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This is my first post hear, and first (non-rp) attempt at 'good' writing in a long while. Also, I'm typing this up as it comes to me, directly into this here text box, so whatever you see, it's likely not very heavily edited.
It was late in the day. He'd finally gotten the chance to rest a his eyes for a while since things had cooled down a bit. It had already been a few weeks since the Independence had downed that suspicious seaplane. This was long enough in fact that the higher-ups had decided that if there were to be a retaliation, it would have come already. The calander hung on the wall of his dorm-like room aboard the carrier told that it was the 23rd of November, 1943. The picture that hung on the top half of the calander was on of the classiest pin-ups any on the ship had seen. Her deep black hair hanging loosely behing her head, her cherry red lips spread in silent laughter. Her most prominent feature though were her big blue eyes. They seemed to jump off the plain paper of the calender as if she were phyisically standing in the room. The young man who was nearly dozing now had often told his ship mates that the girl looked almost exactly like the one he had left at home to enlist. "Close enough to be her twin." He'd told them.
As he began dreaming about the very same girl, the alarm sounded. bolting up, he knew what that meant. Luckily he'd been already suited up in most of his flight gear. As he dashed out of the room and towards the deck he grabbed his helmet. He'd been itching to fight. The Japs had bombed Pearl Harbor when he was seventeen, and his birthday present to himself on his 18th was enlisting in the US Navy. His stomach began it's usual routine when he was nervous, threatening to make him vomit, but he choked it down and ran towards his Hellcat.
The new fighters had almost literally never been used, and now they were about to be tried over the Japanese held atoll of Tarawa. His heart raced as it did every time he took off from the deck of a carrier, but once the fighter was off the deck and in the air, ice ran through his veins. He cleared his head and focused only on the task at hand. As the fighters took off, one after another, they began radioing back and forth between eachother. He caught cracks of the communications in between the others as he readied himself. Within minutes they were in the thick of it.
What had to be at least 30 Japanese Zeros were heading to meet the US fighters. As the two forces neared eachother, all hell broke loose. Planes flying in haphazard formations broke and began attacking, the sound of the machine guns coming out over the roar of the plane engines. The pilot readied himself and took his target. It had been heading right for him, and as he opened up with his machine gun, it banked to the right. He banked to his left, following the craft, the tinny 'tat-tat-tat' of his .50 caliber coming in clear in his ears.
He chased the Jap down, the hate for what they did to his fellow countrymen leading his hand. The steady 'tat-tat-tat' of his gun constant in his ears. The climbed and banked, flying circles around eachother as the Jap tried to get away, or get a clear shot at his assailant. The Zero began climbing, banking slightly at the same time, and suddenly he was bearing down on the pilot of the Hellcat. The American pilot didnt have a chance do to much of anything besides make his peace with god before the Zero's guns began firing down on him in a roaring "pump-pump-pump-pump" compared to his guns. Bullets riddled the plane, first stabbing into the planes single prop-engine, then penetrating the cockpit and the pilot's chest.
The searing pain shot through him as the bullet went through his right lung and came out the back, stopping somewhere inside the plane. Through squinted eyes and clenced teeth, the pilot could only watch as the horizon slipped further and further upwards, as the nose of the plane tipped down. The last things he saw before blacking out were the dark blue seas off the coast of the atoll, then as the pain began to overwhelm him, he saw the girl he'd left behind. Most of all he saw those big blue eyes. God how he would miss those eyes.
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Well, it's probably taken me about half an hour to fourty-five minutes get all that down. I'm actually pretty satisfied with it, I tried to keep it as historically acurrate as possible, and left the pilot without a name on purpose, as the date was the date of the first use of the F6F Hellcat on WWII and only one was lost to the Japanese Zeros. Any input on the peice is greatly appreciated.