4.

That meeting with Albert Speer happened decades ago, but I still think about it as if it were yesterday. All the pieces of this story keep repeating in my mind. They won’t go away.

Just this afternoon, for instance, when I went out jogging along the California coast, in the stunning light of late afternoon, I found myself chanting the rhymes I learned while marching in army basic training more than forty years ago.

“I want to be an Airborne Ranger,” I sang to myself. “I want to lead a life of danger.”

I learned that from Drill Sergeant Yankovic in July 1969 as I marched along in the middle of Company B with my M-14 rifle, marched across the sandy, red soil of Fort Polk, Louisiana, in the dawn light.

I want to be an Airborne Ranger.

I want to lead a life of danger.

Of course that song’s a lie. No one in his right mind would want to be an Airborne Ranger and jump out of airplanes into the dark, shrapnel-filled skies over a battlefield.

“Skies like razors, ground that’ll blow your guts out,” is how Drill Sergeant Yankovic described the war as he sat on the stoop of the barrack, his uniform soaked with the sweat from a malaria attack. He oozed war.

I didn’t want to be an Airborne Ranger. I didn’t want to lead a life of danger. I was a coward then, and I am a coward now. The Vietnam War terrified me, but there I was, in July of 1969, marching along in the brightening light of what would become another scorching hot Louisiana morning, affirming just those things I didn’t believe. I want to be an Airborne Ranger. I want to live a life of danger. Airborne! Airborne! Airborne!

How did this happen to me? I keep asking myself this question over and over, and suddenly I’m back in school, walking up the steps of Marshall Junior High in Janesville, Wisconsin.

After Sputnik was launched in 1957, the Russians were on everyone’s minds. In 1958, twenty-three of us eighth graders were chosen to learn algebra early.

“You’re Janesville’s brightest, and you’re going to be America’s first line of attack against the Russians,” Mrs. Downy, the math teacher, told us as she smoothed out the wrinkles in her skirt.

If you look on page twenty-four of the 1958-59 Marshall Junior High Minor Memories yearbook, you can see us there.

“Janesville’s Algebra Squad,” the caption reads.

A little platoon of kids on the steps of the school beside Mrs. Downy in her harlequin glasses. How serious we all look. There we are—Judy Stryker, Roger Polanski, Jane Martin, Ralph Witfield and sixteen others—squinting into the sunlight of the future. Look at the boys in their pressed chinos and the girls in their buttoned-up blouses. We look like extras from Leave It to Beaver.

“The future,” Mrs. Downy told us, “belongs to you.”

But that future also worried us. Would there be enough fallout shelters to protect all of us in the event of a nuclear attack? Would there be enough of those green drums with yellow triangles labeled EMERGENCY SUPPLIES?

At school, we whispered to each other that someone . . . who? . . . someone important . . . someone had seen lists of cities the Russians planned on attacking once they built a space station with all the satellites they would shoot into the air, and Janesville was a prime target. We were marked for death.

Janesville, while not the absolute first city to be attacked, was near the top of the list, not far below Chicago. We were, someone told us with authority, the thirty-fourth most important target in the country. I would look out the window of my room before I went to bed and, on clear nights, stare at the stars in their slow circle overhead.

Sputnik was up there, people said, shooting by, night after night, sending its secret signals back to Russia.

In the summer of 1959, Marshall Junior High School offered its first summer-school course in Russian History, and Mrs. Downy recommended that we take it.

“In the future, when we go to war against the Russians, we will understand them first and then blow them to pieces with our superior knowledge of algebra. History and math will be the weapons of the next war.”

“Russia is a huge, poor country,” Mr. Niederman said on the first morning of our summer school Russian History class. “A country with great writers, a country trying to escape itself by moving ever westward.”

“So Russia really is coming to Janesville,” Judy Stryker said, underlining “westward” in her notebook and circling it with stars.

