AT LONG LAST THE PRAYERS of this humble rock dove have been answered. Electric typewriters have come on the scene, which means I can employ my hunting-and-pecking skills to tell the whole story of my brave lab mates, Burrhus Frederic Skinner, and our collaborative effort to cripple the German Navy during the Second World War.
Rest assured that I intend to give B. F. Skinner, dean of behaviorists, all the credit he deserves, though you won’t find herein much enthusiasm for his argument that the mind of any given pigeon—myself, for exxxample—is merely an epiphenomenon of its body. (I apologize for the above typo; the xxx key on this machine is sticky.) By the time my tale has ended, I hope to have convinced you that every member of my species enjoys an inner life and aspires to the condition called dignity.
I needn’t remind you that over the centuries your earthbound race has sustained three major blows to its self-esteem. First Nicolaus Copernicus dislodged you from the center of the universe, then Charles Darwin demolished your myth of special creation, and soon thereafter Sigmund Freud dashed your hopes of ever knowing yourselves in full. Now circumstances compel me to heap a fourth humiliation upon your head. It concerns the natural ability of pigeons to communicate telepathically with humans. To be perfectly frank, every time we read your thoughts, we become bored to tears. Evidently my species has little to learn from an animal that cannot travel at thirty-eight miles per hour under its own power, navigate by a planet’s magnetic field, or spread its wings and fly. I don’t mean to give offense. That’s simply the way it is.
Call me Reuben. Hatched on April 17, 1938, I came of age in Professor Skinner’s laboratory, back when he was teaching college students and exxxperimenting with allegedly lower animals at the University of Minnesota. At first my generation was happy to let Skinner believe that a rock dove is essentially a black boxxx with feathers. As long as he kept the rewards coming—the popcorn, the coconut flakes, the Chexxx cereal—we gave him ostensible sovereignty over our psyches, allowing him to train us to play ping-pong, knock over tiny bowling pins with marbles, and engage in other inane activities. But then Hitler invaded Poland, and kibble became the least of our concerns. You would be hard-pressed to find a more patriotic vertebrate than the pigeon. Our military exxxploits are the stuff of legend. We have not always fought on the morally superior side, but we invariably perform our duties with distinction and élan. I think especially of a female Great War veteran named Cher Ami (not Chère Amie, for her gender became known only after her death). On October 3, 1918, during the battle of the Argonne, this fearless bird soared across German lines bearing a dispatch from a lost battalion: WE ARE ALONG THE ROAD PARALLEL TO 276.4. OUR OWN ARTILLERY IS DROPPING A BARRAGE DIRECTLY ON US. FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE STOP IT. Cher Ami arrived at Division Headquarters shot through the breast, blind in one eye, and covered in blood, the leg holding her message capsule dangling by a tendon. Army medics immediately went to work on Cher Ami, saving her life and fitting her with a wooden leg. Her heroic flight delivered 194 American soldiers from annihilation by friendly fire, a feat for which she received the Croixxx de Guerre and, when she left France for her home in New Jersey, a personal send-off from General Pershing.
Not long after the Nazis went on the march, a consensus emerged within the community of Skinner’s winged exxxperimental subjects. We would devise a scheme for thwarting the Third Reich and then, breaking our vow of silence, solicit the great psychologist’s aid in implementing it. This plan, we agreed, should go far beyond the usual employment of pigeons as an organic telegraph system. Our beau geste, when it came, must be unprecedented and classy.
Months passed. No strategy suggested itself. The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, bringing America into the war: a catastrophic event, though one that would surely reinforce Skinner’s patriotism and hence his sympathy for our cause. We passed the early days of 1942 letting Skinner believe he was conditioning us to peck out tunes on a xxxylophone, but our minds remained fixxxed on Hitler and the abominable things he was doing to the doves of central Europe.
The breakthrough occurred one chilly Minneapolis morning when a pallid young entrepreneur named Victor Peabody appeared in the lab seeking Skinner’s opinion of his nascent scheme, Project Canine. Peabody hoped to dazzle the research department of the state’s largest industry, Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, with his design for an antisubmarine weapon: depth charges strapped to dogs conditioned to follow faint acoustic signals emanating from the hulls of U-boats. Was the renowned author of The Behavior of Organisms willing to endorse this idea? Skinner said it sounded feasible, and he would write to the 3M people, urging them to give Peabody a hearing.
