My war

In 1939, Andrew A. Rooney was a Colgate University student who played football, enjoyed philosophy, and hoped to become a writer without knowing how. He leaned toward the America First movement. When Germany invaded Poland, his first question was where the place was, and his second was how he could avoid getting involved.

Like many young Americans of that period, he was drafted and sent to basic training in North Carolina, where he learned to take apart a rifle and fire artillery. His unit, the 17th Field Artillery Regiment, soon moved to England for more training while it waited for the Normandy invasion. That was when his real war began. His only journalism experience came from writing for the regiment's newsletter, but he asked for a transfer to become a correspondent for Stars and Stripes, and he got it.

The memoir traces his journey from Hamilton, New York, to Berlin and covers his reporting on the air war, the D-Day landings, the advance through France and the Low Countries, the discovery of Hitler's concentration camps, and later operations in the Far East. Writing for soldiers fighting in Europe, he saw the extremes of human experience and recorded what he witnessed.

It is also the story of a young, untested reporter learning his trade beside veterans such as Ernie Pyle, Homer Bigart, Walter Cronkite, and hundreds of other seasoned journalists. Among them, he found a calling he could not have imagined as a college student. Rooney later became a long-serving CBS commentator and a regular contributor to 60 Minutes.