Harry Mazer’s The Last Mission is drawn closely from his experiences as a seventeen-year-old in the Army Air Corps. Like Jack, he was a Jewish boy from the Bronx full of fantasies about heroism, and like Jack, he became a waist gunner and never fired his guns. Mazer was also the editor of
Twelve Shots: Outstanding Short Stories About Guns with contributing stories from Walter Dean Myers, Rita Williams-Garcia, Richard Peck, and other well-known authors to create a riveting collection of short fiction that explores the emotion-driven world of guns.