My lab mates and I later learned that Project Canine never got off the ground, largely because the president of 3M had a tender spot in his heart for dogs. But a spark had gone to flame in our collective avian imagination. The longer we mulled over the essentials of Peabody’s brainstorm—lightweight missile, sentient navigation system, suicide mission—the more convinced we became that Hitler might be checkmated through an astute deployment of self-sacrificing pigeons.
For a full month we researched Der Führer’s arsenal. By persuading the US Navy that its most coveted enemy targets were vulnerable to bird-controlled bombs, we reasoned, Skinner would acquire the necessary funding in a trice. Eventually we set our sights on the German fleet. Although the formidable Bismarck was now at the bottom of the North Atlantic, her sister battleship Tirpitz still roamed the seas, preying on Allied shipping, and the heavy cruisers Gneisenau and Scharnhorst also remained at large.
On the morning of his forty-first birthday, after ascertaining that he was the only human in the lab, we entered into telepathic communication with Professor Skinner. He behaved exxxactly as one would exxxpect of such an organism, stammering incoherently and dropping a tray of white mice. The container hit the floor, and the startled creatures scurried toward a familiar habitat, a rodent-scale maze in the far corner. Skinner flopped into his favorite lounge chair, stared at the ceiling, and moaned. Prematurely bald around the temples, he was a slender and agile man, with a gracefulness not normally found outside the Columbidae family. I genuinely liked him, and not just because he occasionally rewarded us with euphoria-inducing cannabis seeds.
“Am I losing my mind?” he asked the skylight.
“Tut-tut, Doc, you know that the mind is nothing but a scientifically uninteresting phantom of the central nervous system,” my little brother, Sasha, reminded him acerbically.
“Give us a moment of your undivided attention,” pleaded my comely cousin Hannah.
As the clan’s official ambassador, I apprised the psychologist of our resolve to help secure an Allied victory. Somehow Professor Skinner must convince the US Navy to underwrite the development of pigeon-guided missiles intended to blow Kriegsmarine vessels out of the water. If our dream failed to become a reality, we’d never be able to look ourselves in the mirror again.
“I can’t believe I’m communing with pigeons,” Skinner averred.
“There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your psychology,” I retorted.
“I appreciate your antifascist sentiments, Mr. Pigeon—”
“Reuben.”
“Reuben, but you see before you an exxxtraordinarily busy man. I’m teaching three classes this semester, supervising a major rat exxxperiment, and trying to be a good husband and father.”
“Gneisenau is out there, causing untold misery,” my cousin Thomas proclaimed. “Also Scharnhorst and Tirpitz.” He pivoted toward me. “There’s a gang of mites in my bib.”
Promptly I removed the parasites from Thomas’s throat feathers, peck, peck, peck, peck, peck.
“Thus far the good guys in this war have failed to devise a single servomechanism capable of delivering a payload to its target,” noted my scrappy sister, Elvira. “The US Navy aims its torpedoes and hopes for the best. The RAF drops its bombs and prays for a lucky strike.”
“If the War Department needed the services of an exxxperimental psychologist, I’d be the first to answer the call,” Skinner asserted. Tugging on the ends of his bow tie, he rose defiantly from the lounge chair. “But I don’t take orders from birds—even birds who’ve somehow conditioned themselves to engage in telepathic verbal behavior.”
“Let me put it this way, Doc,” I declared. “You have many splendid achievements behind you and an even greater career ahead of you. Reward the right people, outwit your antagonists through negative reinforcement, and before long you’ll be running the psych department at Harvard. Ah, but that happy outcome depends on your feathered friends keeping mum about their subjective selves.”
“You have enemies, Doc,” my cousin Aaron reminded the boss, “and I don’t mean the Nazis—I mean the cognitive psychologists. I’ll wager Jean Piaget would be tickled to learn that pigeons worry about phenomenology. I think he’d love to enter into a postwar correspondence with B. F. Skinner’s exxxperimental subjects.”
“You’re indulging in exxxtortion!” protested Skinner. “Conscious and deliberate exxxtortion!”
