Meeting the Jet Man

This book comes direct from the cockpit of a modern fighter-bomber. It brings the sparse poetry of aerial warfare up-to-date, aiming neither to glorify nor to apologise. Knowles’ dogged pursuit of himself in the guise of the Jet Man takes us into the aircraft with him, moving us beyond the CNN video-clips of surgical strikes and collateral damage. Meeting the Jet Man is about a young pilot growing up in thrall to past icons of war and aviation – and following that vision into the heart of the high-tech killing machine that is modern warfare. At a time when the natural distance between our society and its military risks becoming chasm of incomprehension, these poems throw one thin thread across the growing divide.

About David Knowles

In 1912 Bertrand Russell advised Wittgenstein to give up aviation in favour of philosophy. There was no similar advice forthcoming from the professors at Oxford when David Knowles abandoned his ambition to become an academic philosopher. He joined the RAF as a pilot in 1982. During the whole of his subsequent twenty-five-year RAF career David has been assigned to flying duties – they never managed to tie him to a desk job. For most of that time he has been on front-line Tornado ground-attack squadrons, amassing well over 3000 flight hours on one of the most potent airborne weapons systems of its day. From the closing years of the Cold War, through a decade of peace-keeping, the military victory in Iraq and then into its aftermath, David has been strapped into the cockpit trying to make sense of what he is seeing, experiencing and participating in. Awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross for actions during the opening phase of the invasion of Iraq, David has first-hand experience of aspects of modern warfare which have scarcely been touched upon in poetry before. He has recently retired from the RAF and founded Two Ravens Press publishing house with his wife and fellow writer Sharon Blackie.

Praise for Meeting the Jet Man

The Times Literary Supplement made the following mention of Meeting the Jet Man as part of their ongoing discussions about modern war poetry:

'At the beginning of 2007, we wrote: "We have been at war for over five years, first in Afghanistan, then Iraq. Where are the poets of the war?". There were few answers ... Mention might also be made of David Knowles. After twenty-five years as an RAF pilot, during which he was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross "for actions during the opening phase of the invasion of Iraq", Mr Knowles retired to found Two Ravens Press, a poetry publisher in the Scottish Highlands. It has just published a book of his own work, Meeting the Jet Man, an assortment of poetry and prose based on his military experience. "Coming Home in a Seat" describes the return of the bodies of two soldiers accidentally killed by their own side:

these were friendly deaths
with no best side for the camera
denied their varnish
of enemy fire.
Us they send home in a seat
parcel-post on a plane, not met
by bands of black
or weeping.
We are not carried off the ramp
nor punctuated with a bullet.'

An Interview with David Knowles

When did you first begin writing, and what inspired you to do so? Have any specific books/authors served as inspiration for you?

I don’t think there was ever a time when I didn’t admire writers as members of society, and aspire to be one. I wrote lengthy religious essays when I was ten. Poetry too, in some gawky fashion – but rarely stories. Of course my ideas about what it is to be a writer have changed over the years – particularly my ideas about what does not count as being a writer. The giants of my early reading were Camus, Sartre, Mann, Nietzsche and more Nietzsche. Fowles was the only modern writer I stumbled upon who seemed to take the business seriously – though of course I have been shown many others since.

Can you tell us something about the inspiration behind Meeting the Jet Man? And about what you were trying to achieve; what ideas you were trying to convey?

Clearly the inspiration came from events, particularly the invasion of Iraq in 2003, in which I participated. With that raw material I wanted to do at least two things. First, I wanted to put a human face on the bomber pilot – the people whose distorted voices you hear calmly reporting a weapon impact, halfway through the Six o’Clock News. It isn’t enough to see such pilots as an other, as a ‘them’. They live next door, they are in the checkout queue behind you. And it’s only when they have a human face that you can begin to do the second thing – which is far more interesting – and that is to ask what it does to a person to be so completely part of a machine, both the aircraft and the wider military machine. Some of my suggested answers to that question will not be popular – I certainly do not see all the outcomes in a negative light.

