My uncle was a bomber pilot in WWII. His plane was shot up by a German fighter. he said it wasn’t a neat line of bullet holes like the movies show. He said the bullets came in all at once in a clump, blew a big hole in the side of the plane and sounded like someone threw a bucket of bolts through a tin roof.
My uncle was a bomber pilot, too, in WW II. I only saw him a couple times a year at Christmas and Easter. I was born in ‘51, so I became aware that he was a bomber pilot probably around 1957 or 1958. Like so many WW II vets, he never once talked about his war experiences. Too bad he didn’t leave any memoirs behind.
My uncle was a P-51 pilot who flew out of Iwo Jima, escorting B-29s to Japan and back. He used to say that he had "Three enemies: the plane, the ocean, and the Japanese - in that order".