The 6 am siren blared, causing me to promptly fall out of my cot. I sat up, rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, glanced at my RAF sanctioned watch, and yelled some choice words that I learned in high school. I yanked on a shirt and switched out my old pair of shorts for a pair of crisp cargo pants. Grabbing my boots, I blew out of my tent and almost knocked over another pilot.
“Sorry!” I called over my shoulder, still going. The guy swore at me but I was really too hurried to care, which is not unusual for me, really. I ran into the breakfast tent and grabbed a cup of lukewarm coffee (which tasted like dirt, by the way) and a muffin, or as the Brits call it, a biscuit. I stuck to being American though, so a good ole muffin is what I call it, even now. I’m stubborn like that.
“Kenny!” The squadron leader, John Moor, motioned me over. “The squadron is headed out for the English Channel. The wireless ops spotted some aircraft on our radars. Warm up your engine, alright?” John was a good guy, he didn’t care that I was American, or that I was a girl. He just cared about flying, like me. He’s 27 (and very cute, if I do say so myself) and he’s been flying since he was eight, which means that he’s been flying for 19 years (that’s only three years younger than my age), but technically he only started flying a few years before me. He’s the best pilot in the squadron, agile and smart, and when he flies it’s like he’s one with the plane. I’m a girl and the second best pilot, but I’m nowhere close to him.
         Ten rushed minutes later I was warming up my plane, a Supermarine Spitfire XIV with a griffon 61 engine. The wing structure of these planes always amazes me. They are modeled after the Spitfire IV and VIII with improvements like the cut-back fuselage and tear-drop canopies, and the E-Type wing with improved armament. Beautiful! Our squadron is RAF 19. Our job is to tip the bombs over the sea before they get to Britain. We aren’t the closest base to Nazi-occupied France, but the best squadron (I think) in all of England. We are the best pilots in the allies!
         I pulled on my goggles and my helmet and checked my gear- all good. Fuel: check. I jumped into the c***pit and closed the hatch, then drove to the runway and waited for my turn to take off. The sun was beginning to come up and the sky was a mixture of oranges and yellows and blues­—no clouds as far as the eye could see. That’s our squadron’s favorite weather; we can see all the bombs from far away. The more prep time, the easier it is to tip them.
Three planes left till I can take off… Two planes… One. I accelerated and sped down the runway and lifted off into the air. A perfect take-off! I switched on my radio and tested it out.
“Testing- This is A2. RAF 19, do you copy?”
“Copy,” came the responses, one echoing after another. “A” stood for aircraft, and the number after it was the number of your plane in the squadron. We had 14 planes in ours, and John was A1. I grinned. Flying was second to none for me. It had been my passion ever since I had flown my first plane in 1930 when I was 9 years old. I could see the sea from my spot in the sky. I never disliked the views from cruising altitude; no matter what, they never got tiring.
         Static buzzed over the radio and John’s voice came on. “A7, coming up on your left. A9, keep lookout. A2, straight ahead.” I tensed with adrenaline and pushed forward with a burst of speed. I could see the doodlebug inching forward on the horizon. The flying bombs have always creeped me out, so calling them doodlebugs makes them a little less frightening. Sometimes you think they’re other planes, and then you see their lifeless bodies and cargo waiting to take the lives of thousands of innocent people. I cringe every time. I can’t help picturing them landing on my brothers. It’s a personal victory every time I tip one.
         I circled and slowed for the bomb to catch up. “Doodlebug, doodlebug, fly away home,” I hummed under my breath. It caught up to me and I pushed down hard on the throttle to match its speed. I took a deep breath and began the “dance”. I lowered my plane so my wingtip was at the right level. Breathe, Kenny, breathe. Okay. Slowly, slowly, and… got it! My wingtip was underneath! The doodlebug began to fall and I veered out of the way and watched its descent into the ocean. It seemed like forever for it to hit the water, and when it finally did a plume of water shot high into the air and rained on the sea; a flood of saltwater and a few unfortunate fish. “Sorry,” I murmured to the sea.
         No one has the right to take the life of anything else: that’s what I believe. No, it’s not because I’m just a soft girl. I’d believe it no matter what. That’s one of the reasons why I love my job. I save people instead of killing them; it is a privilege very few people in this war get to have. A German life is still a life, a life with a family; a beating heart that’s no different than ours. I told that to one of our gunners and he laughed and said, “Lord, what fools these Americans be.” Don’t ever assume that I don’t know Shakespeare! What a jerk.
