Vasconcells is the most intriguing man to have served in the 27th Pursuit Squadron. Skillful and cautious, impressive but mischevious, hard-edged and vulnerable, funny and serious, Vasconcells embodied the fragile balance between fierce individualism and the soldierly subservience to the needs of his unit.

Frank and Joe looked the part of flying aces. Joe was rugged and handsome, with broad shoulders and a sturdy frame. Frank was golden - a matinee idol with sparkling eyes, blonde hair and chiseled features. Jerry was handsome, but not graceful; Ack was just plain Texas tough - a big-eared man with the goofy look of a maniac not quite gone over the edge.

Jerry was short and stocky with a broad-nosed, almost muscular face. His hairline receded over a prominent, high forehead. While Joe boasted prep school education and a busy passport and Frank was naturally gifted, Jerry got where he was through hard work and brains.

Today, nobody remembers Jerry Vasconcells. Even in Denver, his adoped home, Vasconcells in nothing more than a name on a plaque at the old airport. But what I remember him for was his survival. Jerry proved that sometimes the good guys didn't die young - though he carried the pyschological and physical wounds of the war to his grave.

Al Grant does not come across as one of the good guys, although he probably was not the evil dictator he sometimes appears.

One of four sons of Buffalo, N.Y.-native A. Grant, the chief mechanic at Denton's flour mill, Alfred graduated from Denton schools and spent one semester at a local college. From there, the young Grant traveled to Manhattan, Kansas, where he enrolled in the animal husbandry program at Kansas State Agricultural Collge and served in the campus military cadet corps.

Grant excelled at soldiering, and served as the commander of the cadet corps for a year before the war intervened. In 1917, when Grant was a junior in college, he left Manhattan and enlisted. He went on to become one of the first pilots of the 27th.

While I know little of his personal story, photographs and what I know from his military record suggest a man who might have been something of a bully: a square-jawed, broad-shouldered, jug-eared lineman whose narrow, close-set eyes seem to shimmer with knife's-edge intensity.

While the 27th trained in Texas, Grant enjoyed life. He and his friends - including Vasconcells - on occasion borrowed JN-2s and flew to Denton, which is northeast of Dallas. Pictures show Grant and his buddies clowning around in front of the simple wood- frame house Grant lived in on Oak Street.

But these visits were to have a tragic legacy. After Grant left for France, pilot trainers continued to make flights to Denton. One of Grant's brothers, Silas, was an invalid who had been crippled by a falling wall. Rejected for military service, Silas was the only brother left at home. He loved flying, like his brother Alfred, and arranged to have his mother drive him out to the field where the Army pilots were practicing. A trainer who had known Alfred agreed to take him up - and as Silas' mother watched, stalled, crashed, and killed the cripple.

Later, when Al wrote to tell his parents about shooting down his first plane, he attached as a postscript that read: "Silas is avenged!"

(Dec. 26, 1997 update: ) In 1919, upon returning to the United States, Grant stopped by Manhattan, Kansas to visit with his old fraternity. News clippings hailed him as a hero and an ace with five victories - a claim Grant appears to have promoted in letters to the paper in Manhattan. Though he appeared to enjoy his visit to familiar haunts, Grant did not re-enroll in the university, continuing on to Denton.

But records indicate Grant gave up on his old hometown soon after the war, moving to the Los Angeles area around 1921. He relocated his parents with him, and they died in his care in 1924.

Exactly what line of work he initially took up remains unclear, but in 1941 - when in his mid-40s - Grant was admitted to the fledgling California Bar Association. There are no records of him ever graduating or attending law school, so it appears likely that Grant "read" law under an established Los Angeles attorney. His obituary suggests he had been practing law in Southern California since about 1930.

Grant's law office was located in South Central L.A., just a few blocks from the epicenter of the Rodney King riots, but he lived in Glendale. He married, and fathered two children.

The former commander of the 27th does not appear to have made too great a mark with the balance of his life. Kansas State clippings suggest Grant wrote the local newspaper in 1944 offering to assist K State alumni with legal matters related to service in World War II. There is no indication that Grant served in the military during the Second World War, and he is notable by his absence in the records of the 27th Pursuit Association.

On Jan. 10, 1950 - a chilly, rainy day - Grant died of a heart attack in his Glendale home. There is something sad about his life story, but perhaps that is just the author projecting his own bias on the facts.

As a fighter pilot, his career was undistinguished. Grant fought relatively few combats and managed to down only two or three German aircraft. He suffers greatly in comparison to his counterpart, 94th C.O. Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker - who not only increased his squadron's productivity but also added numerous victories to his own list, usually while personally leading his pilots into their most dangerous dogfights. After his promotion, Grant often seemed content to stay on the ground during the most crucial moments of an offensive.

