It was easy to warm Jimmie’s heart. Mr. Wilson’s words had done that. Jimmie leaned forward eagerly and said, “I’ll bet you would!”
“What’s it like?”
“Like? What’s what like?”
“Why, the RAF.”
“Oh.” Jimmie momentarily suspected this was blood lust, like his mother’s—and knew it was not and unbent. “Like nothing you ever saw on earth before! Remember Churchill—the lines about: Never have so many owed so much to so few? It’s like that. In a quiet way. It’s holy—if you know what I mean. Without seeming so. Seeming, on the contrary, to be unholy. They have religion, too.”
“A lot of ’em die.”
“They all die,” Jimmie answered. Mr. Wilson fumbled his cigar, grabbed at it, showered sparks on himself, and beat them out. Jimmie waited. “That is—in two different ways, they do. They die every day, in their minds. You can say a brave man dies only once, but it’s more the other way around. A man with imagination, facing death repeatedly, seeing people die, dies with them every time. And it takes a lot of imagination to fly a battle plane.”
“Whaddaya mean?”
“Intelligence. Spirit. Quick, inventive brains. They skim the best—the very best—off the population. They give them the best they can make, in the labs and shops. Those boys—they know what they’re doing. They have to. They see each other go down in streaks of fire—alive. They fly each other back home—wounded—in bombers. Their chore is appalling—for a sensitive man. Maybe it’s the very unthinkableness of it that makes it possible for the sensitive, bright ones to do it. Sort of a challenge. The hardest challenge you can put to a person. So—they take it up, and lick it, and kid about it afterward.
Rather—in between. That’s the other way they die.”