Captain Fred Derry was a soda jerk before the war, and became a decorated bombardier in the air war over Germany. When he flew back to his town on a B-17 that was going to be scrapped, he meets up with two other discharged servicemen flying to the same place. One was a sailor who had been on a carrier that was sunken the Pacific and had both of his badly burned hands amputated, the other, and ex-banker-turned Army Sergeant who fought the Japanese on the islands in the Pacific.
Captain Derry was expert and brave in his service, but when he came back home, he couldn't find any work. He ends deciding to leave this typical American city behind, because it was a total dead end for him, and he concluded he just had to start anew somewhere else.
While waiting for a space available spot on any military plane leaving, he wanders around the grounds of the airport where thousands of planes are being flown in from all the theaters of war, being dismembered for scrap.
As he walks around the ghostly carcasses of planes that bore the wear and tear of the service they had provided, their stark, partially dismembered corpses no doubt brought to his mind the very human men like him that had fought in them.
And here they were-forgotten, grime covered, damaged, and worn, and forgotten-just like him.
He then comes across the elderly remains of a B-17, "Round Trip?" which had successfully carried various crews of 10 men sixty times into the blood spattered skies over Germany and brought them back home again. And here she was, her engines missing like amputated limbs, with the wires and tubes sticking out of the raw stumps on her wings, like so many arteries and veins that had been ripped off without anesthetic.
Captain Derry eyed this apparition before, with practiced expertise, hoisting himself into the black gaping hole in her fuselage where the main crew hatch had been, doing it effortlessly and nimbly as he had done hundreds of times before.
Inside, he surveyed the decaying old lady from the inside as she began to slowly decay from the ashes of war into the ashes of obscurity, and the dust of combat to the dust of oblivion.
He picked up old objects, covered with dirt and dust, brushed them off, briefly examining them before tossing them aside, as they were already meaningless.
Then he entered the nose of the plane, his old "office" as he put it, and sat down in the position he had assumed many times before as the lead bombardier in the lead plane. I thought this was one of the most powerful sequences in the film.
He habitually cranes his head to the side, as if he were peering out ahead of him for the landmarks on the ground would recognize as his target. The filthy plexiglass nose on this plane is not at all like the clean, clear view his ground crew had provided for him each time.
As he peers out, he is transported back in time.
He can hear the drone of the four Wright Cyclone engines, he can see the blue sky and white clouds ahead, and below, the impersonal, dark, and deadly earth filled with men who wished to kill him, his plane, and his crew. Lost in thought, the plexiglass in front of him is no longer scratched and opaque. He is transported back to a time where he was doing something meaningful and important, where his men filling his plane were filled with purposed, all of of them filled with a desire to do their job and not let down those around him, his battlefield just ahead of him as he advanced, the first man, in the first plane of a giant swarm of planes just like his followed obligingly along.
He remembered. He was the literal tip of the spear.
He could feel it, the vibration of the engines, and the slight buffeting as the plane pushed through the air. He could smell it, the smell of oil, hydraulic fluid, leather, and gasoline. He felt the emotions. The fear, the desire to do what he had been trained to do and not fail his crew, his squadron, and his country, all wrapped in a cloak of the unknown, what lay only minutes ahead.
Completely lost in the timeless instant where all he was in life, everything he knew, everything he had, was compressed into that one, long instant that went endlessly on and on in his heart and mind.
At that instant, the foreman walking by the plane looks up and sees Captain Derry there, his indistinct face behind the dirty plexiglass-motionless as he watched in his mind the landscape of Nazi Germany unfolding before him, reliving it, seeing it again with his sightless eyes.
The foreman yells at him, and Captain Derry is viciously snapped back to reality, transversing time in a harsh instant, back to the present. He clears his head, and exits, the bomber the way he came in.
Apologizing to the foreman, he strikes up a conversation with the foreman who had also served in the war, albeit in a different capacity, swirly flashing his contempt for those glamor boys of the sky who got to escape the mud and the filth of the ground far below them, but in that world of the Fall of 1945, the contempt means nothing to the man it is directed at.
All he wants to do is go on surviving, and to do that, he needs a job. And he gets one. Removing his jacket, rolling up his sleeves, he gets on with his life.
What struck me about this is the utter timelessness of this. This has been played out millions of times over history, in cultures all over the world. Though the technology and circumstances may change, what happens here, the transition from warrior to civilian, is at heart the same.