"A Very Unnatural Way to Live"
Bomber
duty in World War II left a particularly grim shadow. For those who served,
life ground down into long stretches of tedium jabbed by bursts of tension and
fear; and occasionally a hard, fiery death. The utter randomness of it all,
dropping bombs on unseen targets and being potted at by flak guns, must have
been cosmically unsettling. Its sense of absurdity would be encapsulated in a
novel written by one bombardier veteran called Catch-22.
