Before he was president, Bush was a young naval flier who survived being shot down. The experience stayed with him for life

In 1942, at George Bush’s wartime graduation from his preparatory school, the speaker was Henry Stimson, the secretary of war. Stimson urged the graduates to enroll in college, to give them the skills to become officers. After the speech, Bush’s father asked if anything Stimson said had made him change his mind.

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“No, sir,” the younger Bush replied. He had decided to enlist in the navy. Country and duty called and he would not take special treatment over others already in the service.

It was a natural choice for one with a lifetime love of the sea and boats but he also chose to fly, a sign of daring and courage underneath the exterior of someone born to privilege. He enlisted the day after his 18th birthday; for a time he was the youngest aviator in the US navy.

Already deeply in love with the woman who would be his partner for 73 years, he had “Barbara” painted on the fuselage of his Avenger. He flew 58 combat missions. Shot down near Chichi Jima in September 1944, he was rescued by a submarine, sharing the submariners’ life until he could be reunited with his ship – and return to battle. He never forgot that day, remembering two comrades who died, one when his parachute failed to deploy.

George Bush would have been the first to insist that his wartime story was not unique. Joseph Kennedy, scion of the Kennedy Democratic dynasty and the boy his father had marked to become president, was cleared to return home but died after volunteering for one final mission. Duty and honor knew no party.

As with so many others, the war marked Bush. The oil fields of west Texas, where he and Barbara moved to start his career after his delayed graduation from Yale, were far from the sea he loved but the same pluck and courage that propelled him to war led him to this venture rather than to safer, more conventional opportunities back east.

He had a sailor’s sense of duty and propriety. During the Malta summit of 1989, a few weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when he met Mikhail Gorbachev in the midst of a violent Mediterranean storm, he risked a dangerous helicopter landing on the USS Belknap and happily traveled to Gorbachev’s ship for dinner.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest In December 1989, aboard the Soviet cruise liner Maxim Gorky, Bush shakes hands with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Photograph: Jérôme Delay/AFP/Getty Images

Throughout his life, he maintained a deep kinship with veterans and the families of those serving. Early in his administration, on 19 April 1989, on the battleship Iowa – the ship that carried FDR to Casablanca – a turret exploded, killing 47 sailors. For many, the sight of George and Barbara Bush hugging and speaking with the family members after the memorial service was a moment that put a man who had promised a “kinder, gentler nation” into the national consciousness.

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The expression of grief in his remarks, written from his own experience of losing friends in the war, serves as a fitting epitaph:

They came to the navy as strangers, served the navy as shipmates and friends, and left the navy as brothers in eternity … You’ve always been strong for the sake of love. You must be heroically strong now, but you will find that love endures. It endures in the lingering memory of time together, in the embrace of a friend, in the bright, questioning eyes of a child. And as for the children of the lost, throughout your lives you must never forget, your father was America’s pride. Your mothers and grandmothers, aunts and uncles are entrusted with the memory of this day. In the years to come, they must pass along to you the legacy of the men behind the guns. And to all who mourn … I can only offer you the gratitude of a nation, for your loved one served his country with distinction and honor. I hope that the sympathy and appreciation of all the American people provide some comfort. The true comfort comes from prayer and faith. And your men are under a different command now, one that knows no rank, only love, knows no danger, only peace. May God bless them all.”

George Bush now serves under that “different command”, one in which he gladly served in life through a deep faith that informed his coolness and steadiness even in the most challenging circumstances.

“Any definition of a successful life must include service to others,” Bush said. Beginning in his 18th year and for three-quarters of a century, his did.