I had the privilege at the 1984 American Fighter Aces Association Convention to be "vouched for" by Chuck Yeager, who I had driven around and done all the things a "movie flunky" does on The Right Stuff, so all the Real Guys took me seriously. I was friends with Jimmy Goodson and his wingman Bob Wehrman, and so that Saturday night, I kept my mouth shut at our table and paid attention as Gunther Rall joked with Hub Zemke about nearly bleeding to death as he parachuted from the airplane Zemke shot down, shooting off his thumb in the last burst; as Bob Stanford-Tuck (the kind of Brit we Yanks become Anglophiles for) and his good buddy Adolf Galland caught up with each other, as Jimmy and Walter "Count Punski" Krupinski talked about chasing each other - I will never forget Krupinski telling me how, when he had III/JG26 set for a "company front" attack, known to the bombers as "Twelve O'Clock High," that "Just before I gave the order to advance throttles for the attack, my entire life passed before me - 20 percent of us were going to die in collisions, and no one could know who."
The next morning over breakfast, Jimmy said something pretty profound: "We all had more in common with each other than we did with the rest of those on our respective sides."
Stanford-Tuck was such a superior Englishman to both Douglas Bader and Johnny Johnson, both of whom I had met the year before - both the kind of condescending Brits to the "former colonists" that made me glad my ancestors had given you "lobsterbacks" the boot 200 years previously.
