Ups and Downs with No Regrets

Book excerpt: On a sunny morning in 1927, George Lichter, barely six years old, donned his new skates and rolled to the beach at Gravesend Bay where he witnessed a spectacle that would determine the course of his life. As he watched an airplane take off from the water and fly over the city, he decided he would one day become a pilot. George held onto this dream throughout his childhood in Brooklyn, wild adventures as a trumpet player in the Borscht belt and during his escapades at college in, of all places, the Deep South. A week before his twentieth birthday in 1941, immediately following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, George rode the subway to the nearest recruiting center and joined the United States Air Force. By the end of WWII, having flown eighty-eight combat missions over Nazi-occupied Europe, he had become a decorated fighter pilot. Two years later, in 1947, retired from the Air Force, he learned that the new nation of Israel was about to be attacked by its Arab neighbors. Though George felt the Jewish State had no chance of survival against such insurmountable odds, he knew he had to help. He signed up as a Machalnik (volunteer) and was assigned to an air base in Czechoslovakia where he helped train Israel's first fighter pilots. Within a year they owned the skies over their new nation.