Marvin Raymond Edwards was born in Manhattan, New York City [Annotator's Note: Manhattan is one of the five boroughs in New York, New York] in June 1921. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks Edwards what his life was like during the Great Depression, a global economic depression that lasted from 1929 through 1945.] His father was in the box business in Long Island City [Annotator's Note: now part of Queens, one of the five boroughs in New York, New York]. His father was a chemical engineer from Columbia University [Annotator's Note: in New York, New York]. In World War 1, he was in charge of testing torpedoes for the Navy. He kept his job during the Depression years. His father was put in charge of mill operations in Jacksonville, Florida and did their labor negotiations with the unions who highly respected him. In the 1930s, his father gave women locker rooms and showers which most companies did not do until much later. His parents made sacrifices so he and his brother could go to college. They both attended NYU [Annotator's Note: New York University in New York, New York]. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks Edwards if he remembers where he was for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on 7 December 1941.] He was listening to the radio while working on an office management report and the program was interrupted to announce the attack. His family members thought he was lying about it. Military people were called to report in. Edwards was the editor of the newspaper of the New York University Business School, which is now the Stern School [Annotator's Note: New York University Leonard N. Stern School of Business]. He knew he would be called up for the service. In 1942, he enlisted in the Air Force and was told he would not be called until April 1943. He corrects that to December 1942. He then thought there was no point in going back to school but was not called until 5 April 1943. That taught him not to trust the military to do what it says it is going to do as they are subject to change. He decided that he would do what he could to help win the war, but he was also going to take opportunities to do extra-curricular things. At every base, he either wrote for, or edited, the newspapers. He talked about international things and how he saw the war progressing. His last one was the Carrier Courier with the SHAEF [Annotator's Note: Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force] Air Transport Service in Munich [Annotator's Note: Munich, Germany]. He got a letter of commendation for that.

Marvin Raymond Edwards enlisted because he felt he would be drafted, and he wanted to select the Air Force. He had checked with people who had commissions in the Navy and was told that most of the commissioned officers in his position were ending up as gunnery officers on tankers. Edwards wanted more responsibility than that. He had not given the Army or Marine Corps any thought. He was sent initially to a classification site in Georgia near Valdosta. He went to basic training in Biloxi, Mississippi for a month. That was the hardest month he ever spent. Everyone developed coughs. There was nothing there except mud and sand. He left there for Carlisle, Pennsylvania to take courses. That was completely different. In Biloxi, they were only taught to march and nothing intellectual. In Carlisle, that was a College Training Detachment [Annotator's Note: a United States Army Air Forces program established at more than 150 colleges and universities around the country to provide prospectice pilots, copilots, bombardiers, and navigators with additional higher education prior to their entry into a flight training program] at a nice school. He wrote for the newspaper and then became the editor. The commander there had connections with the Hoover War Library [Annotator's Note: Hoover Institution Library and Archives at Stanford University in Stanford, California] and had copies of their paper sent there. Edwards was there a few years ago and they still had copies. The paperwork gave him an opportunity to travel locally while at school. He wrote or edited newspapers at every base he was at. He had had no formal training. He was fascinated by history and would research things. He found that most people were ignorant of the background of things that were happening. Nothing happens by itself and can be tracked back to prior events one way or another. Even when the Japanese attacked [Annotator's Note: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on 7 December 1941], it was reported that we [Annotator's Note: the United States] forced them to do so by cutting off their oil and steel. Edwards reasoned that it was not a last-minute decision. He was told about Homer Lea [Annotator's Note: Homer Lea, American geopolitical strategist] who indicated that Japan had planning it for a long time. Edwards researched it and found that to be true and that the only country still in opposition to them having complete control was the United States. England and France had made concessions to them. For them to have been able to attack so many areas at one time, they had to do a hell of a lot of planning and not a last-minute thing. The Japanese had said years earlier that there would be war between them and the United States for control of the Pacific.

