Free Paper Doll by Jim Shepard

Famous Walter,” he said.
    Famous Walter had become famous, unhappily, as the Two Hour Replacement: having just arrived at the base he’d sat down to mess, been told he was needed as a last-minute replacement in the tail of Banshee , and had been killed by flak over Hanover. All they’d gotten in the mess was his first name. Someone else had finished his Spam.
    Snowberry clunked his flying boots together at the toes. They were oversized enough to be his father’s. “God, I wanted to be a fighter pilot,” he said. “I thought they were the end. Girls die for fighter pilots. They only get wounded for us.”
    â€œI was a Lindy nut,” Bryant said. “Were you a Lindbergh nut? He came and gave a speech in Providence and they sold little hats. I think it was about staying out of the war, but what did we care? It was Lindy.”
    â€œOh, boy,” Snowberry said. “I must’ve made two thousand Spirit of St. Louis ’s from those wooden Popsicle sticks. House was knee deep in Spirit of St. Louis’s. ”
    â€œI used to play toy soldiers,” Bryant said. “The cardboard kind, with the wood bases. I had a little lead Spirit of St. Louis , used to fly over, strafe the soldiers. I used to have the guys go, ‘Look out! It’s Lindy! Aaah!’ No one stood up to the airplanes. Everyone did a lot of running and dying.”
    â€œLike now,” Snowberry said. “The Krauts: ‘Bryant and Snowberry! Aaah!’”
    They laughed. Bryant had a vision of flak crews in Germany chafing at the insult, crossing hairs over the belly of Paper Doll , and sobered.
    â€œYou’re all right, Bobby,” Snowberry said. “Lewis is tops, but …” he trailed off.
    Bryant was grateful and slightly embarrassed, unsure what he was getting at. He cleared his throat.
    â€œAnyway, I keep, like, a diary,” Snowberry said.
    â€œI saw you working on it,” Bryant said.
    â€œI know you read a lot and stuff.” Bryant read magazines in the day room. “I want to send some parts home to my folks, the best stuff. They’re always telling me to write and I never know what to say.”
    â€œThat’s nice, a diary,” Bryant said. The idea didn’t appeal to him.
    â€œHere, you can look at it,” Snowberry suggested. He pulled it out of his back pocket. It was a smallish softcover. Bryant started to hand it back and protested it was private, but Snowberry assured him that it was all right, they were buddies, so Bryant was forced to open it.
    The cover featured in red ink a battle-weary GI who’d apparently stopped to write beside a makeshift roadside sign. The sign said My War Diary. The book was already half full.
    The margins were crammed with additions and helpful drawings and diagrams—how the arc of the tracers helped him lead a target in gunnery, what approaches he was responsible for defending from the belly. There was a cutaway drawing of Paper Doll , outlining the crew positions, entitled Our Plane.

    He flipped to the back, the morning’s entry.
    Hi again. Another f-ing (!) scrub. It’s terrible and now we’re all juiced up with nowhere to go. It always clears up later but by then it’s too late and everyone’s a real pain to be around. Lewis you can’t even go near. Trying to guess the weather is awful hard. And harder, I guess, for the weatherman (!) We call our base weather officer Stormy. Lewis says he uses a weejee (?) board. He’s a nice guy, though. It’s real bad for morale, a scrub: we fly eight missions on the ground for every one in the air, and it’s bad to get up and think you’re going to be a day closer to the end of your tour and then find out it’s all blooie.
    He paged back to July and Training. There was a small sketch of a latrine with flies and curving lines above it.
    I stink, though I’m getting better, everybody says so. I whipsaw everything