Their sleeping quarters were farther away from the field, which meant either walking or catching a ride on a truck, and too often they no sooner were in their own bed than the radio began squawking for a scramble. The remaining furniture of the ready room consisted of an odd assortment of chairs ranging from overstuffed leather easy chairs to cheaply made straight-back kitchen chairs, all the worse for wear. The walls were lined with pictures that matched the tastes of the pilots. Many of them were pinups of scantily dressed women peering coyly over their shoulders, but some airmen with classic tastes had also put up prints of The Blue Boy by Gainsborough and Whistler’s painting of his mother. These seemed rather incongruous, and the ears of both the boy dressed in blue and the gray-haired mother must have burned at the sizzling language that went on in the ready room. The longer walls of the rectangular room contained three windows each, which admitted the mid-July sunlight.
