Seth Mydans of The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune sent the following email to James Michener three days after "Flying off the map: A veteran's search for peace" was published in the International Herald Tribune.

Jim,

If you can write the way you can talk, your readers are in for a good time. Not many people talk like this. Here for example is a scene I wrote down [as you narrated it] but had no way to use.

"What happened that day was so powerful that the things that led up to it have been erased from my mind. Think of scrub that is high as this ceiling and it's all on fire, like the end of the earth. Everything's on fire, the houses are on fire, the timbers are falling down. I get to the spot, the people come out in their black pyjamas, the whole family, the animals, the pigs in their baskets, you know how they carry pigs. This girl who appeared to be about 15 years old had a baby in her arms, everything was red flames and black sky, she came out, you know how the Vietnamese run, pitter patter pitter patter and she gets to the chopper and stops and looks up at me. There I was, all armored up, helmet, weaponry, and this girl stops and looks up at me, holding this baby in a little rag, you know how choppers kind of bounce, rocking up and down like a rocking chair, and her eyes lock on mine, a kind of electricity, and this baby is so tiny you could have put it in a shoe box, you could have put it in a shoe box and put the lid on it. So what do I do with that in my manuscript?"

Seth

email outbound

By return email, Mirage, drafted in January 2005, was sent to Seth.

Mirage

An excerpt from James Michener’s Poison in the Wind

To a doubting superior, an Army enlisted guy explains what he saw

Nha Trang Air Base | 1966

“At first I thought it was a vapor, like a mirage, you know. It just sat there shimmering, or at least the top of it shimmered -- the sun wasn’t above the sea yet, but the top of the mirage was already a deep blood red color, reflecting -- like a mirror, I guess -- the sun that was not far below the horizon. It is not of this world, that was what I thought, and the fascination of it held me in its grip. And the next thing I knew I was walking towards it, like sort of automated, as if I were not in charge of my feet, like this thing had its own center of gravity, its own magnetic field, in time and space. What finally made me pay attention and take stock of the situation, of course, was the cold. The closer I got to it, the colder the air got. It was like some vast freezer door was open. And then I looked at the ground and saw that the mirage floated mere inches above the runway, just enough to get your hand under, which I did, but I pulled it out quickly -- it was like touching dry ice. So much cold air poured off the towering walls of the mirage that I had to back up twenty or thirty feet to keep from freezing. It was the sounds, of course, that, trance like, spellbound, held me there. Joe and Harry and Lou and Walter -- you know, the guys from the barracks. They were talking about loading cargo, like what cargo to load, there being so much, maybe too much. And I heard the sound of the hangar doors being shoved open. And I heard the sound of the warehouse doors being shoved open. And somebody fired up a mule. Then somebody fired up another mule. And then the engines on a DC-3 started to be run up. And there was all this whirling of props and rolling forward of mules carrying cargo. And I said, is this real or not? It sure sounds real. But the cold kept pouring off the side and I was afraid to walk back to what was looking more and more like an iceberg as crimson at the top slowly descended to the bottom, the strong reflection of it warming my face. Any cargo will do. All cargo is accepted, I heard them say. They said it so many times that I stopped paying attention. The voices were drowned out at times by grinding, grating sounds, and the noise of tools sometimes being dropped on the runway. The sounds were familiar but not necessarily in that combination or so quickly. And then the landing light of the DC-3 came on, and it shown straight on me, so I knew everything had to be real. I mean, I -- my eyes, my ears, all my senses, in other words -- was like a mirror reflecting everything. And then the cargo doors were shut -- I could hear the latches going home where they belonged. And the mules retreated to the warehouse. And the voices retreated to the hangar. And the DC-3 taxied to the runway, where it stopped, waiting for clearance to takeoff, I guess. And there was this deafening pounding of the pistons in the cylinders, but the brakes held tight. Then Echo Alpha appeared and ran into the iceberg guided by voices which I had not heard before and therefore did not recognize. The fuselage door behind the cockpit opened and the whitest light shone out, maybe as bright as the headlight on a locomotive. I looked behind myself and saw that I was casting a long shadow, so I again knew that this had to be real. And Echo Alpha was framed, silhouetted, as he entered the door. His silhouette burns in my mind still, and I will come back to that. The door shut. The brakes were released. And the DC-3 began to roll inside that iceberg towards the seaward end of the runway. God, it was a beautiful sight. The headlight blazing through the crystalline ice. The beacon on top of the fuselage rolling around and around, striking all interior surfaces of the iceberg as if it were the light in a lighthouse. And the tail came up as it passed me. And all the windows were aglow. And I saw Echo Alpha doing something with American flags, which, although I was not initially aware of it, stopped my heart. And then I began to tremble. And then I began to cry. And then, as if it were a reflex, I saluted that DC-3 and all who were in it. And I watched it get light on its wheels. And the engines droned on and on. God, it was beautiful. Something sacred. Something merciful. Something unexplainable. I have never been the same since.”