While unimpressed by most people, Greene's father held the heroes of WWII in very high esteem, especially Paul Tibbets, the man who assembled & led the team that delivered the atomic bombs to Japan I had more time than I'd like to read this past weekend & read this book. His father defined much of his life by his experience in WWII. The book is a first hand look by Greene at his father's death, with whom he'd never communicated well. The first 1/3 didn't really pull me in, but after that it did. I had more time than I'd like to read this past weekend & read this book. On every page you can hear the whisper of a generation and its children bidding each other farewell.more It is an exploration of and response to the concept of duty as it once was and always should be: quiet and from the heart. What Greene came away with is found history and found poetry-a profoundly moving work that offers a vividly new perspective on responsibility, empathy, and love. In one soldier's memory of a mission that transformed the world-and in a son's last attempt to grasp his father's ingrained sense of honor and duty-lies a powerful tribute to the ordinary heroes of an extraordinary time in American life.
What developed was an unlikely friendship that allowed Greene to discover things about his father, and his father's generation of soldiers, that he never fully understood before.ĭuty is the story of three lives connected by history, proximity, and blood indeed, it is many stories, intimate and achingly personal as well as deeply historic.
On the morning after the last meal he ever ate with his father, Greene went to meet Tibbets. In 1945 Tibbets piloted a plane-which he called Enola Gay, after his mother-to the Japanese city of Hiroshima, where he dropped the atomic bomb. At the age of twenty-nine, at the request of his country, Tibbets assembled a secret team of 1,800 American soldiers to carry out the single most violent act in the history of mankind. All but anonymous even in his own city, carefully maintaining his privacy, this man, Greene's father would point out to him, had "won the war." He was Paul Tibbets. Greene's father-a soldier with an infantry division in World War II-often spoke of seeing the man around town. A When Bob Greene went home to central Ohio to be with his dying father, it set off a chain of events that led him to knowing his dad in a way he never had before-thanks to a quiet man who lived just a few miles away, a man who had changed the history of the world. When Bob Greene went home to central Ohio to be with his dying father, it set off a chain of events that led him to knowing his dad in a way he never had before-thanks to a quiet man who lived just a few miles away, a man who had changed the history of the world.