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  Now, it is a rare opportunity for any writer—any person—to have the chance to talk to somebody who was there, who was a first in history. Whenever I spoke with Mr. Morris, I was always a little awed—and jittery, as Levi would say—to be able to interview this humble man who played such a unique role in World War II. I felt it was important to bring the fascinating story of the 555th and their mission to life.

  And that’s where this book began.

  Many of the names and places used in this story are real, including “Tiger Ted” Lowry, who once fought Joe Louis; the army cook called Emerald Jones, who washed out of the paratroops because he couldn’t jump; and the troopers nicknamed “Killer” and “Brothers.” Graphite was indeed the name of the paratroopers’ official army heap, a 1937 two-door Ford.

  Today, there is still a small town in North Carolina called Southern Pines, where some of the black paratroopers’ families stayed during the war. If you look very carefully, you might find a trickle of a creek called McDeeds running through the middle of it. Our Lady of Victory Church still stands on the town’s main street, although it now serves as a community center. You can also find the old train station, where Levi arrived in nearby Fayetteville.

  While few trains are pulled by coal-burning locomotives today, the experience of what it was like to ride in the “Jim Crow cars” in the South hasn’t been forgotten by those who did. When I asked one black veteran what he recalled, he looked at me with an unflinching gaze and said, “I remember riding right behind the stinking coal car.”

  Although the characters of Levi and his father are fictional, the war experiences they describe are as realistic and accurate as possible. Many scenes in the book were adapted from details found in the written and recorded interviews of the men who were part of the 555th, including the final scene, in which Levi and his father refuse to move to the Jim Crow car, and the storekeeper scene, in which Levi nearly loses his life by asking for a Coca-Cola.

  As the army’s only airborne firefighting unit, the 555th made about twelve hundred individual jumps into forest fires during their service in the western United States, from July to October 1945. You can watch army footage of the real 555th in action during the war and see the men “hooking the trees” and parachuting into forest fires on the unit’s website: triplenickle.com.

  Despite the hazardous nature of their work and numerous injuries, the Triple Nickles lost only one paratrooper during their mission. Tragically, just a few days before the war ended, a medic from Pennsylvania named Malvin Brown died in a fall from a tree during a firefighting run. Walter Morris was one of the soldiers who accompanied the soldier’s body home for burial.

  Although most of the paratroopers in the 555th never saw a Japanese balloon bomb, it is estimated that between six thousand and nine thousand balloons were sent from Japan during the war. Parts of the balloons are held at several museums, including the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, near Dayton, Ohio. Historians believe some balloon bombs may still remain undiscovered in the West today. One was found in Oregon in 1978.

  A few months after the war ended, the 555th left Oregon and returned to North Carolina, as Levi describes in the story. In January 1946, they were invited to join the 82nd Airborne in New York City for one of the largest victory parades in the United States. By the following year, the 555th had grown to thirty-six black officers and more than one thousand men as they became an elite demonstration unit for military training exercises and air shows across the country. In December 1947, they became the first black unit integrated into the regular army—long before integration happened in the rest of the country.

  Lt. Col. (Ret.) Bradley Biggs, one of the 555th officers, wrote later that he didn’t join the black test platoon to prove that he could jump out of an airplane, but “to prove it should have been done all along.”

  In 2010, Walter Morris and the 555th veterans were honored in a special ceremony at the Pentagon.

  Acknowledgments

  I am indebted to Walter Morris for so graciously sharing his time with me. I’ll always remember asking him to describe the color of his World War II uniform and how he told me, “Just a minute, I’ll go look at it.” I’m grateful to the other paratroopers who recorded their recollections and left them in the care of our libraries and colleges so that future generations could learn from them. Material used for the novel included recordings by Bradley Biggs, Clifford Allen, and Clarence Beavers in the collection of Howard University (Moorland-Spingarn Research Center) and published interviews of Melvin Lester, Carstell O. Stewart, and Roger S. Walden.

  Ted Lowry’s self-published memoir, God’s in My Corner: A Portrait of an American Boxer (2006), and Bradley Biggs’s book about the 555th, The Triple Nickles: America’s First All-Black Paratroop Unit (Archon Books, 1986), were invaluable resources, along with the Harry S. Truman Library online collections (trumanlibrary.org), the Oregon State Archives online collections, and the Veterans History Project collections of the Library of Congress. The Airborne & Special Operations Museum in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and the Pendleton Public Library also provided important information for the book.

  My journey into World War II history began in another place and time entirely, and I’m grateful to Judith MacPherson Pratt, Kim Pratt, and the Ebel family for being part of my early journey, and to Revere Middle School for introducing me to the Tuskegee Airmen. Thanks to my family—especially Mom, Mike, and Ethan for their spectacular patience. I couldn’t have written this book without the support of my editor, Nancy Siscoe; my agent, Steven Malk; and others: Marcy Lindberg, Jackie Kreiger, Laura Little, Matthew, and the knight. And finally, a big thank-you to the following students who read the first draft of the book: LeAnn Bannister, Sharlene Bannister, Adam Bennett, Sydney Bennett, Kaiya Epps, Amea Jefferson, Moussa Kesselly, Sheyenne McKie-Battle, Lashe Miles, DeSean Smith—and their amazing teacher, Rose Levine.