Flights of Passage: Recollections of a World War II Aviator Review

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(More customer reviews)By the time I got to the last page of Samuel Hynes's memoir GROWING SEASONS, I had developed such an attachment to young Sam that I was reluctant to quit reading. Luckily Hynes had written an earlier memoir about his days as a dive bomber pilot during WWII entitled FLIGHTS OF PASSAGE. Imagine my surprise when I spotted the book already in my bookcase. I'd read it when it was published in 1988. I had to read it again.
Hynes writes with such humility it's easy to put yourself in his shoes. Sam is continually worried about being cut from the flight program and sent to Great Lakes to train as an enlisted man. He also doesn't shirk from describing the times he crashed his plane or did something stupid, trying to show off. Although he went on over a hundred missions on Okinawa, he isn't sure his contribution to the war effort was worth that much. He's disappointed when he's left behind when his squadron goes on a bombing run of Japan.
As an ex-Navy man myself I can relate to a lot of what Hynes went through: the depressing bus stations, the sexual braggadocio, the feeling of vertigo when changing duty stations, the hurry-up-and-wait mentality, the obsession with drinking and playing cards.
About the only problem I have with the book is that the other pilots don't really come alive for me--I had trouble remembering who they were. Sam also gets married (at nineteen) before going overseas, but we never get to know his wife. He doesn't say much about her letters; he doesn't even seem to miss her. I had an ominous feeling about that marriage.
Perhaps the most memorable part of the book is when the war ends and Hynes and his fellow pilots are sitting around waiting for orders and they're caught in a typhoon! It blows away several tents and several men are killed. Talk about situational irony.

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He was a wide-eyed teenager when he left his Minnesota home in 1943 to learn to fly. By the end of World War II, he was a battle-worn Marine bomber pilot who'd survived more than a hundred missions in the Pacific. With stunning eloquence and breathtaking clarity, Samuel Hynes recalls those extraordinary years: the madness of war and the horror of death, the friendships forged in cockpits and gin mills, the wives and sweethearts left at home, and the wonder of flying-that exquisite harmony between pilot and machine aloft in the insubstantial air. More than a combat tale, this is the story of one man's remarkable rite of passage in that timeless world of innocence gone to war.

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