          “A1, copy?” I said into my mic.
“Copy,” John replied.
“Bomb taken,” I said. We were stealing the bombs from the Germans, just like the spies were stealing information and the men on the front lines were stealing land.
“Good job, A2,” he said. Short and sweet, just like usual. Bomb sighted, bomb taken, approval given. I smiled and blushed like a schoolgirl.
         We went back to base an hour later, a little tired and more than a little satisfied. It was only 11:00 am but the radars were empty, so we had the day off, and I decided to go out to lunch. It had been so long since I’d had fresh food. All of the food on the base was shipped in through a huge Sysco truck, along with smaller trucks that carried small parts for the planes and other supplies like toiletries and chocolate. I grabbed a bike and headed off the base into Essex.

My favorite place is a little hole just outside of Essex called the Bombshell Café. Ironic, isn’t it? They have good coffee though. I don’t know how the heck they do it, but it’s imported every two months from Columbia, and it’s not super expensive either. I got a cup of coffee (black) and a sandwich with homemade bread, fresh lettuce and tomatoes, and roasted mushrooms: my usual. I don’t have time to go out to eat very often but when I do I always come here. I read some training manuals on old planes while I ate, and afterward I went back into town and sat at a park to finish reading. After that I biked back to base, where a wireless operator was waiting for me.
         The w/ops (wireless operators) are lower on the food chain here, but I try to be nice to them, because they put in just as much work as the pilots do. “Kenny, we need a plane delivered to Great Yarmouth. You know the way, right?” I nodded. “Okay, well, it’s a Boulton Paul Defiant. It’s missing part of its tail so it’s a little unsteady. It’s going up north to be fixed but we need an experienced pilot to ferry it, just because it’s a little tipsy.” I smiled. It does feel good to be recognized, you know.
“Yeah, sure, I can do it,” I replied. The w/op seemed to relax a little, which confirmed my hunch that he didn’t always get treated as an equal.
“Thanks,” he said.
         I slid my helmet back on and jumped into the plane. A Boulton Paul Defiant is a British fighter jet with a rear-facing turret only. I started the engine and waited for it to warm up. It was about 4:00 pm. I knew the way to Great Yarmouth, everyone did. It was just up the coast, towards the northeast. I started the plane toward the runway and accelerated into my take-off. The plane was wobbly, no balance whatsoever, and it swerved a little as we lifted into the air. My hands were shaking with the effort of holding the plane in place because of how hard it wanted to dip to the right.
         I took a deep breath and pushed down on the throttle. This was turning out a little harder than I thought it would. As we gained altitude the flight got steadier and I was able to relax more, which was good because my wrists were getting sore. Fifteen minutes later I looked out into the sky toward the axis… and blinked hard.  A flying bomb was on the horizon, obviously coming from Germany, but headed for one of its own territories. Then something clicked.
         It was headed for Paris!
         But no, that couldn’t be right! Hitler had ordered someone to bomb the Eiffel tower but he had refused. How could this be happening? There was no other place it could have been heading to though, unless they were trying to bomb the Bay! S***! No! Why me?! I have a family, friends, my dream job! I am loved by others!
         But the world was, is, and will always be unfair. Sometimes we have to choose between wrong and right; the easy path and the harder one, and the decision we make will either haunt us or encourage us for the rest of our lives. The time will come when you too will choose. Each and every one of us has to. If you’re lucky, you might even have to make a sacrifice for the greater good that can end up changing your life and the lives of hundreds and maybe even thousands of people around you. That was my choice, and I would never take back the decision I made.
         I didn’t have enough fuel to wait and match the bomb’s speed, nor could I tip it in this crappy plane. The only option that I had was... no! I won’t, I can’t! My only option was to dive, to go kamikaze and crash my plane into the bomb. Aerial ramming. There’s a word for it in Polish. It’s the same word in Russian and French too: taran. I would have a low survival rate, if any at all: your chances are very slim when you’re ramming a pilotless flying bomb with an already broken plane. I would never have been able to live with myself if I let the bomb go free and kill the millions of people and destroy a national monument. I adjusted my angle, took a deep breath, and let my plane take control, forward and down, dipping hard down and to the right. We sped up to meet the doodlebug in midair. No, not the doodlebug; the bomb. The serious and all too real bomb that I was about to crash my plane into, at 17,040 feet in the air.
