The fourth book, Central Coast Aviators of World War II, will be about war again, and it will be about my parents’ generation again. That doesn’t mean I haven’t learned anything new.

I’ve found a couple of scholarly treatises on this generation, written during the mid-1930s, that bewailed them, negated their promise and despaired for civilization’s future. They were seen by those scholars as shallow, easily distracted by trivialities like popular music and films. They were pleasure-seekers intent on immediate gratification.

And then evil descended on a mythic scale–it was Tolkiensesque–and the Jitterbuggers and hot-rodders and bobby-soxers proved that the scholars, in this case, were idiots.

There is no parallel for what Tom Brokaw called “The Greatest Generation” until and unless you look at the voting patterns and the political candidacies of the Millenials. Yes, many of them are struggling: many are jobless and hopeless, some are in jail, some have succumbed to early-onset cynicism.

But if you look at the World War II generation closely–especially at the few lost fliers who left behind their high school photos– you experience the shock of recognition.

Had I been misplaced a few decades, these kids could have been my kids, back-row wise-crackers or front-row hand-raisers, in any of my history classes. I would have been watching them proudly in the 1930s when they turned their tassels; I would have kept tabs on them, with them gone on to college or trades, gone on to families (three of these boys died with toddler girls back home) and then I would have lost them in the dislocation of wartime America.

They were gone, with events moving so rapidly,  to the Army Air Forces, gone to die in a war that made them vanish, because, in so many cases, there was no body to bring home to San Luis Obispo or Templeton or Arroyo Grande. They had fallen from the sky to leave nothing to the rest of us, earth-bound and bereft.

What they left behind–what they died for, even if they could not have articulated it, because that’s the job of historians–was the ideal of republican democracy and the belief in our common humanity.

If you believe in those things, as I do,  then the best part, the best part, is that they are not gone at all. They are not vanished. They are not dead. I can see them, coming home to us in a generation born a half-century after these young men had flown five miles above us.