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Current Issue-Spring 2008

On the cover: Infantryman Eugene Sledge ‘49 exhibits a classic thousand-yard stare at the end of the Allied assault on Okinawa in spring 1945. Sledge, who joined the U.S. Marine Corps at 19, kept a war diary during his combat service in the Pacific theater.

For more on Eugene Sledge:
China Marine, by Eugene Sledge ’49
Auburn Magazine, Vol. 9 Issue 4, Winter 2003

To Hell and Back

Written by Betsy Robertson
Feature design by Shannon Bryant-Hankes
Photography by Melissa Humble and courtesy of AU Special Collections and Archives

They were so young when it happened. The biggest war our nation has known, fought mostly by American men—just kids, many of them, too young to have finished school, married, or have had careers and children. Many were college students who hadn’t yet learned much about life, much less death. Some say they are our country’s greatest generation.

Six years ago, Emmy-winning documentarian Ken Burns and producer Lynn Novick embarked on an epic project to record the memories of Americans who lived “The War” at home and overseas. The resulting 14-hour documentary—which aired on PBS stations nationwide in September—featured four Auburn University alumni from Mobile, each affected by World War II in ways both subtle and profound. Here are their stories....

The Nose Knows

Written by Suzanne Johnson
Feature design by Lizzie Moore
Photography by Jeff Etheridge

Ice is one unhappy dog.

A 1-year-old black Labrador retriever whose exuberance has earned him a reputation as a “madman,” Ice droops with disappointment as he crouches in his kennel-truck compartment. He can’t see what’s going on outside, but his ears quiver and his nose twitches and then the realization hits: his friend Molly has been released from the next kennel and is on the loose.

Molly is playing, Ice is locked up, and he howls at the injustice of it all.

Oblivious to her pal’s envy, Molly races around the pavement where the truck is parked. The lot is bare but for six identical shipping containers flanked by a couple of small buildings. Black, silky coat rippling over muscle, long ears flapping in the chilly November breeze, Molly is dancing—prancing really—as she reports for training. Her teacher is Daniel McAfee, a clean-cut young man whose chief attributes, as far as his pupils are concerned, are the whistle he holds in his mouth and the red rubber ball stuffed in his pocket......

Raiders of the Lost Art

Written by Suzanne Johnson
Feature design by Shannon Bryant-Hankes
Photography by Jeff Etheridge
Illustration by Eric Field

Armed with an arsenal of tactics in the quest for good teaching, Auburn professors daily tackle classrooms of tuned-in, digitized, multitasking young iPeople—otherwise known as college students.

Consider the species Collegicus Studentus Americanus. If you give much credence to the nightly news, you know a few things about these highly publicized modern teenagers.

• They have every creature comfort known to humankind.
• They are technologically savvy, digitally tuned and cyber-connected.
• They have never known a world in which the U.S. president wasn’t named Bush or
  Clinton, in which the Internet didn’t exist, or in which the
  Cold War did.

And get this: Today’s college students—the same ones who text while driving, engage in marathon cell-phone conversations and have never been drafted into the military— represent the next “Greatest Generation” of Americans.......

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