I don’t know how long Bob was in. But the only thing he ever talked about in any extended degree was his capacity as a navigator in the Air Force. He was a lieutenant. He said he was among the worst in his class and they put together a plane of all the worst people in the groups. So he was the navigator on this bomber, which was assigned the task of finding Truk Island. Truk was an island we never attacked—that was one of the ones we wisely bypassed going across the Pacific—and when the Japanese surrendered they turned the whole thing over to us. I don’t think he said they had an assignment to bomb the island. It was mainly to reconnoiter and find it and bring back whatever intelligence you get from air patrols over this type of enemy site. And his joke was he was the navigator and they never found it. You know, they just didn’t find it and they came back home and his trainers and his officers figured that these guys did about what they expected them to do—get out there and not get killed, not find anything and get home in one piece. And he said that was his career in the Air Force. He made sort of fun of it.

Fred Greene,
Former Political Science Department Chairman