It catches you when you least expect it.
I read a couple of books recently, the first was "Venom" the story of DeHavilland's old single engine twin boom, an aircraft I am an avid admirer of for reasons that I can't quite determine. One service account detailed the fate of a young RAF pilot fresh from the OCU who took a new squadron Venom up one day only to have the ailerons lock at full deflection on takeoff - the young lad rolled into the ground and died instantly, just in his early twenties and he was gone. Reading it bothered me, something about a life not led.
My next book was Through Fire and Water, the story of the frigate HMS Ardent, sunk by bombs in Falkland Sound. I was 18 when those little islands made the international front pages so I was still in college, my entire class followed every news report of the conflict - patriotism and "bash the Argies" type sentiments were rife, and the loss of young lives didn't seem so important to us back then. On reading the list of Ardent's dead in the book, I saw that 2 of the young sailors were just 18 - they could have been me, and I could have been them. I thought of everything I have done and experienced in those intervening 34 years, experiences that those young lads never got the chance to have. I didn't weep for them in 1982, but I do now.
So would I send my own child to certain death, no. But I would encourage him or her to make their own choice, and then support them regardless of what it was with my last breath, hell yes.
Last edited by Fonsini; 5th Feb 2017 at 02:50.