Airman Quotes

Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Love consists of not looking each other in the eye, but of looking outwardly in the same direction.

We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it's there for emergencies but he hopes he'll never have to use it.

A monkey glances up and sees a banana, and that's as far as he looks. A visionary looks up and sees the moon.

Deryn felt brilliant, rising through the air at the center off everyone's attention, like an acrobat aloft on a swing. She wanted to make a speech: Hey, all you sods, I can fly and you can't! A natural airman, in case you haven't noticed. And in conclusion, I'd like to add that I'm a girl and you can all get stuffed!

Don’t feel bad; I regularly reduce people to unintelligible stammers.

Other men look up and down, left and right; but men like us are different. We are visionaries.

A pity to survive night flights over St. Georges Channel only to crack my skull falling from a ladder.

Scientists are the enemies of tradition , and tradition own all the prisons. - Victor Vigny

If things go badly for me tonight, I want you to stay with Mr. Wynter; he will pay you a decent wage.” “Will he make me bathe?” “No, he will debate the matter with you until you decide to wash.” “Ah. One of those.

I have no time for babbling foolishness.” “Don’t be so hasty,” said Victor. “There’s always time for babbling.

An Irish Airman foresees his Death I Know that I shall meet my fate Somewhere among the clouds above; Those that I fight I do not hate Those that I guard I do not love, My country is Kiltartan Cross, My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor, No likely end could bring them loss Or leave them happier than before. Nor law, nor duty bade me fight, Nor public man, nor cheering crowds, A lonely impulse of delight Drove to this tumult in the clouds; I balanced all, brought all to mind, The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind In balance with this life, this death.

Connor Broekhart was born to fly, or more accurately he was born flying.

Everything rests on the poisoned wine. If it were just the queen, I could force it down her gullet, but Declan Broekhart would run me through with that damned ceremonial sword, and if his wife's stares were daggers, he'd be dead already.

There is always a use for everything, Victor had told him. Even pain.

Victor Vigny: A monkey glances up and sees a banana, and that's as far as he looks. A visionary looks up and sees the moon. Conor Broekhart: Which resembles a giant banana.

All we can hope for is that he will fall into the ocean with a bar of soap in his pocket.

The Flyboy who got away became president of the United States. What might have been for Warren Earl, Dick, Marve, Glenn, Floyd, Jimmy, the unidentified airman, and all the Others who had lost their lives?...And what might have been for those millions of doomed Japanese boys, abused and abandoned by their leaders? War is the tragedy of what might have been.

Being part of a secret is a great source of strength.

Conor, I could search the world for another swashbuckling scientist, but I doubt if I would find one like you.

You may take the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid airman or the most audacious soldier, put them at a table together - what do you get? The sum of their fears." - Winston Churchill

But the weight of her anguish over Gregory – this one missing airman, this unreliable, perhaps unworthy man – filled her whole upper half, diaphragm, lungs, ribs, shoulders, with such crushing gravity that the sighs with which she was obliged to displace it shook her entire body.

She could hear his words ringing in her ears like an air raid siren. “Father’s asked me to accompany a sick soldier home. I would leave tomorrow but be back by Christmas.” Who was this Airman Ralph Jacobs? And why now? Why Dick, for heaven’s sakes? The man was shot down in Italy. Wasn’t that Sly and Bobby’s territory? Wasn’t it Harry’s? Maybe that’s what Annie had heard. So instead of using Sly, they dumped the duty onto Dick.

All of us, in words that contradict each other, express at bottom the same exalted impulse. What sets us against one another is not our aims—they all come to the same thing—but our methods, which are the fruit of our varied reasoning.

We are different, my friend. We are visionaries. A monkey looks up and sees and banana, and that is as far as he looks. But a visionary looks up and sees the moon.

Out of 4,063 pilots, not a single airman fit within the average range on all ten dimensions.

Like our imaginary airman, they were totally unaware that there is a law that must be complied with in order to achieve civilizational flight.

It won't work, Robert," Rybar repeated, "but that doesn't mean we don't have to try.

Dear, Missus, Mister - I beg you never to give thoughts to war, in no way, not to work for it, not by writing nor by reading about it nor by looking at the pictures nor on the television about it. Not in any way ever, at all. Not by being a soldier, sailor, airman, work in factory or above all at atom bombs. Above all at atom bombs. No obligation for this, dear fellow creature. Signed Your Fellow Creature.' 'P.S.,' said Gerald slowly, without turning from the window, 'If we all do this, we shall succeed.

