'For You The War Is Over': An airman remembers

Lloyd C. McCracken grew up in a rural community on Canada's east coast. As a teenager, with the World War II entering its peak, he volunteered for the Royal Canadian Air Force as a tail gunner, a job with extreme hazards. Fifty years later, in 1992, McCracken produced this remembrance of his time in the Air Force - his training, hair-raising sorties over Germany and, especially, two years he spent as a POW in a German prisoners of war camp. This text now includes associated documents and photographs. His story reveals a human phenomenon that we nevertheless fail to understand - our uncanny ability to adjust to the inconceivable. Our ability to hold it, live in it, relay it. As his story recounts, McCracken had plenty of traumatic experiences. Yet, his descriptions of these experiences expose details without registering their effects. For readers, comprehension of the emotional happens elsewhere - above and around the words - in envisioning the effect of these experiences on McCracken and his family. Understanding is only discoverable in the text's resignation, its absences, its restraint.