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.They weren’t the only ones on a big mission that day.The Luftwaffe fighter command sent out a fierce squadron to stop them.Only one side would win that day, and it wouldn’t be the Americans.My father’s squadron never even reached the refinery.In fact December 17 would go down as the day of one of the deadliest air battles in all World War II, with only one B-24 Liberator out of the whole group managing to survive the intense Luftwaffe attack and return to base.The rest of the planes, my father’s included, were shot to pieces in the air over the Czech countryside.My father was forced to bail out of his bullet-ridden airplane when half of his crew was killed instantly.He stepped over the bodies of Art Carlson and Morris Goldman, and made a quick decision that the only way he was going to survive was if he jumped out through the burning doors of the bomb bay.My father dislocated his shoulder and hit his head during that jump, knocking himself unconscious.When he came to, he was falling through the sky.He pulled the rip cord on his parachute immediately and floated slowly to the snowy ground below.He landed in a field outside the Czech town of Olomouc and was taken to an inn by a group of townspeople.Only hours later a group of German soldiers barreled through the town, whisking my father and all the other fallen airmen off to a prison camp on the icy lip of the Baltic Sea.My father would remain in that prison camp for the next six months.He would discover four of his crewmen in its barracks.He would subsist on bread made of sawdust and, at one point, an old, dead horse that the German soldiers dragged into the prison yard.In early May 1945, six months after my father was shot down, Hitler committed suicide and the war ended.The German soldiers fled as soon as they heard, and my father, along with several other men, riffled through the prison offices.He found his prisoner file and took it home as a souvenir.In the mug shot that is included with the file my father looks impossibly young, his mouth a hard, angry line.My father returned to Michigan, to a wife he barely knew and a son who had been born while he was imprisoned.He would go on to live a long life, traveling the world, becoming a successful engineer, and marrying several times over.But for five decades he would carry with him many questions that would go unanswered until our trip to the Czech Republic.Finding the answers to these kinds of questions is a feat that few veterans have ever been afforded, but my father had always been lucky.THE FIRST NIGHT in Prague we meet Michael in a loud bar downtown, and we spend the evening at a back table, huddled over maps and fresh pints of beer.My father acts boyish and excited, but I feel protective of him and a gnawing concern churns in my abdomen.Michael is in his thirties.He is smart but nerdy, and when he met us at the airport he was wearing a leather bomber jacket covered in old air force patches, much to my father’s delight.Michael is thrilled that we are here and he has brought along a historian friend of his who works at the newspaper.Michael pulls a sheaf of research papers from his bag, rattling in his warbling Czech accent about all the places he wants to go in the next two weeks, and the people he wants to talk to.Michael does not realize my father’s limitations.Rather, he sees a walking hero, a veritable history book come to life, and he can’t wait to set out with him.Michael does not see what I do: my incredibly fragile, overly exerted, only remaining parent.I don’t know how we are going to make it through these next two weeks.I haven’t seen my father in four months, and he looks worse than ever.He has lost weight and takes long minutes to pause after simple things like getting out of a taxi or walking across the floor of a restaurant.I keep quiet though.As feeble as he has become, I have also never seen him so excited.He runs his finger over a map of the Czech countryside, and Michael leans in close.This has to be it, my father says.This has to be where I landed when the plane was shot down.I take a sip of my beer and it dimly begins to dawn on me just what a big deal all of this is.I’ve been doing some calculations, my father says, and he begins to break them down.I am in awe, reminded of just how smart he is.I am also reminded of all the times my dad ever tried to help me with math, and how much I hated it.My father continues, moving his hand over the map
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