“Didn’t you read your own book?” I asked. “We have no free will in the matter. We’re acting this way because similarly unscrupulous behavior on our parts was rewarded in the past.”
“Please think it over—or whatever you do that the rest of the world calls thinking,” suggested Thomas.
“I’ll think it over,” said Skinner, sighing as he sank back into the chair.
“Happy birthday, Doc,” I said.
So the great psychologist thought it over, and he came to the right conclusion. He would acquiesce to our blackmail, secure his future at Harvard, and perhaps, en passant, destroy the armored heart of the Kriegsmarine.
After consulting with the engineering department at the University of Minnesota, Skinner concluded that our proposal should turn on the Navy’s latest scheme for an air-to-surface missile: an unmanned, unpowered, wing-steered plywood glider called the MK-7. In January of 1942 only three prototype MK-7s exxxisted, but the weapon would go into mass production the instant some genius devised a radio-activated or radar-dependent guidance system and installed it in the spacious forward chamber. Owing to this outsized nose cone, the creators of the MK-7 had nicknamed it the Pelican, in homage to the limerick by ornithologist Dixxxon Lanier Merritt.
A wonderful bird is the pelican,
His bill will hold more than his belly can,
He can take in his beak,
Enough food for a week,
But I’m damned if I see how the hell he can.
Skinner proposed to attach a camera obscura lens to the tip of the nose cone, secure an eight-inch translucent disc along the focal plane, and tether a trained pigeon vertically behind the viewscreen, its harness wired to translate its head and neck movements into course corrections. He called this hypothetical rig an “organicon,” short for “organic control,” and it promised to make MK-7s the most accurate missiles in the world, each exxxplosive-laden glider pursuing a precise flight path as the pilot tapped his beak against a live projected image of a battleship, submarine pen, munitions factory, or other such stimulus.
As a first step in selling the military on Project Organicon, Skinner requested—and received—an audience with the Navy’s Civilian Scientist Liaison Committee in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Little brother Sasha and I went along, secured in a wire-mesh carrier beneath a passenger seat in the DC-3. The trip was not unpleasant. The stewardess, who thought we were adorable, gave us some crushed almonds and a thimble of Chianti. Then Skinner pulled a blanket over our carrier, and Sasha and I went to sleep.
The meeting transpired in a cramped and drafty office on Brattle Street, Commander Roger Quillin presiding, flanked by two MIT professors named John Philipoff and Fred Wapple. While the humans smoked their Pall Malls and Chesterfields, Sasha and I roamed the room, consuming crumbs from a recently spilled boxxx of Cracker Jacks. I exxxperienced a fleeting impulse to poop on the brass base of the floor lamp but managed to subdue the urge.
Not surprisingly, the notion of piloting missiles via sacrificial live animals occasioned within the committee an epidemic of rolled eyes and skeptical frowns. Undaunted, Skinner unfurled a poster of the German chancellor on the carpet. He told the committee that through “carefully calculated schedules of reinforcement” he’d conditioned Sasha and me “to perform dentistry on dictators.” I admired his chutzpah—for in fact we’d received no such training: The boss had simply briefed us an hour before the DC-3 took off.
Sasha and I played our parts with aplomb, systematically exxxtracting Hitler’s visible teeth with our beaks. As a coup de grâce, we removed the eyes. Quillin, Philipoff, and Wapple grunted approvingly, prompting Skinner to claim that in less than a month he could condition a squad of pigeons to peck repeatedly at cutout silhouettes of Gneisenau, Scharnhorst, and Tirpitz. Place such a specialized bird in a Pelican nose cone, outfit the organism with a head-and-neck rig designed to convert its gyrations into directional-control signals, convey the glider via transport plane to within range of a German battleship, present the avian pilot with a camera obscura image of the stimulus, and—voilà!—the bomb would fly straight to its target, exxxploding on impact.