How Grant managed to wrangle the squadron commander's job is unclear. He didn't have a West Point background to support him, and his flight record was rather boring. Yet when Hartney moved up on Aug. 22, there was Grant - the martinet, the squadron's letter-censor, the big-eared Texan - waking the troops for reveille before 6 a.m. Perhaps that was the idea behind his promotion - to see what would happen if somebody scared a little discipline into the squadron.

If discipline was the key, then it wasn't very productive. By one count, the 27th destroyed 54 enemy aircraft during Grant's command. Twenty-four of those were destroyed by just two men - the rebellous pair of Luke and Wehner. When you take out the four victories Vasconcells earned while running his own operation out of Verdun, the margin gets even smaller.

To understand the essential differences between the two men, look no farther than Walter "Shorty" Williams. Grant, even before his promotion, had Shorty arrested for complaining about army life in a letter home. After the Armistice, Vasconcells, on the other hand, locked the heels of a cocky young lieutenant who was reaming Shorty for failure to salute him.

"Well, I'm a captain," the angered Vasconcells shouted. "Salute me!" Jerry kept the lieutenant there, running him through drill and ceremony until he got his point across.

While the men seemed to love Hartney and Vasconcells, Grant appears to have gone without their affection. Shorty's notes from post-war reunions make no mention of Grant's presence. With little personal glory to claim and a dubious record in his dealings with the squadron's dead heroes, Alfred Grant appears to have been more than willing to leave the war behind.

Jerry Vasconcells might have done the same had he not surpassed that magic five-kill number and become the only ace from the state of Colorado.

Vasconcells came from a small town on the prarie - Lyons, Kansas. Jerry's Portugeuse immigrant father was named deVasconcellos - a named he changed when a sign painter misjudged its length and ran out of room while painting it over the door to the man's store. Had the painter been worse at judging distance, Colorado's only ace might well have grown up with the name Vascon. Jerry was named for his uncle, Jerry Cox.

It is a classic American beginning - born to a Portugeuse shopkeeper and an Irish mother, Vasconcells began life in a midwestern small town.

Anxious for a change, teen-age Jerry moved to Denver, where Cox - a visionary - was at work promoting an irrigation project. Jerry moved in with his free-thinking uncle in the big city, but fate crossed him. The irrigation project failed, and Cox died soon after, leaving young Jerry alone and far from family.

This would have been enough for most high school students, but Vasconcells was never ordinary. With no adult support or supervision, Jerry worked his way through East High School in Denver - earning grades good enough to catch the eye of the Ivy League. He had no money, but was willing to work his way through. His future success seemed all but assured as he boarded the train from Denver to Darmouth College.

Yet as it often did, life threw him a curve. The usually healthy Vasconcells contracted double-pneumonia and was forced to return to Denver. His dreams of an Ivy League education came to an abrupt halt.

Jerry didn't let it throw him. Recovered from his life-threatening illness, Vasconcells enrolled in day classes at the University of Denver. To pay the bills he worked at a law office after school and stoked furnances on the midnight shift at the U.S. Mint. Despite his trying circumstances, Vasconcells graduated with honors and went to work for a Denver investment firm.

But Jerry Vasconcells was no mere drone. Despite his considerable work ethic, Jerry's blood ran hot with an adventureous spirit. As America drifted unsteadilly toward war with Germany, Vasconcells saw an opportunity for something beyond the successful future he had secured for himself. He volunteered for the air corps at Fort Riley, Kansas, in 1916, and was trained in Canada.

The written records on Vasconcells list him as a member of the original Lafayette Escadrille, although that makes no sense. I have no other record of his service in that storied unit, although I will double check the proper sources.

He is listed on the rolls of the 27th Squadron from its early days in October, 1917. It is at least possible that Vasconcells sailed for Europe, joined the Lafayette Escadrille and returned for service in the American Army after his country entered the war. This matter requires more study.

At any rate, by the time the 27th took up its place in the line, Jerry was a first lieutenant and one of the squadron's key flight leaders. There was something mature about him from the start, and men were drawn to his natural leadership.

Yet his flying career almost came to an end before it had really even started. On June 10, while leading a patrol, a bullet cut his gas line and Vasconcells found himself "dead stick" at 20,000 feet - with enemy fighters on his tail.

Jerry dove for a cloud bank, shook his pursuers, and began the slow glide to earth. He emerged at 2,000 feet still over German lines, and was immediately bracketted by anti- aircraft fire. He continued his descent.

"Everybody with any kind of a gun took a pot shot at me as I passed over the German trenches and went sailing toward our own lines," he recalled later. "I think someone even through a rock.

