Read Online Once a Warrior by Fran Baker - Free Book Online Page A

hut, he put on his electrically-heated flying suit and fleece-lined boots, then slipped a life preserver—jokingly called a Mae West—over his shoulders and checked both CO² cylinders to make sure they worked. Rumor had it that some of the guys had been using the cartridges to cool their beer and returning them empty. His were full. A parachute harness with tight leg straps and two chest straps went over the Mae West; white silk gloves would later go under his heavy leather mittens to ward off frostbite at high altitudes.
    His sandwich-board-shaped flak suit, which he regarded as almost useless because it left his arms and legs unprotected, would rest behind his seat during the mission.
    “Load ’er up!”  Jerry had commandeered a truck and a driver to carry the crew, their equipment and the machine guns out to the plane.
    Over his personalized leather helmet, John put on his flak helmet. It contained earphones and snaps for his oxygen mask, which had to be tightened constantly. He didn’t like the helmets with built-in microphones because the water condensing from his breath froze the instruments at high altitudes. Instead, he used a throat mike—two hard rubber pill-shaped devices that fit against his larynx by a strap around his neck.
    Wearing the umbilical cords that would connect him to his crew and his aircraft, much the way his unborn child was connected to his wife’s body, he climbed into the truck with the other men.
    The priest stood on the shoulder of the taxi strip. As each truck passed, he made the sign of the cross and said, “Take care of yourselves, boys. And God go with you.”
    John spotted three ground-crew members standing by his plane when the truck stopped at the circular hardstand. While the other men piled out to perform their own individual pre-flight chores, he went through a sequence of instrument and control checks with the crew chief. That done, he walked around the plane with the mechanic he’d talked to the day before. First, they examined the steel patches that had been soldered over the holes sustained during their last mission to Bucharest. Then they checked to be sure the main fuel tanks and the auxiliary tanks were full, and that ten 500-pound bombs hung in the bay.
    “Looks good,” John told him.
    “Give Hans hell for me, sir.”
    The flight crew climbed into the plane, where they spent the final few minutes before engine starting time getting into their takeoff positions.
    “Anybody need their sinuses unplugged?”  Bill opened the first-aid kid and held up a bottle of nose drops. Hearing no takers, he treated himself to a snort before putting the bottle back.
    “Everybody wearing their dog tags?” Bob asked as he slid into the co-pilot’s seat next to John’s.
    “The rosary my mother gave me, too.”  Tommy Murphy reached down the front of his flight suit and pulled it out. He wore it around his neck on every mission, believing it brought him luck.
    Ever the clown, Ed Harrigan grabbed the blue beads from behind and pretended to twist them around Tommy’s neck, saying in a bad German accent, “Start praying, Ami .”
    Tommy crossed his eyes and made a gagging sound. Everyone laughed, releasing some of the pre-flight tension. Then the assembly officer gave the signal to start the engines.
    John checked his watch as Bob reached for the starter engines. The base exploded with sound as thirty-six olive drab B-24 Liberators roared into life and the noise echoed off the mountain ridge. From the tower, a white signal light arced upward, with two stars falling from it.
    It was time to go.
    The ground crew gave them thumbs-up, the brakes were released, and the “Kansas City Kitty” moved off its hardstand to join the other planes in a single-file counterclockwise path around the perimeter taxi strip.
    Fifteen minutes after the squadron’s engines started, the lead plane lifted off the single metal strip. John waited thirty seconds so he wouldn’t get caught in its prop