By now the committee was electrified, especially Professor Philipoff, who noted that, since the proposed servomechanism employed only “the visible segment of the spectrum,” it would be “resistant to jamming,” as opposed to a system dependent on radio signals or radar waves. Quillin straightaway offered Skinner a $25,000 grant to inaugurate Project Organicon, then got on the phone and arranged for 3M to place its research facilities at our disposal. Before the meeting ended, the commander promised to ship an MK-7 aircraft to Skinner post-haste, along with two additional nose cones—though he added a severe caveat: Pigeon-steered missiles would enter America’s arsenal if and only if the prototype passed muster with Admiral Scott Plantinga, head of the Navy’s Office of Special Devices.
Back in Minneapolis, my siblings, cousins, and I endured several weeks of intense tedium while Skinner and a quartet of 3M engineering prodigies set about adapting the glider to the brave new world of Columbidae navigation. The whiz kids soon realized that a Pelican nose cone could accommodate three separate bird cockpits, each equipped with its own lens and viewscreen. If one pilot lost track of the stimulus, his copilots would keep the glider on course. Brilliant.
A month into the project, Skinner and his colleagues started worrying that the proposed head-and-neck rig would prove unreliable under combat conditions. Because the noise and vibrations from flak might cause a pilot to jerk about and disable the gyroscopes—a possibility my lab mates and I couldn’t discount—the whiz kids decided to incorporate the viewscreen itself into the pneumatic-steering mechanism. They installed a valve on each translucent disc at twelve o’clock, three o’clock, sixxx o’clock, and nine o’clock. If the missile drifted laterally from the target, the pilots’ corresponding pecks would trigger the appropriate valve, east or west, delivering corrective jets of air to the wing flaps via rubber tubes and causing the glider to bank. If the missile drifted medially, then the north or south valve would come into play, moving the ailerons to make the Pelican climb or dive.
After two additional months of fiddling, futzing, tinkering, and tweaking, Skinner felt ready to let Admiral Plantinga render a verdict on Project Organicon. Determined to give the most dramatic demonstration possible, the psychologist and his team outfitted the hull of a nose cone with a ball-bearing collar bolted to the interior of a horizontal, open-ended wooden barrel, then connected the steering tubes to a manifold forged to simulate the effects of aileron movements. Every time the avian pilots adjusted their pecking behavior in response to target displacement, the outside observer would behold the suspended capsule bank, climb, or dive. To understand exxxactly how an attack on a German battleship might play out, Plantinga and his staff needed merely imagine that the nose cone was attached to a Pelican glider and its lethal payload.
Satisfied that his bearing-and-barrel contraption would spellbind the Navy brass, Skinner crated it up and sent it COD to the Office of Special Devices. On the evening before our scheduled departure, the psychologist gathered together his three best birds and led us to his 3M office for a briefing. He served us cannabis seeds and addressed us in a somber tone.
“Whatever happens tomorrow, you will make no mental contact with any Navy personnel,” he declared.
“You can count on us, Doc,” I replied. “I’ll pretend my skull’s as empty as one of your damn ping-pong balls.”
“Zero telepathy,” Skinner persisted.
“None whatsoever,” Sasha promised.
Skinner said, “Plantinga and his staff will arrive at tomorrow’s meeting with a cognitive understanding—”
“Hey, the boss said ‘cognitive,’” I noted in a sardonic tone.
“What’s this ‘cognitive’?” Thomas asked Sasha with mock bewilderment.
“An illusory domain invented by softheaded nonbehaviorists,” Sasha exxxplained, pooping on the stand of a hat rack.
“Shut up,” Skinner responded. “Plantinga and his staff will arrive with a cognitive understanding that the Pelican is steered by birds. But once they see the capsule hone in on the Tirpitz cutout, they’ll forget what’s going on in the cockpits.”
“There’s a couple of mites in my auriculars,” Thomas told Sasha, who set about ridding his cousin’s ear feathers of the parasites, peck, peck, peck, peck, peck.
“Sounds like you’re planning to keep us out of sight till the last possible minute,” Sasha hypothesized, facing Skinner.
“Exxxactly,” said the boss. “By the time they decide to see what’s happening behind the scenes, they’ll be totally sold on organicon navigation. They won’t care if they find hamsters under the hood—or rabbits or bumblebees or rubber bands or yo-yos.”
“Most ingenious, Doc,” I observed.
“You’re one bright cookie,” Thomas proclaimed.
“Somebody’s been reinforcing your more intelligent traits,” suggested Sasha.
