When I was a schoolboy, I liked to go to a bookstore and buy memoirs of the former pilots of the World War II. For me it wasn’t so critical who was that pilot: an ally or an enemy. I wanted to know how it felt when you were about to leave the surface of the Earth and go to the fight without knowing whether you would perish or would return safely. Those pilots had been young. Certainly, they might long to glorify themselves. However, how had they managed their fear? How had they coped with anxiety? Hadn’t they wanted to stop fighting one day? Had they longed to start a family? Had they hated the war?

I read many of those books. Unfortunately, I didn’t satisfy my curiosity. I seemed to me, that something really crucial and important was missing at the pages. Perhaps, the pilots hadn’t expressed their true emotions completely. It distorted the whole picture. The same was in the memoirs of the former mariners of warships and submarines.

Quite recently, I’ve accidentally found a collection of short stories written by Roald Dahi. I started to read them. Some of them were extremely funny, like “Vengeance Is Mine Inc.”, some of them were weird ones, like “Yesterday Was Beautiful”. When I finished the last one, I felt like it was not a story at all. It was as if you found on the ground a few pages that had been torn out from an unknown book. You start to read them. You understand every printed word, but you cannot gather the words into a meaningful story. And you will not, because it ends as suddenly as it starts. It triggers a blurry sense. I believe there is a special genre.

Some of those stories were pretty plain and boring for me. “An African Story” is an example.

When I began to read a story, which was entitles as “Death of an Old Man” I couldn’t help myself reading it up in one breath. The story tells us about a young pilot who wants to live. He didn’t care about his life up to one moment. Then he realized how much he could lose if he was shot. Then he met an enemy fighter in the air and after a quick ferocious battle was forced to jump with a parachute on the hostile territory. As soon as he left his cockpit, his opponent did the same, as he had been shot, too!

That short and beautiful story says more words than many novels combined. I’ve found the answers to my questions. It seems I’m a former pilot!

There is a bunch of stories related to the World War II and to the young pilots. “They Shall Not Grow Old”, “A Piece of Cake” are my favorite. I believe the stories were titles so strange on purpose. Before you start reading, it’s better for you not to know anything about it beforehand. It provides more enjoyment and better understanding.