Write about a noise-or a silence- that won't go away.
SPitting and spitting and spitting. SPitting until he thought his teeth, numb with cold and the remnants of vibration would simply drop from his mouth. He was mad, now; he MUST be mad now. How many times had he gone and returned? 60? 70? He had stiopped counting and stopped caring. He has gone numb, completely ignorant of every moment not spent over the front. Days passed, weeks. Years? Who knew? ALl he knew was the focus of the air - the ripping, icy air, filled with smoke and oil and petrol from the engine of his Fokker Triplane as it spun the prop around, the vibration through the airframe, over and around his constantly gritted teath and into his slowly crumbling mind...
That engine, that blasted rattery chattery puck and thrum of the rotary motor that worked so hard to twist the little plane out of his grasp and send him flopping down to the muddy wastes below. The constant mind numbing clamour...it become his breathing, his blood flow, his very conscience. The headaches from the noise and fumes, the nausea from the taste of the motor fluids that washed up into his face every few moments, all that had passed. But the noise was always there. COnstant. He heard it in his sleep. In his dreams.
He heard it now. Even Now. He was laughing and crying and possibly screaming - his chest wracked and scraped with effort. But he could not hear that. He could hear nothing at all but the chopping, laughing moan of the motor.
When his flight spotted the Brisfits they were in nearly perfect position. 400 meters above and to the sun. There were massive cumulous banks that sailed past one another as the three little triplanes fought the air currents, and when two of these white ships passed away from each other the flight of british planes appeared, holding as steady a pattern as was possible in the winds.
The flight leaders motioned and the three fighters began the chase, using the clouds as much as possible and trusting the sun to keep the enemy unaware until the time was right to drop on them. He had done this so many time before it was almost without thought that he fought the hideously torquing triplane around and tried to hold it steady while they closed. So many flights. So many kills. So many men.
He didn't hate them. That made it all worse, somehow. They were not HIS enemies. They were Germany's enemies. He did his duty, and felt priveledged to have been able to join the Jastas after completing his training. Dangerous service, but at least one was not stuck in a trench, muddied and cold and starving and sick. Month after month. year after year. Hell. Hell on earth. Much better to sail the winds above it all, jousting with the French and British like knights of old.
It was better, at first. Dispite the noise and mess and cold and fear, the battles were exillirating. Duels to the death, but with brave men who would sometimes go so far as to wave to you after a particularly hard fought battle resulted in a draw. He had felt part of an elite group of modern jousters.
Things had changed slowly. Instead of single flights the enemy had began using groups of flights, sometimes as many as tenty four strong. They would bait you with a few low flying planes, then the rest would pounce, cutting down your comrades and speeding away before you knew what was happening. Spads were the worst, fore spitting bulls dropping from the heavens, then up again, out of range. The Germans had countered for a few months with similar tactics, but slowly the best German flyers were cut to pieces. Eventually the Germans had to resort to small hit and run patrols, like this one. Hopefully they could catch some slow moving and heavily laden bombers unescorted, or scouts who had wandered away from their escorts, like these below.
Hopefully. Because the alternative was to be caught one's self, only three strong, by a predatory pack of enemy fighters. Fokker triplanes were renowned for their abilities in a dogfight, but now the allies didn't waste time with close combat. The D3s were nearly sitting ducks if the attack came from above.
The leader's plane swung gracefully up and arced over, then began the dive on the two-seaters below. No defenssive fire, so they must have been successful in thier stalking. He kicked his rudder to the left and arced the plane down at the british planes.
It started to come apart when he had shot down the lonely french scout several months ago. He had done it so many times, felt the thrill as his bullets found the pilot and then the engine. He was close - closer than he had ever been before to an enemy plane. He saw the observer in the second seat. Saw him swing around and stare into his eyes. Saw the man. The man like his brother, his cousins. Himself. The man was going to die, and as he stared into the man's eyes the weight of it filled him with a cold that shattered the windy air around him. He would not see the man die - they were too far up. But that was what made it unbearable. That man, that dead man would spend the next thirty seconds arcing to the earth, would spend every bloody moment of it. Perfectly aware, perfectly healthy. Nothing on earth to prevent his life becoming something fantastic, nothing to prevent his children from gazing upon their father with the kind of love he had for his own father. Nothing to stop the successes, tears, joys, fights...nothing but the fact that he would be smashed into the muddy earth of a battlefield in France. Nothing but the German pilot who shot the plane out from under him.
The air sounded like a freight train as it whipped his leather helmet and goggles away from his skin, and the rattle of the engine as the wind forced the prop to spin faster than the mkotor could turn set his teeth together hard. He bit them together and concentrated on his shot. His lead had already made a pass and had holed the rudder and tailplane. Aiming for the rear gunner, he reached up pulled the handle that fored his two machine guns, the bullets prayed maniacally, but he quickly found the mean and brought the plane's nose into the shot. Blood splashed the canvas around the gunner's seat.
The eyes. The gunner looked into his eyes, right as he died. it froze him, squoze the breath from him. The gunner had HIS eyes. His face. His face, grimacing and contorting, feeling death grip him through the bloody holes in his neck and back and chest. It WAS hjim. He knew it. And he saw the triplane screaming toward him, guns sparking, engine spitting black blood, and the man in the cockpit, screaming madly, madly...
When he next saw the world he was almost on it. His plane had continued it's dive for as long as it could, but the three wings had eventually whipped the crate out of the plummet and jolted him out of his nightmare. He couldn't see very well - tears had blurred his goggles. He fought them away like sudden cobwebs in a dark cellar. He was barely one hundred feet from the ground. His eyes danced around, taking it all in. There were machine guns from the trenches sebnding tracers his way. He was too close to enemy lines. He couldn't hear the firing though. All he could hear was the motor, laboring away. He couldn't hear ANYTHING but the motor. He couldn't hear the british plane smashing into the ground a few hundred yards behind him. He couldn't hear the wrenching of fabric and wood as his wings, overstressed by the speed of the dive and abrupt pull out, began to shear off. he couldn't hear the overtaxed engine sputter out.
Because in his ears it never did. And when his plane, now mere feet from the ground ost power and lift, he still heard the engine. Chattering. Puttering. Chastising. And when the plane scudded and smashed into the muddy no man's land and threw him, he heard not a splintyer. All was the motor, louder and louder. he picked himself up, found his mouth full of oil and gas and blood...so much blood. And he spit and pit and spit, but it kept coming, black and red and thrumming like the motor that would not stop. he felt nither the bullets, nor the fall, nor the cold, sticky mud. He felt nothing but the rattle of the plane and groaning, screaming, lamentation of the motor.
I'd really like to post writing exercises here, too -- maybe with an X-line limit, or an X-minute limit. 