“I love you, Elliott! I love you, Duncan!” I screamed, but I couldn’t even hear myself over the sound of the wind. Almost there. I could hear the bomb, a high piercing noise… 4 seconds till impact… 3… 2… and…1. There was a deafening explosion, and then everything went black.

My head was on fire. There was a pounding in my ears, blocking out everything, every noise, every feeling except for pain. I gasped and passed out again.
         The pounding. I could hear it again, detonations in my head. No, not detonations, it was my heart. The pounding was my heart still beating inside of me! But the pain, HELL! The pain was everywhere, climbing and crawling and screaming inside of me. I couldn’t move! “I can’t move I can’t move I CAN’T MOVE!” I yelled in my head, my sanity fighting for air. Okay, calm down, Kenny. You effing saved Paris! You saved the Eiffel Tower! Now get it together so you can see your brothers again. I took slow breaths. Okay.
I made a list in my head of what hurt the most, from 1 to 10—1 being the same as a scraped knee, and 10 being the most pain I’d ever felt. My arms were sore and achy, but I could move them. That was a relief. It hurt to breathe. My whole torso hurt: my chest being the worst. I think I broke my ribs, I thought, all of them, making that maybe an 8 and a half on the pain scale. Then came my head; a throbbing, aching, crying kind of pain, like someone had hit me in the back of my skull with a sledgehammer duct-taped to a wrecking ball that fell off of a cliff. That’s a 9.  I groaned. Okay, at least I can make noises. Next were my legs- s***! There’s the ten. Or eleven, possibly twelve. Owww. My left leg stung above my ankle. It felt like a cut or a burn, and I wished I had read more on how to treat flesh wounds. My right leg hurt at my knee, it hurt so bad it hurt it hurt it hurt like nothing I’ve ever experienced in my life and nothing I will ever experience again. I couldn’t focus on the pain and fell unconscious yet again.
          I blinked. The sky was dark. I could see the endless waving grass. The wreckage of the Boulton Paul Defiant was scattered around the field where I lay, and the bomb parts looked like dead bodies around me. I was still sore but I was beginning to be able to breathe a little easier and my leg hurt less. I couldn’t feel my right leg. Not good. I moved my arms. Nothing broken besides my ribs, I think. I was dizzy, even lying down, and my head was still pounding, but I tried to sit up anyway. I got halfway and rested on my elbows. My head spun and my breaths were coming in gasps that hurt my entire body, but I said I was stubborn, and stubborn I was. I managed to sit up the rest up the way and leaned back on my hands for support, my legs stretched out in front of me. Legs? Oh no. Nonononono! My leg! My right leg! Gone, ripped off below the knee by the explosion, a bloody stump of torn flesh was all that remained! How would I walk? How would I fly?! I tore off a strip of cloth from the pant leg on my good side and tied it tightly around my leg just above the knee. I lay back down, amazed I hadn’t bled to death (though little did I know, I almost had). The impact of the ground touching my back sent shooting pains through my chest. I felt hot tears running down my face, and eventually I fell into a restless sleep.

When I awoke it was dawn, and the sky looked so much different from my new vantage point: my bed of wheat that was waving gracefully to the just risen sun. My head hurt a little less, but I was still dizzy, my consciousness spinning in endless circles around my fallen body. I sat up again and looked around as far as my sore neck would allow. Nothing was to be seen except for the rolling plains. Where was I? I took a deep breath. Holding onto the grass in front of me I tried to pull myself up onto my good knee and fell over. I’d never had to compensate for a missing limb before. As the sun rose higher in the sky, I kept trying, and by the time the sun was completely lighting my surroundings, I had succeeded. Yes! I held up a V for a most triumphant victory and almost lost my balance. “Whoa, okay, wow. I’m gonna have to be way more careful,” I thought.
         The sun shed its light all the way to the end of my horizons and I gasped twice. First because of something I saw in the distance, and second because gasping hurt so bad it caused me to gasp again! I got onto my arms and leg so I could attempt to crawl, but lost my view, so carefully I pushed myself back up onto one knee.
