This Easter weekend Americans are waiting to learn the fate of the remaining U.S. airman downed in Iran on Good Friday. Iranian air defenses shot out of the sky an F-15 fighter jet, and while one crewmember was rescued by U.S. forces, another remains lost as of Saturday afternoon.
My mind turns to a night in Cambridge, England, some years ago, spent drinking with American airmen from the nearby bases from which our Air Force has flown since the 1940s. The downed American jet, lost somewhere in the hills of western Iran, reportedly came from a squadron based in Royal Air Force Lakenheath. On weekends, the men and women of Lakenheath sometimes make the trip to Cambridge, to a pub called The Eagle.
The Eagle is much like any other such establishment you might find in Cambridge—the same kind of quaint old building; the same clientele, a mix of students and faculty and tourists. But since the middle of the last century it has also been a gathering spot for British airmen and their American comrades—the forces that battled for, and have since policed, the skies over Europe and beyond. Its walls are covered with the unit insignias of squadrons from around the world. Its ceiling is graffitied with signatures of airmen from World War II. As the Nazis swept through Europe, the flat, marshy land of East Anglia, so close to the coast of the continent, was destined to become in effect the world’s largest aircraft carrier. Famous fighting organizations like the Eighth Air Force—the “masters of the air”—left from this part of England each day to attack Adolf Hitler’s factories.
