Hart’s War

The Tuskegee men ended up flying more than fifteen hundred combat sorties over Europe. And it is one of the more delicious facts of war that they, indeed, never lost a bomber they were escorting to enemy action. Not a one. But not without cost. To maintain this pristine record, more than sixty of these young men sacrificed their lives.

There are a number of fine works about the kriegie experience.

Lewis Carlson's We Were Each Other's Prisoners is a fascinating collection of oral histories. Arthur Durand's history of Stalag Luft Three is complete. David Westheimer's Sitting It Out is a detailed and elegant memoir of his time in the camps. (I borrowed the slightly risque words to "Cats on the Roof" from this estimable book.)

Once, while talking with my father-I think we were discussing fear and food, two subjects that had more in common than one might initially believe-he suddenly mused, "You know, being in that camp was probably one of the most important things that ever happened to me. It probably changed my life." Given what he has accomplished over the arc of his years, I suppose one could argue that whatever changes came about within him because of his war experience, they were for the best. But that is an observation that might well be true for an entire generation of men and women.

Sometimes I think we live in a world so obsessively devoted to looking forward that it frequently forgets to take the time to look back. But some of our best stories reside in our wake, and, I suspect, no matter how harsh these stories are, they help tell us much about where we are heading.

John Katzenbach

John Katzenbach has been a criminal court reporter for The Miami Herald and Miami News and a featured writer for the Herald's Tropic magazine. He lives in western Massachusetts.