As soon as their enlistments ended, Ed and some of his U.S. Army Air Corps buddies stationed in Hawaii planned to sail a boat to New York. The Japanese, however, scuttled those plans when they attacked Pearl Harbor. Born in New York City, Ed enlisted on July 31, 1939. He was shipped to Hawaii as part of the Twenty-Sixth Bomb Squadron, Eleventh Bomb Group, and trained as an instrument specialist on the B-18, a forerunner of the DC-3. He was sitting in the day room on December 7, 1941, when he heard "an aircraft going into a dive and all of a sudden, an explosion." Helping in the attempt to fight back, Ed was trying to attach a bombsight on a plane when Japanese pilots strafed the airfield. He spent the night manning a fifty-caliber machine gun. Ed was re-assigned to Fiji, and then was ordered to New Guinea. There he was stationed at Seven-Mile Field, which the Japanese often strafed and bombed. His unit's designation was changed to 435^th Bomb Squadron with reconnaissance as its mission. While he flew as gunner, Ed usually served on the ground in repairing aircraft. In October of 1942, he was ordered back to the states where he trained flight crews at Rattlesnake Bomber Base near Pyote, Texas. Later he was sent to Santa Ana, California for pilot training. By then he had accumulated enough points to leave the service as a first lieutenant in late December of 1944. Ed re-enlisted the next year and spent a career in the Air Force, retiring from military service in 1961. He opened a hobby shop in Shreveport, a business he operated for twenty-five years.