Let's go back to the 1930's for a second. Everyone loves World War 2 anyways, so let's take a look at that generation just for shits and giggles. You're some farm kid from Idaho, maybe you're a kid who sells shoes as a part-time job when you're not going to school, maybe you never even
went to school because your parents just couldn't afford it, and you had to pick up a factory job to help your parents make ends meet, since Dad was never the same after he came back from the trenches, and mom can't stand to see him hobbling around with one leg and coughing up the one lung he has left since the mustard gas burnt out the other one, so she drinks too much to hold a steady job.
Either way, you're 18, 17, maybe even 16 if you were really unlucky, and things start to get pretty heated as we're creeping up into the 1940s. Germany's gone and started some shit, France and Japan jumped into the fray, England is getting bombed every single night so a bunch of kids your age are hunkered down in their root cellar in London hoping their house doesn't get blown to pieces like that one poor family's down the street. You know, that one you read about in the paper where they're still picking body parts off the shingles.
Uncle Sam
Needs You!, so you're ripped out of your small town somewhere, shoved in a pair of fatigues and shipped off to boot camp before you're even old enough to drink. This is
way before the military had all of its reforms to prevent Drill Sergeants from coming one step shy of quite literally tearing you a new asshole, so boot camp ain't exactly paradise. You're screamed at, insulted, slapped around, kicked around, dragged through the mud and across barbed wire and before a few months have passed, you get the call. You're shipping off to Germany, because someone has to deal with those Krauts and their fucking Luftwaffe.
Did you ever wonder why they called them Bomber Jackets, or why Bomber Jackets were so thick? If you didn't, you learned real fast when they shoved you into that B-17 Flying Fortress and sent you hauling all the way up to 30,000 feet. Congratulations, son, you get to be a
Waist Gunner. As it turns out, it's mighty fuckin' cold up there, -30
°F to -40
°F, as a matter of fact. The cabin isn't pressurized either; it can't be, you need that side open to keep an eye out and to swing that ball turret around.
Now, in order to even survive up there, you need a Hell of a lot more than just a nice coat. The F-3A heated suit is definitely making it at least marginally more tolerable, the oxygen masks haven't made it easy to talk to anyone around you all night, not that you'd be able to hear each other over the sound of the two fucking jackhammers that some pencilneck decided to call engines, but at least you can breathe. That M1 flak vest with the M4 flak apron sure is Hell on the knees, though. It's already cramped enough in here as it is, and having to stoop down this whole time in 50lbs of bullshit isn't making it any better.
You just want to go home, but you've got 25 runs to make before you're allowed to sign off and go make sure that mom hasn't drank herself to death. You just want to see your stupid room again and play with your stupid dog and go to that stupid malt shop to hang out with your friends, but right in the middle of all that reminiscing over the pitch blackness of whatever craphole countryside they've sent you over, the entire cabin lights up, you've somehow gone even more deaf than you already were, and you look out the side of the plane and see this:
The Krauts fired up their anti-aircraft and landed a direct hit on the plane right next to you. You knew everyone on board, you trained in boot camp together with some of them; Hell, you even went to school with the kid manning the radio. You're probably not going to be playing catch with him out in the field anymore, though. You're probably not going to see him again at all. If you're lucky you might make it to his funeral, but you know that casket's gonna' be closed, if they even find enough of him to fill one.
The anti-aircraft is hammering away, planes are getting blown to shreds left and right, you're hanging onto that fucking ball turret for dear life while the pilot swerves and dives and yells
whatever the fuck, you can't hear him anyways, but that's when you hear the worst thing in the world: Dead silence. The anti-aircraft has stopped, and that means the interceptors are coming in, the ones with the
high-explosive rounds that'll make that 50lbs of bullshit about as useful as cheese cloth against a hand grenade.
Those interceptors don't mess around. Some of them finished the war having taken down 50 planes each, and with the kind of aim they've been having you wouldn't argue with the numbers when you read it in the papers after the war, assuming you live to see those papers ever printed. The kid next to you's spitting blood out of the new hole in his chest, you lost two fingers somewhere over Neumünster, and the pilot's going to need a new co-pilot if you make it home, because his face is all over the windshield.
You finally drop your bombs, you head back home through
another cloud of interceptors and anti-aircraft fire, you land on the runway and the first thing you get is a smile and a handshake with the hand that can still count to five. "Congratulations, son, you've only got 24 missions left."
"My generation has it the worst in the history of America."
Kinda' makes you want to throw up, doesn't it?
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