The time of their lives: sixty years ago, millions of American men did extraordinary things in World War II. But you've never read anything like this.

That's it, that's right. McCarthy. That was the sergeant's name. He was an Irishman from Massachusetts. The Boston area. Justin McCarthy. His gun jammed. Funny things happen in war, and that's what happened. This was Normandy, July 26, 1944. They were running along the hedgerows, Looking for Germans. Private First Class Lou Junod was following McCarthy. Then McCarthy's gun jammed. He had to go back and get another. He said, I'll be back. He didn't come back. Junod was Lost and alone. There were Germans on the other side of the hedgerows. Junod couldn't see them, but he could hear them. He stood up, fired off a few rounds, ducked back down. He wasn't trying to be a hero. Then something came flying over. A little thing. Round. It rolled on the ground, right next to Junod's boot. Then it exploded. Or Junod guesses it exploded, because the next thing he knew, another soldier was shaking him awake. Junod was covered with blood. Do I still have my legs? he asked. You still have your legs, the soldier said, and pointed him to the field hospital. It was funny, because his gun was gone. He had to take a rifle off a dead man. He wandered around for a while with a dead man's rifle, but he found the field hospital. Then the artillery hit. The ground went up, then went back down. Junod woke up in a different hospital, with a haircut. But he didn't go home. He got his Purple Heart, but he recovered. He was one tough son of a bitch in those days. He was twenty-five years old. He weighed two hundred pounds. Back home, he drove rivets. He wound up getting shipped to a replacement depot. He was on his way back to the front as a replacement. He never saw Sergeant Justin McCarthy again. He always figured the son of a bitch got lucky. His gun jammed. Then Junod got hit. Twice in the same day. Twice in the same hour, practically. Christ, that was the kind of luck he had.

More than four hundred thousand American men died in World War II. This is a story about some of them--thirty of them--who didn't. They were spared. This is not in itself so unusual. Sixteen million Americans were mobilized for World War II. One in forty died. The instrument of salvation, though-well, that was unique. It would be easy to say they got lucky; but luck doesn't quite account for either their survival or the degree to which they enjoyed it. Anyone who lived through World War II got lucky. These men, however, did not just live through World War II; they had the time of their lives. In the crucible of war, some soldiers found out they were heroes, others that they were cowards. The soldiers in this story found out they were celebrities.

Basically, what happened is this: They put on a show. No, they weren't USO. They were GIs. They were in the infantry. They were artillerymen. They drove tanks. They'd landed in Normandy within a few days or weeks of D-day. Some had been in combat; a few had been wounded. They were all waiting to go to the front, and they were all pretty sure they were going to die. And then, at the moment each of them had been given his orders, at the moment each had been told to clean his rifle and get on that goddamned troop truck, an officer intervened and said, Get off that truck, soldier: The Army doesn't want you to kill Germans. It wants you to put on a show for Americans. It wants you to live.

The intervention was, as several of them would say later, a miracle. It was especially miraculous because, as all the men would find out, the Army didn't actually want them to put on a show at all. The Army still wanted them to kill Germans. The show, which was called For Men Only, was strictly the officer's idea. His name was Russell Thomas. Lieutenant Russell Thomas from Tulsa, Oklahoma. He was a military man who subverted military discipline in the thick of some of the heaviest fighting of World War II. He saved the lives of thirty men, and yet his reasons for doing so would puzzle them for as long as they lived.

"We were all technically AWOL," remembers Norton Cohen, who wound up surviving World War II writing jokes and imitating one of the Andrews Sisters. "We weren't getting mail, and we weren't getting paid. Nobody knew where we were. We didn't have any equipment, we didn't have any food. Anything we had, we got ourselves. During the day, we hid out in the hedgerows; at night, we'd do a show. Then we'd disappear. We were completely under the radar in the middle of France in the summer of 1944. I look back and still don't know how we did it."

It sounds like a movie--a kind of Schindler's List for American GIs with a little Bridge on the River Kwai vibe thrown in. It could be a movie. Hell, it was a movie, sort of, because the men who lived it thought of it in those terms. Think of it--and themselves--in those terms, still.

NORTON COHEN: the gangly kid, the innocent, the "nice Jewish boy" from Louisville, Kentucky, who sometimes had to seek the protection of LOU JUNOD, six years older, the charismatic Brooklyn crooner with a streak of violence. DICK CROSBY: the wavy-haired cherub from New Orleans who knew he didn't have it in him to kill anyone--"I just wanted to chase girls and play my horn"--and so, through the auspices of LIEUTENANT RUSSELL THOMAS, wound up as a combination of the Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy and the Pied Piper. He spoke in sleepy jazzman's jive, "Hey man" this and "Hey man" that, so the rest of the fellows called him "Spook." He took his battered cornet to war and played it everywhere he went. Soldiers would be marching along some muddy/ dusty road and they'd hear somebody playing American jazz from the back of a truck, above the din of battle. At least that's how one of them, Bob Bogart, remembered it when he told the story to his son Bob Junior:

"My dad had a whole story about how he joined the show. He always told it the same way. It began with him marching along some muddy road, so tired he couldn't raise his head. He was marching to the front. And then he hears, in the distance, somebody playing jazz trumpet. He's climbing a hill, and when he gets to the top, there's Richard Crosby playing 'You Made Me Love You.' It was something right out of a movie."

Of course, the soldiers who performed in For Men Only could say that their experiences were right out of the movies because theirs was the first generation of American soldiers who even knew what movies were. They grew up on movies. By the time they enlisted, the American war machine was helping rev up the American popular-culture machine, and vice versa. Indeed, by the time Spielberg made Saving Private Ryan and Brokaw published The Greatest Generation, the only surprise was the revelation that the men heretofore portrayed by the likes of John Wayne, Burt Lancaster, William Holden, Henry Fonda, and Steve McQueen were, in fact, reluctant heroes who didn't speak about war, much less glorify it. The revelation was surprising because, as any son of a World War II veteran knows, they never stopped talking about it. They told war stories to their sons and they told war stories to one another, and the war stories they told were often celebratory, if not of war itself, then of the camaraderie required to fight it. They watched the same movies their sons did, and if they knew the movies were bullshit, they rarely came out and said so--that's where they were silent. They didn't glorify themselves because they didn't have to. They had already been glorified, to a level unprecedented and now impossible to repeat.

It was the Good War, at the same time that it was the Big One, and most Americans tend to think it was the Good War because it was the Big One: because something as large as, oh, human civilization was at stake and because American soldiers threw themselves so selflessly into the cause of human freedom. Well, obxiously, there's something to all that, or else a war that stands unchallenged as the culminating cataclysm of all human history--the very apotheosis of human savagery--wouldn't have such a sterling reputation. It wouldn't be so immune to the corrosive effect of historical reconsideration, and it wouldn't have spoiled Americans for all wars to come, including the present one. It wouldn't have left the generation of men who fought it so relatively untroubled, and it wouldn't still sound like so much fun.

Sure, sure: The soldiers who starred in For Men Only are not exactly representative. They are, however, just as representative as the soldiers who, in the works of the World War II hagiographers, are supposed to stand for the rest: the Iowa plowboys who wiped out whole nests of German gunners with their teeth and then chafed at winning their Medals of Honor because all they wanted to do was go back home and work the farm.

The proof is in the pudding or, in this case, the culture: If World War II was all about stoic heroism, then the culture it spawned should have been stoical and heroic. It wasn't. It isn't. The culture it spawned was our…