Imagine you’re twenty-three years old and find yourself on a rooftop in a foreign land trying to send messages with a set of pinafores to your shipmates offshore about the locations of enemy combatants who are desperately trying to kill you. Several of the Marines under your command have either been killed or wounded and you haven’t slept in over thirty-six hours…
Imagine having survived the horrors of Vera Cruz then volunteering to train as a naval aviator. Flying in planes made from wood and canvas, while learning to take-off and land on a moving target. All this less than a decade after man’s first powered flight…
Imagine after less than two years of active aviator training and service, you are asked to take command of, and train a group of spoiled, wealthy young men from Yale in order to form a flying unit that any day will be sent to the front lines of World War One…
Imagine having arrived in Europe circa 1918 and your first assignment is to go to Italy and retrieve a group of poorly designed and constructed bombers and fly them over the Alps while random key parts seem to fall off at the worst possible times…
Imagine having survived the horrors of the First World War, you are asked to fly a surplus bi-plane off a ramp attached to a gun turret onboard an American battleship in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. By the way the ramp is only forty-four feet long…
Imagining any of these scenarios is nearly impossible. Unless you have survived them all before your thirtieth birthday. Welcome to the beginning of Admiral Eddie’s life story…
