it'd be me and it'd be you

Obviously, I've been wasting a lot of gasoline. Good night, Vera. - ...Well, it looks like I am free for dinner tonight.

Home was H Company, Second Battalion, First Marine Regiment. [...] Then, with the fire alight, the beer case set in the middle of the floor, we would lie back on our cots, heads propped against the wall, swilling the beer and talking. [...] I suppose much of our conversation was dull. It would seem so, now, I am sure. It was dull, but it was homey. We were becoming a family. - Helmet for My Pillow, Robert Leckie

THE PACIFIC | H COMPANY

How did all this happen? I mean look at us, Sid, sitting here at a dance, drinking punch. Not a scratch on either of us. I mean, what the hell are we doing here? And why... why did I end up back here when all those other fellas didn't? - I thought that. Every guy back has thought that. But you've just got to pull yourself out of bed in the morning and get on with the day. You do that enough times in a row... you forget some things. For a while, anyway.

You know... I woke up one day and I was thirty years old. Satisfied. Then you walk into my mess hall, and look at me now.

There’s a company in Nixon, New Jersey called Nixon Nitration Works. - Sounds picturesque. Yeah, well, oddly enough, I know the owners. Probably gonna expect me to make something of myself. I thought maybe I’d drag you with me.

Hey, Peaches. Are you gonna waste those?

On the next day, Bucky Cleven gathered up the enlisted men who worked at the 350th Squadron Headquarters and told them he was going to make up for the indignity they had suffered the day before. He took them out to the flight line and loaded them up into an old stripped down B-17E, which our group brass used for joy rides and taxi service. Since it had no guns or armaments, it was light and Cleven could fly it like a P-39 fighter plane.

Apparently Cleven had phoned some of his pilot training classmates who were now assigned to P-47's and arranged a surprise. The E was hardly off the runway when it was "attacked" by three American fighters.

For the next twenty minutes, Cleven—whose superb skill as a pilot no one questioned—wrung that old plane out as though it was a Piper Cub. He twisted and turned and plunged, all in a simulated dog fight with his three fighter pilot chums. The three Thunderbolts buzzed the 17 and came within inches of it.