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Gingrich wrote that during the height of the Iraq war, shortly after President George W. Bush donned a flight suit and gave his premature "Mission Accomplished" speech on an aircraft carrier, Republicans were triumphant and saw themselves as the world's saviors for ending terrorism and building a new world in America's image, whether the world wanted it or not.

On a crisp September night in 1943, a woman boarded a warplane ready to return to Poland to fight the Nazis, a parachute strapped to her back and a blue dress beneath her flight suit.

On Thursday, Putin, clad in a flight suit, boarded the warplane at a snow-covered airfield of an aircraft-making plant in the Volga River city of Kazan that has built the heavy bombers since the Soviet times.

“He was a tail gunner on a bomber in England, and his flight suit — you know they’re heated, and the heating went out on his right hand and his fingers froze to the gun and he wound up having his fingers amputated,” she said.

Air Force flight suit, the mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo took her place onstage one recent morning and began to sing about war.