Roman was a high-school senior working at a Standard Stations filling station when Pearl Harbor was attacked. He tried to enlist the same day, but was told he was too young without his mother's permission — and on the way home to get it, he stopped by his girlfriend Carol's house instead. They eloped to Las Vegas that afternoon. A chance conversation with an aviation cadet who pulled in for gas later set him on the path to flight school, five nights a week of night classes at Polytechnic High School to qualify.
"Everything went fine until I applied opposite rudder — it jammed in the neutral position, and the plane just spun faster. I decided it was a good time to think about leaving the airplane."
That's Roman describing his first solo flight in a PT-22 trainer, practicing spins, when the rudder pedals jammed mid-recovery — he got as far as unbuckling his belt and putting a leg over the side of the cockpit before finding the problem (a jammed locking pin) and climbing back in. He never told his instructor. A second near-disaster came later in advanced training: a fellow cadet's rough landing knocked the propeller off their plane mid-runway, and Roman had to help fly it clear of a control tower and 150 parked aircraft before they belly-landed it — an episode that ended with a base commander getting quietly told off by his own squadron commander for questioning how it was handled.
The story closes on a personal note: the same cadet who first told Roman about the pilot program back at the gas station went on to fly Roman's very first combat mission with him overseas.
[This is a condensed excerpt for the sketch — the full page would carry more of the story alongside the video, as already sent to Bernard for review.]
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