“You birds drive me crazy,” seethed Skinner.
On the morning of December 16, 1942, the psychologist, Sasha, Thomas, and I flew from Minneapolis Airport to Washington National along with a backup team comprising Hannah, Elvira, and Aaron. The journey proved entirely wretched. No almonds, no Chianti, and, because our carrier lay adjacent to the cacophonous starboard engine, sleep proved impossible, even after Skinner draped a blanket over the carrier.
The instant our DC-3 skated to a halt on the icy runway, Skinner frantically collected his luggage—suitcase, carrier, valise holding the Tirpitz cutout—and hailed a taxxxi. He told the driver to get him across town as quickly as possible. Against the odds, we arrived at 1401 Pennsylvania Avenue a full hour ahead of schedule. The Pelican nose cone lay in the far corner of the conference room, afloat inside the open-ended barrel. After hiding the backup team in a broom closet, Skinner set the capsule on the polished oak table and secured Sasha, Thomas, and me in our respective cockpits. He closed all three hatches. Lifting one leg, I puffed up my feathers and took a nap.
Within the hour I awoke. Although the nose cone muffled their voices, I could hear the Navy brass greeting Professor Skinner, who proceeded to exxxplain the basics of the system: operantly conditioned avian pilots, redundant pecking screens, pneumatic course-correction valves. To pass the time, Sasha, Thomas, and I chatted telepathically.
“Nervous?” asked Thomas.
“I feel like I’m walking on eggs,” Sasha replied.
Alas, the tension was getting to me as well. I sensed feathers loosening around my throat and along my left wing.
“I hear the Army Air Corps plans to attach incendiary bombs to thousands of bats and release them over Japanese cities,” said Sasha. “The bats will roost in the eaves and attics. Built-in timers will ignite the bombs, causing firestorms.”
“Clever idea, but I wish the poor mammals could consciously volunteer,” I said. “Otherwise it’s murder.”
“Agreed,” said Thomas.
“I believe that bat-human rapport, like bat-pigeon rapport, will always be a distant dream,” said Sasha.
“Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be a bat?” asked Thomas.
“I’ve tried, but I can’t wrap my mind around echolocation,” Sasha replied.
“Professor Skinner, I suggest we get on with the show,” said some Navy big shot—probably the admiral.
“For purposes of this demonstration, you should imagine that a Douglas C-47 Skytrain is towing our Pelican glider to within striking distance of Tirpitz,” said Skinner. “Admiral, perhaps you’d like to play the transport plane’s pilot.”
“With pleasure,” said Plantinga. “Commander Culkin, you’ll be my navigator. Maintain present course!”
“Maintain present course,” echoed Culkin.
“Lieutenant Kresky, you’re the bombardier,” said Plantinga.
“Aye aye, sir,” said Kresky.
“Bad news, guys,” said Sasha. “The tension’s getting to my gizzard. I think I’m about to poop.”
“Oh, please,” said Thomas.
“I’m not in great shape either,” I confessed. “I’ve lost some hackles and a few secondary remiges.”
“Same here,” said Thomas.
“Visual contact!” cried Plantinga.
Suddenly the cutout of Tirpitz appeared on my viewscreen, her four pairs of 38-cm guns protruding from their turrets like arms exxxtended in Sieg heils.
“You see that?” I asked my fellow pilots.
“Target acquired!” yelled Sasha, who’d apparently mastered his intestinal distress.
“Lieutenant Kresky, drop glider on the naught!” ordered Plantinga.
“Aye aye, sir,” said Kresky.
Plantinga shouted, “Ten … nine … eight … seven … sixxx … five … four …!”
“The early bird gets the Kraut!” I told my colleagues, resting my beak against the viewscreen.
“We’re with you, Reuben!” Sasha and Thomas replied in unison.
“Three … two … one … release!”
“Missile flying!” screamed Kresky.
“Bomb under organic control!” cried Skinner.
Transcending our anxxxiety, Sasha, Thomas, and I thrust our beaks back and forth, pecking till hell wouldn’t have it again, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. After twenty seconds somebody tried making our task more difficult, jerking the battleship cutout first to the left, then to the right, then up, then down. I cleaved to my target, hammering with the steely determination of Poe’s raven, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. The valves whistled madly, releasing measured bursts of pressurized air, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. I could feel the nose cone banking, diving, and climbing as we faithfully tracked Tirpitz.
