CLASS OF 1942.(World War II veteran reflects on war memories and on possible war with Iraq)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 03-MAR-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Neil MacKenna, my brother-in-law, got blown up in the fighting at Belfort Gap, in eastern France, and walked with a limp after that. Now he walks with two canes. John Brackett, Walter Ebbitt, and William (Boopa) Sturtevant, Jr., who were school or college or summertime friends of mine, died while training to fly combat planes for the Army or the Navy. Freddy Alexandre joined the Royal Canadian Air Force a year before Pearl Harbor and was killed on a Mosquito combat mission over the English Channel. Harry Blaine fell in the first wave at Saipan; our classmate Demi Lloyd, a Navy aviator, was killed there two days earlier. Orson Thomas was lost at Wake Island; Bob Nassau and Paul Carp in the Mediterranean; Allan Waite in the Southwest Pacific. Gordy Curtis, a childhood friend of my first wife, died in the Allied invasion of Sicily, in 1943, when the Army plane he was piloting was shot down by friendly fire. Three others I'd known in college (at least a little) went down in B-17 or B-24 bombers over Europe: Bill Emmet, on his fifth mission; Frank Joyce, on his eighteenth; and Robert Rand, on his forty-third. Rand had won the Purple Heart and the Air Medal...

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