He began to prepare himself—mentally, physically—to turn around and do whatever he could in a desperate close-range engagement. It’s one thing to be brave when you feel you have options. It’s another thing entirely when bravery becomes your last available tool.
Then, abruptly, the Zero pulled off and flew away.
Hank lived.
War often leaves men with questions they don’t get to answer. Why did the enemy break off? Did the Zero pilot run low on fuel? Did he see something Hank couldn’t? Did he decide the risk wasn’t worth it? Did he simply have mercy? In the moment, Hank didn’t know. He only knew the immediate fact: he was still flying.
Years passed.
The war ended, but the shapes it carved into people did not simply disappear. Hank continued his career and eventually retired from the Marine Corps. In 1973, he worked for the Singer Company in an aerospace division—life shifting into a new kind of machinery, a new kind of responsibility. He was sent to Japan to help a Mitsubishi division producing gyros and planning for the future.
There, he met a man named Sugawara—a retired Japanese Air Force general who served as vice president of marketing. The two men began to talk about the war.
It could have been tense.
It could have been distant and formal, two veterans speaking carefully around old wounds. But something unexpected happened instead: they became friendly. They discovered they both liked hunting. Friendship formed not through grand gestures, but through shared interests and the quiet recognition that both had survived something neither could fully explain to civilians.
Sugawara even arranged for Hank to receive a custom-made shotgun—something Hank considered nearly impossible for an outsider to obtain in Japan. It was a gift that carried respect, not just politeness. The kind of respect one warrior sometimes gives another, even long after they were enemies.
At some point, Sugawara was invited to the United States—New Jersey—to see their factory and how they did things. Hank suggested a strange idea: bring a logbook. He would check his own logbook too.
They sat together and looked.
And Hank realized something that made his heart hitch: the man who had tried to shoot him down—back over the Pacific, low on gas, with tracers cutting the air—was sitting across from him.
Sugawara had been that pilot.
The world has a way of staging moments like that only after it’s done taking what it wants from you. When you’re young and fighting, it never offers closure. It offers survival, if you’re lucky. Closure comes later, if it comes at all.
Hank and Sugawara became lifelong friends.
Hank took him duck and goose hunting on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. They went to dinner. Hank had been picking up the tab, he admitted, the way you do when you feel like the host. Then one night Sugawara insisted on paying. They drank a little. The conversation loosened.
And then Sugawara said something Hank never forgot.
“Thanks, son,” he told him. “I’m sure glad I didn’t shoot you down.”
It was not a boast. It was not a confession meant to shock. It was a simple statement of gratitude for a decision—whether deliberate or circumstantial—that had left Hank alive and had eventually made their friendship possible.
If you want to understand the full complexity of war, you could do worse than to sit with that sentence.
Two men who once would have killed each other without hesitation now sharing a table, one thanking the other for being spared. The irony is almost unbearable. The humanity in it is undeniable.
Years later, popular culture took its turn. In 1976, a television series was produced loosely based on Pappy Boyington’s book—another chapter in the way America transformed wartime experiences into stories for living rooms. The Black Sheep became entertainment. Characters, catchphrases, dramatized heroics.
But Hank had lived the real version, and he knew what never made it into television.
The real version included mechanics working through the night, hands raw and blackened with grease, because airplanes needed to fly again at dawn. It included the terrifying boredom of patrols and the way boredom could make men reckless. It included the misidentification of friendly targets and the sickening realization afterward. It included the complicated truth of Boyington: charismatic and flawed, often drunk on the ground, yet brilliant in the air. It included the bitter language men used to keep themselves from thinking too hard about the fact that they were killing other young men who also had birthdays and families and favorite songs.
It also included the quiet moments: brandies after flying, men singing close together in the night, building something like home in a place that had none.
As the decades rolled on, the Black Sheep gathered at reunions, the way veterans often do—drawn together by a bond that time can’t dissolve. But the number of survivors kept shrinking. Hank spoke of it with a kind of weary humor and sadness: out of fifty-four men from the first two combat tours, only a few remained.
He wondered who would “fly the last mission.”
He hoped it would be him.
That line—half joke, half prayer—carried everything he’d learned. In aviation, your “last mission” isn’t always about heroism. It’s about time. About how long you get to keep going. About whether fate decides you land safely or whether it decides you don’t.
When Hank told his story later in life, he did not tell it like a movie. He didn’t polish it into neat moral lessons. He told it like a man describing what happened because it happened, and because the truth mattered more than the myth.
He talked about the first time he saw a Zero close enough to fill his windshield.
He talked about the cloud that saved him and the emptiness that followed the fight.
He talked about a Corsair that felt a little better than the others, as if machines could carry personality.
He talked about Boyington sweating in the cockpit, a brilliant predator in the air and a chaotic force on the ground.
He talked about fear—not in dramatic speeches, but in small details: low fuel, wrong heading, tracers passing close, and the decision that if the enemy didn’t break off, he would have to turn and fight.
And then he told the part that no one expects when they hear a story about wartime dogfights.
He told about meeting that enemy pilot decades later.
About talking.
About hunting.
About friendship.
Because if there is any final truth in Hank Bourgeois’s story, it’s this: history is not a straight line from enemy to victory to peace. It loops. It surprises. It refuses to stay simple. Men who once tried to kill each other can grow old and share meals. The sky that once held fire and smoke can become just sky again. And the things you thought would define you—fear, aggression, survival—can be joined by something you didn’t plan for: understanding.
Not forgiveness in the easy sense. Not forgetting. But recognition.
The kind that makes a retired general say, quietly, over drinks in America: “I’m sure glad I didn’t shoot you down.”
And makes a Marine pilot, who once dove into clouds with a Zero on his tail, realize that the most astonishing thing he ever did wasn’t shooting down two enemy fighters in a day.
It was living long enough to sit across from the man who might have ended his life—and calling him a friend.
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