More on aviators. I am about halfway through the list of young men we–San Luis Obispo County– lost during World War II in air combat or in accidents.

So, of course, being more or less half-Irish, I had to pull myself up short and ask myself my motives.

What the hell are you doing, Gregory?

There has to be some kind of Cardinal Sin involved in me looking up the names of 106 young men lost fighting fascism and militarism, then paring them down to the aviators, then spending the hours it takes to track down everything from their parents’ names to the airframe numbers of the aircraft that would become their final homes and their coffins.

It’s not morbidity, I decided after a long, long time.

It’s the fact that I have two sons, and most of these young men were younger than my boys.

You see, I had already decided a long time ago that these are my boys, too. So I may have to write a book about them.

You see, I don’t want them to be lost again. Once was enough. That’s what I’m doing, I think. If I’m at all Irish, then we Irish believe there’s nothing quite so close at hand yet so transitory as death.

Whatever my generation has enjoyed, and the two generations I’ve taught history now enjoy and will enjoy, it’s because of these boys. We live because they willed us life, in their deepest hearts, without ever knowing it in the terrible moments when they fell from the sky.

Click the link below to meet some of them, and this is only half. I’ve work to do yet. The table that follows them lists the air accidents that took their comrades in a single day Stateside: March 2, 1944.

The number lost in combat overseas that day is, of course, far larger.

Think on that.

Think about how little, too, the president we have today, who knows almost nothing about our history–or any other nation’s– can register the meaning of lives, like these, given up for us. They represent a generosity and an integrity that he cannot understand.

We deserve better. We owe it to these boys.

Don’t we?

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Here is the link:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B05dFICUx2kGV2NmSWF6OEpSaGs