Mr. Ledbetter's Boots, page 1
Praise for Johnson’s previous works
Once I started reading it, I quickly fell in love with the humor and honesty. I could not put it down.
BEATE ON “DOOFUS DAD DOES EVEREST BASE CAMP”
Johnson, aka "Doofus Dad,” is able to clearly depict the fantastic scenery, culture, and people he encounters throughout the Khumbu Valley and does so with a keen insight and rapier wit.
ROSS M. FINLAYSON ON “DOOFUS DAD DOES EVEREST BASE CAMP”
I had to grab a blanket to warm up as I made this trip of a lifetime. The smell of garlic soup, Tibetan bread, and, yes, yak dung, still fill my nostrils. At age 80 and with medical and visual problems that would prohibit me from making this trip in person, I am much obliged to Johnson and his wife, Holly, for taking me along on this magical expedition. The bells of Shangri-La continue to tinkle their wistful call to a land of the gentle Sherpas far away, but now forever etched in my memory.
JOE BATES, M.D., ON “DOOFUS DAD DOES EVEREST BASE CAMP”
Praise for Johnson’s previous works
Johnson does a stunning job of capturing (what I can only imagine are) the feelings of battling your way through the mountainous terrain of the Himalayas and the perhaps even more daunting terrain of the everyday airport in this must-read adventure. This book has heart: You’ll find yourself sharing in the trekking group’s triumphs and biting your nails during their defeats.
TIMOTHY ON “DOOFUS DAD DOES EVEREST BASE CAMP
If leaving your hometown to get on the roller coaster ride of show business wasn’t enough, add the wine, women, and song, and you’ve got the makings of one hell of an adventure. Johnson rides it for all it’s worth.
DOUG HOLMQUIST ON “BLOW THE MAN DOWN”
This funny, poignant, artist’s coming-of-age story is a vicarious travel narrative for anyone who has ever dreamed of getting their act together and taking it on the road. Highly recommended for its entertainment value!
BOOK CONSPIRATOR ON “BLOW THE MAN DOWN”
Praise for Johnson’s previous works
We’ve all read music bios and memoirs from household names like Bob Dylan, Keith Richards, or Miles Davis. But what about the experience most of us musicians, who aren’t household names, have? The one where we scrape by, occasionally feeling like we’re on the cusp of great success, and other times wondering why we would choose this crazy life. Musician-turned-writer Mark Johnson has delivered that book, and it’s both funny and touching, whimsical and informative.
MICHAEL ST. PATRICK, POCKET SOUNDS, ON “BLOW THE MAN DOWN”
Mark’s writing style and descriptions of the people, places, and events is such that you finish a chapter, put the book down … and then pick it back up, further procrastinating whatever it was you were about to move onto.
MICHAEL STRAUSS ON “BLOW THE MAN DOWN”
Mr. Ledbetter’s Boots
A NOVEL
M. ERNEST JOHNSON
Copyright © 2023 by M. Ernest Johnson
All rights reserved. ISBN: 979-8-3927082-4-6
Cover art by Big Harvest Creative Group.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
For my dad, Hal Johnson, who has lived a life of hard work, creativity, and fierce love for his family. He did his best to show us three knuckleheads right from wrong, common sense from madness.
You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.
MAE WEST
Contents
Prologue
I. America
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
II. Into the Khumbu
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
III. The Last Leg
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by M. Ernest Johnson
Prologue
March 27, 1945
10:34 am
Austrian Alps
Black smoke poured from the cowling of the P-51 Mustang and the engine sputtered. A spray of 30mm shells from the German Messerschmitt ME 262 had not only impacted the engine, but also cut through the Mustang’s flight controls, rendering them useless. Satisfied that the attack was fatal to the enemy plane, the Messerschmitt had sped away, leaving the Mustang to a slow demise.
“Darned lucky shot,” Maj. Raymond Ulysses Ledbetter muttered as he assessed the damage, working his stick and pedals. “That guy will be bragging to his buddies later, but he knows he was dad-blamed lucky.”
He keyed his radio.
“Mayday, mayday, mayday. This is 51-33. I’ve been hit and I’m going down. Heading southeast toward the north-facing slopes of a mountain range. Mayday, mayday, mayday.”
Nothing. His comms were out. He was on his own.
A member of the U.S. Air Force 332 Expeditionary Operations Group — commonly known as the “Tuskegee Airmen” — Raymond had downed two German Focke-Wulf Fw 190 fighters not five minutes ago in a chaotic dogfight. A squadron of “Red Tails” had been escorting a bomber group into Berlin when a swarm of at least 30 Luftwaffe aircraft attacked. Raymond had acted on pure instinct, both in flaming the two 190s and avoiding mid-air collisions in all the confusion, but he never saw the streaking ME 262, Germany’s prized jet-powered fighter. He only felt his Mustang shutter as the German shells tore through the airframe. Two punctured his canopy, barely missing his head and opening holes that whistled like tea kettles.
