Vanished by Wil S. Hylton Page A

sort of played bridge and golf, and liked their drinking. The whistle blew at noon, and everybody went home for lunch.”
    Like the other leading families in Amesbury, the Coorssens kept a summer cottage at nearby Plaice Cove, where Norman and George spent teenage afternoons swimming and sailing and chasing all the right kinds of girls. For high school, they attended Phillips Exeter Academy. For college Norman chose Williams, and George, MIT.
    But while George adapted well to collegiate life, Norman had trouble. “Norman liked to play a lot,” Helen said. “He was handsome, blond, crispy-creme, and all that—just
loved
the parties.” After the Pearl Harbor attack, George volunteered for officer training in the Navy. Norman continued to enjoy himself at Williams, until the draft notice came.
    For the first time in his life, Norman Coorssen was on the wrong side of fortune. “It was like a rug pulled out,” his nephew, Gary Coorssen, said. Under the draft, Norman would not only enter the service as a lowly private, but he was slated to serve in one of the most dangerous jobs of the war, as an infantryman in a reconnaissance battalion. “That’s when he started to think, ‘ Gee, that’s the front line —maybe I should become a pilot!’” Gary said.
    “He must have been a wretched private,” Helen added. “He used every wile he had to get out of it.”
    Somehow, by the spring of 1943, Norman had managed a leap that few men could make, from the enlisted ranks to the officers’ club, from grunt to pilot. How he did so, even his family wasn’t sure. But he arrived in Tonopah at the head of a crew filled with men who weren’t so lucky: Jimmie and Johnny and Ted and Earl and Leland—the Big Stoop crew. Now, as Norman climbed aboard the 453 bomber for his observation flight to Yap, even those men were gone. He was heading into enemy territory with a crew he didn’t know.
    Norman listened to the familiar rumble of engines as the 453 rolled down the coral taxiway, turning at the end to face the open runway, then surging forward to sweep into the sky in a formation of six. Through the window, he could see the other five planes in the squadron fanned out against the horizon, and beyond them, two other squadrons, for a total ofeighteen planes from the Long Rangers, plus another formation of the same size from the Fifth Bombardment Group, which was stationed a few miles south on Momote Airfield.
    Together, the Liberators climbed through the clouds until they reached the open sky, looking down on pillowy cumuli that seemed to rest upon deep black water. The hours crept by, the horizon unchanging. Norman Coorssen waited. When the formation finally drew close to Yap, the planes circled above a nearby island, Sorol, pulling into a tight box formation for the bombing run.
    Leaving Sorol, the 453 was near the back of the formation. Norman watched as the Fifth Bombardment Group led the way toward Yap. As the first squadron approached, a swarm of Japanese Zeros leaped from the airfields toward them, zipping around the Fifth bombers and dancing in the air above them, swooping down like knives to slice through them, rattling them with machine-gun fire, and then looping overhead again to drop phosphorus bombs that exploded into tentacles of white-hot liquid dripping down the clouds.
    It was like watching sailboats in a storm. The artillery pumping up from the ground filled the sky with a haze of shells, and there seemed no way for the Fifth planes to avoid being hit. Within seconds, one was streaming down, a thick plume of yellow smoke trailing from its right wing as it swerved across the enemy islands with two Japanese fighters chasing it. Norman watched as they sprayed the Liberator with an endless torrent of fire.
    On the radio, he heard the pilot of the wounded Liberator call out. The damage was too great. He would have to ditch the plane. The bomber sank toward the water. It skirted the whitecaps at 150 miles per hour, and for