Mort, T. A

In the spring of 1944, Hemingway traveled to London and then to France to cover World War II for Collier's Magazine. Why did he go so late in the war? He had resisted this kind of journalism for years but when he finally made the decision to go, he threw himself into it and became a conduit to understanding some of the major events and characters in the war. He flew missions with the RAF, was on a landing craft on Omaha Beach on D-Day, worked with the French Resistance, rode into the streets of liberated Paris, and was at the German Siegfried line for the horrendous killing ground of the Hurtgen Forest, where the 22nd Regiment lost nearly every man they sent into the fight. It has been argued that after the Hurtgen Forest tragedy, Hemingway was never the same. He used his wartime experiences for much of his later work.

In February 1861, the twelve-year-old son of Arizona rancher John Ward was kidnapped by Apaches. Ward followed their trail and reported the incident to patrols at Fort Buchanan, blaming a band of Chiricahuas led by the infamous warrior Cochise. What followed that precipitous encounter would ignite a Southwestern frontier war between the Chiricahuas and the US Army that would last twenty-five years. In the days following the initial melee, innocent passersby -- Apache, white, and Mexican -- would be taken as hostages on both sides, and almost all of them would be brutally slaughtered.