It looks like there's going to be a film about the Tuskegee Airmen. Despite the fact that it looks a little cliché-ridden, I will still probably go to see it. When I was but a little whippersnap, 2nd grade or so, I had the chance to meet some of the Airmen, who came to my hometown for reasons I don't remember to give a talk. I was a young kid who was fascinated by military history and remember reading up the night before so I could ask a good question. Though I've forgotten large stretches of the talk, one of the Airmen mentioned that he'd been shot down and held in a German POW camp; since I had a great uncle who had also spent some time in a POW camp, I thought I'd ask about that. I remember him saying "I wish I could tell you they treated us well," as though he really wanted to say it but couldn't bring himself to, even for the sake of a kid who didn't know what he was asking about.
There are three or four key points in my life that sparked my interest in ethics and war, and that was certainly one of them.
(The others include a short article on Raoul Wallenberg that I want to say was in Boys Life but might've been in a National Geographic (needless to say Wallenberg is my favorite Michigan alumnus by far) and the anecdote from the documentary Shoah that is right at the beginning of "The Conract of Mutual Indifference," which convinced me to watch all nine hours of the film)
"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
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