"The old bus went just as far as she could - 100 yards in front of the American trenches. She tried to poke her nose up just enough to get behind and enjoy a little protection, but she just couldn't make it. So there we were, the Spad and I, in No Man's Land, a couple of beautiful targets for the Boche - and how they heaved lead at us!

"I think it required just one minute for me to get out of my poor old bus and flatten out on the ground nearby. Then the Spad went to whatever heaven airplanes go to.

"A big washtubful of dynamite, heaved over by a Boche trench mortar landed square in the cockpit of the old ship - and went off!

"The next thing I know, four or five doughboys were racing toward me, yelling like the Comanches. I was already on my way toward them before I saw them. Then the doughboys had me and were pulling me over the parapet of the Yankee trench. Then it happened.

"Here I was, my legs still numb from the jarring landing and subsequent explosion, lucky to be getting away with my life, the Yanks hauling me to safety - and they had to bump my head against the breech of a trench mortar and knock me out cold. It was really a brutal knockout blow.

"I was actually out for three hours as a result of that collision between my skull and the mortar breech - concussion of the brain!

"In a cemetery behind the lines, within a few hours, a little cross stood beside a grave that waited for my remains. My relatives were notified of my death.

"Three nights later I stumbled into my old mess and howled for chow. I was greeted as one from the grave. Some of them pinched me, while others prodded me to see if that could believe their eyes. Up at the far end of the mess a buddy of mine began swiftly to unlace a pair of boots - my boots. Such are the fortunes of war. The lad in the stockinged feet even grumbled about it all, I think."

Vasconcells had been credited with one kill by the time Joe and Frank arrived at the squadron - a two-seat Rumpler downed over Dormans. He shot down his second plane in the Aug. 1 debacle. The other four came in September and October.

But Vasconcells wasn't honored by his comrades for his six confirmed kills. They came almost as a matter of course. His great asset was his personality - a rare mixture of humor, total dependability, loyalty and independence. Amid all the high-octane egos of the 27th Pursuit, Jerry Vasconcells stood alone as a man trying to stay in balance within himself.

Had Hartney had his way, Vasconcells would have replaced him as C.O. of the 27th and this story would have a very different ending. Instead, the job went to Ack Grant. To Hartney, Grant and Vasconcells were the beligerent twin angels of his eccentric psyche - the warring halves of a house divided against itself. In the end, Hartney simply moved the two to different air fields - a separation that was Frank Luke's last bleak hope.

Vasconcells flew under Grant until late September when Hartney ordered him back up to Verdun with B Flight to run an alert/refueling aerodrome. It was the same primitive field where Vasconcells had spent time during parts of St. Mihiel.

The idea was to get a flight closer to the action - a unit capable of getting to the lines more quickly when spotting reports called for an immediate response. Hartney could have chosen any one of the four squadrons under his command to provide that flight. He chose Grant's.

For a man like Vasconcells, it would have felt like a reprieve. While Grant was a man who liked to stomp about Rembercourt with an entourage of his pilots, Vasconcells was a guy who carried corn in his pocket to feed Tom and Jerry, the two geese he had trained as squadron mascots. Tom and Jerry once interrupted a solemn ceremony involving the French commander Marshal Foch by running frantically about pulling a little red wagon filled with beer.

He also had a tame fox (probably the one in the photo with Rickenbacker) and a trained monkey, which would jump from the rafters at Jerry's signal and scatter all the chips when Jerry was losing at poker.

On July 4, 1918, Jerry flew in an airshow meant to impress the British and French brass with America's quickly emerging Air Corps. American troops built a stand and covered it in case of rain. The lumber was wet and muddy from exposure.

After the show, Jerry buzzed the officers' reviewing stand, bouncing his wheels on the roofs and showering the colonels, generals and dignitaries with clumps of dried mud.

"I heard about it later," Vasconcells said later.

He once almost shot down Gen. Billy Mitchell when the chief of staff tried to join Vasconcells' formation unannounced. Only Mitchell's faster plane saved him.

Perhaps Jerry's best trick was his coffee trick. At his rough Verdun aerodrome, Jerry lived and worked under the shadow of two imposing naval guns on rail cars. The enormous 16-inchers were slow to load, and so were fired on more-or-less of a clockwork schedule. Jerry not only memorized the schedule, he possessed sufficient nerve to hold a cup of coffee level despite the deafening concussion of the nearby artillery.

This allowed him to invite fellow pilots into his office and - at just the right moment - treat them to a hot cup of coffee. Seconds later the gun would roar and the coffee would fly. Vasconcells would roll with laughter.

After moving to Verdun, Vasconcells never really fell back under Grant's control. As the war wound down, he finally received his formal command, serving as the first C.O. to the 185th Night Fighter Squadron under Hartney. The 185th never scored a combat victory. Five days after Jerry assumed command, the war ended.

