Let the Kicking Mule Kick

"Let The Kicking Mule Kick" is a unique, two-perspective, historical memoir. The words of First Lieutenant Ladd L. Horn will draw you into his world and his experiences as a WWII, B-26 bomber pilot. Through his fascinating oral stories, his letters and more than three hundred of his personal pictures taken during the war, your mind will be transported to the people, animals, places and machines of war in North Africa, Sardinia, Corsica and France. May they come to life for you as they did for me.

"Let The Kicking Mule Kick" is a unique, two-perspective, historical memoir. The words of First Lieutenant Ladd L. Horn will draw you into his world and his experiences as a WWII, B-26 bomber pilot. Through his fascinating stories, letters and more than three hundred of his original pictures your mind will be directed to the people, animals, places and machines of war in North Africa, Sardinia, Corsica and France. This is no "boring" history book filled with facts about generals, divisions and politics. Instead, it is real, funny and sad. In "Part 1 The War As I Heard It" the verbatim oral stories he told our family when he was in his nineties, incorporate the seasoned perspective that comes from remembering events after seventy-plus years. Then the hundreds of stories excerpted from his letters in "Part II The War Through The Lens of Love," explode with the raw emotions and insights of a twenty-one to twenty-three-year-old caught up in training and war. You will hear funny stories of crew members, dogs and kids, and even of pilots who forgot to buckle their seatbelts during training, "flew backwards," landed in farmer's fields or went off the runway and hit a horse. But you will also learn something of what it was like to buckle up in a 38,000 pound machine filled with bombs and six to eight crew members with the roar of two 2,000 hp engines outside the uninsulated cockpit and fly for hours at 10,000 to 18,000 feet in temperatures below zero with flak and 88 mm shells bursting around you while accompanied by the twin, very-real fears of being shot down or running out of fuel. And, you will hear first-person stories of what it was like to lose planes and friends. But what is so fascinating in this memoir is that the stories are all illustrated with pictures that 1st Lieutenant Ladd Horn took and developed, sometimes under a blanket, in a mess kit and helmet in his tent. The pictures are often combined with military documents that complete the picture of the reality of life during war. Sometimes as you read, you will likely forget that these stories are real. I wrote this book for his great-grandchildren and to my surprise, I have had them "fighting" over who gets to read next!

Keith A. Horn is a Ph.D. scientist, author and inventor who has written over forty major journal articles and book chapters and holds thirteen patents. He has received research grants from the ACS, NIH, and NSF and held the positions of assistant professor at Tufts University, group manager at AlliedSignal, Inc., Division VP and Co-Executive Director of Science and Technology and Division VP and Director of Commercial Technologies at Corning Incorporated and Associate Dean of Math and Science at Houghton University. He loves teaching the Bible to adults, teens and children, go-karting, ice-skating, skiing and being silly with grandkids, a little woodworking, vacationing internationally and especially visiting family in Africa. Jesus Christ is the Lord of his life and Valerie, his wife of forty-six years, is the love of his life. His current historical, WWII memoir, Let The Kicking Mule Kick, was written so that his two daughters and six grandchildren would know who their grandfather/great-grandfather, a B-26 bomber pilot, was and what he did for their freedom.