My daddy was a World War I pilot, and I just wanted to be able to fly like he did.

Richard Kerry not only was a pilot in World War II, but was a civil servant. He did not come from money.

As a soldier, I survived World War I when most of my comrades did not.

Nine g's is good, if the pilot can stand it. We couldn't stand it. Not in the airplanes of World War II.

Rats, the only creatures that seemed to flourish in the trenches, were quite brave and were often a foot long (not including the tail), the size of a small cat. They grew fat on the corpses in No Man’s Land and were known to bite sleeping soldiers’ faces and gather around the eating areas. The French left the rats alone. Like a canary in a coal mine, the rats were a warning that gas shells had been fired. At the slightest whiff of gas, the large rats flipped feet up, dead. The Americans hated them too much to leave them alone. They bludgeoned the rats with shovels and rifle butts or shot them with their side arms.

During World War II, the pilot losses were staggering. In some bombing raids, as many as 80% of the planes that left did not return.