My Band of Brothers in Fleet Air Wing 7

.....May 30th is Memorial Day--although it is being celebrated tomorrow. However, I will celebrate it today, although it is really not a "celebration". It is time, however, to remember the boys who fought by your side in the long ago war. After radio and radar school and after aerial gunnery school we were all brought together, including our flight officers, one day in Key West to become the crew of a PB4Y (B-24) Liberator, a war plane packing a dozen 50 caliber machine guns, all but four of them activated hydraulically. There were two in the nose turret, two in the top turret, two in the belly turret, two in the tail turret and four in the waste hatches operated manually. Our officers were the navigator John Egan, the Co-pilot, Lieut. Leo Brougham, and our pilot, Lieut. Arthur Noehren.

.....Our enlisted crew consisted of two radio/radar operators, Hal Mack and the guy called "Rosie"--namely me; then there was Howard Lee, our leader, a guy who was a farmer back in Maine or Vermont, as I recall. Howard was a mild-mannered, soft-spoken, pipe smoking young man--although slightly older than the rest of us, and whose homely drawl fell pleasingly on our ears. Howard was our flight engineer who took care of all the mechanical problems on the plane as they cropped up. His assistant was Paul Gordon who hailed from Maryland where he had just gotten married.

.....Our three ordnance men were John Shekitka, from a Pennsylvania coal mining family; Don "Doc" Fraser, from Brooklyn with a sense of humor that kept us all laughing and relaxed, and Norman England from Connecticut whose family ran a typewriter and office supply store. For the uninitiated, ordnance men were in charge of the armory on the plane--keeping the guns and the bomb bay in operating condition. And then, of course, there was our Scotch Terrier, Bombs Away, and our Fox Terrier, Yank, both of whom gave us lip-licking and tail-wagging welcomes when we returned to our quonset hut from a mission.

.....All on our crew were under 21, except for the officers; and all have gone to a better place than here, with the exception of Harold Mack and myself--strangely enough, the two radio operators. All of the boys and men on this crew flew combat missions together for many months in Europe, and war tends to weld together a unit like ours as inextricably as mortise and tenon, never to be separated.

.....So, on this Memorial Day, I take a minute to remember you, John and Arthur and Leo and England and "Doc" and Paul and Shekitka and Howard. No one who has never been where we have been will ever know or truly understand the meaning of a Band of Brothers.

.....Hal and I are now over 85 years old, and feeling it. But we both have a mission today, and we will accept it.

Sic transit gloria mundi