大象传媒

My parents were married in Summer 1944. On their wedding photo, there are about a dozen of my dad's RAF comrades.

My dad was a rear gunner in a Lancaster operating out of Lincolnshire. After the wedding in London, he returned to his base. However, he had developed a small cyst on his eye and was told that with impaired vision, he would be operating suboptimally and thus present a risk to the rest of the crew. He was very unhappy to be taken off the mission.

Their plane never returned and none of the men on the photo were ever seen again. That photo and the memory of his lost mates haunted my dad. He felt somehow responsible for their disappearnace.

I can never remember him being spontaneously happy. He would talk about his luck but never about the guilt and sadness that ate away at him until he died destroyed by drink, loneliness and unhappines in 1993.

There are no winners in war.

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