         “Head northwest,” I told myself. The sun’s position had given my bearings back to me, and I quickly used landmarks to symbol the four directions: North, South, East, and West, now Small Tree, Big Tree, Dead Tree, and (my personal favorite) Hay Baler! Best of all, in between North (Small Tree) and West (Hay Baler) there was a farmhouse! A speck of a farmhouse way off in the distance, but a farmhouse nonetheless! I almost sobbed out of joy when I saw it but then I remembered how much it would hurt, so I clamped my mouth shut just in time and managed a grin instead.

I got about 20 feet on my hands and knee crawling like a half-squished bug, painfully dragging the bloody remnants of my leg on the ground. Then my chest exploded and I fell over, screaming silently for help, my mouth gaping like a fish out of water. I tried to get up but my broken ribs wouldn’t allow it. The pressure of holding my body up by my arms and leg had put too much pressure on my shattered ribs, sending shooting pains outward from my lungs. I cried and lay down to rest. The only way I could get anywhere was by crawling, which I could no longer do, but damnit, I was going to get there somehow! I grabbed the grass with my burnt hands, winced, and pulled myself forward on my stomach. I slid easily; the grass was smooth and slippery and made my new method of transportation almost effortless. Another plus was that I didn’t have to drag my stump on the ground anymore, which was good because doing that was making it bleed again.
         I got far by pulling myself forward with the grass; in fact, I was halfway to the farmhouse before the sun dipped behind the rolling hills. The air began to get colder and I wondered how I was going to stay warm. Being unconscious the night before had helped, but I had no intention of causing myself enough pain to black out again. So I was left with a dilemma. After much intense pondering (about 20 seconds) I pulled out handfuls of grass until I had enough to cover my body like a blanket. Then, exhausted and shivering, I fell asleep.
         When I woke up for the sixth time, I thought the sky looked a little lighter, and finally accepting that I wasn’t going to get anymore sleep, I sat up and waited for the sun to rise. It was taking its sweet time, for sure. When the sky was light enough to see around, I angled myself towards the northwest and began pulling myself along. I got tired quickly though. My leg, or lack thereof, could be used heat the earth if the sun ever died. My stub felt like it was on fire. The air around me was cold, and I was almost surprised that the differences in temperature didn’t create a small thunderstorm around me I was so hot. My stub would have appreciated the rain, too.
         My wish came true. Clouds filled the sky, which was why I hadn’t been able to see the sun as it had risen. Soon, fat drops of rain began to fall from the sky, although strangely, I wasn’t cold. I felt like the raindrops would evaporate as soon as they hit my skin. It was so hot. The ground felt cold against my burnt skin, but the air seemed to suffocate me. This was a weird mix of weather, and it had come on so quickly. It was freezing just half an hour ago. It was so cold I had been shivering. I’m still shivering, I realized. Oh, crap.

The fever shook me and tossed me to and fro and pulled at my hair, and I yelled because I was so hot. I yelled for help until my voice was hoarse. It must be an infection, I thought, wreaking havoc on my already weak body- “OhmygodI’mgoingtodie!” I gasped, then, driven by a sudden thirst that took control of my body, I dragged myself over to a hollow tree stump that was collecting water, and pulled my torso up onto my good leg. Leaning against the stump, I cupped my hands and dipped them into the water and drank until I was sick. My stomach turned inside out and I heaved over the side of the stump. I emptied my stomach onto the wet grass, not that there was much to empty out. I took a shaky breath, and fought to stay upright but collapsed anyway into the same emptiness that filled my stomach and the space where my leg had been. It was the kind of emptiness where something used to be before it was stolen.
         I’m still not sure how I survived that night; drenched, feverish, and unconscious, with many of the bones in my body broken. My stump was infected from dragging it through the dirt and decaying matter on the ground, and I had suffered major blood loss. But the human brain is really an amazing organ, capable of far more than what we give it credit for. My guess as to what kept me alive that night in the rain was my will to live. I had proven my bravery to myself and I sure as hell wasn’t going to let it go just yet. So, the next morning, I awoke.
