WHEN PENGUINS FLEW AND WATER BURNED This is the true memoir of one US Air Force navigator’s journey from the schoolhouses of Air Training Command to the nuclear alerts of the Cold War to combat in a 35-year-old anachronism called the B-52. It is a first-hand account of life during the last days of Strategic Air Command, the early days of Air Combat Command and the ensuing military drawdown of the 1990s. From peacetime training exercises across the globe to combat operations in Desert Storm, Jim Clonts takes the reader inside the cockpit where life and death are seconds apart. Often comical, sometimes heart-pounding, other times tragic, WHEN PENGUINS FLEW AND WATER BURNED takes you into the world of military aviation, a crucible where warriors learn the true nature of character, conscience and mortality.

Friends of Liberty VOL 46
by Jim Clonts, 2010

03/24/2010

Today I came across the following in a short novel I am reading and thought it may strike a chord with you, Friends of Liberty, given the events of the past weekend.

"But I still wonder how it was possible, in those graceless years of transition, long ago, that men did not see whither they were going, and went on in blindness and cowardice, to their fate. I wonder, for it is hard for me to conceive how men who knew the word "I", could give it up and not know what they lost...

Perhaps, in those days, there were a few among men, a few of clear sight and clean soul, who refused to surrender. What agony must have been theirs before that which they saw coming and could not stop. Perhaps they cried out in protest and in warning. But men paid no heed to their warning. And they, these few, fought a hopeless battle, and they perished with their banners smeared with their own blood. And they chose to perish, for they knew."

Ayn Rand, ANTHEM

1937

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