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I Watched Friends Die in Afghanistan. The Guilt Has Nearly Killed Me. [nytimes.com]

 

By Adam Linehan, The New York Times, November 11, 2019

When my grandfather Michael Linehan Jr. arrived in North Africa in December 1943 to begin his tour of duty with the 15th Air Force, the average life expectancy of an Allied heavy-bomber crewman was roughly six combat missions, less than a fourth of what he was required to fly. As the 25-year-old pilot of a B-24 Liberator, my grandfather flew in some of the most decisive engagements of the war, including the Battle of Anzio and the second Ploesti oil-field raids. Upon completing his tour, he was transferred to the Eighth Air Force just in time to fly bombing runs on D-Day. According to his discharge papers, he earned a Distinguished Flying Cross and two Air Medals before being sent to Texas in August 1944. He spent the remainder of the war training new bomber pilots near El Paso, a job he liked to joke was scarier than combat and in reality was hardly less dangerous. Driving through the area with my uncle several years later, he pointed to a mountain looming over the edge of town. “See all those craters?” he said. “Those were made by new guys.”

My grandfather stopped talking about the war long before I was born, and very few of his stories survive. One is of a low-flying mission over Crete, during which half his squadron was gunned down by German antiaircraft batteries. B-24 crew members had such a high fatality rate during World War II that the aircraft was nicknamed “the flying coffin.” Between the Luftwaffe and the German 88s, there was only so much a crew could do to avoid being blown out of the sky. More than 52,000 American airmen were killed in the war. For many of those who made it home, existential questions over the role luck played in their survival would eventually take a heavy toll on them and their families. “The flyer who returns to his home and is lionized for heroic exploits may still torture himself with the feeling of unworthiness and guilt,” the sociologist Willard Waller cautioned in his landmark 1944 book, “The Veteran Comes Back.”

My grandfather’s brother, Jack, served with the Navy in the Pacific, and after the war the two men bought adjacent homes in their native Dallas, where their father emigrated from County Cork, Ireland, as a teenager. The brothers also started a plastics-manufacturing company, and it became lucrative enough to support their mutual devotion to gambling, liquor and bird hunting. My grandfather was a lifelong driver of big Cadillacs, and he liked to drive the way he flew his B-24: fast and loaded on bourbon. I never really got to know the man, in part because laryngeal cancer deprived him of a voice box in his later years. The last time I saw him, he was on his deathbed, enmeshed in medical tubing and fighting for oxygen.

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