“Amazing!” cried Culkin.
“This is better than radar!” shouted Kresky.
Plantinga yelled, “Lieutenant Bissonette, move target closer!”
“Aye aye, sir!”
Bissonette did as instructed, simulating the Pelican’s progress toward Tirpitz. Our mission became ridiculously easy, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. Even a starling could hit a Schlachtschiffe at this range, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.
Now somebody got the bright idea of covering my camera obscura lens with his palm, making my viewscreen go black.
“Fellas, I gotta drop out!” I informed my colleagues, lifting my beak from the strike zone. “I lost the target!”
“Lost mine too!” moaned Thomas.
“Sasha, it’s up to you,” I exhorted my little brother. “I’m on the job!” shouted Sasha.
“Professor Skinner, I salute you,” said Culkin. “Two servomechanisms knocked out, but the missile remains on course.”
The mischief maker abruptly restored my Tirpitz projection.
“Stimulus reacquired!” I yelled, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.
“Stimulus reacquired!” echoed Thomas.
“Now let’s have a look at these hotshot pilots of yours,” said Plantinga.
“Not yet,” pleaded Skinner. “The missile hasn’t detonated. I haven’t said, ‘Ka-boom.’”
Ignoring the psychologist’s protest, Plantinga opened the hatch of my cockpit. Ambient light flooded my viewscreen, washing out the projected image, and I found myself pecking at a maddeningly vague battleship, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.
“A pretty raggedy-ass bird you got there, Professor,” said Plantinga. “I’ll bet he’s shed a dozen hackles.”
“Ka-boom!” shouted Skinner.
“This one’s even mangier,” said Culkin, evidently commenting on Thomas’s condition.
“Ka-boom! Ka-boom!”
“This last one’s in the worst shape of all,” said Kresky. “He’s pooped all over the place.”
And then it happened, the most undesirable development imaginable. Our presumed patrons stopped taking us seriously. Merriment gathered in the decorated breasts of Admiral Plantinga, Commander Culkin, Lieutenant Kresky, and Lieutenant Bissonette, and they all burst out laughing.
“P-p-p-pigeons!” cackled Culkin with unrestrained glee.
“P-p-p-pigeons!” echoed Kresky.
“Of course they’re pigeons!” countered Skinner. “That’s what you paid for!”
“A scruffy bunch of p-p-p-pooping p-p-p-pigeons!” snickered Bissonette.
“They delivered the bomb to the target!” wailed Skinner. “They sank Tirpitz!”
“They crapped in their cockpits!” cried Culkin, guffawing.
“Radar guidance might not work, but it doesn’t get the runs!” said Plantinga, howling hysterically.
And from that moment on, it was clear to all of us—to Sasha and Thomas and me and even to the great psychologist—that Project Organicon was history.
Speaking from my perspective as an old, tired, postwar pigeon, I would predict that behaviorism does not have a bright future. To be sure, cannily forged stimulus-response bonds and sagacious schedules of reinforcement, positive and negative, will always boast great utility—ask any guide-dog trainer, porpoise handler, lion tamer, dressage artist, or elementary schoolteacher giving out gold stars—and yet I suspect that psychology will become a real science only by keying itself to biochemistry and neurology. OK, I suppose the field could go in the opposite direction, scorning materialism and embracing teleology, but Aristotle already tried that and scientifically it got him nowhere.
I am skeptical of behaviorism now, and my lab mates and I were skeptical of it when, ten years ago, the US Navy slammed the door on the Pelican initiative. And yet we stayed true to our word. The instant we reiterated our promise to keep our qualia to ourselves, convening no press conferences on the topic of Columbidae consciousness, Professor Skinner wept tears of gratitude. I continue to honor that commitment—indeed, I recently arranged for this memoir to remain under wraps until the second decade of the new millennium, by which time I’ll be dead and Skinner also will have gone to his, as it were, reward.
Amazingly, the saga of Project Organicon has a third act. Like a phoenixxx rising from the ashes, the notion of biologically controlled bombs did not die on that dreadful afternoon in the Office of Special Devices. Instead it transmuted into a British plan to exxxploit behaviorism in the struggle against totalitarianism.
