My “war years”: The tools of war thrilled me as a boy. In the very early 1960s, I assembled model ships and planes and immersed myself in the comic-book adventures of Johnny “Flying” Cloud, an American fighter ace who saw the shapes of his Navajo ancestors in the sky while shooting down German Messerschmitts. My idealized view of war and warriors was much like that of this president, though the toys he commands are not toys at all. These “war years,” as I called them, lasted roughly from ages eight to 12 and ended not long after I visited an American air base in Spain where the commanding general, a friend of my father’s, allowed me to sit in the cockpit of an F-104 Starfighter. That same American general later organized a visit to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., in which his friend, a retired colonel who had flown hundreds of wartime missions, took me to a room that, as I remember, contained bound volumes imprinted with the words Lost Crews. They contained dozens of 8x10 photos of stunningly young American aviators standing or kneeling beside their B-17 bombers. “They’re all gone, son,” said the colonel, “so when you think of your model planes, think of these boys, and hope it never needs to be that way again.” If only the colonel were still alive to take this adolescent president to the lost crews room and lock him in.