Wings of Honor

Willard's third entry in his Black Sabre Chronicles (after The Sable Doughboys and Buffalo Soldiers) explores with accuracy and feeling the historical plight of four generations of a black family in the U.S. military. Willard focuses here on the sharpshooting men and hardscrabble women of the Sharps family, who range from ex-slaves to successful Arizona ranchers to soldiers in WWI and Tuskegee airmen in WWII. Selona Sharps is the grandmother and early pioneer on the Arizona ranch; scalped and raped as a girl by Texas Rangers, her strength and stoicism are inherited by her two sons, David and Adrian, who are both casualties of WWI. Hannah, Adrian's wife, is an ex-slave who wrestles free of Florida bigotry to settle in Arizona and run a restaurant; Samuel, her second son, is accepted into Tuskegee Institute and becomes part of the legendary first Negro squadron, the Black Red-Tail Angels, which flew against the Nazis. Willard's portraits are drawn swiftly, in an understated style, delineating military battles, personal trials and romantic attachments in the same straightforward prose. This capsule history of blacks in the military clearly captures the climate of racial antagonism that they endured. While the lives of the Sharps forebears are romanticized, often stalled in stilted prose, the later description of Samuel's sons in combat in Vietnam (the author is himself a vet of the war) are highly effective. (Jan.)