         I groaned and rolled over onto my side, but the movement made me so dizzy I dry heaved onto the wet grass and mud. I waited until my head had cleared and I was able to see straight, and sat up. I slowly looked around. The farmhouse! It was there, I could see it in front of me less than 50 feet away. I lay down on my stomach slowly so as to not jostle my shattered ribcage, and grabbed the wheat to begin my trek. I made it five feet before I started panting. The air pressed down on me and the ground pressed up and I screamed in pain, all the bones in my body being crushed and re-crushed inside of me. I gasped for air, not letting out the sob that was building up inside of me. “I’m not giving up,” I thought, “not here, not now, not when I’ve come so far.” I readjusted my hands and dragged myself across the ground: another five feet, then ten, then another five, and I was halfway there. I allowed myself a break and tried to catch my breath, but it’s hard to catch it when you don’t have any to start with. I coughed and tasted blood in my mouth. Keep going, Kenny, come one, move! I groaned and kept going. “Almost there, so close, I am so close,” I thought. I made it to the farmhouse, dragged myself up the steps and went limp. I did it, I thought, I made it. Finally, I allowed myself to cry, out of relief but mostly out of fright.

I could hear the door open and a young voice yelling for help. I heard running footsteps and someone said something in French. I was only able to make out one word: RAF. Hands grabbed me and I screamed in pain as I was lifted and carried inside. The hands set me down on something soft and I could feel one as it rested on my forehead and commanded something to the others. I cried, too afraid to open my eyes, and focused on the hand caressing my feverish brow. Come one, Kenny, you fought an A1 flying bomb, you can open your eyes. I opened them just a sliver. A woman was standing over me. She appeared to be middle aged, but her hair was silver and her face was tired. She wore a dress and an apron stained with years of cooking, and as she saw me opening my eyes she squatted down and looked at me with cold, hard eyes. Then she smiled and spoke, and as she spoke her eyes began to water.
         “My name is Corinne,” she said in French-accented English. “You are in France, in Chaumont. We will not hurt you, for although our beautiful country is occupied by the Germans, we are on the side of the allied forces. You are in the RAF. That is Royal Air Force. My son is fighting with the British on the front lines. You have given me hope. You fell from the sky in pieces with your plane when you crashed into the bomb, yet you are alive, so maybe he is too.” Her eyes crinkled at the edges, and I could see that she used to smile very often, though I guessed that she didn’t much now. There isn’t a lot to smile about during wartime.
         “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you so much. You saved me.” She smiled at me again, her eyes warm and sad.
“And maybe,” she said, “maybe some day someone will end up doing the same for my son.” That was when I knew that I was no longer afraid.
Two little boys and an older boy that looked to be around twenty five came in with medical supplies. The older boy was being led by one of the younger ones, and I realized why he hadn’t been drafted or gone to war on his own. His eyes were cloudy, and he walked cautiously, letting the little boy lead him by the hand. He was blind. Corinne said something to them in French, and then switched to English. “What is your name?” She asked me.
“Kendra,” I said, “Kendra Heaton.” The little boys stood still as their mom introduced them to me.
“Bonjour,” they said in unison. The man spoke without the translation, and his English was perfect.
“Hello,” he said. “I’m Andrew. I’m from America, and, as I can tell from your accent, so are you. I was in the USAAF, part of a bomber squad. We were over Germany when our plane was hit by anti-aircraft fire and we crashed not far from here. Yours wasn’t the only life she’s saved, believe it or not. Where are you from?”
I shook my head in amazement, and then quickly corrected myself when I remembered he couldn’t see. Whoops!
“Yes, I mean, me too! Yes. I’m from America, you’re right. I was living in England; I’m part of the Royal Air Force.” I stuttered, absolutely shocked. He smiled, and they got to work.

One of the boys pulled gauze wrapping out of his pocket and the other one had a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. I winced remembering when my dad had dabbed that on my scraped knees once when I was learning how to ride my bike. Corinne took it and poured some on a cotton ball. I grimaced and she gave me her hand. She handed the cotton ball to Andrew and guided his hands to my leg. Curiously, I watched experienced hands dabbed at my torn flesh. I cried a little when he poured the hydrogen peroxide over my stump and it foamed up. He apologized but kept going. He seemed to know exactly what he was doing, and I had a guess at why. “Are you a medic?” I asked.
He grinned, “Sure am.” They rinsed my stump in saline. Andrew sutured and bandaged it, and treated the rest of me, wrapping my chest with an ace bandage and cleaning and covering my many cuts and burns. Corinne gave me a bottle of malt whiskey and some aspirin to help with the pain, and helped me eat a bowl of vegetable soup because my hands were bandaged from the burns they had suffered.  I managed to drink half the bottle, but I was so tired that I fell into a deep sleep before I could finish it, and ten hours later woke up with blankets covering me, the house quiet, and the sky outside dark. I went back to sleep with a warm feeling inside.
