As If They Were My Own (Gliders over Normandy Book 3) by Thomas Wood

Author:Thomas Wood [Wood, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781916413818
Publisher: BoleynBennett Publishing
Published: 2018-11-15T23:00:00+00:00

16

It was the noise more than anything that I remember about the landing. I do not remember anything from my visual recollections so deduce now that I must have kept my eyelids welded together throughout the whole procedure, leaving me a blind man. Like a blind man, I felt like my sense of hearing was heightened in those few seconds of landing, and I now frequently play them out in my own mind, like a drama on the wireless.

“We’re coming in too fast!” the pilot with the flashing grin screamed, undoubtedly with both of his thumbs wrapped tightly around the wooden console in the cockpit.

“Arrester chute…flaps to full…” he began to calm down considerably in the half second between his first sentence and his second, acknowledged calmer still by his co-pilot by repeating his orders as he carried them out.

As he did so, I felt like someone had yanked my stomach to one side, twisting and manipulating me, and felt like for a moment that I had been thrown from the glider, and that I was falling, plummeting to the ground.

“We’re going to hit the orchard…brace!” His words confirmed that I was still in the Horsa, but did nothing to comfort me as to my current situation. I clamped my molars down upon one another hard, so that when the landing inevitably came, I didn’t actually sink one of my teeth into the surface of my tongue, something that I had learned very early on in training.

After that, there was silence. Even the sound of the air rushing over the surface of the wings disappeared into the night, along with the rat-tat-tat of machine gun fire. I thought about opening my eyes, it felt like everything was over already, but I kept them shut, petrified at the thought of what purgatory looked like.

Then the sound of ripping; not the sound of ripping that I was ever used to, paper tearing from paper, nor was it like a sheet of fabric being torn, it was more like an ear-splitting crack, one that never seemed to end and continued to grow louder and louder.

I felt every single groove as we snaked our way across the ground, waiting for the thump and lurch of us smashing into the first tree in the orchard. I felt strange at the thought that one of the only things in my life that I obsessed over, was now quite possibly the thing that was most likely to kill me.

I loved how solid and dependable trees were, always allowing themselves to be battered and bruised by a storm, the way they let their branches twist and snap in the wind, but rarely surrendering the trunk to any force of nature.

I was always transfixed in the autumn, when the leaves turned from a luscious green, to the crunchy brown texture as they died, before finally throwing themselves to the ground, dramatically gliding to the floor, taking their time as they did so.

It was on one such autumn afternoon, as

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