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Show 137 Silence. BABY BROCKEN! The smallest here ever heard. But everybody heard it. I finally got my name changed on my records but none of the cadets ever called me Chess or Chet or even Chester, and damned few even called me Babe. The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune are not always the big stuff. It was months before I felt noble again. I felt wiped out, I felt like somebody else, a stranger: Cadet Brocken sounded like a third cousin; Babe Brocken I didn't even know; Baby Brocken I didn't want to know. I got acquainted with them all. But the guy who razzed me the most got sent to Livermore to primary flight training, while I went to Los Alamitos, my second trip to that paradise of L.A., out in the orange groves. Gradually everyone was calling me Babe, and in Corpus Christi when I got my wings in November of that year, '43, with those gold wings and gold bars I found I could do more than live with it. Chance had offered me another role to play and I plunged into it: the hot fighter pilot, Babe Brocken. For I was sent to train in fighters. In Florida. In Miami. In Paradise. Out at the Naval Air Station at Opa Locka, just north of Hialeah with its flamingos and thoroughbreds, just a bus ride away from Flagler Street and all those fabulous girls, just under that moon over Miami. Dolphins played in Biscayne Bay, palm trees grew real coconuts, hibiscus and bathing beauties bloomed under the sun. I loved Collins Avenue and those Beach hotels, from the air set with turquoise swimming-pool jewels. And the white beach lining the edge of the blue Atlantic-it was Paradise all right, built from scratch on a tropical swamp. The cockroaches were no bigger than in Texas, the heat rash no worse than a dose, most of the girls were clean. At least I never got the clap and |