I slept for six days, except for Corinne waking me up to feed me soup and soft foods, and Andrew cleaning and re-bandaging my wounds. Those memories are still blurry.
Sometimes I would wake up crying or screaming in pain, and Andrew and Corinne would give me aspirin and gin or whiskey for the pain. Then I would go back to sleep, and the cycle would repeat.
On the seventh morning, I awoke to the smell of bacon and eggs and the sound of the boys laughing and joking in French. I sat up slowly, and to my relief I wasn’t as dizzy. My head and chest were aching, and my leg felt like it was being stabbed, but I was hungry, which was a good sign. My stomach was grumbling at the smell of the food. I stood up and promptly fell back onto the couch where I had slept. There was no way I was crawling to the kitchen. That was just not going to happen. Thankfully, I heard Corinne ask Andrew to see if I was up and heard his careful footsteps. He walked into the room and said my name. “Kendra?” He said. “You up?”
“Yeah, I’m up,” I said.
“How’s the stump?” he asked.
I laughed. “That’s what I call it!” I said.
He grinned sheepishly. “Good! For a moment there I thought I might have offended you.”
He called for Corinne, who came in and asked me if I wanted to come into the kitchen. I replied with an enthusiastic “Yes!” She picked me up gently and carried me like a baby to their kitchen. When we got there she sat me down on a chair and Andrew filled the table with eggs, bacon, and fresh biscuits, (actual biscuits, not muffins) and then he and the boys sat down. I never did learn their names,  but they reminded me so much of Elliott and Duncan back at home that it made me want to cry and laugh at the same time. We filled our stomachs and then Corinne told us her plan for the day: The boys would go out and work the fields until lunchtime, and then we would eat lunch and find a way to contact my squadron.
“And what will I do while they’re working out in the fields?” I asked. Corinne told me that she wanted me inside to rest, and Andrew agreed. So there I was in the house, Corinne was  off shopping and the boys were in the field with Andrew, and I had nothing to do. I slept a lot, and then managed to crawl over to a bookshelf in another part of the living room.  A lot of the books were in English, and suddenly staying in the house didn’t really seem like such a bad idea after all.

Lunchtime came sooner than I expected, and we all dined at the kitchen table again. Corinne came into the room carrying a box covered in a sheet. She unwrapped it, and I stared, puzzled. It was a cardboard box that had ‘Grandma’s pictures’ written on it in messy scrawl. She opened the box and took out a few stacks of pictures and then pulled out what the pictures were concealing. Ahh, a radio. That made a lot more sense. I smirked at my moment of stupidity. Corinne reached under one of the benches and came up holding a transmitter and a receiver. “Okay,” she said, “let’s see if we can find your RAF.”
Half an hour of static and garbled voices later, we came across a clear station. We waited for something to come on to make sure it wasn’t German, and finally a voice submerged. It wasn’t, but it was in code. I hadn’t studied code. Damn. But… that voice.
A memory popped into my head: “Kenny, we need a plane delivered to Great Yarmouth. You know the way, right?” I nodded. “Okay, well, it’s a Boulton Paul Defiant. It’s missing part of its tail so it’s a little unsteady. It’s going up north to be fixed but we need an experienced pilot to ferry it, just because it’s a little tipsy.”
I knew that voice! I did, I knew it, and boy was I relieved. “I know him!” I exclaimed. Everyone looked at me, and I burst out laughing, but stopped because of the pain shooting through my lungs. “I know him,” I said again. Corinne laughed, and soon so did everyone else.
“What’s his name?” she asked. I stopped laughing. What was his name? I thought hard.
“Collin!” I burst out, startling the room. “It’s Collin, his name is Collin!” Corinne handed me the receiver. I took it and held the button down to talk. “Collin, do you copy? This is A2 transmitting,” I said. The line was silent for a long time, and then his voice came back on.
“A2, I copy. We all thought you had- But you went off of our radar- You went into Nazi-occupied France and- It’s been- What- But, how…?” His voice trailed off, and I laughed.
“Collin, how secure is this line?” I asked.
“Very, I think,” he replied.
