A Higher Call

by Adam Makos

“Feel the plane in your seat, in the stick, in your stomach. Let go of your worry!”

“If you, as a captain, do not know how to behave,” Franz said, “how could we have made you into a good pilot?”

“Every single time you go up, you’ll be outnumbered,”

“You follow the rules of war for you, not for your enemy,” Roedel said. “You fight by rules to keep your humanity.”

bothered by the hypocrisy of the war he had joined, of people who believed in the same God fighting one another.

“As soldiers, we must kill or be killed, but once a person enjoys killing, he is lost.

“You score victories, not kills,” Roedel told Voegl, frustrated. “Haven’t you learned anything?” Turning to Franz, Roedel added, “You shoot at a machine not a man.”

Marseille wrote a letter to his mother the night of his first victory that read, “I keep thinking how the mother of this young man must feel when she gets the news of her son’s death. And I am to blame for this death. I am sad, instead of being happy about the first victory.”2

“Don’t worry,” he said. “We fight our best when we’re losing.”

They felt more at home above the earth than on its face.

silently prayed or, as he referred to it, conducted a “short briefing with my Third Pilot.”

Their code said to fight with fearlessness and restraint, to celebrate victories not death, and to know when it was time to answer a higher call.

Barkhorn had told Hartmann, “Bubi, you must remember that one day that Russian pilot was the baby son of a beautiful Russian girl. He has his right to life and love the same as we do.”

Franz would have been happy to have never worn an Air Force uniform if he could have avoided what he had seen that afternoon.