Truth is the language that expresses universality. Newton did not “discover” a law that lay hidden from man like the answer to a rebus. He accomplished a creative operation. He founded a human speech which could express at one and the same time the fall of an apple and the rising of the sun. Truth is not that which is demonstrable but that which is ineluctable.

To them, it’s everything. Each identity card I create—each one you deliver—represents a unique and singular life, a person, an airman or an agent or a Jew who has another chance to survive. Don’t ever forget that. Don’t ever lose yourself thinking of the ones you couldn’t save. Think instead of the ones you did.

Owning a drone does not a pilot make.

Pillsbury shouted the only word that came to mind. “Ow!

Are you an angel or a devil, sir? I need to know. Are you taking me up or down?

Every airman was given a “Mae West” life vest,*3 but because some men stole the vests’ carbon dioxide cartridges for use in carbonating drinks, some vests didn’t inflate.

It is like the old fairy tale. The boy saves the princess; they fall in love. He invents a flying machine—along with his dashing teacher, of course. They get married and name their firstborn after the aforementioned dashing teacher.

The parallel is not quite exact. For those Dark Ages were not really so very dark—they were full of flickering lanterns, and even if the light had gone out of Europe altogether, there were other rays, literally from China to Peru, at which it could have been rekindled. But the Dark Ages that are to come will cover the whole world in a single pall; there will be neither escape nor sanctuary, save such as are too secret to be found or too humble to be noticed. And Shangri-La may hope to be both of these. The airman bearing loads of death to the great cities will not pass our way, and if by chance he should he may not consider us worth a bomb.

tell you. Fun is worth having. And love. And beauty. And travel. And success—My God, there is so much worth having, Dad!” It felt very queer to be talking to her father about herself in earnest, as though he were Noel Airman or Marsha Zelenko. It was like blurting confidences to a new friend whom she wasn’t sure she could trust. But she was enjoying it. “The finest foods are worth having, the finest wines, the loveliest places, the best music, the best books, the best art. Amounting to something. Being well known, being myself, being distinguished, being important, using all my abilities, instead of becoming just one more of the millions of human cows! Children,

This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness; to be deprived of it is to be dehumanized, to be cleaved from, and cast below, mankind. Men subjected to dehumanizing treatment experience profound wretchedness and loneliness and find that hope is almost impossible to retain. Without dignity, identity is erased. In its absence, men are defined not by themselves, but by their captors and the circumstances in which they are forced to live. One American airman, shot down and relentlessly debased by his Japanese captors, described the state of mind that his captivity created: "I was literally becoming a lesser human being.

At first all was well. In fact, all was terrific. The Takers were pedaling away and the wings of their craft were flapping beautifully. They felt wonderful, exhilarated. They were experiencing the freedom of the air: freedom from restraints that bind and limit the rest of the biological community. And with that freedom came marvels—all the things you mentioned the other day: urbanization, technology, literacy, mathematics, science. “Their flight could never end, it could only go on becoming more and more exciting. They couldn’t know, couldn’t even have guessed that, like our hapless airman, they were in the air but not in flight. They were in free fall, because their craft was simply not in compliance with the law that makes flight possible. But their disillusionment is far away in the future, and so they’re pedaling away and having a wonderful time. Like our airman, they see strange sights in the course of their fall. They see the remains of craft very like their own—not destroyed, merely abandoned—by the Maya, by the Hohokam, by the Anasazi, by the peoples of the Hopewell cult, to mention only a few of those found here in the New World. ‘Why,’ they wonder, ‘are these craft on the ground instead of in the air? Why would any people prefer to be earthbound when they could have the freedom of the air, as we do?’ It’s beyond comprehension, an unfathomable mystery.

In Sugamo, Louie asked his escort what had happened to the Bird. He was told that it was believed that the former sergeant, hunted, exiled and in despair, had stabbed himself to death. The words washed over Louie. In prison camp, Watanabe had forced him to live in incomprehensible degradation and violence. Bereft of his dignity, Louie had come home to a life lost in darkness, and had dashed himself against the memory of the Bird. But on an October night in Los Angeles, Louie had found, in Payton Jordan’s words, “daybreak.” That night, the sense of shame and powerlessness that had driven his hate the Bird had vanished. The Bird was no longer his monster. He was only a man. In Sugamo Prison, as he was told of Watanabe’s fate, all Louie saw was a lost person, a life beyond redemption. He felt something that he had never felt fro his captor before. With a shiver of amazement, he realized that it was compassion. At that moment, something shifted swiftly inside him. It was forgiveness, beautiful and effortless and complete. For Louie Zamperini, the was was over.

