to Okinawa on April 19, 1945, and participate in the tail end of the war in the Pacific. Two of Hynes' closest friends are killed, leaving him bereft and confused: "I didn't know how a man grieves." Suddenly, the war is over. While waiting for orders to return home, Hynes and his surviving mates are nearly wiped out by a typhoon.

By Hynes' own definition, what he and his cohorts lived through was unique to them. He also makes good on his promise to tell his story as he remembers it and "not to impose upon it the revisionary wisdom of age." But his prose betrays a mature intelligence. It is deceptively simple and consistently enchanting. Here is a pilot's view of Santa Barbara: "In the autumn the fogs were frequent, and moved in very quickly, as though the earth were pulling a blanket up to its chin in preparation for a cold night." Thanks to many such moments, Flights of Passage reaches well beyond those who "had been happy in that timeless world of young men." Youth is a universal heritage, as are dreams that the future will hold wonderful adventures. Amid general catastrophe, Hynes had the opportunity to live out those expectations. His book conveys memorably the sense of flight and the descent back to ordinary life.