My whole life, the Doolittle Raiders were heroes to me.
I first learned of them when I was eight years old, reading Ted Lawson's Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. It was one of the first books I remember checking out of the library.
I read that book over and over. I still cannot forget the imagery that his book imparted in my brain, specifically the crash on the beach.
I could imagine it perfectly as a kid. The shock. The confusion. Coming to on the surface and making it to the beach. The stupefaction of shock and concussion. His description of his wounds on his face and his leg.
As a kid, he transported me to that beach on that night. I could feel the hopelessness and the confusion. Just amazes me. How I wish I could get transported through a book again in my life like I did then.
I built the Revell model of the B-25 endlessly, and it was never the B-25 of Vesuvius.
And not the B-25 attacking Japanese shipping in the South Pacific.
And it wasn't the B-25 that crashed into the Empire State building.
It was always THIS B-25: 
Or this: 
I feel older tonight. The story of the Doolittle Raid was an integral part of growing up for me. Even though it was the early Sixties and the raid had been done 20+ years earlier, the story resonated with me so strongly that when I was faced with difficult things in my childhood, I could always feel in my gut the desperation that Ted Lawson had on that dark rainy beach in April of 1942, alone and hurt, far from home on an unknown shore, and that feeling would give me a more realistic perspective of my trivial childish problems.
God bless those men and their families. God bless them all.