He had seen bigger men than he with mummy's handkerchief clutched in on hand and a bloody dagger in the other.

Find a good woman. Make her your everything—your life. Then you will know peace no matter

Young love is common, but that doesn't mean it's not precious.

Naturally, we lunatics are the kindest of the bunch.

Today he became a killer, or else a corpse.

A sentence in Auden's Airman's Journal has always seemed very profound to me ---I haven't the book here so I can't quote it exactly, but something about time and space and how 'geography is a thousand times more important to modern man than history'---I always like to feel where I am geographically all the time, on the map,---but maybe that is something else again.

The only break in the gloom came from a guard who would saunter down the barracks aisle, pause before each cell, raise one leg, and fart at each captive. He never quite succeeded in farting his way down the entire cell block.

I must capture the flag,’ he breathed. ‘That’s what a pirate captain is supposed to do. Go to the roof, so I can capture the flag and gloat.’ ‘Capture the flag and goat?’ ‘Gloat.’ Isabella stood hands on hips. ‘It’s pronounced goooaaat, idiot.

Airman’s Creed I am an American Airman. I am a Warrior. I have answered my Nation's call. I am an American Airman. My mission is to fly, fight, and win. I am faithful to a proud heritage, A tradition of honor, And a legacy of valor. I am an American Airman. Guardian of freedom and justice, My nation's sword and shield, Its sentry and avenger, I defend my country with my life. I am and American Airman. Wingman, Leader, Warrior. I will never leave an Airman behind, I will never falter, And I will not fail.

As with all new inventions, there are upsides and downsides. The commercial drone is no exception. But until robust safeguards have been introduced to protect personal privacy from prying eyes in the skies, the true benefits to society of unmanned aerial vehicles will remain unrealised.

Well, I heard the story, as one hears all the varied marvels and terrors of the air; as one heard some years ago of “air pockets,” strange gulfs or voids in the atmosphere into which airmen fell with great peril; or as one heard of the experience of the airman who flew over the Cumberland mountains in the burning summer of 1911, and as he swam far above the heights was suddenly and vehemently blown upwards, the hot air from the rocks striking his plane as if it had been a blast from a furnace chimney. We have just begun to navigate a strange region; we must expect to encounter strange adventures, strange perils.

What are your thoughts about Mac, who panicked and ate all the chocolate on the raft on the first night but later tried hard to help out? At first, I thought, wow, I’ve got a real problem with him. But every time he did something right I knew I had to compliment him, and he just kept changing and changing. One day the sharks were jumping on the raft trying to take me out, two of them, one right after the other. I’m pushing them back into the water with my hand on the ends of their noses. And then Mac grabs an oar and the two of us were punching them out with the oars, and they finally gave up. Well, boy, I really complimented Mac, and he kept getting better and better. He just turned out beautifully, and it was breaking my heart to see him dying.

an elephant, an elephant if you please, that I loved this man – this airman, this enemy, whom I had not known even for twenty-four hours – that I knew I would love him till the day I died. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but that was how I felt, and when you are sixteen you feel things very immediately, very strongly, very certainly. “How wicked is that, Marlene?” I said. “How wicked is that, to love someone who should be my enemy, who has just bombed my city, killed my friends? How wicked is that?” I looked up into her weepy eye. For an answer she wafted her ears gently at me, and groaned deep inside herself. It was enough to tell me that she had listened, and understood, and that she did not judge me. I learned something that day from Marlene, about friendship, and I have never forgotten it. To be a true friend, you have to be a good listener, and I discovered that day that Marlene was

The guard sought to deprive them of something that had sustained them, even as all else had been lost, dignity. This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness. To be deprived of it is to be dehumanized. To be cleaved from and cast below mankind. Men subjected to dehumanizing treatment experience profound wretchedness and loneliness and find that hope is almost impossible to retain. Without dignity, identity is erased. In its absence, men are defined not by themselves but by their captures and the circumstances in which they are forced to live. One American airman, shot down and relentlessly debased by his Japanese captures described the state of mind that his captivity created. "I was literally becoming a lesser human being." Few societies treasured dignity and feared humiliation as did the Japanese for whom a loss of honor could merit suicide.

