I discovered my dad was a hero when I read a book. I mean a real hero. To me he was just my dad, a man I loved passionately and whom I knew loved me. He was strong and wise and kind. And he could be tough when he needed to be. He was the man who taught me about God by what he said and by the way he lived.

I took all of that for granted.

I knew he’d been a B-26 bomber pilot during World War II. There was a sepia-toned picture of him in his uniform that stood for years on the living room bookshelf. He had a black model of his plane that floated from a stand on his desk.

I knew a few of the stories he told—often on Sundays as illustrations for one of the sermons he preached. Stories like how he saw the shadow of his plane outlined as a cross on the clouds below. Or the time he and his crew got lost on a nighttime training flight over the Gulf of Mexico—because they were listening to Hit Parade on the plane’s radio.

I knew how he’d secretly moved out of the barracks after he and my mom got married so he could be with her instead of sweaty, smelly men.

And there were hints of darker experiences—the picture of a pilot friend who had died in a crash--also on the bookshelf. And the story of Olson, who had been killed by a flak burst in the seat right behind my dad. And I knew about the scar on his leg where he had been wounded.

But I never asked about those things. I wasn’t curious. He was just my dad, and they didn’t concern me when I was small. He never let them.

And then a few weeks ago I read the book--Rick Atkinson’s, The Guns at Last Light (New York, 2013). And that was when I knew my dad was a hero. More than just the kind of hero a small boy—or a grown one—makes of his dad.

On pages 350-351 Atkinson tells a few things about the war in the air over Europe. During the time my dad was flying across the English Channel to bomb strategic sites in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands--from 1943 to 1944--the Germans employed 1.2 million men to fire 88mm anti-aircraft guns, trying hard to kill my dad!

“Each time I close the canopy before take-off,” one airman wrote, “I feel that I am closing the lid of my own coffin.” During the first half of 1944, battle casualty rates for every 1000 US crewmen who served six months in combat included 712 killed or missing and 175 wounded—89 percent.

Among the British, two out of five airmen did not live to complete a tour of duty. Among US crewmen barely one in four completed 25 missions over Germany. Twenty-five missions was when they cycled a man out. You just didn’t live after that. Then they raised it to 30, and later to 35.

My dad flew 60.

It took courage and guts and steeled bravery to climb into the cockpit and take off into skies so thick with flak that pilots swore they could walk on it. My dad never told me about the day he was making a bomb run, flying on the left, behind the squadron leader, Captain Harmon, when a shell struck the plane in front and it exploded. One moment it was there. The next it was gone. Dad never said a word. One of his fellow pilots, whom I met after Dad’s death, told me about that one.

A hero. I wish I had known. How did he become such a man of strength? It lay in the prayer he prayed each time as his plane was rushing down the runway to take off. “Lord, today my life is in your hands. If you want me to return to serve you here on earth, then I am ready. But if it is your plan today to transfer me to headquarters, I am ready for that too. Your will be done.” And by that time the plane was in the air.

The Army Air Force issued every pilot a pistol to carry in case he was shot down. My dad carried a Bible in his holster.

“My help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth.” (Psalm 124:8)

A hero. Little boys need heroes living in the house with them, who will help them become some other little boy’s hero.

Dr. Rick Perrin is Chairman of the Board of World Reformed Fellowship and senior pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church in Cherry Hill NJ. He writes a weekly blog called ReTHINK which may be accessed at www.rethinkingnews.wordpress.com. He may be contacted directly at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..