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

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 with seven oak-leaf clusters. I didn't know Dirck Westervelt in college but heard about him when he dropped out after our sophomore year to enter West Point. Late for our war, he stayed on in the service as a fighter pilot and died over Seoul, Korea, in 1951, on his seventy-sixth mission. A cousin of mine, Hyozo Omori, the adopted son of my bluestocking aunt and her Japanese husband, also died at Saipan, albeit while fighting for the other side. Hyozo and I had exchanged pen-pal letters as kids.

Elsewhere in the Pacific, Larry Swift and I had tossed a coin to decide which of us would go to the Marianas and which would stay behind in Oahu and head Down Under a bit later. We were Air Force public-relations sergeants, and our job was to write stories about enlisted men for hometown papers in the States. He won the toss, and a couple of weeks afterward got into a B-25 bomber and flew a low-level mission over Tinian, to see what that was like. He was almost ten years older than I was, and curious; in New York, in peacetime, he had been a reporter with PM, the city's serious-minded, crusading afternoon tabloid. His plane hit a palm tree or ran into Japanese ground fire, and went in. My friend Gardner Botsford, who was an infantry officer, landed at Omaha Beach on D Day, fought in Normandy and at the Bulge and Aachen and the Hurtgen Forest, was twice wounded, and received numerous decorations, including the Croix de Guerre. He has recently written a book in which he talks about some of this, but never with pathos. He is suave and unflappable, but when there's a thunderstorm passing over his hilltop house in the Berkshires he turns pale and wears a different look.

My friend Bob Capa took the most famous combat photograph of the twentieth century--the 1936 picture of a Spanish Loyalist fighter at Cordoba falling violently backward and dropping his rifle as he takes a bullet in the head. Capa snapped more war photographs in Hankow, China, in 1938, and then in Italy and Paris and Bastogne and Leipzig in the Second World War. When the chance came in 1954 for him to go to Indochina, later known as Vietnam, to cover the fighting between the occupying French and the guerrilla forces of Ho Chi Minh, he admitted that he was tired of wars, but took the assignment. "It's the only thing I know how to do," he said. He stepped on a mine near Thai Binh and died. In 1967, my suburban neighbor Ted Yates went to Israel as a young TV news producer for NBC, to cover what turned out to be the Six-Day War. In Jerusalem, he heard some firing, stuck his head up, and was shot dead. He left a wife and three small boys. My friend Brian Urquhart jumped out of a ...