My Father In The 8th Air Force

My father was a World War II flyer. He never talked about it except once, briefly, to a granddaughter doing a school project. By then, late in his life, he had gone to a therapist who diagnosed PTSD and treated him so he could finally say a little about his experience, but even then, not much. The girl's paper on her grandfather in World War II was a couple of pages.

I looked into his military career after he passed away. Included in his effects was a slim file containing a few papers from that time. There was not much. I added to it gradually and followed a story that, I discovered going along, is flat-out amazing, the more so since the most he said about it was two pages sixty years later. Not that he was awarded a Medal of Honor or that his was a more amazing story than thousands of other crewmen. 225,000 men flew combat missions for the 8th Air Force in World War II and Dean Reid's is just one of the regular, run-of-the-mill, spectacular and astonishing stories common to all those fliers. As a cousin of his wrote to him toward the end of his life, "Flying those bombers full of gas and bombs, overloaded, out of that English fog had to be one of the most dangerous jobs of the whole war. I don't know how anyone lived through it. You should have all gotten the medal of honor."