During the early weeks of 1943, however, none of us had any inkling of Project Columbine. Inspired by the exxxample of Cher Ami, my lab mates and I allowed ourselves to be drafted into the Allied Signal Corps. For nineteen months I delivered messages and dropped poop all over the European Theater without any disabling misadventures. But then, on October 17, 1944, while I was carrying a dispatch from General Truscott to Général de Lattre de Tassigny following. Operation Dragoon, a German bullet tore through my rump, and I lost my right leg plus half my left-wing feathers to a second enemy volley. The message reached de Lattre’s headquarters, but I almost died on the operating table.
Realizing that I faced a long recuperation, de Lattre’s personal physician transferred me to a clinic in Nîmes. The vétérinaires whittled a wooden leg for le Reuben courageuxxx, just like Cher Ami’s, and spliced in replacement plumage to stabilize me until my feathers grew out again. Eventually I began to feel better. True, my soldiering days were over, but I figured I’d already made my contribution to the war effort. A bird could do worse than sitting out the rest of this global conflagration drinking Chablis in a therapeutic loft.
On the first day in November my little brother appeared at my side. He brought me a crouton and a newspaper article about my last mission. Le Figaro called me “le héros volant de l’Opération Dragoon.”
“Any news from the family?” I asked.
“It could be much worse,” Sasha replied, exxxtracting a mite from my nape. “Elvira’s still with Patton’s Third Army. She fractured a wing at Arracourt, but I’m told it healed just fine. Aaron lost most of his bill in the same battle. I heard he’s adjusting well to the prosthetic.”
“Somebody up there likes pigeons.”
“Here’s the really big news,” said Sasha. “Looks like I’ll be piloting a glider against the Nazis after all!”
Elaborating, he exxxplained that, two days after the Normandy landing, Skinner’s bête noire Admiral Plantinga got to swapping stories with a British naval officer named Eric Strawson. Plantinga told Commander Strawson about his encounter two years earlier with a crackpot Minnesota psychologist obsessed with putting pigeons in gliders. But Strawson decided that a bird-steered bomb was a capital idea, and he lost no time talking it up with Winston Churchill’s scientific adviser. Lord Cherwell immediately grasped the shrewdness of the system and inaugurated Project Columbine, whereby His Majesty’s military would build a score of single-pilot gliders, each equipped with a camera obscura lens, a viewscreen, and a dove-size cockpit.
“Last month Cherwell’s people asked our favorite psychologist to round up his twenty best pilots,” said Sasha. “Skinner tracked me down in Luxxxembourg and gave me the task of drafting the other nineteen.”
“I’m not well enough to guide a missile,” I said, sipping Chablis.
“Good heavens, Reuben, I came to visit you, not recruit you.”
Sasha proceeded to reveal that in four days he and the other volunteers would join Skinner aboard the British carrier Indefatigable, part of a convoy cruising Norwegian waters under orders to hunt down and sink German battleships. Evidently the boss wanted to be on the scene when all his hard work on organicon navigation finally paid off.
“This is my chance to redeem myself for pooping during the Plantinga demonstration,” said Sasha.
“Plantinga would’ve closed us down whether you’d pooped or not,” I said. “The man has no imagination. So what’s your primary target? Gneisenau?”
“Gneisenau is out of action, torn to pieces in a bombing raid. Scharnhorst capsized last year during the Battle of the North Cape. Get this, Reuben. Four days from now a squadron of transport planes will tow me and the other pilots to within striking range of our old nemesis, Tirpitz.”
“Tirpitz. Golly.”
“Strange are the ways of fate.”
“Promise me you’ll be careful,” I said, a ridiculous thing to tell somebody embarking on a suicide mission.
“Sure, I’ll be careful. You bet.”
“I’ll miss you, Sasha,” I said, encircling him with my good wing. “I’ll think about you every day for the rest of my life.”
“I love you, Reuben.”
And with that avowal, my stouthearted little brother bobbed his head, cooed vigorously, and flew away.
I spent another week convalescing in Nîmes, after which the vétérinaires gave me a clean bill of health and discharged me. Before long I decided to go feral and settle in le gaie Paris. Now that the Germans were on the run, la vie française held a special allure for me.