Marvin Raymond Edwards was sent to Maxwell Field in Montgomery, Alabama [Annotator's Note: now Maxwell-Gunter Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama] for training to determine what he would be in the Air Force [Annotator's Note: after finishing college training at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania]. He went on a flight and got vertigo when the plane went into a spin. He was told not to try and be a fighter pilot and that a navigator would be better. He then went to navigation school at Selman Field in Monroe, Louisiana [Annotator's Note: Selman Army Airfield in Monroe, Louisiana]. When he was young, Edwards rode the subways often and he would get nauseous. Navigation training was interesting. They were behind the times. The equipment was supposed to be secret but when he got to Europe, he found out the English and Germans both knew more about radar. He took a lot of math, science, and meteorology in his training. He ended up in California and went from there with his crew to Walla Walla, Washington for crew training. There were many mountains there and several planes crashed into the mountains. Edwards told his crew that he figured out a highway line that would help them fly around the mountains. That worked out well.

Marvin Raymond Edwards had all kinds in his crew. One was from New Mexico, several from the Midwest, one from Texas, and he was from Jacksonville [Annotator's Note: Jacksonville, Florida]. The copilot was from the Washington, D.C. [Annotator's Note: Washington, District of Columbia] area. They were on B-24 Liberators [Annotator's Note: Consolidated B-24 Liberator heavy bomber]. There was a Naval base nearby with fighters who would buzz their field. Several crews loaded their bomb bays with rolls of toilet paper and dropped them on their base. Big brass [Annotator's Note: slang for high-ranking officers] happened to be there when they did it and wanted them punished, but it was let go. They were told there was a highly restricted area nearby at Moses Lake [Annotator's Note: Moses Lake, Washington] that was an Air Force base with fighters, and if they flew over it, they could be shot down. They were told a man named Willke [Annotator's Note: Wendell Lewis Willkie, American politician] was running against Roosevelt [Annotator's Note: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States] and they were making Willke buttons. In truth, it was the Hanford DuPont area [Annotator's Note: Hanford Site, nuclear production complex in Hanford, Washington; DuPont de Nemours, Incorporated, chemical company] where they were making plutonium for the future atomic bomb. He made sure they did not fly over that area. His crew was very good, and they were all very good friends. They made a good team. Edwards became good friends with the one from New Mexico who a lot of people ignored. Edwards attended his daughter's wedding. They left Walla Walla [Annotator's Note: Walla Walla, Washington] for California and went on a train for seven days to the east coast to go to Europe. His brother had been told three times that he was going overseas but never did. His brother was doing bookkeeping work for the Ordnance in the Army in Virginia. His parents had gone to see his brother off all three times. When it was Edwards' turn, they did not believe it so did not go to see him. He went on the Amsterdam with other aircrews to Europe unescorted and zig-zagging [Annotator's Note: a naval anti-submarine maneuver]. A ship ahead of them was torpedoed but the weather turned bad and that was good luck for them. They went to Scotland and then took a train to Kettering [Annotator's Note: Kettering, England] and then buses to Harrington [Annotator's Note: Royal Air Force Harrington in Harrington, England]. They were put in tents. In winter, wet towels would be frozen solid in the morning. He had been assigned to the 492nd Bomb Group before he got there, but he had not been told. He does not recall his squadron number [Annotator's Note: it was the 856th Bombardment Squadron, 492nd Bombardment Group, 8th Air Force].

Marvin Raymond Edwards and his outfit [Annotator's Note: 856th Bombardment Squadron, 492nd Bombardment Group, 8th Air Force] lived in tents in England. Food was not too bad but not too good either. WAAFs [Annotator's Note: Women's Auxiliary Air Force, Royal Air Force], who were British gals, worked on the base and the men would be invited to parties and would relax going out on dates. A number of families invited Edwards to their homes for dinner. Right after the war, Edwards worked for the OSS [Annotator's Note: Office of Strategic Services; pre-runner to today's Central Intelligence Agency or CIA] in Denmark, and he would bring cheese from Denmark to England to the families that had been nice to him and in return they would give him tobacco to take back to Denmark. When Edwards got to England, he had to learn the radar system. Before his first mission, Edwards received a returned letter from a friend that said, "killed in action." It hit him hard. On the flight, the plane was getting close to the target and was suddenly lit up brightly. Edwards told the pilot they had really bright lights. The pilot told him it was antiaircraft fire. They dropped their bombs and got out as fast as they could. They were in a B-24 [Annotator's Note: Consolidated B-24 Liberator heavy bomber].

