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

age twenty-two, he was older than everyone in his crew.
    “Have you checked out the ship yet?”  As flight engineer and top turret gunner, Dirk Ellington was worried about their plane, which had sustained some flak damage on their trip to Bucharest the day before yesterday and had been sent to the hangar for repair.
    “I walked over and talked to the ground crew after lunch yesterday,” John told him. “They promised to work all night if necessary to finish patching it up.”
    Dirk nodded, then turned his attention to the papers he’d picked up at the door.
    John grinned at his radio operator. “Got your Purple Heart on, Bill?”
    Crewman Bill Burnside had been burned in the groin area by a short in his electrical suit during a raid over Nis, Yugoslavia, and John never failed to kid him about the decoration he’d received while recuperating from his injury.
    “Right here.”  Bill opened his jacket and flashed his brag rag.
    Pat came over, carrying a packet of evasion materials that the crew would use if they were shot down. In addition, Dirk had a box of hard candies and Bill a first-aid kit. After each mission Pat had to turn in his kit, but the crew usually ate up the candy on the way back to the base, and Bill always kept the medical supplies.
    “Ten-HUT!” 
    Everyone stood at attention when the group commander and the briefing officers mounted the stage. After they resumed their seats, a junior officer opened the curtain to reveal a wall-map on which the flight track from base to target and back to base was plotted. Two days ago there’d been groans and grimaces all around when the aircrews saw that the target was Bucharest. But today, when the map showed the same target, silence settled over them like a shroud.
    “That’s right,” the group commander declared, “we’re going back to Bucharest.”  He stuck the tip of the pointer he carried at the target. “As you all know, the master plan calls for stepped-up activity against the Germans’ Romanian oil refineries as well as their oil transportation capabilities. We’re an essential part of that plan. So we’re going to hit these railyards again and, this time, we’re going to wipe ’em out for good.”
    John noticed that he wasn’t alone in rolling his eyes. The commander seemed to have conveniently forgotten that their previous mission to Bucharest had been a toss-up as to which would be wiped out first—the bombardment group or the marshalling yards. Even worse, they’d lost two planes and their entire crews to antiaircraft fire.
    The flak officer came next. The munitions, weather, maintenance and taxi-control officers followed him. Finally, to the commander’s solemn countdown of “Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . HACK!” the pilots all synchronized their watches.
    After the briefing, each crew huddled together to decide if there was anything special that needed to be done before they headed to the equipment hut.
    “Have we got enough ammo?” Technical Sergeant Larry Shaffer asked.            
    “For all the good it’ll do us against the flak.”  The expression on the face of the right waist gunner, Jerry Watson, was a grim reminder of the gauntlet of enemy gunfire they’d barely survived two days before.
    The crew split up then, some of them going to finish last-minute chores and others making a beeline for the rooms behind the stage where chaplains of all faiths were waiting to tend to their spiritual needs.
    After receiving Holy Communion and the Last Rites of the Roman Catholic Church, as he always did before going on a mission, John made the short walk over to operations to chat with the duty officer. He left encouraged by the news that his crew would probably be on an every-other-day schedule for the next couple of months. It was a killer rotation, no doubt about it. But the sooner he got this tour over with, he reminded himself, the sooner he’d be reunited with Kitty.
    In the equipment