At first I thought I would imitate my fellow ferals, dining on hibernating bugs during winter and, come spring, consuming baguette crumbs tossed by visitors to le parc des Buttes Chaumont. But soon I began to miss my old life as an exxxperimental subject, so I took to hanging around the main plaza at the Sorbonne. I was netted in less than a week, then brought to the laboratory of a grizzled scientist named Jean-Marc Delrue, a recent convert to behaviorism, too old for the fight against Hitler. Despite wartime austerity, the rewards were splendid: croissant flakes, brioche chunks, macaron bits. I spent many gratifying hours letting Delrue believe he was conditioning me to assemble children’s jigsaw puzzles.
It was in the domain of le professeur that I met and courted my one true love, une jolie colombe named Marie. We bonded for life—I believe she was attracted to my status as an héros de guerre—and planned to start raising squabs after Der Führer abandoned his fantasies of a Thousand-Year Reich. Delrue must have sensed there was something going on between us. No sooner had he resolved to create a pigeon orchestra than he began teaching Marie and me to play duets on his great-grandfather’s harpsichord.
Early in May of 1945, two exxxtraordinary events occurred: General Alfred Jodl, having arrived at Allied headquarters in Reims, signed unconditional surrender documents for all German forces—and Professor B. F. Skinner came to the Sorbonne to give a lecture called “Engineering Human Happiness.” Shortly before he was to appear in the Amphithéâtre Richelieu, I importuned the great psychologist as he paced anxxxiously around backstage. He recognized me instantly. I bowed to him thrice. He reciprocated. Our telepathic conversation was brief but pointed.
I asked, “Can you tell me anything about—?”
“He’s dead,” Skinner informed me.
“I assumed as much.” A nugget of grief coalesced in my crop. “Tell me more.”
“The first missile to attack Tirpitz destroyed the aft turrets. The second strike turned the bow to scrap metal. And then came Sasha, piloting his glider straight for the main ammunition magazine.”
“I can see him pecking his heart out,” I mused.
“The exxxplosion tore an immense hole in the hull,” Skinner reported. “The ship capsized and sank in a matter of minutes, and so the other strikes were called off. Thanks to his skill and courage, Sasha saved—”
“Seventeen pigeons and God knows how many British sailors.”
“Quite so.”
“You trained him well,” I averred in a mildly sarcastic tone.
Skinner graciously disregarded my rudeness. “Sasha and the other fallen birds received Dickin Medals, the only ones awarded posthumously so far. The Victoria Cross for animals—have you heard of it?—very handsome, silk ribbon, bronze disc. The obverse reads ‘For Gallantry’ and, below that, ‘We Also Serve.’”
“Bonsoir, mesdames et messieurs!” came the amplified voice of le professeur, who then introduced the evening’s celebrated guest. I translated Delrue’s remarks for Skinner.
“I wish I could’ve died in Sasha’s place,” I added.
“Do you mean that?” asked the psychologist.
“No,” I replied. “I hope your speech goes well.”
“My interpreter, a young man from Boston, is very competent. Allow me to offer my deepest condolences.”
“War is hell,” I observed.
“Je vous présente Professeur B. F. Skinner!” declared Delrue.
The psychologist offered me a soft smile and strode toward the stage. “Good-bye, Reuben,” he called over his shoulder.
“Au revoir, Doc.”
I didn’t stay around for Skinner’s lecture on “Engineering Human Happiness.” The commodity in question, I feel, is not something one can engineer, and neither is avian happiness. And even if such a technology were possible, I would worry about the side effects.
So I left the auditorium and took to the air, headed for the lab and the lovely dove who awaited me there. Despite my war wounds I could still fly, albeit clumsily. Fluttering over the main plaza, I composed an epitaph for the recipients of the first posthumously awarded Dickin Medals.
A wonderful bird is the pigeon,
Whose mind holds much more than a smidgeon,
He can soar from the sod,
To the left eye of God,
And he does it without a religion.
Adieu, noble Sasha. Farewell, little brother. Good-bye, mon cher ami. You were a mysterious and irreducible creature. But then again, aren’t we all?