Marvin Raymond Edwards' [Annotator's Note: with the 856th Bombardment Squadron, 492nd Bombardment Group, 8th Air Force] first mission with the OSS [Annotator's Note: Office of Strategic Services; pre-runner to today's Central Intelligence Agency or CIA] was dropping a girl who was going to become a Jane [Annotator's Note: slang for female spy] in France. She was dropped out of the bomb bay over the target, and he does not know whatever happened to her. All they were told was the location and flight instruction to get there. That was the only time they did that. Their other missions were all diversionary bombing missions. He was selected to be a navigator on a Mosquito [Annotator's Note: de Havilland DH. 98 Mosquito multirole combat aircraft]. Everything was secret there. The base itself was not shown on a lot of the 8th Air Force bases and every plane was painted black. They only flew at night. Had the war continued, they would have become a Pathfinder [Annotator's Note: target-marking squadrons] group. Their job would have been to fly to the targets and drop flares for the other planes to bomb by. His missions before going to the Mosquito were bombing missions and they often dropped chaff [Annotator's Note: tin-foil strips or aluminum-coated fibers released to confuse enemy radar] to fool the German radar. There would be their group, as well as British groups, targeting a single area. He does not recall exactly when he was switched from B-24s [Annotator's Note: Consolidated B-24 Liberator heavy bomber] to the Mosquito. They were highly secret missions to contact spies in Germany from high altitude. There was an OSS operator in the belly of the plane who would converse with the spy using Joan and Eleanor [Annotator's Note: Joan-Eleanor system, or J-E; clandestine very high frequency radio system used by espionage agents] communication equipment. The Mosquito was made of plywood. He met the pilots who explained the radar to him. The Mosquito used the heat from the engines for the plane, unlike the B-24. They flew at altitudes where the temperatures could be 30 to 40 degrees below zero. In the B-24, he had to wear a heated flight suit and gloves that made it hard to do the navigation work. In the Mosquito, it was room temperature. He had five missions with the Mosquito, but two had to be scrubbed. The purpose of the missions was to find out what the German Army was doing. His last mission was during the Battle of the Bulge [Annotator's Note: Battle of the Bulge or German Ardennes Counter Offensive, 16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945]. There had been reports that the SS troops [Annotator's Note: Schutzstaffel; German paramilitary organization] were going to build fortifications in the Bavarian Alps [Annotator's Note: mountain ranges in Bavaria, Germany] to continue the fight after Germany surrendered. The mission was to find out if this was true. Edwards later found out at OSS Headquarters in London [Annotator's Note: London, England] in Grosvenor Square, that they had learned the SS was going to surrender. Edwards later learned more about the SS in the Malmedy Massacre [Annotator's Note: German war crime against American prisoners of war, 17 December 1944 near Malmedy, Belgium] trial [Annotator's Note: in Dachau, Germany, May to July 1946]. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks Edwards to describe the Joan-Eleanor equipment.] The equipment in the plane weighed around 40 pounds. The part the agent on the ground carried weighed about four pounds and was not conspicuous. Edwards had to keep the plane in a sixty mile diameter at 40,000 feet to keep them in contact. Joan was the part in the plane, and Eleanor was the part on the ground [Annotator's Note: Joan was the carried part on the ground and Eleanor was in the aircraft].

