Do we even remember nothing lasts forever?

My father has been immensely enjoying the LOA's Into the Blue: American Writing on Aviation and Spaceflight (2011) and directed me in particular toward the sequence of letters excerpted from A Yankee Ace in the RAF: The World War I Letters of Captain Bogart Rogers (1996), which turns out to have been edited and published by one of the children of the letter-writer and the recipient of his letters, who did in fact marry when Rogers returned after the war, the only one of his group of five friends from Los Angeles to survive the Western Front with the Royal Flying Corps. All seven letters in the chapter are interesting, but this one—

[Bellevue]
France
September 4, 1918

Isabelle Dear

Everything's all wrong tonight and the only thing left is to take it out on you. You don't mind if I unload a trouble or two on you, do you, lover? If I can write them to you it's almost the same as being able to tell them to you.

It started yesterday afternoon when in one of the easiest shows we've had in many a day, poor little Jerry Flynn was shot down in flames. A bunch of Huns came down on his flight, and before we could get to him he was gone. Then there was a wicked dogfight everybody getting more or less shot up. Jerry was only a kid and about the most popular person in the squadron. Everyone was pretty much broken up over it, more so than I've ever seen them before.

Last night Green, who was Jerry's best friend (they've been together for ten months) went all to pieces, nerves simply gone. It gets to you to see a boy go like that, for while Green is an old man in the war, he still has his twentieth birthday to celebrate. He's been out here too long, nearly ten months, and will probably go home almost any day now. The C.O. told me told me today that I was to be recommended for his flight, but I doubt if it will go thru. I haven't been out here long enough and haven't done a thing to deserve it.

There are only three flying officers in the squadon who were here when I came. Makes one feel pretty old and experienced. It surely is hell to see them pass by, Id. But the only thing to do is simply to forget that you ever possessed such a thing as an emotion or a nerve and carry on just as if nothing had happened. Is it any wonder that fellows go to pieces?

Good night, lover. I always wish terribly that I might be able to say it some other way than with a pen, even without any words at all. But—c'est la guerre.

Love
Bo

I thought I'd just read the God-damned synopsis for The Dawn Patrol (1930) in real time. The more detailed version included further after the fact in "The Startling Truth About War Flyers" in the December 1930 issue of Popular Aviation did little to change my mind except for dropping Only Angels Have Wings (1939) on top of it: "If your best friend was shot down you masked a breaking heart by declaring he was a damn fool who should have had better sense." (Who's Joe? Anybody know a Joe?) Thus it makes a certain amount of sense that Rogers was one of the co-writers and producers of The Eagle and the Hawk (1933), although he was also a writer and producer on a couple of pictures that make no sense whatsoever, most notably—as evidence just check out the musical numbers with Elisha Cook Jr. and Robert McClung—Pigskin Parade (1936). An early investor in the photo-finish camera, too, the internet informs me. And a record of something that I know through fiction, where it became a trope not only because it was reified onscreen but because it had happened too often in life. I haven't even gotten to the chapter excerpted from the memoirs of Ernest K. Gann.