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by his letters. I could see his mother's face getting drawn and his father's hand tremble a little as he lighted his pipe, but neither men' tioned what I knew was inside.
We kidded and talked about casual things. As nearly as they could figure, he was about to fly his twenty-fourth mission. One more and he'd be on his way home. His letters had been looking forward to that.
Toward the end of October came the dread telegram. His mother was at home alone when it arrived. It said the War Department regretted to announce that Captain Dexter Lisbon, U.S.A.A.F., had been missing in action since October 8.
That's the first they knew that he'd been promoted to Captain. We lost thirty-nine planes on October 8, and sixty the next day over Schweinfurt. That's the first time our fliers ran into the new rocket guns of the enemy.
The father came home from his office. The neighbors and friends gathered as word spread by telephone. The sons, the daughters, the brave little bride who'd been so proud of the wings that gleamed on his tunic, all came to what amounts to the family homestead.
There was no weeping nor wailing. Neither was there any of this "chin-up-stout-fella" business. There was Deckie's picture on the piano where it always had been. There was a tenseness, of course, a tenseness that many another American home has known, and many another will know.
in^ January, 1945
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But here is where the story goes beyond the reach of any words of mine. The Lishons are straightgrained Yankee stock, Lester, the pater familias, being a native of Maine.
The Navigator of Deckie's crew was a Jewish boy from the other side of town, maybe a better side for all I know, but what I mean is that the families in the ordinary course of events never would have heard of each other. The Tail Gunner, an enlisted man, and the cited hero of a previous mission, had a bride in Lynn.
A Pohsh lad, a member of the ground crew that serviced the plane, has a mother in Allston. She works in a war plant. The wife of the Major, who seems to be the personnel officer at that still unnamed field, lives in Waban.
I don't know how many more of the crew, and those close to it, have relatives in this immediate vicinity, but because of this common bond, because their sons and brothers and husbands were a crew, a team, daring death shoulder to shoulder in foreign skies, the families here have been drawn together as if they were relatives.
Regardless of race, religion, status in hfe, they've been pulled close together— closer than relatives. They've been drawn together as Americans.
Polish, Jewish, Yankee, what not, they've become firm friends by telephone. They've read their letters to each other. They've pooled their