Twenty cadets of the Civil Air Patrol's Tamiami Composite Squadron sat in front of flying ace Lt. Col. Don Blakeslee at Wings Over Miami, the air museum at Kendall-Tamiami Airport.
''How many of you have ever soloed?'' he asked them. By this he meant if they had piloted a plane without a teacher aboard.
Nobody had.
''It's the greatest thrill you'll ever have,'' Blakeslee said. ''And if you're lucky enough to be a fighter pilot, it'll be the first time you get a kill.''
Blakeslee has lots of kills, but he doesn't like to talk numbers.
Rafael Lima, who was at the museum and had interviewed him for a documentary film, put the number at 16 planes shot out of the sky. Lima said there are about four pilots alive in Blakeslee's generation with that many kills, and that Blakeslee had logged 1,200 combat flying hours.
Blakeslee is 89 and looks 70. He is an ex-smoker who used to go through four packs a day, if he happened to be drinking. He is a widower who dresses in jeans and cowboy boots. He drives a sporty Acura and lives alone in Homestead.
Wanting to fight, but the United States not being in the fight, Blakeslee joined the Canadian Royal Air Force at the beginning of World War II. He later flew for Great Britain and the United States, and in 1944 assumed command of the 4th Fighter Group.
After that war finished he went to another one on the Korean peninsula, and on to the next in Vietnam.
Eventually, Blakeslee was recognized as one of the two finest combat fighter commanders in the history of the United States Air Force.
The cadets at Wings Over Miami were teenagers, a few years younger than Blakeslee was when he signed on. Some of them had used computer flight simulators or had been up with their teachers in Cessna trainers. They didn't know much about fighter planes or war.
Somebody asked about the feel of killing.
''There's nothing like the thrill you get when you kill someone,'' Blakeslee said. ''You really learn to fly when you kill someone who's out to kill you. But it's a nasty game if you don't like it.''
Blakeslee talked about the importance of confidence. ''You sort of have to be an egotist,'' he said. ''If you're not the best and don't get to thinking you're the best, you're not going to last.
''I don't know of anyone who's a bigger egotist than I am.''
He said little about German pilots. They were ''pretty damned rugged,'' he said, and he'd never had any interest in meeting them. ''No, and they wouldn't want to meet me, either.''
He'd seen only one face-to-face, and that was only because Blakeslee couldn't shoot him first. His guns had frozen at altitude.
''What did a fighter pilot do after returning from a mission? What's it like, being in the sky? Were you ever scared?'' the cadets asked.
Usually, he said, pilots partied, if they came back.
The sky is nice, if you're up there alone, but if there are nasty people up there it's horrible. He'd never been scared, maybe because he'd gotten his first kill early. He never once thought he could not do it.
The only pilots he mentioned besides himself belonged to a Polish squadron. They were ragtag but impressive in one way: ''They had nothing left,'' Blakeslee said. ''Families gone. They just wanted revenge. When they were chasing Germans they'd just chase and keep going until they ran out of fuel.''
Blakeslee finished, and the cadets' minders presented him with a model of the P-51 Mustang he'd flown, a squad T-shirt and a miniature U.S. flag. The cadets took digital pictures and thanked him for serving his country.
''I'm going to shoot down as many Iraqis as possible,'' Javier Roviera, 17, a senior at Felix Varela Senior High, said when he shook Blakeslee's hand. ''And the North Koreans are next.''
The cadet squad disbanded for the day, and Blakeslee walked out to the parking lot. He recalled dumping napalm in Korea and strafing infantry coming down from the North.
He is a man at home with killing and maybe in love. ''I never had any problem with it,'' he said. ''If you hate enough, it's no problem at all. I'm not ashamed of it. Hell, I lived for war. That was my business.''
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