The Candy Bombers by Andrei Cherny

Author:Andrei Cherny
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2008-04-16T16:00:00+00:00

WHEN THE WAR ended and everyone else had headed home, Tunner remained behind, keeping his men there with him. He was consumed by a new dream of tying the nations of Asia together with air transport. He called it the “Orient Project.”

His wife had, by then, taken their sons home to her mother’s house in Mississippi. One day, she took the boys to a dentist in New Orleans and suddenly collapsed unconscious. Tunner received a telegram with the news—accompanied with a personal message from his commander, General Harold George, reminding him that the war was long over, that it was now time for him to come home, and that he should go immediately to Louisiana. He flew three days and nights straight to New Orleans. By that time Sarah had regained consciousness, but the doctors were unable to find out what the problem had been. They thought it might well be a brain tumor, but warned that it would take months to make a full diagnosis. Tunner took Sarah and the boys back to Mississippi and managed to spend the rest of the day with them before leaving for Washington. He had not seen them for more than a year. In Washington, General George was doubtful about the Orient Project—the cry of “bring the boys home” was rising and military demobilization was quickening in pace. But he told Tunner he would let him go ahead with it for now. Tunner returned immediately to India. He had been gone nine days—seven in travel, two in the United States, one of those with his family.

A month later, he was flying to Beijing when his plane received a message informing him that Sarah had fallen again. This time the doctors were sure it was a tumor, but they would not operate until he arrived. Tunner would recall that “again” General George “advised me to come home,” which raises the question of what he would have done were it not for that recommendation. Once more, he traveled home over three days and nights. The doctors operated the next day, but the tumor had spread over a large area of her brain. Sarah never awoke. In his memoir he would describe what happened: “She lingered on for a year and a half, still comatose. Then she died.”

The next sentence he wrote was “And the Orient Project collapsed. The boss had run out on his own project, and those who had volunteered lost faith.” He, of course, had not run out but gone to a dying wife and small children who needed him. But there is more between those two sentences than the empty space of a white page. It was not just the Orient Project that collapsed, but the career of its creator.

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