The Hunters by James Salter

not reply. He fought down his pride and turned away. He knew what was happening. Even as an ordinary flight leader he was expected to get kills; but he had to live up to more than that. Everybody was watching him, many of them cynically. Everybody was waiting for proof of his ability, and somehow he had not been able to give it. He could sense the ebbing respect. It was showing up more frequently as the days passed.
    He was overcome by a lonely, hopeless feeling. He did not want to talk to anybody, only to be by himself. Later, he might have a drink if the club was not too crowded, or perhaps even see the movie. Slowly the mood would abate, leaving finally only its invisible scar. Years ago, losing a football game away from home, he had walked like this, slowly, off the hard field, away from the crowd and the noise. The cleated shoes sounded hollow as they scraped down the long hallway to the locker room, and there were
very few words that did not sound hollow, too. The ride home in the chartered bus seemed endless. Nobody talked, but only slept fitfully or stared out the cold, misting windows.
    Perhaps it was true that through defeat men were made, and that victors actually lost, with every triumph, the vital strength that found exercise only in recovering strength. Perhaps the spirit grew greater in achieving the understanding that was first confused and then exquisitely clear after having lost. But that was, Cleve thought, like saying it was strengthening to be poor. It wasn’t, he was sure. It was sapping. It was like having a leech’s mouth on your breast, forever draining, so that everything had to be sacrificed for nothing more than sustaining the burden of flesh. There were very few men who ever surmounted poverty; and there were very few losers, he felt, who realized anything but tears from their defeats.
    He wondered how this had happened to him, how despite himself he had been imprisoned by this inflexible choice of winning or losing; for there seemed to be no compromise between the two in this barren place where there was a single definition of excellence. If only there were some ground in between, some neutral stretch separating attainment and failure. He yearned for that. He felt emptied by desire. Suddenly he found himself wanting to be honorably relieved from the struggle, to have no part of it. Interminably, he saw it stretching out ahead of him, and he faced it with a sense of helplessness that he hated more than anything else. He had lost a moral independence. He had never lived without it before, and he did not know what to expect.
    Whatever it was that had denied him the enemy, he wanted to meet and demolish. If it was only bad fortune, he could outwait
that; but he was increasingly tortured by the thought that it might be something more insidious, he was afraid to identify what. If it was something unacknowledged within himself, then he was lost. The torment of that possibility tore at his heart.
    He sat in the dark room, thinking. The clamor of Nolan and his flight returning to their room next door, shouting happily to each other and to those who came by to hear what had happened, streamed by him abstractly. At one point he was aware of Hunter’s voice in there, but the actual words floated by him.
    For a long time he sat quietly, in a solitude that gave only a vast discomfort instead of peace, pushing his thoughts before him as if through a jungle of spears. He was miserable. It could not go on. He had never been beaten, and it could not happen now; yet there was this before him which seemed to endanger everything he had fought for within himself. The mystic tissue that joined the soul of a man together, he felt it dissolving. He had to succeed. If he could only find them. He needed just a fragment of triumph, only that, to remove the doubts.
    He did not know how many minutes or hours passed like that, but slowly his despair was washed away by visions, and he could see, as if it were