Few grown humans can normally survive a fall of much more than twenty-five or thirty feet, though there have been some notable exceptions—none more memorable perhaps than that of a British airman in World War II named Nicholas Alkemade. In the late winter of 1944, while on a bombing run over Germany, Flight Sergeant Alkemade, the tail gunner on a British Lancaster bomber, found himself in a literally tight spot when his plane was hit by enemy flak and quickly filled with smoke and flames. Tail gunners on Lancasters couldn’t wear parachutes because the space in which they operated was too confined, and by the time Alkemade managed to haul himself out of his turret and reach for his parachute, he found it was on fire and beyond salvation. He decided to leap from the plane anyway rather than perish horribly in flames, so he hauled open a hatch and tumbled out into the night. He was three miles above the ground and falling at 120 miles per hour. “It was very quiet,” Alkemade recalled years later, “the only sound being the drumming of aircraft engines in the distance, and no sensation of falling at all. I felt suspended in space.” Rather to his surprise, he found himself to be strangely composed and at peace. He was sorry to die, of course, but accepted it philosophically, as something that happened to airmen sometimes. The experience was so surreal and dreamy that Alkemade was never certain afterward whether he lost consciousness, but he was certainly jerked back to reality when he crashed through the branches of some lofty pine trees and landed with a resounding thud in a snowbank, in a sitting position. He had somehow lost both his boots, and had a sore knee and some minor abrasions, but otherwise was quite unharmed. Alkemade’s survival adventures did not quite end there. After the war, he took a job in a chemical plant in Loughborough, in the English Midlands. While he was working with chlorine gas, his gas mask came loose, and he was instantly exposed to dangerously high levels of the gas. He lay unconscious for fifteen minutes before co-workers noticed his unconscious form and dragged him to safety. Miraculously, he survived. Some time after that, he was adjusting a pipe when it ruptured and sprayed him from head to foot with sulfuric acid. He suffered extensive burns but again survived. Shortly after he returned to work from that setback, a nine-foot-long metal pole fell on him from a height and very nearly killed him, but once again he recovered. This time, however, he decided to tempt fate no longer. He took a safer job as a furniture salesman and lived out the rest of his life without incident. He died peacefully, in bed, aged sixty-four in 1987. —

Consider this, and in our time As the hawk sees it, or the helmeted airman:

Call it Mooristan,’ Aurora told me. ‘This seaside, this hill, with the fort on top. Water-gardens and hanging gardens, watchtowers and towers of silence too. Place where worlds collide, flow in and out of one another, and washofy away. Place where an air-man can drowno in water, or else grow gills; where a water-creature can get drunk, but also chokeofy, on air.

Isabelle went to the airman. As she neared him, she

On 8 April 2003, SSgt Scott Sather, a combat controller, became the first Airman killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom. (32)

goading

her German holiday, but she has guests. Do not stop by. Will watch out for her. Vianne was fine—she had been released after questioning—but another soldier, or soldiers, was billeted there. She crumpled the paper and tossed it in the fire. She didn’t know whether to be relieved or more worried. Instinctively, her gaze sought out Gaëtan, who was watching her as he spoke to an airman. “I see the way you’re watching him, you know.” “Lord big nose?” Madame Babineau barked out a laugh. “I am old but not blind. The young handsome one

Why don't you write that sentence down and read it? Then perhaps you would realize how insane you are. -Linus Wynter

Every man in Air Force uniform ought to be armed with something—a rifle, a tommy-gun, a pistol. . . . Every airman should have his place in the defence scheme. . . . It must be understood by all ranks that they are expected to fight and die in the defence of their airfields. . . . The enormous mass of noncombatant personnel who look after the very few heroic pilots, who alone in ordinary circumstances do all the fighting, is an inherent difficulty in the organization of the Air Force. . . . Every airfield should be a stronghold of fighting air-groundmen, and not the abode of uniformed civilians in the prime of life protected by detachments of soldiers.

Every man in Air Force uniform ought to be armed with something—a rifle, a tommy-gun, a pistol. . . . Every airman should have his place in the defence scheme. . . . It must be understood by all ranks that they are expected to fight and die in the defence of their airfields. . . . The enormous mass of noncombatant personnel who look after the very few heroic pilots, who alone in ordinary circumstances do all the fighting, isan inherent difficulty in the organization of the Air Force. . . . Every airfield should be a stronghold of fighting air-groundmen, and not the abode of uniformed civilians in the prime of life protected by detachments of soldiers.

