You Are Not Forgotten by Bryan Bender

Author:Bryan Bender [Bender, Bryan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-53518-2
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-10-28T16:00:00+00:00

By the middle of January the Hell’s Angels had been in combat two weeks, and Ryan was flying combat missions to Rabaul every other day. On January 13, it was another bomber escort, but the fighter formation failed to rendezvous with the bombers and was forced to turn back. The next day, January 14, was a Friday—and Ryan’s twenty-seventh birthday. He marked the milestone at the Torokina camp with the other pilots who also had the day off, including the three pilots he was regularly flying with in his four-plane division.

There was his wingman, the young Californian Bob See, who could now boast several downed Japanese planes; Roger Brindos, the dark-haired card shark with movie-star good looks from Minnesota whom just about everyone now owed money; and Brindos’s wingman, the quiet and unassuming Bob Marshall from Amite, Louisiana, the small town whose name meant both “friendship” and “young.”

The twenty-one-year-old See, a lanky kid with a cat-ate-the-canary grin, had graduated in 1939 from Balboa High School in San Francisco’s working-class Mission Terrace district. An only child, he was already proving to be one of the best pilots in the squadron and well on his way to becoming an ace.

Brindos, whose parents owned a hotel on London Road in Duluth overlooking Lake Superior, had quit Duluth Junior College and enlisted in the Navy a few months after Pearl Harbor. Brindos was the only one of the four who was married. Waiting back in Minnesota was his new bride, Patricia, who had been among the wives who piled into a red convertible for the cross-country journey to bid them all farewell in San Diego at the end of September.

But Ryan had a special rapport with the red-haired Marshall, even though Ryan was five years older. Like Ryan, Marshall studied engineering—at Louisiana State University—and had been captivated by airplanes ever since he was a kid. He also loved Edgar Allan Poe, naming his Corsair “The Raven” after one his poems. Ryan and Marshall also shared an affinity for motorcycles.

Ryan spent much of his birthday tarrying in his tent and taking it easy. He huddled with some of the other pilots for their now almost daily ritual of tuning in to Tokyo Rose, the English-speaking Japanese propaganda broadcaster who constantly harassed the Allies, vowing that MacArthur would be captured in a month. They were eager to hear any news about their lost comrades who might have been captured.

In the afternoon Ryan and the others reported for the daily intelligence briefing near the airstrip to learn about the next day’s assignment. They were informed they would once again be flying cover for Army Air Corps bombers attacking one of the Japanese airfields near Rabaul. Ryan opened his mission folder to analyze the maps and flight charts that would guide them.

One location, as its code name, Sordid, suggested, filled him with almost as much contempt as Rabaul. The volcanic island of Buka sat directly to the northwest of the larger Bougainville, across a narrow strait less than a mile wide.

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