Welcome back to my Deep Dive: Secret Bomber. If you missed it, be sure to read the first chapter here.
The sound of a plane coming in for a landing grabbed his attention, and Gail Hal
vorsen knew he had to catch his ride back to base. As he looked at the faces of the children that he talked to, he thought, “This? This is the enemy?”
It was impossible to hate them, even if their parents had been Nazis, even if they might have been part of the Hitler youth. You couldn’t hate someone whose eyes were only a few feet from yours. As Gail turned to go, he instinctively stuck his hand into this pocket for a treat, and came up short, finding only two sticks of Doublemint gum.
He broke each of them in half and gave them to the older children who spoke English, instructing them to share. Not a morsel of gum was wasted among the thirty children. He saw them tear the wrapper into shreds, so that every child could have something to smell and taste. That moment, with those two sticks of gum, changed Gail’s life forever. Imagine if I had thirty sticks of gum to give out, he thought.