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In school, he won second place in an essay contest on "Why I Am Glad I Am an American." He had gotten most of his ideas on this subject from a comic book whose hero was Uncle Sam. The book said that Uncle Sam was happy because he was free to go around and "lip off" about anything he pleased, because "he didn't have to mind his Ps and Qs."
In sixth-grade geography, David Tatum learned that there was a world beyond America. He had heard a little about the Roman Empire, which conquered the world and, in time, fell. He learned about the British Empire, which also ruled a large part of the world—in fact, said Teacher, the sun never set on it. Tatum could not understand that, so the teacher got a globe and patiently explained the celestial facts. In a larger sense, Tatum never understood; he still wonders with a mixture of curiosity and awe how the British managed to keep control of so much land, so many people.
Sparrows & People. His seventh-grade teacher taught him some current affairs-something about the isms. Naziism to him was the swastika, and evil because it was against the underdog. Fascism to him was a fat man on a balcony. Communism? Today he says without hesitation and with deep seriousness: "I will not live under Communism."
In 1946, just after he turned 18 and liable for the draft, he volunteered for the Navy. Soon after he joined, he sat in the movies holding hands with his girl. They were showing newsreels of the Bikini A-bomb test. For the first time he was frightened of war. Without knowing it, he squeezed Mary's hand so hard that she cried out. "I was sorry for those ships going down," he says. "I told myself, 'Tatum, you ought to be in a foxhole, not on a ship. This is where a man can get hurt.'" But he really liked ships. "A ship is home," he says.
The Navy sent him to college (Rice Institute in Houston), then to preflight school at Pensacola, Fla. In December 1948, he qualified for carrier duty. On July 31, 1950, he joined the Valley Forge at Okinawa. On Aug. 6, he flew his first combat mission. The next day, on another mission, was the first time the 22-year-old, raised under the rule of law & order and under the Ten Commandments, killed a man. In his journal, Tatum wrote later in neat block letters: "Monday, August 7. Armed Recon Southwest Korea. Up to Taejon and Seoul. Shot up 2 junks, one supplies. Burned other troops. Burned in water." Somehow, he did not feel about the dead Koreans as he had about his father's sparrows. "Probably because I didn't have to pick up the Koreans and look at them."
But jet fighters over Korea flew very low; sometimes a pilot had to look at the people he shot. On one mission, Tatum was firing into some troops moving along the road. With them walked an elderly woman. She was hit, and literally exploded: she had obviously been carrying ammunition in her pack. "That I don't like. If you have never seen arms and legs flying through the air . . ." says Tatum, his sentence dangling like a severed limb.
None of the other fellows in his squadron liked this business of shooting civilians. But, "I figured if we had to kill ten civilians to kill one soldier who might later shoot at us, we were justified."