biography

In 1965, drafted into the Army to serve in Vietnam, Lawrence Climo, a young physician just out of training, learned of a unique humanitarian mission with counter-insurgency objectives that was looking for doctors: Military Provincial Hospital Augmentation Program (MILPHAP). Because it seemed an honorable as well as a doable enterprise he volunteered and began keeping a journal. At the time he appreciated the varied interactions with people of different relitious, social, radical, and ethnic cultures. But then he encountered a culture shock that proved toxic and threatened to corrupt everything.

German midshipman Erich Killinger was captured by Russia at the start of World War I. Killinger escaped the Russian POW train in Siberia, fled to China, and passed through a series of German consulates and safe houses to Shanghai. Given fake identity papers, Killinger traveled in style by ship and rail from Shanghai to Skien, Norway, via the United States. He arrived back in Germany on March 6, 1916--eleven months after being captured.

As a member of a Georgia Christian commune, Koinonia, Greg Wittkamper was publicly and devoutly in favor of racial integration and harmony. When Georgia's Americus High School was integrated, he refused to participate in the insults and violence aimed at its black students. He was harassed and bullied and beaten but stood his ground. In the summer after his senior year, as racial strife in Americus reached its peak, Greg left town. Forty-two years later, in the spring of 2006, a dozen former classmates wrote letters to Greg, asking his forgiveness and inviting him to return for a class reunion. Their words opened a vein of painful memory and unresolved emotion. The long-deferred attempt at reconciliation started him on a journey that would prove healing and saddening. The Class of '65 transcends the ugly things that happened decades ago in the Deep South. This book is also the story of four other people--David Morgan, Joseph Logan, Deanie Dudley, and Celia Harvey--who reached out to their former classmate. Why did they change their minds? Why did it still matter to them, decades later? Their tale illustrates our capacity for change and the ways in which America has--and has not--matured in its attitudes about race. At heart, this is a tale about a pariah and the people who eventually realized that they had been a party to injustice.

Few people had even heard of Barack Obama before 2004, but one powerful speech in Boston changed all that for the Illinois senator.

"The men of the 77th Infantry Division couldn't fathom why Private Desmond T. Doss would venture into the horrors of World War II without a single weapon to defend himself. They called him a coward, but the soft-spoken medic insisted that his mission was to heal, not kill. Herndon shares the story of how Doss became the first conscientious objector to receive the Medal of Honor"--OCLC.

Jerald Walker recounts his childhood growing up worshipping in Herbert W. Armstrong's Worldwide Church of God, a religion with a white supremacist ideology, and discusses how he came to have is own faith.

"The untold story of five young American friends who left the ivory towers at Harvard and Dartmouth to take on the Nazis ..."--Back cover.

Brandon Webb discusses his life with a focus on his training to become a Navy SEAL.

Presents the letters of army nurse and prisoner of war Marcia Gates during World War Two.

Briefly examines the life of Desmond Doss, a Christian man who was at first ridiculed for his refusal to carry a weapon into war during World War II. However, on Okinawa, Desmond showed bravery nonetheless by carrying his wounded comrades to safety and won the Congressional Medal of Honor.