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Men who train for months to fight, then travel far across the seas to war, gradually attune to a new world in which their business is to kill or be killed.
But it was an extraordinary experience for the British people, after 300 years of living in peace, suddenly, in 1940, to find one of the defining battles of history being fought on their doorsteps.
Housewives looked out of kitchen windows to see Spitfires and Messerschmitts dogfighting overhead. Children playing in suburban gardens found cartridge cases clattering down from the sky around them. Young women who enlisted in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) expecting to cook, type, man operations rooms or pack parachutes far from the sound of gunfire, found themselves expected to do their duty amid exploding bombs. Absurdly young pilots who fought in the sky all day sang in their 'local' that night - if they survived.
This is the story told in a new TV documentary, The Heroes Of Biggin Hill, in which a cast of former aircrew, ground staff and locals, who lived through the Battle of Britain at its most famous airfield, recall their experiences 70 years later.
Biggin Hill in Kent became a fighter station in 1917, during World War I. Through the two decades that followed, it was a popular posting for the young men of the RAF - 'nice little airfield, a lovely officers' mess'. It was handy for nights out in London, and earned a reputation for its jolly social life. Young men flocked to the RAF before the war got serious because, to their generation, flight seemed so wonderfully romantic.
Like the then 19-year-old Sergeant Tony Pickering, who says, 'I'd seen pictures of trench warfare, so I thought, "I'm going to join the Air Force instead." I'd always wanted to fly.'
And in the beginning, he and his fellow 'Brylcreem boys' did indeed find glamour - airmen did attract the girls. 'It was like nothing else, and I loved it,' says Pickering, who was thrilled at the experience of throwing a fighter around the sky.
In 1939, Churchill visited Biggin Hill from his home at nearby Chartwell, and shared a drink with the men in the mess. The neighbouring village still felt like real countryside and, in summer, a heavy scent of strawberries suffused the cottages as lorries trundled past, laden with fruit for the London market.
For local civilians, the sights and sounds of the airfield became familiar, but it was cut off from the village by barbed wire and sentries at the gate. In the words of local, 'We knew that was where the war was happening'. But all through the winter of 1939-40, it was still other people's war.
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