If Raymond had any remaining luck, it was the fact that his flight controls had been frozen into a level orientation rather than spinning him into the ground. However, he had lost side-to-side influence — he could only glide in one direction: straight toward the towering, snowy peaks of the Austrian Alps.
Raymond knew his plane, the “Screaming Clarice,” was not long for this world, and sure enough, the sputtering soon stopped, the sound replaced by near silence. As the serrated peaks grew larger in his windscreen, the pilot unbuckled himself, removed his oxygen mask, and slid the canopy open, a blast of frigid air shoving him back into the seat. As he lifted his left leg to climb out of the cockpit, something on his parachute pack snagged.
What the…?!
Raymond tugged at the pack, feeling a wave of desperation swelling.
“Let go, dammit! Let go!” he screamed, throwing the weight of his body against the straps of his parachute pack.
Every second that passed sent him further into the mountain range. He must bail out immediately.
With a final mighty jerk, something snapped, and the pack released. Raymond took a quick look in front of him. The plane was hurtling toward what looked like a saddle of snow sloping between two peaks that towered above his aircraft. The saddle looked to be only a couple hundred feet below. It was probably suicide, but jumping beat riding the plane into the mountain. It was now or never.
Now.
Raymond sprang out. He simultaneously pulled the rip cord, and his roughly 200-mile-an-hour speed exploded the parachute open in a millisecond, snapping the airman’s head and limbs forward violently and knocking him unconscious.
The “Screaming Clarice” impacted the mountain just beneath the saddle and exploded. Debris and flames billowed up toward the dangling airman, searing the soles of his boots and burning holes into his flight jacket.
A swirling mountain thermal suddenly grabbed the parachute like a child’s toy and thrust it forward over Raymond’s head, yanking him toward the saddle. As the pilot regained consciousness, he felt an odd sensation in his feet — boots plowing through soft snow. He tried to dig his heels in, searching for something solid to arrest his forward motion, but there was only loose powder. His parachute, propelled by the thermal, was an unstoppable force dragging him toward the edge of the saddle on the opposite side.
No chance.
With a shriek, Raymond flew off what revealed itself as a sheer rock cliff that dropped at least two thousand feet. Below that were broad expanses of snow fields, small glaciers, and scree-covered slopes, and the winds were jerking him in uncontrolled directions as if shaken by a giant, invisible dog.
As he dropped at some 15 miles per hour, he could easily make out the verdant meadows and crystalline lakes of Austria far below in the valleys between the peaks. In the confusion of his synapses firing through a wave of adrenaline, Raymond noted the beauty of his surroundings. It was like nothing he’d ever seen before. Perhaps it was Heaven.
Slam! The thermal jerked the parachute and its human cargo back into the mountain, spinning Raymond into an icy slope that was easily 45 degrees in pitch. Before he could react, the airman was sliding on his back, feet first, at a suicidal speed, rushing toward a cluster of boulders 1,000 feet below. The collapsed parachute dragged behind him, useless.
Raymond was no doctor, but any fool could do the math: this was not a survivable situation. He closed his eyes and clenched his muscles in anticipation of the impact that would surely kill him. In his mind’s eye, he saw the smiling face of Clarice. Clarice, who had been his middle-school sweetheart back in Selma, North Carolina. Clarice, who had insisted they marry one week prior to his deployment. Clarice, who had rejected the romantic airplane monikers like “Glamorous Clarice” or “Lovely Clarice” in favor of something that would strike fear in the hearts of the enemy. “Screaming Clarice.” That was more like it! That was his Clarice! Raymond fixed her doe-eyed visage in his mind and accepted what was to come.
Blackness.
For the second time in less than two minutes, the pilot was knocked unconscious by the jerk of his chute. But this time, it was on the ground. Just as he was within feet of the boulder field, the fabric and cords of the parachute snagged on an outcropping of stone and stopped Raymond’s forward momentum, snapping him up and back.
Five minutes later, the world returned to focus, and Raymond felt throbbing pain where his head had banged against the ice. A thin stream of blood trickled from under his leather flight helmet and dripped off his chin, splattering onto his yellow “Mae West” life jacket.
Wait. Why was he feeling pain? Heaven doesn’t have pain!
It dawned on him that he was somehow still alive. This defied logic, but he wasn’t about to question it. He must now get to work.
He assessed his extremities; nothing appeared to be broken, although his shoulders ached from the violent jerk of the parachute harness. His backside was on fire, as if by an exaggerated rug burn, but there were no deep lacerations. There was a tiny nick in the leather of his flight helmet above his right eye, enough of a scratch on his forehead to bleed but not enough to worry about.
