I
n his apartment, Goodwin sorts through newspaper clippings like he’s sifting memories, weighing them for fact and importance. He pauses to pull anecdotes and sidebars from each ink-smeared clip, but
his impressive history spirals over a central conflict. The celebrated veteran is now a Quaker. His mother belonged to the faith, which advocates nonviolence, and two of his brothers were conscientious objectors while he fought in World War II. “I think I need to write something about all this,” he says toward the end of our interview. “But part of the problem I’ve had is that I’ve never been able to square myself with it in a way. I will not apologize for my war experience, and yet I’ve moved on. I’ve come back to a very different place, and it isn’t easy. I mean, my God, I’m 86 years old. At least it isn’t pressing on me. I’ve been dealing with it for so long.” The younger Pierson says he’s seen many Airmen, including his father, engage in intense contemplation as they age. “They’re a justifiably proud and remarkably humble group of men, but I see them beginning to look at themselves differently. There’s a lot of bitterness, but I’m not saying they live their lives as bitter men . . . I don’t know how to describe it. My father used to tell me about how, in training, the bar was set so much higher for them. The littlest things were watched out for and they were imposed with extra duties and called names.” Despite his mixed feelings on war, the rigid segregation he saw in the South and the restrictions he faced in the army, Goodwin seems to have escaped bitterness. His quiet voice is filled with intense conviction when he speaks about his post-war work in the Peace Corps and with War on Poverty, and his belief that, despite everything he’s witnessed, reconciliation is a human possibility. “Peace isn’t the end, it’s the way,” he says. “It’s a way to live your life and deal with others. It has to be almost like getting a new DNA. We keep wondering why people go to war, like it’s this natural instinct that we can’t biologically shed, but I think we can. I really do.”
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commander Benjamin O. Davis Jr. returned to the States to advocate for his squadron when Air Force officials recommended it be sent home. Everything changed in January. On a notoriously balmy Mediterranean day, the Allies swarmed a 15-mile stretch of rocky beach near Anzio, Italy, and in the battle that followed, the Tuskegee Airmen shot down 12 German planes in two days. “These incredible statistics went back to the States about the Airmen,” Goodwin says. “That 1925 war report went out the window.” The 99th was legendary by the time Goodwin’s newly graduated squadron joined them in 1944. But though he was elated to be fighting alongside them, the 99th struggled with his group’s presence, he recalls. In May, the senior squadron was relocated from its mixed-race (though still strictly segregated) fighter group to the all-black 332 group, composed of four Tuskegeetrained squadrons. “They weren’t happy about being re-segregated,” he says, “but thank God they were, because they taught us how to do the work we needed to do. It’s kind of a mixed story, because these men had accomplished the goal of integration, and they didn’t want to join an all-black group but they didn’t hold on to those feelings. Finally, there was some mentorship, and no one had given them any mentorship in the beginning. That’s one of the reasons the Army could ding them and say they weren’t very good.” Without losing many bombers, the group destroyed and damaged upwards of 400 enemy aircraft, becoming known as the “red-tail angels.”
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