Among the thrilling and harrowing moments of Lloyd Burns' life was his heroic service in the United States Army Air Force (USAAF) in one of the most pivotal actions of the Second World War. On June 6, 1944, Burns piloted the B-17 Flying Fortress Heavenly Body 12,000 feet above the Normandy coast. He described a "scene that shocked us all when we broke through the clouds on the way down...thousands of ships so dense that it seemed that one could walk across the English Channel." Burns' crew, having completed its two missions on that historic day, began its return to England. The co-pilot Freddie, wanting to gain experience for future missions, took command of the Heavenly Body, but on its descent above the Thames it collided with one of its fighter escorts. Burns had removed his Mae West life preserver earlier and scrambled to put on a parachute as the plane, hopelessly crippled, careened toward the turbulent estuary. The hatch door, the crew's only route of escape, was stuck. Burns said of the dire situation, "I forgot about my leg strap being loose and threw all my body weight against the door," which thrust open violently into the sky, dragging Burns with it. His head gashed and bloodied, he fell into the Thames half-conscious. Burns summed up his desperation by saying, "I have no idea how long I swam but was so cold and tired I was ready to give up, sink, and get it over with." English boaters dispatched to recover the aircraft heard Burns' cries of "Help!" and navigated toward him amidst the angry sea. Their blessed rescue was merely a chapter in the life of this man who encapsulates the Greatest Generation.

Lloyd Burns was born on March 20, 1925 in Atlanta's Piedmont Hospital — "when it was still on Piedmont," he said. His father was a physician in Valdosta and had arranged for his son to be born in Atlanta before returning home. As a 130-pound high school senior, Burns obtained a forged birth certificate (to read 1924 instead of 1925) with the help of his father and enlisted as war consumed much of the world. He skipped school and took a bus to Moody Field outside of Valdosta. At the sight of the scrawny Burns in his drawers the flight surgeon admonished him: "Go home boy. You're not eighteen," to which Burns replied, "My daddy is Dr. Burns in Valdosta." The flight surgeon relented because, as Burns recalls it, doctors liked one another in those days. He sailed through the tests and was on the way to become the youngest First Pilot in the USAAF.

This was 1942. Burns was sworn in as an air cadet and graduated from high school that June. He was called up in November and trained in Arcadia, Florida at the Southeast Training Command and Bainbridge, Georgia, where he discovered an amusing pastime: "One pleasure was flying over to Valdosta and 'dive-bombing' my girlfriend's country home — a capital offense." He completed his training at Moody and received his wings and commission on August 28, 1943 at eighteen years and five months of age. He married his high school sweetheart not long before he began his worldwide odyssey.

In Sebring, Fla. Burns was acquainted with the B-17 Flying Fortress, America's legendary tool of the air war against the Axis. "I was convinced that the B-17 would withstand just about anything and everything, and there was nothing to fear from enemy fighters or those strange puffs of black smoke all around us, short of a direct hit. I swallowed the lie of course — until my first mission." Burns' time in Sebring was personally pivotal, as evidenced in this memory: "I remember walking the streets one evening, sitting down on the cold steps of an empty church, talking to God, and crying from loneliness. I think that moment was the last gasp of my childhood." The preparations for war were hardening Burns into a soldier, and as his training concluded he and his comrades "were told that we were ready to kill or be killed."

This stark reminder accompanied Burns as he trekked across the North Atlantic, from Bangor, Maine to Labrador, Canada to Reykjavík, Iceland to Prestwick, Scotland and finally to Kimbolton Air Force Base in England. Loneliness menaced Burns between missions as his friends frequented pubs and brothels in London. The drudgery of the missions grated his nerves, too: "One day of flying a mission became just like another." He remembers the collective groan that followed the announcement of each mission, the lone exception being when the bombing of the Normandy beaches was revealed.

Shortly after the tortuous affair on D-Day, Burns returned to the United States aboard the S.S. Stockholm in a convoy stalked by a wolf pack of German submarines. In his stateside respite he stayed at the Tarlton Hotel in Miami Beach for two weeks, took his meals at the Cadillac Hotel, and listened to Louis Prima and Keely Smith in an outdoor theater. After his two weeks of R&R, Burns applied to be trained to fly the B-29 Super Fortress in the Pacific Theater. His training took him to Pecos and Galveston, Texas, Los Angeles, Hawaii, Guam, and finally to Tinian, the second-largest of the three principal islands of the Northern Marianas.

From Tinian, Burns piloted his B-29 on bombing raids over Japan, a less dangerous task than in Europe because the Japanese air force had been devastated. He remembers the Pacific Theater as a "gravy train" and said of the pilots who had spent the whole war there "didn't know what combat was all about." "Night attacks using incendiary bombs were a favorite because of the very flammable structures the Japanese lived in," he said. "I don't remember any admonition against hitting civilian areas. After such a raid a totally lighted city was a fascinating sight. We felt little sympathy because their treatment of our POWs was so abhorrent and fresh in our minds." Once, after a raid, Burns was forced to land his plane on Iwo Jima to refuel; its proximity to danger was such that "on-and-off the island double-time was the rule."

Unbeknownst to Burns and most everyone else on Tinian was that the Enola Gay was hidden in a shed in a forbidden zone on the island. When the order came in from Washington for the Enola Gay to launch its now-famous mission to drop the first of two atomic bombs, this one on Hiroshima, Burns was sent to pilot a decoy plane. He was recalled under the command of "mission scrubbed," but when he returned the news came in that the bomb had been dropped. It was not until the news that the second bomb had been dropped on Nagasaki that he and his fellow soldiers believed the news (they had assumed it was American propaganda intended to frighten the Japanese). The Japanese surrendered days later, and Burns made it his new mission to get home as quickly as possible. He turned down a promotion to captain and flew a planeload of soldiers back to the United States and was formally discharging soon thereafter in San Antonio.

In the 62 years since Lloyd Burns left the USAAF he has graduated from Emory University with bachelors and medical degrees, been a physician with Kaiser Permanente in Sacramento, and lived in Naples, Florida and Reynolds Plantation on Lake Oconee before settling in Peachtree City. He married his second wife, Frances, a graduate of Russell High School in East Point, Ga., on Thanksgiving Day in 1961 and has four children and three step-children. As we talked in his manicured backyard garden, where Confederate Jasmine creeps up a weather vane and cacti populate a bed of rocks and sand, he told me about the "awe" reserved for veterans after the war. He reflected on the racism in which he was raised, his voice breaking: "When I look back on the way they were treated by us Southerners, it just breaks my heart. When I came home I knew their blood was just as red as ours."

Then Burns turned to a more somber subject, telling me he had found out earlier in the year he has Alzheimer's disease. His memory of the war seemed impeccable, but he said he has lately misplaced items around the house and forgotten scheduled commitments. He is planning "an old-fashioned wiener roast" to be held in late October as an opportunity to thank his friends in the neighborhood, who took to calling him "Doc" after he moved in and to gather his family. Several months ago Burns was flown to Washington, D.C. with other World War II veterans on Honor Flight One, a chartered plane organized to allow veterans to see the monuments dedicated to them and their service, including the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the new World War II Memorial. Burns described the experience as having been "awesome, fantastic, glorious, uplifting, inspiring, humbling." These words could just as easily have been applied to Lloyd Burns' own life.