Harry Mazer's The Last Mission is drawn closely from his
experiences as a seventeen-year-old in the Army Air Corps. Like
Jack, he was a Jewish boy from the Bronx full of fantasies about
heroism, and like Jack, he became a waist gunner and never fired
his guns. He remembers, "I was scared every time we flew....On our
26th mission we flew over Pilzen, Czechoslovakia, to bomb the Skoda
Munitions Works. We missed our target, turned over the target
again, and were hit. I saw Mike, who was our radio operator, frozen
in the door of the radio room. He never made it out of the plane.
Only three of us parachuted....No one in the plane lived." ( ALAN
Review, Fall 1980)
Harry Mazer is the editor of Twelve Shots: Outstanding Short
Stories About Guns, where twelve authors explore the extreme
emotions that guns provoke in all of us. Walter Dean Myers, Rita
Williams-Garcia, Richard Peck and other well-known authors create a
riveting collection of short fiction that explores the
emotion-driven world of guns.
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