Saunders: WWII ace met enemy twice

Remember the last time you were flying and your plane hit some turbulence and you started praying and making deals with the Almighty?

OK, Lord, if you let this plane land safely, you said, I'll never try to get the senior citizens discount at Golden Corral or at the movies again until I'm really old enough. Or broke.

Or how about this one: Oh Lord, if you let me see one more birthday, I promise I'll never again claim seven in one year just to get a free Grand Slam breakfast at Denny's.

Oops, that was me.

Anyway, when Barrie Davis of Zebulon got his fighter plane shot up and the canopy blown off at 30,000 feet by an enemy plane that came up behind him during World War II, his first thought was, "Golly Moses. That guy is a real good shot."

Then he passed out, his body and head peppered by shrapnel and whipped by wind and 60-below zero temperatures in the now unprotected cockpit. "When I came to, the plane was flying by itself at 20,000 feet," Davis told me on a warm February Saturday. He and I sat in the study of the immaculate condo he lives in with his wife of 32 years, Ramona. They live on Nostalgia Lane, and nostalgia is a place Davis doesn't mind returning to.

On the walls of the study are pictures of Davis in his uniform and pictures and paintings of several World War II airplanes, including the P-51 fighter plane that was almost blown from under him and the Messerschmidt that did the blowing.

The enemy pilot who got him, he said, "hadn't hit anything vital" - if you don't consider the canopy and all four propellers, not to mention several places on Davis' body, vital - "and I was able to land. That's when we found the unexploded cannon shell in the plane. That's how lucky I was. The flight surgeon spent an hour picking fragments out of my head, shoulder and thighs. They wrapped me in gauze - I looked like a mummy - and sent me on my way. Around about suppertime, I got tired of all that mess. I took it off."

Even as he went on his way, getting rid of gauze, he couldn't get rid of one thought. "Golly Moses," he said, repeating a favorite phrase, "I wonder who shot me?"

He found out 66 years later when he flew to Bucharest, Romania, and met Ion Dobran, the Romanian pilot who tried to turn Davis - like his older brother Eric had become a month into the war - into a war casualty. Dobran and Davis were feted by National Geographic magazine and the government. At 91 and 86, respectively, they were no longer enemy pilots. They were simply two old men who'd shared a similar experience, albeit on opposite sides. They hugged and spent several days together, waxing nostalgic.

After Davis left the Army, he joined the Air National Guard and the Raleigh Rotary Club in 1946. "I guess I'm a joiner," he said. He came back to Wake County and took over the family printing business and its weekly newspapers. Ramona and he became columnists, often covering the same meetings.

Anyone reading their differing accounts, Ramona said, "wouldn't even know we were at the same meeting."

As a columnist, though, Davis only had to worry about ducking invective from angry readers, not .50-caliber, armor-piercing bullets at 20,000 feet.

It was at a Rotary Club meeting last week that I first heard of the local World War II flying ace - a designation you receive after shooting down at least five enemy aircraft - who'd literally embraced the enemy pilot who tried to turn his plane into an airborne coffin. Davis wasn't at the meeting, but Peyton Woodson III was. He, too, was a WWII fighter pilot and retains - lo these many years later - the confident, militaristic bearing of one who has seen and done things most of us can't even imagine.

Men such as Davis and Woodson comprise a generation of Americans to whom writer Tom Brokaw affixed the cloying term "the greatest generation." All of them weren't great - sorry, Tom - but some were. Even more answered when their country called. All of them are, however, are getting old.

We often exalt what's new, often undeservedly so, and discard what's old even when it still has value. That's the case of men and women who've been alive and done the things that some of them have done. We need to show them proper reverence.

So, the next time you find yourself in a huff because the old dude in front of you at Sack 'N Go is fumbling with his change purse and costing you a couple of extra seconds, chill out: His fingers might be shaking because he once flew an airplane with no top in minus-60-degree weather or endured some other hardship so you can do whatever it is you do.