Reply #27: I actually met a guy.... [View All]

[sofa king]

About ten years ago I shared a dining table on a cruise with a couple who had been through World War II. The guy was a B-25 pilot in the 12th Air Force, flying missions out of Corsica--the same unit in which the young Joseph Heller served as a bombardier.

He said they really did that, bumping the number of missions as high as they needed to go to keep the crews in combat.

The couple arranged a code to get past the Army censors. Occasionally, the pilot would write to his wife, saying, "be sure to congratulate Bob and Edith (or whomever it was) on their 5th Anniversary." That meant five missions completed.

The wife wryly observed to me that in less than two years, 1943-1945, Bob and Edith went from newlyweds to celebrating their Golden Anniversary. The pilot finally got off the line somewhere beyond his fiftieth mission, his planes having been shot up more times than he could count and bringing at least one home so beat up it went straight from the runway to the scrapyard.

The couple was lucky to have emerged with their lives and their sanity. I feel almost as lucky to have met them.