Humour is very personal thing. What one person finds funny, another may not. Some stories may just make you smile, others make you laugh out loud. This story for me falls into the second category.
A humorous story by Fast in his role as a World War Two war correspondent, who finds himself stranded at a scoring hot airbase in the middle of a desert. His one wish is fly out on the next available freight plane. Which just happens to be loaded with empty coca cola bottles. Fast is alarmed to find that once airborne the plane isn’t gaining height, the plane’s doors are missing, the aircrew are a crew of teenagers who are unwilling to jettison the empty bottles due to the paperwork it would cause. Plus,
“I looked at the open doors and then at the sand hills, and then I nodded and asked a foolish question about parachutes.
‘You don’t have one? Well, that’s strange, and it’s against regulations too, but it wouldn’t be much use at this altitude.’”
The situation goes rapidly downhill from there.
First published in he Last Supper and Other Stories, Blue Heron Press, 1955, and collected in The Howard Fast Reader, Crown Publishers, 1960
A Personal Anthology 