Marvin Raymond Edwards [Annotator's Note: with the 856th Bombardment Squadron, 492nd Bombardment Group, 8th Air Force] was in London [Annotator's Note: London, England] when the Germans surrendered [Annotator's Note: Victory in Europe Day, 8 May 1945]. There were a million people out in the street celebrating. There was a Red Cross Station in downtown London, and they had celebrations. Italy had already capitulated and now Germany had. All that was left was Japan. It was thought that the 492nd might end up in Japan. The OSS [Annotator's Note: Office of Strategic Services; pre-runner to today's Central Intelligence Agency or CIA] also wanted a crew to do work for them. Edwards was fascinated by the work with the OSS and his crew told them they would be delighted to work with them. They were selected to be the crew for them. One time previous to this, in the B-24 [Annotator's Note: Consolidated B-24 Liberator heavy bomber], they were on a mission when several generators went out close to Germany. They had to return to England with two and a half tons of bombs. The engineer had to put the pins back in the bombs. They returned to Harrington [Annotator's Note: Royal Air Force Harrington in Harrington, England] and the whole area was cleared in case the bombs exploded. On a Mosquito [Annotator's Note: de Havilland DH. 98 Mosquito multirole combat aircraft] mission, Edwards was picked to replace the navigator who was ill. At the last minute, the navigator said he could go after all. The plane developed engine problems on the flight. The escape hatch is right underneath the navigator. The pilot cannot get out unless the navigator goes out first. The navigator did not have his chute buckled but jumped out to save the pilot's life. The navigator fell out of his chute and was killed. The pilot got out. They lost quite a few aircraft on the bombing missions because the B-24 did not fly that high. All of their aircraft were painted black. They could see Royal Air Force bombers taking off when they did but did not see them once they crossed the Channel [Annotator's Note: the English Channel]. He only flew at night. Edwards' pilot, Ralph Smith [Annotator's Note: phonetic spelling; unable to identify], was the only one of his crew that also flew on the Mosquito missions. The Mosquito only had a pilot, navigator, and OSS officer. It was a rough assignment for the OSS officers. They were all buddies on the ground. The OSS were not Air Force and had been trained for the Joan and Eleanor [Annotator's Note: Joan-Eleanor system, or J-E; clandestine very high frequency radio system used by espionage agents] equipment. They wore heated suits.

After Germany surrendered, Marvin Raymond Edwards worked with the OSS [Annotator's Note: Office of Strategic Services; pre-runner to today's Central Intelligence Agency or CIA]. Some missions were to deliver secret documents to various parts of Europe like Paris, France and Wiesbaden, Germany. One assignment was to take photographs of the western coast of Europe. They spent time in Copenhagen [Annotator's Note: Copenhagen, Denmark] and Oslo [Annotator's Note: Oslo, Norway] using a B-17 [Annotator's Note: Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bomber] with professional photographers. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks Edwards what he thought of the B-17 as compared to the Consolidated B-24 Liberator heavy bomber.] It was interesting. The navigator's position was not next to the nose wheel. He also flew on C-47s [Annotator's Note: Douglas C-47 Skytrain cargo aircraft]. That lasted about six weeks. They were in Copenhagen most of the time. The Danish pastry was wonderful, and the people were too. He was invited to their homes and dated Danish girls. When the Germans occupied Denmark, they wanted the Danish flag taken down in Copenhagen and replaced by the German flag. King Christian [Annotator's Note: Christian X of Denmark, Christian Carl Frederick Albert Alexander Vilhelm] objected, rode his horse to the town square, and took the German flag down himself. When the Germans were getting ready to send about 10,000 Jews to concentration camps, the Danes smuggled out about 95 percent and saved their lives. One was Niels Bohr [Annotator's Note: Niels Henrik David Bohr, Danish physicist] who made it to America and worked on the atomic bomb.

Marvin Raymond Edwards was transferred into the European Air Transport Service around August 1945. Before that, he did a mission that he thinks no one was aware of and that was flying Czech [Annotator's Note: Czechoslovakian] agents to Pilsen, Czechoslovakia [Annotator's Note: Pilsen, Czechoslovakia; now Plzeň, Czech Republic] to mingle through the country because the Russians were taking over. They dropped seven or eight agents there. That was the last American plane to fly into there. Edwards was in Copenhagen [Annotator's Note: Copenhagen, Denmark] when he heard of the Japanese surrender. He thought he would get to go home but was in the Transport Service for another four or five months. He convinced the colonel in charge of the base to let him start a newspaper and that became his job. The paper was the Carrier Courier. He covered the UN [Annotator's Note: United Nations] meetings. He would go to England to get photographic material that he could not get in Munich [Annotator's Note: Munich, Germany]. He went to United Nations General Assembly meetings and met Eleanor Roosevelt [Annotator's Note: wife of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States]. Only the elite could go to Security Council meetings, and he had a UN Press Pass. At that time, it was called the UNO, the United Nations Organization. One day, General McNarney [Annotator's Note: US Army General Joseph Taggart McNarney], who replaced General Eisenhower [Annotator's Note: General of the Army Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower, Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force; 34th President of the United States], came in with an entourage for a Security Council meeting. Edwards marched in with them. At the end of the meeting, he went up front and met Reschinsky [Annotator's Note: phonetic spelling; unable to identify], Gromyko [Annotator's Note: Andrei Gromyko, Soviet politician], Shetinny [Annotator's Note: phonetic spelling; unable to identify], Bido [Annotator's Note: phonetic spelling; unable to identify], and Bevan [Annotator's Note: phonetic spelling; unable to identify] and shook all of their hands. He wrote a series of articles where he said the greatest concern was that just one of the permanent members of the Security Council could veto any measure and that could create a problem over the years. Russia at that time was vetoing a lot of things.

