neptune-vasilias

    His boots hit solid ground as he gazed joyfully over the few families in the JFK Airport. The families, he realized in grief, of the few who had survived the mission. Six families smiling and crying and hugging their returned pilots, he stared at the Forty-Nine on his fighter. Six soldiers including himself. Six.    He remembered the story Captain Anderson had told him just before liftoff, the soldiers who didn’t cry, but he’d had to hide his tears. “Don’t look back 49”, he had told him so many times, “focus on the mission, private”, he couldn’t cry in the hangar, but he was now sobbing qu