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The B-17 ball turret gunner was a subject of American poet Randall Jarrell's poem titled "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner," published in 1945. The poem goes as follows: "From my mother's sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose." In 1942, Jarrell enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces, initially as a flying cadet and later becoming a celestial navigation tower operator. He provided the following explanation: "A ball turret was a Plexiglas sphere set into the belly of a B-17 or B-24, and it housed two .50 caliber machine guns and one man, a short small man. When this gunner tracked a fighter attacking his bomber from below with his machine guns, he rotated with the turret, hunched upside-down in his little sphere, resembling a fetus in the womb. The fighters that attacked him were equipped with cannons that fired explosive shells. The hose mentioned in the poem referred to a steam hose."