“In 1912 he got his commission, and became an ensign. And he also began to formulate plans for his great adventures. Connected with the Navy—there was no telling what opportunity for adventure would come to him. But he reckoned without his ankle. It gave way a third time—this time while he was going down a gangway, so that he was pitched headfirst down. They tried to fix up the ankle—in fact, they joined the bones together with a silver nail. That is, Byrd thought that they had used a silver nail—and when he discovered that just a plain, ordinary nail had been used, he felt very much deflated. Nail and all, Byrd walked with a limp, and an ensign with a limp was just useless, so far as the Navy was concerned. So Byrd was retired. “That must have been an awful blow to him. Not only was the only career open to him cut short, but he had been married the year before, to Marie Ames, a childhood sweetheart from Winchester. So that his retirement affected not just himself, but another as well. “It might have floored a lesser man. But not Dick Byrd. In 1917 the United States went into the World War, And Byrd, who had been rejected by the Navy, and who doubtless could not have found a place in the army, decided to go into the branch of the service that wouldn’t ask questions about his bad leg—because it didn’t matter whether he had a bad leg or not—in aviation. So to aviation he turned. “He entered the Naval flying school at Pensacola, Florida. It was a lucky day for Byrd and for aviation that he took to the air. It seems that the air was where he belonged. He was a Byrd by birth, and might have been born with wings, for the ease with which he took to flying. “He became assistant superintendent of the school, and was on the commission to investigate accidents. There were a lot of them, then. The planes were not so highly developed as they are now—and the green youngsters who were entering the service could not handle them. You can imagine how horrible it was to see some friend’s plane come crashing down into the ocean, and have to be the first to go out in the rescue boat, in order to do what was possible to rescue him, and to discover what had caused the accident. A warning from the observation tower—somebody was in tailspin. A deafening crash! And the rescue boat would be put out before the waves from the great splash had subsided. At this work Byrd learned that more than half of the accidents could have been avoided with care—either in inspecting the machine before going up, or in handling it up in the air. “Dick Byrd was just too good. That was his tough luck at this point in his career. He was too good to be sent over to France, where he wanted to go. He was sent instead to Canada, where he was chief of the American air forces in Canada. At this job, as well as at any other that he undertook, Byrd acquitted himself admirably. And even though he chafed at being kept in America, he did his job well.