Marvin Raymond Edwards got word that the Sixth SS Panzer Army [Annotator's Note: German 6th Panzer Army] that had been involved in the brutality during the Battle of the Bulge [Annotator's Note: Battle of the Bulge or German Ardennes Counter Offensive, 16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945] in Malmedy [Annotator's Note: called the Malmedy Massacre, German war crime against American prisoners of war, 17 December 1944 near Malmedy, Belgium] had killed a lot of American prisoners of war. The trial [Annotator's Note: in Dachau, Germany, May to July 1946] was going to be held at Dachau concentration camp [Annotator's Note: in Dachau, Germany] near Munich [Annotator's Note: Munich, Germany]. He took his photographer to cover the trial. There were around 70 SS troops [Annotator's Note: Schutzstaffel; German paramilitary organization] who survivors had identified. The colonel [Annotator's Note: sixth rank of commissioned officer in the Army, Air Force, and Marine Corps; O6] in charge asked his photographer to cover the faces of the individuals who had been murdered so the families could not see them when they were released to the Associated Press and United Press [Annotator's Note: United Press International]. Until the six men appeared, they were joking. A senator who was not known well then, claimed the Germans had been browbeaten into confessions. Edwards saw no evidence of that. Half of them had been sentenced to death, including General Sepp Dietrich [Annotator's Note: German SS-Oberst-Gruppenführer, or Generl, Josef "Sepp" Dietrich] who was with Hitler [Annotator's Note: German dictator Adolf Hitler] in 1923. Because of that senator, none were executed. One of the colonels [Annotator's Note: SS-Standartenführer, or Colonel, Joachim Peiper] was later assassinated in France. The senator later became very famous, Senator Joe McCarthy [Annotator's Note: Joseph Raymond McCarthy, American politician] from Wisconsin. A book that came out after the trial mentions this. The crematory at Dachau was still there. There was a sign that said that 2,038 people had been cremated there. There were trenches there that they lined people up at and shot them. They had areas where they put people in with wild dogs. The Germans were savages. They were not only Jews at Dachau. Edwards has a picture from the camps because a lot of people say it never happened. He has a picture of Eisenhower [Annotator's Note: General of the Army Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower, Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force; 34th President of the United States] standing in front hundreds of bodies. Edwards gave a set of the pictures to the Holocaust Museum [Annotator's Note: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.]. At the trial, the Germans were joking amongst themselves. There were no witnesses initially. The six had pretended to be dead and were not killed. Then the Germans took a different attitude. McCarthy accused the Army of torturing the Germans into confessions.

