Classics professor and military historian Victor Davis. Hanson has written extensively about ancient Greek and modern warfare. His uncle, who was also his namesake, fought and died in World War II, two intent on uncovering the last moments of his uncle’s life. Hanson was surprised to find several living members of the 29th Marines in the sixth Marine Division, which had taken heavy casualties at Okinawa. Here is an excerpt from one of his many correspondences with his uncle’s former comrades. Dear Victor, you simply must overlook the blatant familiarity reflected in this salutation. I plead only the overwhelming emotion with which I’ve been attempting to cope for the last 40 hours since the arrival of your startling letter. Thank you for enabling …

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Will Campbell also had the unique experience of seeing the return of the Enola Gay after its fateful bombing run over Hiroshima. So I was on side panel know when the war ended. In fact, I saw the Enola Gay land. I didn’t we didn’t know what had happened, but we knew something big had happened because our CEO, Oliver, said he didn’t know what it was, but he knew it was something very unusual. And. And the next day we heard that they’d dropped the first atomic bomb. We never heard of atomic bomb. Course. And, because we were when we saw the plane come in, we would go out every afternoon and watch them come back from their bombing raids. And …

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In World War II, two young American men who had never traveled a hundred miles from their homes suddenly found themselves thousands of miles from their own nation. Private Will Campbell was one such soldier, known today as a courageous minister in the civil rights movement and award winning author. Campbell enlisted in the army at 18 and was stationed at Saipan as a medic. Here, Campbell relates his experience crossing the Pacific in a Liberty ship. It was December 1943, and we were on a crowded troopship bound for the South Pacific. Most of us were in our teens, seasick, homesick, and a little afraid. I had asked my best pal, Herman Hyman, what he was going to send his girlfriend for …

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Vietnam War veteran Tobias Wolff translated his military experiences into an acclaimed memoir, In Pharaoh’s Army. I was sent off to language school to learn Vietnamese. I was gone for over a year, 13 months, and I was in civilian status that whole time. I never went to a base. That was how I spent the 13 months before I left for Vietnam. And that’s what begins this passage. Here is my orders for Vietnam. And then my year of grace ended at the end of it. Scared, short winded, forgetful of all martial skills and disciplines. I was promoted to first lieutenant and posted back to Fort Bragg to await orders. Just after I got there, I was assigned to a training …

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Award winning novelist James Salter. From fighter jets in World War Two and the Korean War. In this selection, from his memoir Burning the Days. Salter describes a dogfight with a MiG in Korea. The first good weather in a week. The fighter bombers are going north again in strength. To someplace up near the border. The briefing room is crowded and electric. It’s max effort. Everything they can fly. 600 enemy aircraft have encountered on their fields. We’re sending up 40 far beneath us. The silver formations were moving slowly, it seemed. Across barren hills. Enemy flights were being announced. One after another. And then someone saw them along the river at 30,000ft. Blood jumping after the idle days, we dropped tanks …

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