The Armistice came at 11 a.m. on the 11th month at the 11th hour. Though the 185th was equipped with Sopwith Camels, Jerry posed in his personal Spad 13, smiling back at the camera from the cockpit at the exact moment the war ended.

He returned to the United States in 1919 a weakened, troubled man. Perhaps because of his concussion, perhaps because he suffered what we would call post-traumatic stress syndrome, Jerry was often felled by severe headaches. Suddenly his prosperous future as a lawyer and stock broker held no interest for him.

In the parlance of the day, Vasconcells' nerves were shot. His doctor prescribed "a period of physical labor and no mental strain," and the grateful state of Colorado pitched in. Former Gov. Elias Ammons had three sections of game preserve in Colorado's Middle Park made avialable for his son, Teller (a future Colorado governor!), Jere Wilson and Jerry Vasconcells. Jerry's time in service was counted as part of the time required to prove claim to the homestead.

For about a year, the former Army captain lived in the high Rockies, building a cabin, staying away from the life that awaited him, trying to come to terms with the war just ended.

A nightmare began to haunt him. It was a war memory, an image so horrific to him that it played on its own in an endless nocturnal loop. When he finally gave an interview to the Rocky Mountain News in the 1920s, he said only that it was the worst experience of his life.

"I was flying around 18,000 feet when my deputy flight commander was hit by a stray bullet from a German plane. He flew alongside me for a matter of seconds, threw off his helmet, goggles, waved, looked out at the front of his plane, which was commencing to smoke, looked over, smiled and waved again, and the plane exploded," Jerry said.

Another reference made years later suggests that this "memory" was either the nightmare that haunted him - or perhaps not a memory at all, but a powerful dream. Vasconcells does not identify the victim, and there is no fatality that I've found in the 1st P.G. records that matches this description.

Whatever the literal truth of the dream, Vasconcells was in those early years after the war a man quite literally crippled by it. He was not alone in that regard, and like most, he struggled through. By the early 1920s he had moved off the homestead and back to Denver, where he joined an investment firm. He granted an interview to a Rocky Mountain News reporter named Marietta Cassell (the well-heeled granddaughter of Henry Cordes Brown, who built the Brown Palace Hotel and gave Colorado the land on which to build its capitol), and in 1922, he married her. Jerry had been down, but he was clawing his way back into his life.

The slope was slippery. Marietta spoke of the nightmares that tortured him "and in which he saw, again and again, his best friend shot down in flames."

Meanwhile, his fellow pilots began to seek him out as they too wrestled with the leftover demons of France.

"The War Birds of 1917 and 1918 - most of whom seemed unable to make the transition to civilian life as Jerry had - often visited him in Denver," Bernard Kelly wrote years later. "Flying was in their blood and danger was their food and drink. Some barnstormed in rickety crates, some were stunt fliers, others pushed the frontiers of aviation outward. When they came to Denver it was the occasion for a party, with much laughter and reminiscence, and the celebration going on until dawn. At these times Jerry...recalled many of his experiences ...and on these nights the war had glamour, fun and comradeship."

Yet most of the time he kept his war memories all boxed up and packed away - literally. He showed no interest in his considerable collection of photographs and momentoes, dumping them all in a cardboard box in a basement cupboard and leaving them uncataloged at this death. He refused to let his wife compile his experiences into a book - even though there was a tremendous market for WWI aviation stories by the late 1920s. He vowed never to fly again, and often went through deep bouts of depression.

His one concession to the his wartime glory was an annual meeting to honor the memories of the men who didn't make it back - the Quiet Birdmen. It was born out of meeting of airmen in New York, and Vasconcells took it to heart. He showed up every year in their honor, wearing the bronze QB pin on that day and that day only.

Ten years after his discharge, Jerry finally confronted the worst of the unopened doors on his war. For a decade he had stayed away from airplanes. But finally, Vasconcells - his state's only flying ace - agreed to participate in a Colorado Day celebration and took to the air as part of the observance. It seemed to liberate him.

From that point on Jerry served a prominent role in Colorado aviation. He helped establish Denver's municipal airport and served - without salary or expenses - as chairman of the Colorado Aeronautics Commission under two governors.

In 1941, Vasconcells tried to return to the military when war broke out, but he failed the physical. In 1949 he took ill and he died in 1950, seven months later.

Even in death, Vasconcells and Grant were linked.

His momentoes were eventually donated to the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, where they remain - still uncataloged - to this day. He never had any children, and his wife remarried again after his death. His own family in Lyons, Kansas, still remembers him fondly - a jovial, successful man with pattern baldness and eyes that, while merry, still seemed to swim in deep pools of memory and sadness.