Marvin Raymond Edwards returned to the United States around October 1946 via a Liberty ship [Annotator's Note: a class of quickly produced cargo ship] through New York near Camp Kilmer, New Jersey. It was wonderful and refreshing. Edwards had to go back to NYU [Annotator's Note: New York University in New York, New York] to finish his degree at what is now the Stern School [Annotator's Note: New York University Leonard N. Stern School of Business]. He left the service as a second lieutenant [Annotator's Note: lowest rank of commissioned officer in the Army, Air Force, and Marine Corps; O1] and got the Air Medal [Annotator's Note: US Armed Forces medal for single acts of heroism or meritorious achievement while in aerial flight] and other decorations. He was discharged fairly quickly. They kept trying to talk him into staying. His wife's father was a medic in the Lost Battalion [Annotator's Note: name given to nine companies of the 77th Division] in the First World War [Annotator's Note: World War 1]. An officer was shot, and her father saved his life. He received the Distinguished Service Cross [Annotator's Note: the Distinguished Service Cross is the second-highest award a United States service member can receive for a heroic or meritorious deed performed in a conflict with an armed enemy]. There was a Lost Battalion [Annotator's Note: 1st Battalion, 141st Infantry Regiment, 36th Infantry Division] in the Second World War [Annotator's Note: World War 2] also. In the first one, they refused to surrender and two-thirds of them were killed. Colonel Whittlesey [Annotator's Note: US Army Lieutenant Colonel Charles White Whittlesey] was a brilliant attorney and was bothered so much by what had happened to all of his men, that he killed himself. There were three battalions that were supposed to move but they were the only ones who did and were surrounded by the Germans. Edwards was separated from the service by mail while at home. He did not use the G.I. Bill [Annotator's Note: the G.I. Bill, or Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, was enacted by the United States Congress to aid United States veterans of World War 2 in transitioning back to civilian life and included financial aid for education, mortgages, business starts and unemployment] because he had only one year of school left. He majored in management and minored in journalism. One of his instructors was the editor of the New York Herald Tribune and liked Edwards' writing. He offered Edwards a position, but Edwards turned it down. Edwards started fighting to improve the school system in Jacksonville in Duval County [Annotator's Note: in Florida]. He wrote articles in several publications and some op-ed pieces in the daily newspaper. He continued to do regarding the hanky-panky [Annotator's Note: slang for corruption] going on in the city and county governments. He called the group that managed the city "The Nifty Fifty" and wrote about their activities. He had an industrial supply business and his wife convinced him to go into the investment business instead. He did well for his clients. He was president of the Financial Analysts Society twice. He founded the first Florida affiliate of the National Association of Business Economists which is still in existence.

Marvin Raymond Edwards' most memorable experience of the war was the horrible treatment by the Germans and their cold-blooded brutality at Dachau [Annotator's Note: Dachau concentration camp complex near Dachau, Germany] and going through the Malmedy Massacre [Annotator's Note: German war crime against American prisoners of war, 17 December 1944 near Malmedy, Belgium] trial [Annotator's Note: in Dachau, Germany, May to July 1946]. Edwards became convinced we are still savages and the proof is in the wars that are taking place one after the other. He cannot understand the mentality of people who can do these things, even in this country [Annotator's Note: the United States]. It is unbelievable. We are supposedly civilized. Human beings fail to live up to being human. The war gave Edwards a chance to be independent and find his own way. He loved his parents, but this gave him a chance to do things on his own. He feels very successful. He edited newspapers. He got a beautiful letter from Harry Truman [Annotator's Note: Harry S. Truman, 33rd President of the United States] who was a senator at the time. He has gotten letters from all kinds of people and feels very fortunate. He has a wonderful wife, three wonderful children, and seven wonderful grandchildren. When he looks at the world generally, he feels frustrated, but he feels he has been super fortunate in his life. In the war, he was just damn lucky but somehow survived and lived to tell about it. His values have not changed. He supports good charities, fights for good government, exposes waste and corruption, and fights for education. The whole nation is way below where it should be in math and science. The future depends on technology. One son was the 59th employee of Google [Annotator's Note: Google Limited Liability Corporation, American technology company] and wrote a book about it called "I'm Feeling Lucky" [Annotator's Note: "I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59", by Douglas Edwards, 2012]. He was the Director of Consumer Marketing and Brand Management. He retired on his own in 2005. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks Edwards if he feels it is important to have The National WWII Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana, and if it should continue to teach about the war to future generations.] Edwards thinks that too many people think World War 2 is ancient history. So much of what has developed since World War 2 is impacted by the importance of the war. There was a great threat with Stalin [Annotator's Note: Joseph Stalin; General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union] on one side, the Germans and Italians on another, and the Japanese on the other. There has been great progress, but not enough progress, to become civilized again. Every generation has great problems to resolve and sometimes at a great price. Edwards is a fan of Mark Twain [Annotator's Note: pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, American author], who knew how to ridicule everything going on. He was a genius and had a horrible life. Despite all of that, he was a fantastic writer and is an ideal of a person that is great. There are not too many of them. The war was an experience and an education.