Every man in Air Force uniform ought to be armed with something—a rifle, a tommy-gun, a pistol, or a mace. Every airman should have his place in the defence scheme. It must be understood by all ranks that they are expected to fight and die in the defence of their airfields. The enormous mass of noncombatant personnel who look after the very few heroic pilots, who alone in ordinary circumstances do all the fighting, is an inherent difficulty in the organization of the Air Force. Every airfield should be a stronghold of fighting air groundmen, and not the abode of uniformed civilians in the prime of life protected by detachments of soldiers.

there are three routes to choose from. From Morocco, the Azores, or Senegal; the Cape Verde Islands, St. Paul Island, and Cayenne. Those are the routes most talked about at the start. They are favored because they are the farthest north and the most direct. I have a better, a least safer, idea.” “I’ll warrant you have, Dave, if it’s to be found,” declared Hiram. “What is it?” inquired Elmer. “The objection to those routes,” explained the young airman, “is that the water stretches are of wide extent. What I dread most is the fear of being caught away from land.” “Is there a shorter route than those you speak of?” asked Hiram. “Yes, there is,” asserted Dave. “What is it?” “Egypt, the Sahara Desert, the French Congo, Ascension Island, St. Helena, Trinidad, Rio Janeiro, and we are on American soil.” “Capital!” cried Hiram. “I wouldn’t lose an hour, Dave,” advised Elmer, with real anxiety. “Ever since we found out that there are two of the crowd ahead of us, it seems as if I’d be willing to sleep in the seat in the machine all the way to get ahead of them.” It was a warm, clear day when the Comet came to a rest at the city of Mayamlia, in French Congo. Looking back over the ten days consumed in making the run across Egypt, through Fezzan, the width of the great desert, over darkest Africa, and into the Soudan, the airship boys had viewed a country never before thus inspected by an aerial explorer. “Baked,

otherworldly

Some of the more doctrine-laden ground people also talk about the strategic, operational, and tactical levels of war, so they can think in bins or boxes: “strategic” means whatever the President thinks about and does, “operational” is what the CINC thinks about and does, “tactical” is component-level-and-below thinking and doing. To an airman this is meaningless. My tactical fighter (tactical), flying to Baghdad (operational), kills Saddam Hussein (strategic). So finally, in talking about air plans or air operations, I keep as far from these words as I can. Airpower is essentially very simple: Aircraft can range very quickly over very wide areas and accurately hit targets very close to home or very far away. Nothing more. Nothing less.

I took to spending free days wandering the Joslyn galleries, where, among other things, I tried to reconcile Renoir’s plump and rosy, wine-warmed wenches with the graceful if sinister beauty of the B-47 bombers nurtured and nourished at my air force base, eventually concluding that anything that says yes to life (a Renoir) is automatically saying no to war, regardless of how attractively its weapons and justifications may be packaged. Thus, like those bohemians with whom he was feeling a growing kinship, Airman Second Class Tommy Rotten woke up one morning to find himself once and for all a pacifist.

WATCH FOR POGO’S ABOUNDING SCHTICK In February of 1957, Rich earned his next leave to visit Gail. The news did the job of making Gail’s choice glad. She offered to meet him at the airport and watched curiously as he stepped off the plane wearing his casual blue airman suit. “Nonstop?” Gail asked. “Of course.” “How does one get off a nonstop flight, Mr. Air Force, if it doesn’t ever stop?” Rich stopped and looked Gail over. He didn’t get her joke. “You have luggage?” she asked. “Yes. One case. Over this direction.” He took her arm and led her down the corridor. “Have you ever lost your luggage?” “No. I haven’t flown commercially much.” “I hear you can sue the airlines if they lose your baggage.” “Oh?” “Yes, but there’s no guarantee that you’ll win your case.” Gail skipped in front of her boyfriend and laughed in his face. “What are you talking about, girl? I have no intention of suing the airlines.” Gail’s teasing ceased. Rich obviously had no sense of humor. At least not her kind. Sobered, she let him take the lead.

