6/12 - First thought - antiaircraft (found in the introduction on page 7) - shouldn't there be a hyphen in there somewhere? It doesn't look right.

I like that Stout has come right out and said that not all 'heroes' of war were/are heroes in their everyday life and that in some cases he refused to pursue interesting stories because of the contemptibleness of the 'hero' of the story. Some books/movies/tv shows do place halos over war heroes heads, when it's often not deserved - just because he saved a man's life doesn't mean he won't go home, drink and drive and kill another man in a crash. To be continued...

A few hours later - Well, they say you learn something new everyday. I just learned that men tend to 'hang' down one pant leg or the other and that when having a pair of suit pants tailored for you the tailor needs to know which side you hang so as to add a little extra fabric for propriety and comfort's sake. I guess it's the equivalent of a lot of women having one breast slightly bigger and/or differently shaped than the other. To be continued...

15/12 - This has earned its fourth star over the last 20 pages. Stout is able to mix the exact right amount of military detail with action-filled anecdotes. The names of all the different planes flown by all the different units fly right by me - I wouldn't know an F2F biplane if it bit me, but I can tell a generic biplane from a bomber or a fighter. So when Stout says bomber I see a big, heavy, slow-flying plane with two exposed propellers and little tufts of cloud floating below it; when he says fighter I see a little manoeuvrable jet thing with guns on its short wings; when he says biplane I see a plane with paper wrapped wings made of balsa wood, an exposed cockpit and those giant fixed wheels that always seemed to cause the plane to bounce during landing. So you see, while I'm not an authority on the differences between a P-40 and a Ki-27, I do have some idea. Despite not really taking in all the different plane titles I'm really enjoying the details Stout injects into the story to place each personal anecdote into proper context, so we know why each pilot was where they were and why they were doing what they were doing and what was going on around them in the larger scheme of things.

At the beginning of the book, Stout talks about the fact that these stories are not about the celebrated heroes of WWII, but of the everyday airmen who fought just as hard as the famous ones. To me, it doesn't matter that the men I'm reading about weren't taking part in a famous battle, or aren't famous themselves, what they did during their war was still just as life-threatening. The men who died during the Doolittle raid are just as dead as Neil Martin is, a mostly unknown man who was shot down during the first time the Flying Tigers saw action on December 23rd, 1941, in an air battle that has no name, but was just as important for those involved and their families. I mean no disrespect to any of the airmen who lost their lives during the war, but it doesn't make sense to me to put some of these brave men on pedestals just because they died in one battle instead of another, and Stout is one of the few who seems to understand that - I applaud him for that. To be continued...

This was archived before I had a chance to finish it. If I ever get the chance to read it again I definitely will.