OK, I’m functional, Raymond thought. Now, how to proceed…
After a quick look around, his heart sank. He remained perched on an incredibly steep slope of mostly ice and snow that dropped vertically for hundreds of feet.
Terrain like this was unfamiliar territory for Raymond. It’s not that he had something against mountains — he had quite enjoyed seeing them in picture books and from the cockpit of the “Screaming Clarice” — it’s just that he was inexperienced with them in person. He was used to flat and level. Selma was flat and level; there wasn’t a hillside within 100 miles, let alone a mountain. The soybean, cotton, peanut, and tobacco fields of the Carolina Piedmont and coastal plains were as flat as tabletops, broken only by stands of loblolly pines that were equally monotonous. A person raised in these surroundings might go their entire lives without experiencing a pitch of any kind, save perhaps for that of a barn roof. Even as an aviator, Raymond was trained to keep his aircraft on the level — level with the horizon and with his flight indicator gauge. A vertical world where gravity was actively trying to pull unsecured items — and at the moment, he was an unsecured item — to the termination point of an extreme pitch was beyond Raymond’s sphere of experience.
“Okay, Ray, calm down and think,” he said aloud. “You are alive, and you’re unbroken. Work the problem.”
He checked the gear attached to his person. His standard-issue Colt .45 pistol was still secure in its holster. The pilot escape kit was still there, miraculously hanging by a thread. He opened it and retrieved a small machete.
His best option was to pound his heels into the hard pack until they could support his weight and then use the machete to cut himself loose from the parachute cords.
He stood up carefully after assuring himself that he wouldn’t begin another plummet down the mountain. Turning sideways in his dugout foot depressions, he was able to shake part of the chute loose from its tangles and detach a couple of 25-foot suspension lines, which he wrapped around his waist in case he needed them later. That accomplished, Raymond worked himself diagonally across the slope toward a scree field of rocky debris where he could gain some purchase, jabbing the uphill side of his boots into the snow with each step and testing the weight-bearing capacity of the icy material before progressing further. It was slow-going, and waves of dizziness and nausea swelled with every jarring step.
“It’s the altitude,” he gasped. “Maybe a concussion. Take it slow.”
Within 30 minutes, Raymond had reached the scree. He scooted down to a nearly level perch, where he vomited and collapsed. Looking back at where he had just traveled, the airman smiled in satisfaction and again fell into unconsciousness.
According to his wristwatch, it was two hours later — past 1 pm, Austrian time — when Raymond awoke to a throbbing headache. He sat up and oriented himself, grimacing against the pain. The base of the mountain seemed an insurmountable distance, but it was either make progress or die. He stood up on wobbly legs.
“Clarice, I’m getting off this mountain, honey,” Raymond spoke into the alpine air. “Send some prayers up for me; I’m gonna need ’em.”
For the next four hours, Raymond picked his way down the slopes, often sliding on the loose debris from one boulder to another and using his hands as rudders. He was thankful for the protection of his heavy leather flight gloves. At one point, he found himself at the edge of a 30-foot cliff and, with much apprehension, tied the suspension lines to a secure boulder and rappelled down slowly, a skill he was taught in basic training. When he found himself hanging at the end of the lines and was still six feet above the ground, he severed the cords and landed in a heap. He hated to leave the suspension lines but had no way to retrieve them.
He continued down. As the oxygen in the air thickened, he found that he had more strength and that his headache had subsided. He was now navigating the boulder fields with relative ease, almost enjoying himself but dreading what might be in store for him in the pastoral valley below.
At the airbase of the 332nd in Ramitelli, Italy, a story had been circulating that a downed Tuskegee Airman — Raymond’s friend, Philadelphian Walter Manning — had been captured in Austria and locked up. An angry mob of Nazi sympathizers calling themselves “The Werewolf” then ransacked the jail where he was being held, killed the guards, and dragged Manning out.
Rumor had it that Walter had been beaten and lynched on a light pole. Had the airman’s race played a role in this crime? Similar atrocities had certainly happened to white American airmen as well, but the concept of lynching had understandably touched a nerve among the members of the 332nd and had created a good deal of discussion.
As far as Raymond was concerned, dead was dead, regardless of the method, and he intended to avoid death. He could only hope that his crash and descent down the mountain had gone unnoticed by any unfriendlies.
The scree and snow finally gave way to fields of grass, wildflowers, and stands of birches. Raymond followed the flow of a small but energetic meltwater stream, stopping often to drink handfuls. The sun disappeared behind a neighboring peak, and in an instant, the air temperature cooled.
The airman knew he would have to overnight in this valley.
Just as the pitch of the slope became manageable, Raymond spotted a barn a short distance below. He approached cautiously, .45 in his right hand. After several minutes of listening for movement and hearing none, he crept inside.
