Charlie Manning always wanted to be a soldier and with World War II he gets his chance, following his father who served in World War One. As a regular soldier he is unhappy until he gets a chance to join the Flying Corp and becomes a glider pilot. We join him in the middle of his mission, taking his troops to an area in France and while the tense journey unfolds we cut back to his earlier life showing how he got there. Life with his co-pilot, learning to fly the giant Horsa glider containing him and a small troop of soldiers, the people he has met and the wife who now waits for him to come home.

This is a well written and engaging historical short that keeps the tension slowly ratcheting up by skillful use of switching back and forth between the flight they are undertaking as part of D-Day and the events that led up to this point. The events described are brief but help to form the reasons for the flight, not just for the war, but also personally for Charlie as well. The characters are quickly defined, more in the way that Charlie interacts with them, but help to round out his character and show what type of person he is. Spelling and grammar are fine, I didn’t notice any mistakes reading through, although if there were I missed them because I was enjoying the story.

The only downside to the story is that there is a lot more that could be told, but in some ways it doesn’t need it, as a tightly crafted piece of fiction. It is not really a war story, more a story that is set in a war, but well worth reading even if you don’t think you would like the genre.