When Ed Ryon and his classmates at Tyner High School graduated in 1941, they didn’t have to decide what to do with their lives. Their immediate futures were already set; the Germans were taking control over all of Europe, and the draft was all anyone his age talked about.
Ryon and an old friend decided to join the Army Air Corps, even though neither had ever been in a plane.
“We knew we were being drafted, so we just more or less flipped a nickel,” he said.
They planned to stay together throughout the war, but when they were called to the train station in Chattanooga, they were split into separate groups based on their last names and didn’t see each other again for two years.
He was sent to Miami Beach to train before being sent overseas a year before the war ended.