Colin MacIver arrived late, March 14, 1945, after a year at the University of California. Like so many of us, he did his advanced fighter training at Lake Charles. He flew seventeen missions over Germany until V-E Day, and is credited with two kills and two probables. Lt. MacIver’s gun cameras produced some of the first pictures of a German jet, which are shown on page 54. As for the speed of his reflexes, which enabled him to get such pictures, Mac said, “He made his pass and I clipped his arc, that’s all. Anybody would have done the same.” We know better, Mac. It was nice going.

Leland looked at the photograph. Probably MacIver had not been called “Mac” before or since. He looked very young. Not much of his hair was visible, but it seemed to be cut more severely than had been the style in those days. The jaw looked not as sharp, and there was a puffiness—the tension, perhaps—around his mouth. He looked toward the floor, as the photographer had instructed him to do; he looked stolid, humorless, immature. Photographs were no way to judge such things. The left side of his neck was visible and there was no scar. Leland turned to the day-by-day account.

In the paragraphs for the sixteenth of March he found his own name. “Leland got his nineteenth today, a Focke-Wulfe over Regensburg. Billy Gibbs, watching from above, said it went like this: ‘Joe spotted a loner on the deck outside of town, after a bust of an afternoon. After a little Alphonse and Gaston he won the toss and went down for him. He crawled up on his tail and blew him up with the first burst. There was no plane left, just wreckage, for a mile. They’re building them cheaper and flying them stupider.’”

Leland could remember. A chill of disgust went through him. The plane and the man—boy, probably—had torn apart in less than a second. Leland wondered how Billy, who had been his wingman, would feel about his language now. Billy ran a hardware store in Eureka, California. His weight had ballooned to two hundred and ten pounds and he had four children. By the look of the snapshots he sometimes sent east, he was a long way from killing. Leland kept turning pages, reading for MacIver.

March 20: “Joe Leland got a double today for twenty and twenty-one! The 161st’s leading ace and wingman Billy Gibbs spotted four Focke-Wulfes twenty miles north of Regensburg, at seventeen thousand over heavy clouds. ‘They were absolutely green,’ Leland said. ‘Billy and I went at them together, hitting the third finger and Charlie. One, two, and four broke for the cloud. The man in the middle flamed. He bailed out. Number one reached the cloud but I caught number two and blew him up. Billy chased four all the way into the cloud. We saw smoke, but we couldn’t hang around.’”