A few words before I start. I don't name our group or our squadron on this page. The men I served with are mostly gone now, and their families may not want their fathers and grandfathers turning up on the computer without being asked. So I keep it to the Ninth Air Force. The men I do name here, I asked first, or asked their families.

And not every boy I trained with came home. I don't write about that here. That belongs to their families.

I grew up in Nebraska and was working at a feed store when Pearl Harbor came. I signed up for the aviation cadet program that winter. I had never been in an airplane. I had seen exactly two up close, both of them crop dusters.

They taught us in steps. First Primary, in a Stearman biplane with an open cockpit and an instructor in the front seat who could see everything you did wrong and told you about all of it through a rubber tube. Then Basic, in the BT-13, which everybody called the Vultee Vibrator, for good reason. Then Advanced, in the AT-6, which was the first airplane that felt like a real fighter to me. A lot of fellows washed out along the way. I came close twice. The second time was a landing, which may explain some things in my flight log.

I got my wings and my gold bars in 1943, and then I was sent to learn the Thunderbolt. The first time I climbed up on the wing and looked down into that cockpit I thought, they've made a mistake, this is a truck. By the end of the first week I wouldn't have traded her for anything.

We crossed on a troopship early in 1944. I was seasick for five days and have not been on a boat since, Genevieve's cousin's bass boat on Saguaro Lake included.

Our field in England was in the south, close enough to the Channel that you could smell it. We lived in a round tin hut with a coal stove that never had enough coal. It rained. Then it rained more. The English people were very good to us, and they put up with a great deal.

The Ninth was a tactical air force. That means we worked for the Army on the ground. We dive-bombed bridges and rail yards, we shot up trains and trucks, and after the invasion we flew over the soldiers and went after whatever was in their way. The Thunderbolt was built for that work. She could carry bombs under the wings and eight .50 caliber guns, and she could take a beating and bring you home, which she did for me more than once.

On the night before the invasion, every airplane on the field had to be painted with wide black and white stripes around the wings and the body, so our own side would know us. The crew chiefs did it overnight with brooms and mops and whatever paint they could find. On the sixth of June we flew from before it was light until after it was dark. From up there, the Channel was full of ships from one side to the other. I have never seen anything like it, before or since.

A few weeks after that we moved across to France, to the pasture with the steel mat I wrote about on the front page. We lived in tents. It was mud or it was dust, never anything in between. In December the weather kept us on the ground for days, right when the Army needed us most, and when it finally cleared just before Christmas we flew from first light to dark, every day it held. Later we moved farther east, and farther again, and by the time it was over in May we were flying out of Germany.

A pilot gets the credit, but a pilot is only as good as his crew chief, and mine was the best in the outfit. His name was Hugo Feltner. He was a sergeant from Kentucky, three years older than me, and before the war he had fixed trucks and tractors at a garage back home. He could fix anything with a screwdriver, a piece of wire and a cigarette in the corner of his mouth.

Hugo had my airplane ready every morning, no matter what had happened to her the day before. He stood on the wing and helped me strap in. He would rap twice on the top of my helmet with his knuckles, and that meant go. He never said much. When I came back he walked all the way around her before he said a word to me, looking for holes. If he found some, he'd look at me for a long moment, and then he'd say, "Well, Lieutenant, I guess I'll be up late." That was all.

My airplane was named Genevieve, after my girl back home. Hugo painted it on the cowling himself, in white letters, and he was prouder of those letters than of anything I ever did in her. When I wrote Genevieve that I'd named an airplane after her, she wrote back that she hoped it was a pretty one. I sent her a picture. She married me anyway, in 1946.

Hugo and I sent Christmas cards for forty-seven years, until he passed on in 1992. His daughter still sends one. I would give a good deal to show him my flight log. He would walk all the way around it before he said a word.

I came home at the end of 1945, married Genevieve, and went to work for the telephone company, where I stayed thirty-four years. I never flew an airplane again, not even a little one. I didn't want to. I had done it, and that was enough. We have three children and seven grandchildren, and we moved down to Mesa in 1983 for the sunshine.

So it surprises me, at eighty, to be sitting at a computer at seven in the morning with my hand on a joystick and my heart going like I'm twenty-four. Jason says that's the point of a present. I suppose he's right.