Of course, the basic question isn’t unique to jet pilots, not by a long shot. But it is particularly acute and clear for a pilot on operations. I once saw a clip of myself on television, climbing down from the cockpit after a bombing mission. I was grinning from ear to ear and walked confidently over to do a live interview. I did not recognise myself. What I saw was The Jet Man. That degree of dissociation is part of what I wanted to write about.

How do you go about creating your voice on the page?

I concentrate very hard on not hearing all the other voices that want to speak when I open my mouth. All the authors I ever read and all the people I have really listened to – they all want to grab the microphone. I have to produce some sort of diversion to keep them busy while I sneak off-stage and write. Luckily they leave me alone when I’m revising and re-writing.

How and when do you write?

Mostly in fragments, anywhere, anytime. Often first thing in the morning but just as likely on a boarding pass as I wait for a plane, even once in a dentist’s waiting room.

What do you enjoy reading? What are you reading that you can recommend at the moment?

I read a lot of poetry, of course. But I try to focus on a particular poet for days or weeks at a time, reading the work and the secondary literature. Most recently I have returned to Dylan Thomas. I have always found him an easy poet to listen to, but a very difficult one to understand. It seems to be a common view that poems can be picked up in isolation from their context and fully, or nearly fully understood. No doubt there are such poems – but I believe them to be the exception rather than the rule.

Other than that I read a lot of non-fiction – philosophy and history. I would generally chose the short story before the novel – maybe I have too short a concentration span!

An extract from Meeting the Jet Man

Introduction

My dreams about flying started some short time before my dreams about sex. With a similar whole-body sensation in the two cases. Shortly after that came an awareness of the great air battles of the Second World War – through feature films such as The Battle of Britain and The Dambusters. In my young mind some sort of fusion took place between these two threads – the flying and the warfare – which was in a sense quite arbitrary. There are many reasons to take to the air, warfare being only one of the more outlandish. The combination of themes was no less powerful for that – so powerful that it has taken me thirty years to glimpse the contingent nature of the connection. It is like finding that the smell you always associated with your mother’s kitchen, and always took to be a function of her cooking, actually originated at the bakery next door.

I have just completed twenty-five years in the RAF. Those years were dedicated to the pursuit of excellence in flying and the application of my aircraft as a weapons system. Nothing more, nothing less. There can at times be an almost monastic completeness to the life of the fast-jet aircrew, the Jet Man.

Physically, flying is strange. The world is frequently upside down, your body often weighs four or five times its normal weight – or less than nothing. Great distances are consumed in seconds. Into that environment warfare intrudes. Or at least a tiny, upside-down frog’s-eye glimpse of warfare intrudes. These poems are intended to take the reader into the cockpit and communicate that glimpse. For the strangeness of the sensations and the obscurity of some of the terminology I have no antidote but the poems themselves, plus a few explanatory notes at the back of the collection. Overcoming disorientation, both spatial and situational, is at the heart of military flying.

The sections of the collection are chronological – following the military operations in Iraq from the first Gulf War up to 2008, and my own involvement in them. However, the writing is not intended to be a ‘working through’, nor to provide a potted history, much less a resolution of moral issues. It is intended to bear witness to terrible events and what it is to actively participate in them. Why read such a book? Because it is easy for the natural distance between a society and its military to become a chasm of incomprehension. If this is allowed to happen, the decisions a society makes about the employment of military force are liable to be erroneous. I hope that these poems throw one thin thread across the chasm.

But before you go on operational duties, you first need to learn how to fly…

THROUGH THE SOUND BARRIER

No, there are no colours
we can still hear our thoughts
through air crammed so solid
nothing gets away.

Only goose-prickle shock
after shock-waves burst
through the skin of wings,
decorate the canopy with
hot thorns, the lambda feet
of brittle gas.

Still we push fuel through
a fat garden hose into burner cans,
bulldoze through these brambles
dragging at our sleeve
while the great salmon slab-tail
of this transonic Tornado grunts and holds
nose steady, scythe-line clear
through a forest of startled icicles,
leading shocks and trailing shocks clear-felled.
So mustn’t we be quiet now
— out here ahead?

Alone, an old altimeter
round glass, much as it was,
curtseys in an LCD cockpit
to the passing of Mach one.