In his new introduction to Donald L. Miller’s masterpiece, acting legend Tom Hanks celebrates the heavy bomber heroes of the Eighth Air Force.

You are not yet 25 years old. In fact, you’re not long out of high school, and going to college is beyond your station; you will work for a living when you find a job.

For the last two and half years you have been watching as the world beyond the continental United States has gone mad. Tyrants have declared themselves supreme rulers and their people to be spiritually, physically, and genetically superior to you. To us. Thus, wars of conquest, revenge and retribution have turned the map of the world into dots of charred cities, erased borders, and mass cemeteries. The dead and the enslaved, those tyrants tell us, deserved their fate.

You have never been in an aeroplane (many people call flying machines ‘aeroplanes’) but you choose to serve your country in the sky even though you have yet to fly. The first time you go aloft is on your first day of training in the Air Force. Even if you can’t pass muster as a pilot, good news: the heavy machines that will fight the air war – in Europe and all over the Pacific – will need a crew of 10. So, you are trained on the radio, the navigation tools, the machine guns, and the bombs. Once you earn your wings, you’re at least a Sergeant, flying over Greenland and the North Atlantic and maybe Ireland, assigned to a bomb group, to live at a base somewhere in Great Britain.

When the battle is engaged, you know it. Boredom and anticipation become minutes of terror, of hell in the sky. Those you are bombing are hoping to kill you. You see planes of your group, filled with fellows you have known for months, or days, or saw at breakfast, disappear into a ball of flame and shrapnel, twisting uncontrollably out of the air and into the ground without survivable physics. You watch as bodies attached to parachutes descend to possible imprisonment, possible death.

When your load of bombs is finally released from the belly of your aircraft, the plane lurches upward from the sudden loss of weight. You make a wide turn to return to England. The enemy is still hoping to kill you. Only when you are beyond the reach of their guns, their fighter planes, and their territory can you assume the chances of survival are in your favor. But if your plane was hit, damaged, or underpowered for a myriad of reasons (if you still have enough gasoline), you may not make it back.

This scenario plays out repeatedly. On your third mission. Your sixth. On the 11th time you fly. On the 17th. On the 24th attempt to do your part to win the war.

The world is at war and for you, who are one of the Masters of the Air, the math is just horrible: you have a 50-50 chance of being shot down, wounded, or killed.

And you were in high school just two years ago.

Introduction to Donald L. Miller's Masters of the Air, written by Tom Hanks