As one of your addicts, I was delighted with the August/September 1986 issue of American Heritage. For one thing, I was once a Fuller Brush Man. For another, I went through the Great Depression (“The Big Picture of the Great Depression”) during my teens. For yet another, trying to make a new career as a writer, I found ironic solace in reading “The Blighted Life of the Writer, Circa 1840.” As for “Positively the Last Word on Baseball,” thanks, but I wish Elting E. Morison would furnish a glossary for sport fans residing outside the United States and Japan. But the high point of my reading of this particular issue was Richard Rhodes’s article, “The Toughest Flying in the World.”

I was a “Humpster.” In fact, 1 believe I was the first Humpster. As a 2d lieutenant in the then U.S. Army Air Corps, I piloted the first Douglas C-47 to leave MacDill Field, Florida, as a member of the HALPRO unit bound for the China-Burma-India Theater in March 1942 and went (with secret orders signed by the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson) to the CBI by way of the South Atlantic route mentioned by Mr. Rhodes, except that Ascension Island not being then available to us, we flew directly from Brazil to Liberia. According to my log, that transatlantic flight took fourteen hours and thirty-five minutes, made possible by doubling the plane’s fuel range when we installed four fuel tanks in the fuselage.

I had just turned twenty-three the previous month and was the oldest member of the crew, with zero command experience, having graduated only the previous October with the Class of 41-H from the Randolph-Kelly Fields Flying Cadet Training Progam. Needless to say, it was the most exciting adventure of mv life.

HALPRO, following me, was diverted to North Africa when Rommel’s Afrika Corps burst British defenses and reached Al-Alamein, so 1 lost my CO by pounding on to China, where I got “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, the top gun in the area. He was at Shwebo, in Burma, when I arrived, preparing to walk out at the head of a Chinese army. Acting for him was an Infantry colonel named Olds, the only American officer I found at a British RAF airport named Dinjan. It was the jump-off point from Assam into Burma and China and served as the headquarters for me and other transport crewmen straggling into the area.

We were quartered in a British tea planter’s house, a rambling structure built on steel rails ten feet above tea and mud. It was raining when I landed at Dinjan and it was raining when I reached “Dingleberry,” the name we gave the house, and, so help me, I never saw either place when it was not raining.

Checking the weather was a joke. Colonel Olds saw no reason for it so long as he could get around in