The first time Henry Mayo “Hank” Bourgeois really understood what fear felt like at altitude wasn’t when flak stitched the sky or when an engine coughed at the wrong moment. It was the instant he realized a Japanese Zero was behind him—close enough that, if he turned his head just right, he could imagine the pilot’s eyes through the canopy—while the Pacific stretched out below like an endless, indifferent sheet of blue.
But that wasn’t how his story began.
It began long before the clouds and tracers, before the smell of cordite, before the hard-earned superstition that some airplanes simply flew better than others. It began with a date that felt ordinary at the time: September 1st, 1941—his twentieth birthday. The world had not yet changed, at least not for most Americans. Pearl Harbor hadn’t been attacked. The war was a storm on the far side of the horizon. Hank, however, took a step that would carry him straight into that weather.
He joined the Marine Corps.
Back then, the path to become a fighter pilot—and an officer—was long, deliberate, and full of things that felt like ritual. A course of eighteen to twenty months. Procedures. Protocol. A careful shaping of young men into something the service could trust with an airplane and a decision measured in seconds.
Then the war started.
And when war starts, the calendar itself seems to compress. The same training that once took nearly two years suddenly had no room for “extra.” The parts that weren’t strictly necessary were stripped away. The pace turned brutal and efficient. Hank later described it with the blunt humor of someone who lived it: they “cut out all the crap.”
Six months.
That’s all it took to turn him into a Marine with wings.
By June, he had them—golden symbols pinned to his chest that carried the weight of expectation, pride, and a quiet, unspoken truth: the sky was going to be crowded with people trying to kill him. He graduated into a world that no longer pretended the future was predictable.
He went west for fighter training—North Island, California, near San Diego. The air smelled like ocean and fuel, and the days were full of engine noise and instruction. The kind of instruction you can’t fully understand until your hands do it without thinking. Fly here. Climb there. Stall recovery. Gunnery. Formation. The discipline of staying steady while everything in you wants to move.
By December 1st, 1942, he finished the fighter program. The paperwork concluded, the signatures dried, and the Marine Corps did what it did best: it sent him where he was needed.
The transport ship that carried him across the Pacific was not glamorous. It was functional—steel, bunks, narrow passageways, and men learning to live in close proximity. Hank sailed to New Caledonia, then onward to Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides. The names sounded exotic, almost romantic, until you learned what they meant in practice: heat that stuck to your skin, mud that swallowed boots, and the constant awareness that the enemy did not need to invade your island to reach you. They could reach you from the air.
He arrived in late January 1943 and joined VMF-122.
His first combat tour was on Guadalcanal, flying F4F Wildcats—sturdy, blunt-nosed fighters that were already becoming legends for the men who’d fought the early months of the Pacific war. But Hank was new. And in squadrons like these, experience was a currency you couldn’t fake. The seasoned pilots got the combat flights. The rookies waited, studied, and did the jobs that needed doing.
So Hank flew photo missions.
A Wildcat variant configured for reconnaissance—flying over places like Munda, bringing back photographs that would guide the next strike. It was a strange kind of combat: you weren’t seeking a fight, but you were still flying through spaces the enemy wanted to own. Sometimes he came back with the airplane “riddled,” metal punched through by bullets that could have been inches from something vital. The photographs were valuable. The feeling afterward—the realization that you’d survived a situation you didn’t control—was its own kind of education.
He remembered one other mission from that tour: a strafing run after a naval engagement, when a Japanese ship had been damaged—he thought it might’ve been a destroyer—in the straits. They went up to rake it with gunfire, low and fast, the sea rushing beneath them. It was direct, violent, and brief. The kind of mission where you didn’t have time to think about morals or strategy. You only thought about staying on your run, hitting the target, and living long enough to climb out.
His first tour ended with him still hungry—hungry for more flying, more chance to do what he’d trained for, more chance to prove he belonged in that world.
Then came the second tour.
That’s when the squadron got Corsairs.
Not brand-new, but new enough to feel like a miracle. Eighteen of them—F4U Corsairs with their distinctive bent wings and that big, hungry engine up front. The first time Hank sat in one, he did what so many young pilots did: he opened the handbook and tried to translate paper instructions into something real.
Push this switch.
Push that button.
Flip this lever.
Check this gauge.
Confirm that system.
It sounds simple when you read it.
It never feels simple when it’s your life.
Even the mechanics, he remembered, hadn’t seen the airplane before. That detail stayed with him, because it meant something important: everyone was learning, together, under pressure. There wasn’t time for a gentle adjustment period. You learned quickly, or you didn’t learn at all.
And then the engine started.
The Corsair’s engine wasn’t just noise. It was a presence—deep and muscular, vibrating through the cockpit like a promise. Hank never forgot the thrill of it. In the middle of a war, where so much was uncertainty and loss, the feel of that engine turning over was something like certainty.
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