Mr. Niederman was short and harried. His glasses had the gray plastic frames that I would later know as GI glasses. A chain-smoker, he pulled out a pack of Lucky Strikes from his coat pocket and locked himself in the closet of the classroom during the ten-minute breaks between the hours of the class, which lasted all morning. At the end of each break, he emerged in a haze of smoke, as if his enthusiasm had set him on fire.

We had to memorize the dates and the names of Russian leaders in a fat history book, identify cities on a variety of historic and contemporary maps, and read The Brothers Karamazov.

“I went into the army when I was eighteen,” Mr. Niederman said one day, about halfway through the course. When he spoke he nodded, encouraging people to agree with him. As he did so, his glasses kept slipping down his nose, and he pushed them back up.

“I went to Korea, in the infantry. Oh, how cold it was. You couldn’t ever get warm.”

His voice floated off in his reverie.

“They shot me. That’s why I majored in history when I came back and went to college on the GI Bill. I wanted to find out what happened to me. I wanted to understand why I got shot and why my friends got killed.”

That day, Mr. Niederman had brought in a slide projector. He pulled the heavy black window shades down.

“Is Korea part of Russia?” Judy Stryker raised her hand and asked. Judy liked to line up her facts.

Mr. Niederman didn’t seem to hear the question. Grainy black-and-white images flickered on the wall. Mr. Niederman kept changing the focus on the projector, but the people remained a blur.

“That’s Tom Riley there. See. Charpentier is to his right. See the other guy with the BAR? The big gun. That’s a Browning Automatic Rifle. See it there? Johnson’s holding it. He was my best friend. A mortar shot got him about ten minutes later. See him with that goofy grin, waving—how blurred his hand is.”

“Are these Russian soldiers?” Judy Stryker asked, as if she were an inspector from the Board of Education.

“There. See,” Mr. Niederman said. The slide stuck, and the next slide gave the blurred images of Johnson and the rest a different background. “It’s a little bakery just set up along the road by some peasants. We had cakes and tea after Johnson died.”

Mr. Niederman sobbed then, his breath came in heaves.

“Mr. Niederman, Mr. Niederman,” Judy Stryker asked, “are you all right? Should we take a break now? Do you want to go in the closet and have a cigarette?”

She walked to him. He was bent over, holding on to the podium at the front of the classroom, gagging on his tears. The rest of us looked at our notebooks or walked out of the room.

In the hall, John Rogers said, “What the fuck was that all about?”

“Some war our parents had to fight,” Ron Moriarty said.

“Does this mean we’re not having a test on that novel about the brothers?” Bill Philippi asked.

“What the fuck was that all about?” John Rogers asked again and looked at me.

I didn’t know what to say. Mr. Niederman and the Korean War were unknowns in a kind of algebra I wouldn’t learn about until I got drafted into the army ten years later.

When Judy Stryker walked him away from the podium, those of us in the hall just stared through the doorway at Mr. Niederman as if he were in another world. The features of his face undone by tears, he looked at us as if he hoped we might throw him a lifeline, but we all began to study the floor.

“This is just too weird,” John Rogers whispered.

Yesterday, I looked up Joel Niederman on the Internet and found one in Janesville, at 716 Adams Street, 608-352-2906, so I decided to call him.

The voice that answered was frail, elderly.

“Mr. Niederman?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Niederman, did you teach at Marshall Junior High School in the fifties and sixties?”

“Who is this?”

“Rick Ryan. I was a student of yours. Do you remember a Russian History course you taught in 1959?”

“Who did you say this is?”

“Rick Ryan, Mr. Niederman. I’m calling about the time you cried. It was 1959, Mr. Niederman. Do you remember 1959? Do you remember that, when you were showing us slides from Korea?”

“Korea?”

“Yes, do you remember?”

“Korea was a long time ago. Are you calling from the Veterans?”

“The Veterans . . . yes, I guess I am. I’m calling to tell you I finally understand.”

“Who did you say you were?”