We all think something’s gonna happen. Maybe we need to make it happen.[to Buck]
You know how to tell if a man is a pilot?[Paulina]How?[John ‘Bucky’ Egan]He’ll tell you.[Paulina]
Within days, they woke us up for our first mission. With hundreds of hours of flight training in the States, we had to believe we were prepared. We had to, because now it was real.
When you look at it, and don’t pay any attention to what’s really going on, it’s kinda beautiful.
When a crew went down, they disappeared. No more than four months at Thorpe Abbotts until 32 of the 35 original crews were among the missing. We did not talk about such crews. Those of us who continued to fly mission after mission had to tiptoe around their ghosts. Some of the men were coming undone. They’d seen too many planes blow up in front of them and too many friends killed. Some people drank. Some people fought. Some people slept around. If you got a chance to forget, you took it.
We told each other all kinds of stories. Some of them were true. Most were not. It didn’t matter. Tall tales, music, laughter, good Irish whiskey… We all needed something to help us climb back into that plane and do it all again.
We got a long road ahead of us.
Twenty-five was the magic number. If you survived 25 missions, they sent you home and built bond tours around you.
Watch now on:
To get a letter, you need someone to get it from.
This won’t end until we hit them where it hurts. Better now before every f***ing guy we’ve ever shared a bunk with is either dead or MIA.
There is no balance. Just one event after another. The worst come out untouched. The innocent dead.
There are two kinds of pilots, those who have had a wheels-up landing and those who will.
