Duty
 Bob Greene
 (Reviewed by The Editor - Rebecca Brown)
 2000 William Morrow/HarperCollins Pubrs, NY USA
  ISBN: 0380978490


A Father, His Son, and the Man who Won the War. Back home in Ohio to be with his dying father leads this author to knowing his dad in ways he never had before, thanks to a quiet man who lived a few miles away. Paul Tibbets & his flight in the Enola Gay which changed the course of WWII & this author's father's life.

This quiet man who had been so revered by Bob's dad was Brigadier General Paul Tibbets, USAF(Ret.) At the age of twenty-nine, at the behest of his President & at the request of his country, he had assembled a secret team of 1800 American soldiers in the Utah salt flats & the island of Tinian in the Pacific Ocean. There, the 509th Composite Group, worked to deliver the first atomic bombs ever to be used.

In this memoir of three lives connected by history, proximity & family ties are many stories, often intimate & achingly personal as well as deeply historic. In one soldier's memories of a mission that changed the world & a son's final attempt to grasp his father's sense of honor & duty, lives a haunting tribute to ordinary heroes in an extraordinary time.

Even as Bob Greene continues his friendship with Paul Tibbets, asking of this aging citizen, the questions he could not have asked his own father; meeting Paul Tibbets' surviving crew members, Bob is listening to the tapes his father had made, of his memories of when he met Bob's mother, of his life in the infantry as they marched ever north in Italy after the retreating foe only to be pulled back to the coast to prepare to be shipped for the invasion of Japan. Only to be told they would not have to go because the bombs that the 509th had dropped had brought Japan to surrender; had saved the world.

It has been fascinating to see those long ago years through different eyes, through another perspective; simply put, the fiber of duty & the fabric of life at that time when our parents & grandparents stood brightly in the sun. Bob Greene has raised my consciousness about the quality of duty for Paul Tibbets & Bob's father did their duty during dire times. Whether you agree with it or not, as you read, you will see that Paul Tibbets was the perfect man for the task.

Bob Greene has woven together an absorbing book of discovery of things momentous & minute: his father's army trunk in which lay the debris of those young & distant years; the 50 years his parents had attended the Saturday football games at the Ohio Stadium & traveling with Paul Tibbets to Branson, Missouri for the last Hurrah of the B-29 crew & a grateful son's gesture.

Gripping, emotional & inspiring, Bob Greene's homage to his father & to the man who saved the world is a must read.

More from Bob Greene: Chevrolet Summers, Dairy Queen Nights; The 50-Year Dash; Rebound: The Odyssey of Michael Jordan; All summer Long; Hang Time; He Was A Midwestern Boy on His Own; Homecoming: When the Soldiers Returned from Vietnam; Be True to Your School; Cheeseburgers; Good Morning, Merry Sunshine; American Best; Johnny Deadline, Reporter; Billion Dollar Baby; Bagtime with Paul Galloway; Running: A Nixon-McGovern Campaign Journal; We Didn't Have None of Them Fat Funky Angels on the Wall of Heartbreak Hotel, and Other Reports from America.
(10/22/00)

Rebecca