"We'll be home for dinner. Tommy, check it out! Tell me what y'all see back there!"

Lovely Lydia had a small Plexiglas bubble in the roof, designed for the navigator to use for observation, although Tommy preferred to climb into the nose. There was a small metal step that he used to push himself up into the bubble, and he took a quick glance behind them and saw huge black spirals of smoke rising from a half-dozen ships in the convoy and a massive red explosion from an oil tanker. But his attention to the success of their work was short-lived, for what he'd immediately seen had frightened him far more in that moment than anything in the bombing run-not the speed, not the scream of the engines, not the wall of bullets they'd passed through. What he saw was the unmistakable red-orange of flames shooting from the port engine, licking across the surface of the wing.

He had screamed into the intercom: "Port side! Port side!

Fire!"

Only to hear the captain reply nonchalantly, "I know, they're on fire, helluva job, bombardier…"

"No, damn it, captain, it's us!"

The flames were shooting out of the cowling, streaking the blue air, and black smoke was smudging the wind. We're dead. Tommy had thought right then. In a second or two, or maybe five or ten, the flames will hit the fuel line and race back into the wing tank and we'll explode.

He had stopped being afraid at that moment. It was the rarest of sensations, to look out at something taking place just beyond his reach and recognize it for what it was-his own death. He felt a slight twinge of irritation, as if frustrated that there was nothing he could do, but resigned. And, in the same second, felt an odd, distant sort of loneliness and worried about his mother, and his brother, who was somewhere in the Pacific, and his sister and his sister's best friend, who lived down the block from them back in Manchester and whom he loved with a painful, dogged intensity, and how they would all be hurt far worse and for far longer than he was about to be, because he knew the explosion that was about to overtake them would be quick and decisive.