I took a deep breath, “Okay. I am in a secure part of France staying with a family who are with the Resistance. One of them is an American medic. I’m injured, but my wounds have been treated by the resistance family. I need a flight out of here ASAP.” I gave him my coordinates and the area of France I was in.
“10/4,” replied Collin. “I can get you a flight out of there in about 3 hours. It’ll most likely be A1 picking you up.”
“Um, yeah, sure, no, yeah, that’s fine,” I said. Great, John gets to see me with no leg. I wonder what he’s going to think when he sees me like this: all beat up and half broken. I pulled myself out of my head grimacing, but continued on.
“I’ll send him out, okay, Kenny?”
“Yeah, that’s good. See you soon.”
“See ya, A2,” he said.
The room was silent. I looked at the table for a little while and then looked at the ground. Then I looked up at Corinne. She walked over and hugged me, and I sobbed into her shoulder. She and Andrew carried me back to the couch and we all sat and held each other. I cried with them until I fell asleep. I was such a mess that day. A few hours later, Corrine shook me awake. Andrew was gone, but she had stayed with me. I didn’t realized how hard this must be for him. His crew had crashed; he must have been the only survivor. Poor guy. I could hear new voices down the hall. One was John’s, the other Andrew’s.

Corinne carried me into the hall and stopped in front of John. He looked exhausted, terribly exhausted. He walked over, didn’t even look at my leg, and took me into his arms. I started crying again and we all went into the living room. He sat down on the couch and held me until I felt okay enough to stop blubbering. I love him so much for that.
“I’ve been looking for you—the whole squadron has,” he blurted. “We were so worried, and we all missed you so much. The base is, I don’t know, different now.”
I looked around the room at all of my new friends: Corinne, the boys, Andrew; they had saved my life. They were part of my family. But I needed to go home. I sat up on the couch.
“We’ll keep in touch?” I asked Corrine.
She nodded tearfully and smiled at me, “Of course.”
There was one more thing I had to settle before I left. I turned to Andrew. He seemed to sense my attention on him. He knew what I was going to say and responded before I could get a word out.
“I have no family back in America. This is my home now, this is my family. I speak French fluently now, and the boys are teaching me how to farm. I like being part of the Resistance; I don’t have to see to be helpful. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize, Andrew,” I said, smiling through happy tears, “and thank you for everything.” We hugged, and I said goodbye to the boys in French and they hugged me too. Finally, I turned to Corinne. “I…” She wrapped me in her shawl and hugged me. We were both crying. “I love you,” I said into her shoulder.
“I love you, too,” She replied.
Then we parted ways.
John carried me to the plane, still wrapped in Corinne’s shawl. I was shaking with fright the whole flight home; I didn’t dare opening my eyes for fear of seeing a bomb headed directly at us. John held my hand when he could. When we finally got back to the base, the pilots carried me from the plane to a waiting ambulance. John and I got in, and I said my goodbyes to the rest of the squadron. Then the medics closed the doors. I began to cry again (I really was a mess) and John held my hands until we got to the hospital in Essex, where they made sure I was healing well. I was, by the way, thanks to Andrew. They gave me a wheelchair and then, in the middle of the hospital, John turned to me and… wait for it… kneeled! I gasped despite the pain.
“Kendra Heaton, you are an inspiration, and I love you. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Will you marry me?” I didn’t hesitate for a second.
“Yes!”

We went home to Pennsylvania and he met my parents. He retired from the RAF and we bought a house an hour away from my parents. John didn’t have any ties in England so he was okay with moving to my home state. I was awarded with a Purple Heart and financial compensation for my bravery, and I had interviews that were in newspapers all over the world (without my name of course, just in case). The headlines read: “The Pilot Who Saved Paris.”
Elliot and Duncan grew up and graduated from college. They got their doctorates in medicine, became Doctors without Borders, and are currently living in Jamaica. My parents are retired and live with two dogs and a bazillion chickens. John and I live in Washington now, and I work from home for a law firm that helps get compensations to wounded veterans. John works as a private pilot for this rich couple, William Gates Sr. and his wife Mary. They had a baby last year: William Gates Jr., but everyone calls him Bill. It is 1956 now, and the war ended eleven years ago. John and I have 2 kids that are both in school (Addison and Kevin). We have been married for 13 years now, but we love each other just as much as the day we were married.
And yes, to answer your question, we do live happily ever after.