U.S. ARMY AIR CORPS Joe Braunhut   Joe Braunhut, 81, remembers more about his war experience today than he did 60 years ago.  “After I got out, I forgot just about everything,” he said. “It was that traumatic for me.” He recently watched “Band of Brothers,” an HBO miniseries based on the book by Stephen Ambrose. The chronicle of WWII combat kindled Braunhut’s war memories.  “It brought it all back,” he said, “the depression I felt all during that time I was overseas. You figured every day would be your last, every mission your last. It was so depressing. That’s why I didn’t remember any of it.”  The documentary was about infantry combat, but Braunhut served in the 8th Air Force, which included the 392nd Bombardment Group stationed at Wendling Air Force Base in England. Viewing historic photos of Wendling on the Internet, Braunhut recalled details of his wartime activities. Looking at photos of the Nissen huts that housed the 8th Air Force in England, he could vividly recall the bunk he slept in. Though he remembers more of the war, he is reluctant to talk about it.  “I’m more interested in this war than the one I was in,” he said, referring to the war in Iraq. “We’ve sent three generations in a row to war. That concerns me more than what I went through.” He was 19 when he entered the Army Air Corps. He had graduated from high school in Brooklyn, N.Y., and had been accepted to Juilliard and Brooklyn College. In high school, he studied voice. He wrote and acted for the Shoestring Opera Company, as well as singing with the All-City Chorus and performing in a play at a prestigious venue in New York. The 392nd Bombardment Group joined the 8th Air Force at Wendling in August 1943. Braunhut was among them. The group would fly 285 combat missions, suffering 1,552 casualties, including 835 killed in action and 184 aircraft lost.  Braunhut flew combat missions as a crewmember aboard B-24s, “flying coffins.” His duty included manually releasing bombs that had failed to release by mechanical means. He also operated the radio.  Braunhut received three Bronze Stars for his participation in the Battle of Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge and the Battle of the Rhine. On one mission, his plane was heavily damaged by enemy fire and had to land in Belgium. On another, the crew was preparing to go down in the English Channel while Braunhut sent SOS signals so rescuers could track them in the water. But the plane made it back to base and did not have to ditch. He recalls that one of the most dangerous missions took place during the Battle of the Bulge. All the guns and bombs were removed from the plane, which flew the entire mission only 500 feet above ground, dropping supplies to American troops trapped below. He said German soldiers on the ground were firing at the plane. He remembers a bullet sailing between his legs. When he returned to his radio station, he discovered a window had been shot out. “I was almost killed five times in that one mission,” he said. Returning home in 1945, Braunhut was depressed and confused. He wondered whether he should risk a career in show business or get an education. Eventually, he chose college. He entered New York University in 1946 and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English and history in 1948. He then earned a master’s of fine arts degree from the Writer’s Workshop at Iowa University. He received a teaching license in New York and worked one year as a high school substitute teacher. He then went to work as a technical writer. “I thought that was a hack job, and I hadn’t survived the war to be a hack the rest of my life,” he said.  Preferring to do something “useful,” he returned to teaching, taking jobs at West Virginia Tech and Hofstra College before embarking on a 30-year career as a high school teacher. On sabbatical in 1975, he earned a second MFA in theater from Sarah Lawrence College. He also married his second wife in 1975. In 1981, they built a house on land in his wife’s family since 1936 and became year-round residents of Deer Isle. Though Braunhut initially remembered nearly nothing about the war, he often encountered reminders. While teaching in New York, he was taking two college students who had spoken at the high school to the train station. While talking with them, he realized that the young women came from a Swiss village his division had accidentally bombed and destroyed during the war. More recently, he and his wife were entertaining guests at their home when Braunhut discovered that one of the guests, a man from Germany, lived in a village bombed by the 8th Air Force. Braunhut said the man vividly recalled American soldiers looting his family home and stealing his mother’s jewelry. As the soldiers left, one of them dropped some jewelry, and Braunhut’s guest remembered running out to retrieve it. “The war comes back in so many ways,” Braunhut said. But the way that troubles him most is the perpetration of the horrors of war. “We do this to generation after generation, and I simply cannot fathom this,” he said. “In the war, you figured you were never going to have anything — never a wife or a family. You thought each step would be your last. It is so awful to me that we are doing this to two other generations.” — James Straub