It interests me that there is no end of fictions, and facts made over in the forms of fictions. Because we class them under so many different rubrics, and media, and means of delivery, we don't recognize the sheer proliferation and seamlessness of them. I think at some level of scale or perspective, the police drama in which a criminal is shot, the hospital in which the doctors massage a heart back to life, the news video in which jihadists behead a hostage, and the human-interest story of a child who gets his fondest wish (a tourist trip somewhere) become the same sorts of drama. They are representations of strong experience, which, as they multiply, began to dedifferentiate in our uptake of them, despite our names and categories and distinctions... I say I watch the news to "know". But I don't really know anything. Certainly I can't do anything. I know that there is a war in Iraq, but I knew that already. I know that there are fires and car accidents in my state and in my country, but that, too, I knew already. With each particular piece of footage, I know nothing more than I did before. I feel something, or I don't feel something. One way I am likely to feel is virtuous and "responsible" for knowing more of these things that I can do nothing about. Surely this feeling is wrong, even contemptible. I am not sure anymore what I feel. What is it like to watch a human being's beheading? The first showing of the video is bad. The second, fifth, tenth, hundredth are—like one's own experiences—retained, recountable, real, and yet dreamlike. Some describe the repetition as "numbing". "Numbing" is very imprecise. I think the feeling, finally, is of something like envelopment and even satisfaction at having endured the worst without quite caring or being tormented. It is the paradoxically calm satisfaction of having been enveloped in a weak or placid "real" that another person endured as the worst experience imaginable, in his personal frenzy, fear, and desperation, which we view from the outside as the simple occurrence of a death... I see: Severed heads. The Extra Value Meal. Kohl-gray eyelids. A holiday sale at Kohl's. Red seeping between the fingers of the gloved hand that presses the wound. "Doctor, can you save him?" "We'll do our best." The dining room of the newly renovated house, done in red. Often a bold color is best. The kids are grateful for their playroom. The bad guy falls down, shot. The detectives get shot. The new Lexus is now available for lease. On CNN, with a downed helicopter in the background, a peaceful field of reeds waves in the foreground. One after another the reeds are bent, broken, by boot treads advancing with the camera. The cameraman, as savior, locates the surviving American airman. He shoots him dead. It was a terrorist video. They run it again. Scenes from ads: sales, roads, ordinary calm shopping, daily life. Tarpaulined bodies in the street. The blue of the sky advertises the new car's color. Whatever you could suffer will have been recorded in the suffering of someone else. Red Lobster holds a shrimp festival. Clorox gets out blood. Advil stops pain fast. Some of us are going to need something stronger.

Then, out of the blue, I had the ah ha moment of inspiration at one of our 3rd SPG reunions as I listened to everyone reminisce. I realized our stories connected us to one another.

I mpotent. It was an ugly feeling. Sam would rather be out-arm-wrestled by an Airman.

Nor law, nor duty bade me fight, Nor public men, nor cheering crowds, A lonely impulse of delight, Drove to this tumult in the clouds. - W.B. Yeats, An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

The Italians had set up a separate flight school near the city of Luoyang in central China which, Chennault said, “graduated every Chinese cadet who survived the training course as a full-fledged pilot regardless of his ability.” This had deadly consequences. The American airman watched how “fighter pilots supposedly ready for combat spun in and killed themselves in basic trainers.

King Nicholas had explained the lense box to

In faith I have a renewing account of Personal Courage which I'll write checks against until this country's most valuable natural resource the Soldier, Sailor, Marine, and Airman are fully supported with the level of dignity and respect we've earned. These checks don't bounce.

the soldier cannot function alone. His flanks are bare, his rear is vulnerable, and he looks aloft with a cautious eye. He needs the airman and the sailor for his own security in doing his own job. This

airman in the barn. What should be done? The question haunted her all day, reasserting itself constantly. Every choice was dangerous. Obviously she should just keep quiet about the airman in the barn. Silence was always safest. But what if Beck and the Gestapo and the SS and their dogs went into the barn on their own? If Beck found the airman in a barn on the property where he was billeted, the Kommandant would not be

Catherine Broekhart stepped in from the balcony, where she had been waiting, and joined the embrace. The guard at the door was tempted, but decided against it.

The man was an animal. Base and foul. In a just world he would be the prisoner and Conor a free man.

I can’t believe this,” Estlin said, watching an airman secure the container. Sergeant Malone took a seat across the aisle. “You asked for it.

It is like the old fairy tale. The boy saves the princess; they fall in love. He invents a flying machine—along with his dashing teacher, of course. They get married and name their firstborn after the aforementioned dashing teacher.” Conor frowned. “I don’t recall that fairy tale from the nursery.” “Trust me, it’s a classic.

Other men look up and down, left and right,” he said. “But men like us are different. We are visionaries.

In the airman’s world, a B-17 pilot sat in the five-foot cube of his cockpit with “an oxygen mask full of drool” amid the roar of four engines. He fiddled with 130 switches, dials, gauges, levers, and pedals long enough to dump his payload of bombs—“big ugly dead things,” in one officer’s phrase—and then fled for home. In this world, Germany was known as “the Land of Doom.