Word: gunner
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...course, a story of growing up-at a time when America was standing still. At a time when American youth did not have TV, the Beatles, drugs, radical politics or literary gurus to point them in a direction unlike the one they had always known. Sonny and Gunner had only each other, their cars, and a vague desire for something different and more exciting as means for escape...
Willard (Sonny) Burns and Gunner Casselman, the novel's two central figures, grew up in Indianapolis, went to college in Indiana, and knew nothing outside of the Midwest until a strange war called the "Korean Conflict" forced them to leave home for two years. Going All the Way is the story of their return home after Korea, their friendship, and their attempts to "start a whole new part of life-the 'real part...
...Sonny and Gunner are out of whack with their times and with their environment. Sonny doesn't see anything wrong with the Supreme Court desegregation decision, despite his mother's hysterical fears of a "darkening" of white Indianapolis neighborhoods. Gunner exercises his right to wear a beard and fall in love with a Jewish girl, despite the objections of his mother and his old "Big Rod" high-school jock friends...
Real escape can only be found by getting in the car and driving away. They finally decide to go to Chicago ("Chi"), where Gunner has a vague offer to work for an ad-agency. "They came roaring into Chi through a night torched by the steel-mill fires, eerie and hellish," writes Wakefield. They reach a curve in the road and Sonny fumbles, realizing it is "too late, too late even to put on the brake." They head straight into a cement abutment and then smash...
...that mistaken-identity crisis was a B-25 bombardier named Joseph Heller during a World War II raid over Avignon. He was a dozen feet from the pilot; yet they were separated by layers of chaos and terror. It was not Heller who was hurt?it was his gunner who was bleeding copiously into his flight suit. It was Heller's 37th mission. From that instant of agony he grew petrified of flight. When his war ended, he took a ship home; it was some 15 years later before the flyer entered another plane...