THE BELL CURVE -- joseph n. bell

On this day 58 years ago -- two days after the attack on Pearl Harbor --

I enlisted in the Navy Air Corps. The day after the attack, I hitchhiked

from the University of Missouri in Columbia to my home in Fort Wayne,

Ind., to get my father’s permission. It seems quaint now, but the Navy

then required its pilot enlistees to have two years of college and

parental consent if they were under 21 -- which I was.

I had to convince my father, who strongly supported my enlistment but

asked me to consider finishing my junior year at college first. When he

saw the degree of my determination, he signed the papers, I enlisted,

then went back to school to await my call.

There I found I had become a member of a group of other Navy pilot

enlistees who had been designated by enthusiastic Navy recruiters as the

Missouri Flying Tigers. During the four months we awaited a summons to

active duty, we fantasized nightly about making history as the squadron

that single-handedly wiped out the Japanese fleet.

That fantasy lasted until the end of pre-flight school, when we were

fragmented and sent to a half-dozen different primary flight centers.

The degree of our innocence back then seems downright breathtaking now.

We actually sent a committee to see the commanding officer at Iowa

Pre-Flight to explain to him that we had been promised we would go

through flight training and into combat as a unit. That was the day the

real world began to take over.

I recall this here for two reasons in particular: because Pearl Harbor

Day always sets me to remembering such matters and because so much is

being written and said about what a great generation we were -- an agenda

that warms me deeply but also seems to require a little perspective from

some of us who were there. Especially when the plaudits extend to

canonizing our formative years as the Good Old Days, when our society was

universally imbued with solid principles that made clear distinctions

between right and wrong.

This current wave of adulation pretty much started with Tom Brokaw’s

book, “The Greatest Generation,” a paean of love that described us as

“men and women whose everyday lives of duty, honor, achievement and

courage gave us the world we have today.” A few years later, the movie

“Saving Private Ryan” put the capstone on this assessment.

I don’t mean in any way to denigrate it. When called upon, we did a hell

of a job, and I’m as proud of my part in it as the contemporaries I meet

and swap reminiscences with frequently.

But the accolades sometimes become uncomfortable. We did what we did

because those were the times in which we lived. We had the misfortune --

or, perhaps, the good fortune -- to grow up and spend our early adulthood

during a devastating economic depression and a global war.

Faced with these crises, we performed admirably. But we are all creatures

of our time, and I have no reason to believe that succeeding generations

required to deal with the same problems we faced wouldn’t have done as

well. And did -- with the crises presented them.

To take two examples, I can’t think of any group that showed more raw

courage and dedication than the young people who put their lives on the

line in the deep South to fight for equality for black people in our

society. Or the young men who fought a rotten war in Vietnam without the

proper support of either their government or fellow citizens.

And a little balance about the idyllic moral times in which we grew up is

useful. I can still remember vividly standing on my uncle’s front porch

in the county seat town of Decatur, Ind., and watching the Klu Klux Klan

parade before mostly approving fellow townsmen. They were marching not to

protest black people -- there were virtually none in Decatur at that time

-- but Catholics.

In the years before Pearl Harbor, we lived in an almost totally

segregated society, both north and south. In the north by economic

necessity, in the south by local law and custom. We torpedoed the League

of Nations, fought unionism and created organized crime by a foolish

effort to outlaw alcohol (which, not incidentally, we are repeating today

with other drugs). And if there was a black Naval aviator in my war, I

sure never ran into him.

But the Depression taught most of us that there is a commonality in

despair. And when it touches virtually a whole society, we learn to work

together with compassion and respect. Life was reduced to simple verities

that carried over to family relations and trust between people. And that,

in turn, carried over to an unparalleled national effort in World War II,

both at home and in the military.

Being an American then was splendid. It was all captured for me on a road

sign I saw on a rocky trail on Guam that some unknown Yankee soldier had

erected. It pointed east, and scratched into the wood was “Rapid City

7,645 miles.”

If beneath our splendid surface were some serious blemishes, succeeding

generations addressed them aggressively and generally well. Meanwhile,

the simple verities of the ‘30s and ‘40s were engulfed in social disorder

and the explosion of technology. And new generations continue to struggle

to find those verities on their own terms, under conditions so very

different from those my generation experienced.

If those conditions will hopefully never be reproduced, we at least left

a model worth shooting for.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a Santa Ana Heights resident. His column runs

Thursdays.